That’s the finding of a from the Hoover Institution, based on its “” project. Hoover researchers held nine in-person focus groups across seven states — Colorado, West Virginia, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Indiana, New Mexico and New York — and talked with 82 participants, from parents and teachers to leaders of nonprofit organizations and elected officials. The format combined short surveys with open-ended discussions, which allowed the researchers to gather a wide variety of information and hear the nuance behind it.

Of course, 82 participants across nine sites is a small sample, so the findings should be seen as qualitative and exploratory rather than nationally representative. Still, the responses identify some consistent patterns and offer some potential solutions. 

People don’t know how bad things are

The authors deliberately focused on communities where academic proficiency scores were low, in the bottom fifth of all schools statewide. Yet more than half of the participants weren’t familiar with how their local schools actually performed.

Focus group participants reported that they rarely heard news about student reading and math scores. Instead, they described district communications  as occasionally misleading. For example, one expressed concern that the local district was celebrating growth metrics that obscured persistently low performance. As another participant put it: “Parents can’t be involved if they aren’t informed. They can’t be informed if they aren’t invited.”

Those who do know the ratings think their schools are failing

Among respondents familiar with the performance data, more than half rated their local district schools as needing improvement, or worse. When asked about the quality of different types of schools in their communities, participants gave district schools the lowest average rating, below charter and private schools and vocational programs. They described teachers ill-prepared for diverse classrooms, inadequate special education services and a striking absence of practical preparation for students in things like financial literacy or vocational and technical skills.

Communities want to help but feel shut out

A majority of participants said they want to be real partners in improving their schools, but fewer than a quarter said they think their districts actually want that. School boards, in particular, were rated as particularly unreceptive to community input.

The anecdotes reveal a repeating pattern: People show up to meetings, join committees, raise concerns — and are ignored, dismissed or labeled as troublemakers. In some communities, language barriers and unreliable translation services make things harder. In others, parents hold back out of fear that speaking up could affect how their children are treated in school. Overall, only about a quarter said they felt they could personally drive change. 

And yet, people are still willing to get involved. Nearly 90% of participants said they would join a community task force to improve their local schools. More than half said they’d take on an active or leadership role, and nearly two-thirds were optimistic about what a coordinated community group could accomplish. People may not think they can drive change on their own, but they still hold out hope for collective improvement efforts.

So what would actually help?

Participants had concrete suggestions like flexible meeting times, reliable translation services, transportation, modest stipends to recognize parents’ time commitments and protections against retaliation. Procedurally, they wanted to feel like they are being included early, not handed decisions after they have already been made.

None of this will be especially surprising to people who’ve followed education debates over the years. This is not the first report to find that families are often excluded from decision-making.

Still, the Hoover research adds nuance and urgency. It offers a portrait of communities that are ready and willing to be involved, but are often blocked from doing so — and provides a set of suggestions for what changing that would take.

The focus of the executive order, though, was more troubling than its title: It directed the secretary of education to facilitate the closure of the U.S. Department of Education. Many have written, including here at �鶹��Ʒ, about concerns with the order’s implications for our education system, especially for the most vulnerable students. I share many of those concerns.

Eliminating expertise and capacity within the department will not magically enable states to do a better job to improve education, as those in states often count on federal support and guidance to enhance quality. 

The order’s explicit acknowledgement of parents and communities compelled me to write this commentary. Our work at the National Association for Family, School and Community Engagement advances policies, practices, and research to promote family-school partnerships that support student achievement. Family and community engagement is one of the strongest predictors of student success. 

Moreover, improving the degree to which education institutions partner with families and communities creates conditions that improve other factors like teacher recruitment and retention, family and community well-being, and overall school improvement. 

Despite its importance, high-quality family and community engagement is usually an afterthought in many policy conversations. In general, there are not enough resources to carry out this work. More is needed to bolster everything from teacher preparation for family engagement to training and services directly to families. 

Many of the most important programs that foster authentic family and community engagement come directly from the federal government. For example, Title 1 provides funding to low-income schools in both rural and urban communities and includes funds specifically dedicated to family engagement. Full-Service Community Schools grants support active family and community engagement as one of the four requirements. 

Federal grants fund Statewide Family Engagement Centers in 19 states and Parent Training and Information Centers in all states, programs that have been crucial in elevating statewide work that better links schools to families and their communities. These programs are prime examples of initiatives that should not only be sustained but expanded. Although I am relieved they have not yet been defunded, initiatives such as these now face a huge amount of uncertainty. 

There is a nonpartisan and common desire to better connect schools, families, and communities in authentic ways based on shared power, trust, and accountability. It is also widely agreed that schools, and the education system more broadly, can do a lot more to support these relationships. 

However, in some cases, exclusionary practices are draped in the cloak of family engagement or parents’ rights, which pit families against each other and against schools or otherwise inappropriately frame family engagement as a “watchdog” exercise resulting in censorship and fear of retribution. These narratives misrepresent family engagement. Instead, prioritizing deeply-rooted connections among the various stakeholders would go a long way to building a system where all students are better served. 

All this being said, I am not naive. As aptly identified by many others, threats to a department focused on ensuring quality education for all students leave me apprehensive.

The order’s proponents argue that these programs can be easily administered outside the Department of Education. However, it is doubtful that shifting administrative responsibility for education programs to other downsized departments will be smooth and more efficient. 

Worse still, there’s not yet a clearly articulated plan to develop the necessary knowledge or infrastructure to ensure these programs could continue to succeed outside of the Education Department, especially considering that resources, capacity and staff expertise have recently been substantially reduced. The lack of concrete details and the growing uncertainty around these changes leaves more questions than answers.It is my hope that the order’s title is not made up of hollow words and instead reflects an increased focus on family and community engagement in education, especially as it translates into funding, policies, and programs that support this work. While I acknowledge much of the responsibility for education lies with state and local governments, we have a collective responsibility as a country to guarantee that all students—from urban Miami to rural Montana—have access to a high-quality public education. That is what the Department of Education was founded on, and what we must ensure remains a priority moving forward.

From to �鶹��Ʒ, it’s now an annual tradition to share a journalism “Jealousy List” — a tribute to the most memorable and impactful coverage published by other outlets. 

In short, it’s a list of stories we wish we’d covered.

At Early Learning Nation, we want to celebrate and honor the powerful stories that have shaped important conversations around our nation’s youngest children and the families, caregivers and early educators who support them.

Some of these pieces focus on the early care and education workforce, covering key issues like low wages, the challenges of subsidies, and barriers to accessing funding and benefits. Others address topics central to families, like the affordability and quality of care, the high stakes of screen time and why it’s so tough to find child care options.

Below, in no particular order, are nine stories about early care and education that we can’t stop thinking about from 2024. Kudos to the journalists who wrote them, the sources who boldly shared their experiences and ideas, and the researchers who released studies and data that informed them. 

By sharing these stories, we aim to surface (or resurface) some of the most creative storytelling, impactful practices and important research in the field. We hope you’ll read — and share — them.

Sarah Carr, The Hechinger Report

Family, friend and neighbor (FFN) care is the most prevalent form of non-parental child care in the U.S. but this critical group of child care providers often goes unnoticed and many are underpaid. 

There are efforts across the country to provide more , but obstacles arise. In many states, for example, FFN caregivers often face barriers to accessing funds they qualify for, such as subsidies for children from low-income families.

From language barriers, to government mistrust to enrollment difficulties and more, Sarah Carr looks at the challenges facing this vast group of providers and why so many of them struggle to obtain the funding they are eligible to receive. And even when they can access the funds, Carr raises important issues like low reimbursement rates and processing delays that extend and complicate the series of hurdles for these caregivers.

Six women get candid on dwindling enrollment, priced-out parents, and crying kids. 

Anya Kamenetz, The Cut

When it comes to early care and education, many of the stories that resonate most are about the significant cost of providing high-quality, developmentally appropriate, reliable child care — and the tough reality that while the price is often high for families, child care programs typically operate on thin margins with providers working for very low wages. That rings true in New York City, where the that half of the city’s households can’t afford basic needs, funding for pre-K and 3-K programs is unpredictable, and child care subsidies often fall short. Six child care workers in various settings across the boroughs shared their day-to-day experiences with Anya Kamenetz, who writes about education and parenting. Their experiences, as told to Kamenetz, shine a light on the complexities of the profession as well as their passion for the young children they serve.

Moriah Balingit and Sharon Lurye, The Associated Press and Daniel Beekman, The Seattle Times

For many parents, especially mothers, the decision about whether to work has a number of factors, but often comes down to a simple question: Is the cost of child care greater than my take-home pay? 

Nicole Slemp found herself asking this question. She expected to return to her job, which she loved, after having her son. But once she crunched the numbers, she learned that most of her salary would go to child care and found that she and her husband made too much to qualify for support from the government. She felt she had no choice but to quit. 

In the U.S., where the cost of care can be prohibitive, government assistance is sparse and child care slots are limited, this story isn’t uncommon, . But while women’s participation in the workforce has increased overall, there’s a noticeable employment gap between mothers with and without a four-year degree. Moriah Balingit, Sharon Lurye and Daniel Beekman unpack that employment gap, the data behind it and the lived experiences of some of the women finding themselves faced with difficult decisions. 

Teachers this year saw the effects of the pandemic’s stress and isolation on young students: Some can barely speak, sit still or even hold a pencil.

Claire Cain Miller and Sarah Mervosh, New York Times, The Upshot

There’s been a good deal of reporting on the effects of the pandemic on older children. Less covered is the impact on the nation’s youngest children — those who were babies, toddlers and preschoolers during the height of the pandemic and are now school-aged.

Claire Cain Miller and Sarah Mervosh share findings from interviews with teachers, pediatricians and early childhood experts. The bottom line: Many of these younger children are showing signs of academic and developmental delays. There are also concerns related to a variety of areas like speech and language development, emotional regulation, social interactions, behavior, attention span, core strength and fine motor skills. Researchers suggested that a number of factors affected young children during the pandemic, including parental stress, less exposure to people, more time on screens and lower preschool attendance.

Despite these trends, some experts said recovery is possible, pointing to tools and resources that can help as well as evidence that the early years of brain development in young children positions them well to “catch up.”

Emily Tate Sullivan, EdSurge

At a time when people can make dinner reservations on an app and buy a car online, it may come as a surprise that finding child care options isn’t that easy, but that’s the reality for many families.

In most states, there’s a website with information about providers, such as operating hours and quality ratings, but enrollment data is often outdated or not listed at all. Without reliable information on vacancies, a parent might spend time calling programs that are at capacity. 

Some states — including Iowa, Maryland and Arizona — have teamed up with technology firms to develop solutions that help families find child care, reports Emily Tate Sullivan. 

By using “near real-time” vacancy data, these efforts are saving families time and helping state leaders understand their child care systems, giving them a better sense of capacity by surfacing open slots as well as shortages. This approach, which provides more accurate data, can help state leaders, lawmakers and communities plan more intentionally, make informed decisions and direct attention where it’s needed.

Chabeli Carrazana, The 19th

“For years, American women soccer players have been at the forefront of advocating for pay equity in a sport they dominate at a global level. But child care has long been an issue they’ve also contended with” writes Chabeli Carrazana, adding that “Some have argued that their pay and benefits simply were not enough to cover child care costs.”

Carrazana digs into a dispute between the Angel City Football Club — an American professional women’s soccer team — and the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL). 

After conducting an investigation into a salary cap violation by Angel City FC, and determining that the team had surpassed the cap through a number of agreements that were made with players directly and not disclosed to the NWSL, the league that it was docking three points from the team’s standings and fining the team.

While child care payments were only part of the reason the team exceeded the cap, the situation brought child care benefits for parent athletes into the spotlight, and in particular, raised a question about whether any child care payments should count against the salary cap.

Jenny Gold, Los Angeles Times

are making headlines, and the U.S. surgeon general has warning families that usage of the apps could be detrimental to the mental health of adolescents. Pediatricians have raised concerns around health and development, like behavioral challenges, issues with sleep, language delays and more.

For families with young children, a major question is: How much screen time is OK? There are for children under 5 years old, but the guidance can feel overwhelming. From time limits to quality assessment to the importance of “co-viewing” digital media with young children, there’s a lot for parents to consider, and the reality is that many families aren’t meeting these guidelines. 

Jenny Gold dives into the high stakes of screen time, whether limiting it is realistic given the world parents are raising children in today, and what families can do to make the most of their children’s screen time.

Carly Flandro, Idaho Education News and Valeria Olivares, The Dallas Morning News Education Lab

Stress. Anxiety. Financial pressure. The is weighing on parents, especially the ones who work. Teachers aren’t immune. Many parenting teachers are faced with difficult decisions about their work lives, and child care is a major factor. 

A number of schools in some states, particularly those with limited funding for early care and education, are offering high-quality, affordable child care for their teachers. This solution addresses educator retention, while aiming to help early learners become better prepared to enter kindergarten. Programs vary, but some offer care from infancy so teachers don’t have to between parenting and their career. 

Carly Flandro and Valeria Olivares dive into two of these initiatives. One is an elementary school in Nampa, Idaho that offers on-site child care, which a dozen of the school’s 30 teachers take advantage of. The other is a Texas district that’s offering subsidized child care and that has two “child learning academies” for infants and toddlers from 6-weeks-old through age 3, that serve 120 children. 

Flandro and Olivares reported that these services made a difference for teachers, whether easing the cost, helping them feel reassured their children were receiving high-quality care, or even keeping them in the classroom. 

New study reveals the extent of harms of an ‘outdated, uneven’ Head Start funding system.

Jackie Mader, The Hechinger Report

“When Head Start was established in 1965, it was meant to boost outcomes for children from low-income families by offering high-quality early learning and wraparound services,” writes Jackie Mader. Today, she adds, the program has seen increased funding, but the way that federal funding is distributed is based in part on a formula from 1974. 

So what does that mean for children and families? Mader takes a look at the funding model and analyzes findings from a report by the Southern Education Foundation, which suggests that the formula should be updated to reflect changes in the definition of poverty, and to account for the number of eligible children and where they live.

Researchers say the best fix is to give Head Start a one-time increase to be spread across a few years, which could be used to even out the funding and then to adjust the formula. With a new federal rule to provide a raise to most Head Start teachers, Mader writes, researchers expressed a sense of urgency to adjust the formula. Paying staff more is key. So, too, is increasing access to serve more children.

The figures are stark. The number of kids who are chronically absent has doubled since 2016. More than one-quarter of all U.S. public school students missed at least 10% of the 2022-23 school year. That’s equivalent to more than three weeks of classroom time.

Accepting chronic absenteeism as the new normal simply isn’t an option. It can — and must — be stopped. 

The crisis is everyone’s problem, but it doesn’t impact everyone equally. The school districts that have experienced the largest spike in chronic absenteeism are low-income and majority nonwhite, with absentee rates 13% higher in the lowest-income districts than they are in the wealthiest ones.

This trend bears significant long-term costs, as attendance at school is strongly correlated with academic success, graduation rates — and even future job prospects. Students who are chronically absent are more likely to be socially disengaged and alienated, and to have an encounter with the criminal justice system. 

At , the network of public charter schools we help run in northern California, we have made tackling this crisis a priority. Caliber serves primarily low-income Black and Hispanic students from transitional kindergarten — an additional year of school before kindergarten for students needing extra support — to eighth grade. As at many schools, our attendance levels dropped after the pandemic and chronic absenteeism began to soar. During the 2022-23 school year, over 40% of students at Caliber schools qualified as chronically absent. 

At the start of last school year, we rolled out a pilot program to shift the narrative to one of chronic attendance. Our nonpunitive, data-driven approach could serve as a model for other schools.

A key component of our strategy is our Student Wellness and Attendance Team — our SWAAT team. Its members, who include school therapists, administrative staff and other professionals, track daily attendance and maintain a database that enables Caliber’s administrators to detect patterns across time. Using this data, we identified “red flag” days when students were most likely to skip school — like Fridays, especially before a holiday.

To counter that trend, we gave students a teaser: Mystery Fridays, a surprise event one Friday per month that celebrates them. They don’t know which Friday it will be, so there’s a strong incentive not to miss one.

Family outreach has been another key pillar of our strategy. Like many schools, we check in at home every time a student misses school. But we also discuss with parents what material their children missed, how they can get caught up and what future lessons will cover. Our goal is to reinforce the message that when students skip school, they’re missing out on valuable instruction and relationships with peers.

Instead of involving — which fails to engage students or address the root causes of absenteeism, and has been shown to have a negative, long-term impact on attendance — we refer students who miss 20% of class to a support panel. Its members work with the student, parent and/or guardian to discuss appropriate services for underlying issues, including housing instability and mental health challenges. Non-punitive solutions like counseling are prioritized in this early intervention effort.

By the end of the year, we had reduced chronic absenteeism by more than 13 percentage points, from 40% to 26.8%, and we’re off to a good start in 2024: both schools in our network averaged over 95% daily attendance in the first month of the year.

There’s still work to be done. One in four public school districts say nothing they’ve done has been effective in reducing chronic absenteeism, but chronic absenteeism won’t get better on its own. Our experience shows that with positive and proactive approaches, it can be reversed.

put forth a list of close to 500 strained schools as a “wake up call” for districts to plan interventions such as family engagement, high dosage tutoring and address specific community concerns before they “find themselves pushed against a wall” and forced to close schools, said author Sofoklis Goulas, a fellow with the Brookings Institution who built on his prior enrollment research in this latest study with Fordham. 

The study cautioned districts against using the list as a strict guide or framing it as a “bad schools list,” rather, as a starting point for interventions and discussions.

School closures are often and can lead to distrust in the system, particularly when plans target campuses, most often elementary schools, with predominantly Black and brown children.

The study is the first to correlate school performance with enrollment declines, revealing the drops are far from random: Among schools identified as chronically underperforming by their states, those in high-poverty, urban areas, and charter schools lost the highest proportions of students, those “grappling with systemic challenges and resource constraints,” the report stated. 

Goulas’s latest findings suggest family dissatisfaction with schools is outpacing other known drivers such as . 

“Families are essentially rejecting schools that are not serving them well,” Goulas told �鶹��Ʒ, adding solutions won’t look the same across all districts – some will be forced to close schools while others may not. He urged leaders to address, “the core problem, which is the disengagement, the sentiment of dissatisfaction from traditional public schools.”

California and New York, hosting the nation’s largest school systems by population, both have about 40 schools on the list of 500. Overall, roughly 5,100 of the nation’s 98,000 schools, or one in 12, lost substantial numbers of students. 

Five are underperforming Los Angeles Unified schools which have lost between 22 and 55% of their enrollment as of 2022-23. Pio Pico Middle School, for instance, lost 261 students since 2019, more than the 212 who remain enrolled. 

Alongside Illinois and New York, California experienced one of the largest heading into 2023. Los Angeles Unified, the second largest district in the country, has established a new office to better support schools’ recruitment and retention. 

But, as spokesperson for LAUSD told �鶹��Ʒ by email, “there are stark realities confronting Los Angeles Unified that transcend what a school system can address such as cost of living, job prospects and statewide economic challenges that are forcing families to leave the city and state.” 

“Our students represent some of the most fragile in the city and are particularly impacted by financial pressures… School closures or consolidations are a measure of last resort which have little to do with finances and more with the type of offerings schools are able to provide.”

In Washington, a multimillion dollar has been credited with bringing back 2,000 kids. Given the financial strain the declines are already placing on districts across the country, some like and have already announced or enacted closure plans. 

Researchers relied on a federal guideline to determine which schools are low performing, using states’ required Comprehensive Support and Improvement schools lists, those with the lowest performance and graduation rates. They caution this metric is not completely reliable, given the variation from state to state, with some updating every year while others only every three years. The CSI lists don’t often account for year-to-year academic growth either, which may be strong and indicate a thriving school community. 

Researchers also did not determine whether students attending these schools have nearby high-quality alternatives in the event their schools close. 

“This is an exposition of the situation… There’s no horizontal solution across the board that we need,” said Goulas. “District superintendents need to find the solution that meets the needs of their community,” he said, adding student demographics, year-to-year growth, transportation and strength of alternatives are some measures that cannot get lost in closure conversations. 

, children whose schools close .  At the same time, when students are moved into larger schools, it means more financial resources, and with them, more extracurriculars or specialty course offerings. 

The best of the worst case scenario is to be honest with families about consolidations or closures and provide 5- and 10-year plans, former Chicago schools chief told �鶹��Ʒ earlier this year.

“I hope that the research that people like me provide can help the districts plan ahead,” Goulas said, “because the less runway you have to make a plan and be prepared, the harsher the decisions you end up making.”

While the closure undeniably helped keep students, families and staff physically safe, it also had a devastating impact on young people’s academic and social-emotional growth. For example, K-2 literacy rates dropped by nearly 25 percentage points.

The harm of this once-in-a-century pandemic required a once-in-a-century response. Simply returning to normal with the hope of a quick recovery was not going to work — and, frankly, would have been irresponsible. 

We decided to do something very simple, but surprisingly revolutionary: make the school year longer. Last year, we piloted a 200-day school year, rather than the traditional 180 days, at two elementary schools: Fairfield Court and Cardinal. The program was entirely opt-in: More than 90% of families and 70% of teachers at both schools voted in favor of joining the pilot; all were all given the option of moving to a school with a traditional calendar. While we heard some concerns, of course, nearly all agreed that it was worth trying. Mixed in with the nerves, we even heard a lot of excitement. Parents, for instance, were glad to have four extra weeks of free, safe and structured learning time. Teachers were eager to keep their students on track and were excited about the extra pay: a 10% increase in salary and an automatic $10,000 bonus.  

Students at these schools started classes in July 2023 and finished with the rest of the district in May. It was a financial investment, but more importantly, it was an investment of time – a resource that we hadn’t truly tapped before. The schools used that time to build relationships with families, dive into literacy instruction and enrich the curriculum with field trips and enrichment activities. Our family liaisons held pop-up events, sent text messages and went door to door to speak with parents and caregivers, stressing the importance of daily attendance and offering solutions, such as door-to-door transportation, when there were barriers to regular attendance. Local businesses, nonprofits and donors also stepped up to provide students with everything from school supplies and meals to washer-dryers and haircuts at school. By the time the traditional school calendar began in late August, the 200-day schools were rocking and rolling — and the momentum didn’t stop. 

These two schools had remarkable results. Fairfield Court Elementary’s jumped from 61% to 82% in just one year. It now has the seventh-highest early literacy scores out of 26 elementary schools in the district, despite having the highest percentage of economically disadvantaged students (97%). Cardinal Elementary, where over 80% of students are recent immigrants, also saw gains, going from 53% to 58% proficient. To top it all off, despite the longer year, attendance at these schools .

Given these results, our district board and administration decided to expand the pilot to two more schools: Woodville Elementary, which is just down the road from Fairfield, and Oak Grove-Bellemeade Elementary, whose zone borders Cardinal’s. A majority of families and staff at both schools voted to participate in the pilot, and Bloomberg Philanthropies signed on to fund the expansion. On July 22, students at all four schools — nearly 2,000 (8%) of the district’s total enrollment — headed back to school for the 2024-25 year. 

The impetus for RPS200 was the pandemic, but the need for it goes much deeper. For decades, if not centuries, Virginia has created systemic barriers to education, particularly for Black students. In the early part of the 19th century, the General Assembly – which we can see from our office windows – made it illegal for enslaved and free Africans to gather to learn to read or write, “either in the day or night, under whatsoever pretext.” In 1959, Prince Edward County shuttered its entire school system for five years rather than integrate its classrooms. And over the last 50 years, the district itself has seen constant disinvestment as white Richmonders left the city and its public schools.

The inequities are further compounded by Virginia’s antiquated school funding formula, which disadvantages areas like Richmond that have high levels of concentrated poverty. The General Assembly’s own recently said the state is underfunding K-12 schools by about $3 billion. 

Students deserve more than the legacy of inequity; they deserve a future of opportunity and excellence. That’s why the 200-day calendar is not just an investment of time, but an opportunity. It’s designed to help Richmond’s students rebound from the devastating COVID-19 pandemic — but it’s also about honoring those who have fought for the right to learn. 

At Richmond Public Schools, our motto is to “Teach, Lead and Serve With Love.” We can’t think of any better way to show our young people how much we love them than by giving them a leg up in their education. RPS200 is helping us do exactly that.

When we hear the word, “lullaby,” most of us imagine something like the dictionary definition of “a gentle, quiet song that lulls a child to sleep,” a cradle song to soothe a baby’s way to the Land of Nod.

For the past 12 years, Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute has been refining that definition with its Lullaby Project, pairing new and expecting parents with professional teaching artists to write lullabies for their babies. Because the parents and caregivers come from a variety of racial, cultural and geographic backgrounds, you’re as likely to hear merengue or the Afrobeat of a djembe as you are to hear a sweet rock-a-bye.

“They’re not all soothing,” says Sarah Johnson, Carnegie Hall’s chief education officer and director of the Weill Music Institute (WMI). “They really become love songs and whatever the parents want them to be. Sometimes a mom will say, ‘My baby is so active, I want to write more of a dance song for her.’ Some of the parents have quite detailed ideas about the music before they even start writing, and others not so much. But it all comes from the parents so the range is huge.”

The began in Jacobi Medical Center, a New York City public hospital in the Bronx, when a cross-disciplinary team invited WMI to collaborate on a program to support the hospital’s teenage mothers and young parents. Medical staff had observed that the young parents were dealing with high stress levels that sometimes got in the way of their bonding with their infants.

The idea of working with a small group of parents to write personal lullabies for their infants and create a simple recording of the song, evolved into Lullaby’s pilot in 2011. Over the years it has expanded to reach parents in healthcare settings, homeless shelters, high schools and correctional settings. The project, which is now part of WMI’s early childhood and family programs, has nearly 60 organizations worldwide, with well over 4,000 unique lullabies having been written in more than 40 languages — and it’s still growing.

It Starts with a Few Words

The process often starts with the parents being asked to write a letter to their child or to write down their hopes and dreams for themselves as caregivers.

“We ask them where they can imagine their child years from now,” says Tiffany Ortiz, Director of WMI’s early childhood programs. “It serves as a pause button for families to reflect on their parenting experiences and their relationship with their child or child-to-be.

“We have a lullaby journal, which offers a range of prompts. One of the most popular is writing a letter to their baby where parents or caregivers are encouraged to express their hopes and dreams or any stories they want to share with their child. Caregivers are encouraged to think about the language they want to pass down, the cultural rituals within their family they want to pass along or any personal stories about their parenthood experience they want to include.

“We encourage them to think about the melody they want to add to the messages that they wrote, in the right key so they feel comfortable singing this lullaby to their child. We want the song to be something they continue to use, not something that sits on a shelf. We want it to be an active part of families engaging with each other and perhaps passing it down generation to generation, so that it ends up being a beautiful gift to the families.”

My babies, sweet babies,
I love you like crazy.
You’re wonderful and fun,
Sweet like honey buns.

The parents or caregivers are paired with teaching artists and songwriters who work with them to structure lyrics from the key ideas they’ve written, expanding on one another’s ideas and trying out possible melodies and arranging the instrumentation. Accompaniment runs the gamut from piano to marimba, flute to cello, and an array of percussion instruments guaranteed to punctuate and enliven any sentiment. A roster of professional musicians works with the families to create and arrange a song that is uniquely, singularly theirs. The lullaby is recorded for the parent to keep and sing again and again. Each year, some of the new works are selected to be performed at the Hall, some sung by the project’s professional musicians and some by the parents themselves. It’s a delicious process, as plainly seen in of the 2023 Lullaby Project’s Celebration Concert.

And the effect apparently lasts. Now that the project is entering its 13^th year, WMI has started hosting alumni days to invite lullaby writers to come back to the Hall and share how they’re doing.

“Last year we had a family who came with their 8-year-old who said, ‘We still know our song and we still sing it.’” Ortiz says. “They were so excited to be in the space again and to share and revisit their songs. We’re seeing some long-term ripple effects — seeing so many families come back after many years with their kids grown to share how meaningful the experience has been for them.”

However inspiring, performance is not the project’s primary aim or value. The design was to strengthen the bond between parent and child, aid child development and support parent’s health and well-being, all of which have been accomplished — and then some — according to qualitative analysis by arts research firm WolfBrown, which WMI commissioned to evaluate the project from 2011 to 2017. Researchers found “marked differences” in participants’ positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and sense of achievement, key markers for measuring well-being. Some of the lullaby writers who performed their songs had never spoken — much less sung — in front of an audience.

“You can see people being brave,” Johnson says. “A couple of years ago when one of our writers, Anya, performed, she was shaking when she introduced herself and told her story. You could tell that it was hard for her, but she has this amazing voice, and in that moment, you see her bravery and you see all these other people leaning in and encouraging her. It was quite beautiful.” (Watch Anya’s performance of her lullaby, “,” accompanied by teaching artists James and Camila.)

Feeding the Artists

The Lullaby Project has nourished not only the families but the participating musicians and songwriters as well. Johnson says WMI offers the musicians who come into the project professional training and development, along with the resources they need to be successful in their role in supporting the lullaby writers. She also acknowledges that the work isn’t for everyone because not every musician is comfortable with the service aspect of supporting another person’s creativity and process of discovery.

For many though, she says, that has been the most magical part of the process.

“We have many local teaching artists who’ve been part of the project since the inception and continue to come back,” Johnson says. “One said that what feeds them about the project is that they always learn something new about themselves and their community. It isn’t just the parents who are vulnerable. The artists learn from the families in that exchange.

“The artists have created this community of practice where they gather and bring their challenges, they bring something they’re proud of, a song they love that they wrote with someone. Those are durable and generative relationships.”

The process is as much about trust as it is about music, Ortiz says.

“We talk a lot about attunement between parent and child, but there’s quite a bit of attunement that needs to happen among the facilitator, musician and the parent. That requires a level of deep listening, trust-building and a lot of generosity.”

Scaling the Project

Part of the Weill Music Institute’s DNA is to broadly share what they’ve developed, Johnson says. They have designed the Lullaby Project to be nimble, portable and scalable. Although they believe in the superpower of artists, she says, they have looked beyond the professional teaching artists they work with to see who else in a community might be able to bring the project to families most in need. For example, they’re exploring a project with a partner in India that would provide a simple set of video resources that would enable health workers to support lullaby writing in their communities. Their lead partner in Australia is experimenting with creating a library of lullaby music templates to which personalized lyrics could be added, expanding the capacity of lullaby writing without benefit of facilitators.

“The growth has been organic,” Johnson says. “When we moved from Jacobi Medical Center, it was because people wanted to take it other places and were knocking on our door asking if they could take it to a refugee camp in Athens or to this or that place. We have access to extraordinary resources — the Carnegie Hall name, our artistic relationships, our human capital and our partnerships — that enable us to develop things that are often useful in other places. And then give them away.

“We dream about a world in which every parent might be able to write a personal lullaby for their child,” she says. “A colleague of ours often says that when a child is born, so too is a parent and when we think about these personal lullabies, they are just as much for the parent as they are for the child. These lullabies are little vessels of love, and who wouldn’t want more of that in the world.”

Taking Your Toddler to Carnegie Hall

If music be the food of love, then Carnegie Hall’s Weill Music Institute (WMI) offers a banquet the whole family can feast on. WMI encompasses the Hall’s education and social impact programs, whose mission is to make great music accessible to the widest possible audience. Hundreds of families in New York City and throughout the world have found their way to music through Carnegie Hall’s array of age-appropriate offerings, from live performances to free online resources to spark the curiosity and enthusiasm that can last a lifetime. More than 800,000 people each year engage in WMI’s programs through national and international partnerships, in New York City schools and community settings, and at Carnegie Hall.

The early childhood programs of are designed specifically with babies and toddlers in mind — colorful, lively and sometimes silly — creating musical experiences that feed the developing brain and imagination. Since its inception 12 years ago, the Lullaby Project has been at the heart of the WMI’s early childhood programs, a rich ecosystem that brings music to life in a child’s earliest years.

Resources

• To better understand the effect of music in early childhood development, Carnegie Hall commissioned papers from arts research expert Dr. Dennie Palmer Wolf. The first, , points to key reasons why investing in children early and often is critical to healthy development and a successful future — and demonstrates the role music can play in everyday interactions that support children.
• , looks at how and why lullabies make a difference, highlighting how the Lullaby Project helps families come together and imagine a positive future for children, and how writing a lullaby often can support a deeper process of connecting and communicating among parents, grandparents, musicians, staff and community members.
• Inspired by the Lullaby Project, the Bernard van Leer Foundation commissioned WolfBrown to write a paper, , which explores the Lullaby Project alongside early childhood programming from around the world.
• Unwind with Lullabies: Hopes & Dreams In April 2018, Decca Gold (Universal Music Group) released an album of 15 original lullabies written by Lullaby Project participants and performed by world renowned artists including Fiona Apple, the Brentano String Quartet, Lawrence Brownlee, Rosanne Cash, Joyce DiDonato, Angélique Kidjo, Natalie Merchant, Dianne Reeves, Gilberto Santa Rosa and others. The album is available from the  and other online retailers.

A key to halting that malign ascendency could be found very close to home, especially Latinx homes, recent research from the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences (I-LABS) indicates. “,” published in the Journal of Latinx Psychology, found that Latinx children living with grandparents at home were more likely to exhibit prosocial, other-oriented behavior than children without grandparents in the home. The findings, the authors write, have broader implications for our understanding of culture, socialization and prosociality.

Prosociality refers to behaviors that accommodate or benefit others, voluntary actions such as sharing, comforting, helping and cooperating. In short, the cornerstones of a workable society. For research scientist Dr. Rodolfo Cortes Barragan, the study’s lead author, investigating children’s prosocial behavior is more than an academic exercise, its real-world applications matter to the kind of society we have now and in the future. Barragan’s research seeks to identify the key ingredients for positive outcomes in human development and society.

“Prosociality is key to everyday human civilization,” Barragan says. “Civic society may start with simple actions with children but over the long term, that gets us to a well-functioning society.

“It’s an important goal for scientists to be able to inform the dialogue about how we can have a better, more civilized, courteous society. I’ve been interested in that reality and that’s what drives me to conduct research that’s broadly relevant to everyday social interactions.”

Though prosocial behaviors vary by culture, numerous social theorists have held that Latinx culture is especially adept in this domain. According to previous research cited in this study, Latinx individuals generally prefer to engage and work in settings that emphasize personal harmony and seek to engage in positive conversations and interactions with new people. Latinx people’s graciousness, gregariousness and hospitality are legendary, and those qualities generally begin at home. A series of I-LABS experiments with 19-month-old infants showed that Latinx infants shared more objects of personal value with strangers than non-Latinx white infants, indicating that the enculturation of prosociality may start at “surprisingly early ages,” the researchers wrote.

A solid body of research has looked at children’s prosocial learning from their parents, but little has been done to examine the connection between grandparents and young children’s prosociality, including Latinx grandparents. What is known about Latinx grandparents is their connection to cultural values such as �������貹��í��, or relational harmony; familismo, an emphasis on supporting and nurturing all members of a family; and respeto, deference and respect toward others, all of which are likely to be emphasized in their interactions with grandchildren. These prosocial behaviors can have a significant effect on children in an academic setting, and previous research has shown that Latinx children with grandparents at home do better academically and emotionally than kids without grandparents at home.

To test the idea that Latinx grandparents’ presence in their grandchildren’s homes puts them in a prime position to influence prosocial values, the researchers conducted their study in Los Angeles County, which has the largest Latinx population of any U.S. county. The children in L.A. County are often children and grandchildren of immigrants, or immigrants themselves, and a pilot study found that approximately 50 percent of the young Latinx children in the region’s parks lived with grandparents at home. The researchers focused on 4- and 5-year-olds because at these ages children are less influenced by the formal education system and are considered old enough to engage in verbal interactions with researchers.

The pilot study took place in 2019 and ground to a halt along with most other public life when the pandemic hit in early 2020. By the time the study started again once vaccinations became available, researchers observed that the percentage of live-in grandparents had been reduced to about 33 percent — likely reflecting the fact that COVID-19 had hit the older U.S. population hardest. A national analysis found that Latinx children had nearly twice the risk of experiencing a grandparent’s death during the pandemic compared to non-Latinx white children.

Still, the researchers were able to carry out their study with 250 young Latinx children and their families, which Barragan says is the largest — “almost unheard of” — sample of children of this population on a behavioral test. They conducted the study in public parks because they wanted to take it out of the constrained environment of the behavior lab and into the community. Testing sessions were conducted in the mid-to late-afternoon when the parks had many families with young children and a recreational atmosphere prevailed. On some days, the parks were hosting COVID-19 vaccination drives.

For the study, young children were invited to play a “sticker game” on a preprinted sheet of paper divided into two sides. One side gave the child the choice of getting a small smiley-face sticker for themselves, and another child represented by a silhouette would also get a sticker. The other side gave the child the choice to take a sticker for themselves only, with the other child getting none. The study indicated that children with a grandparent in the home were almost twice as likely to make the prosocial choice of giving another sticker to the other child as were the children without a grandparent at home.

The researchers theorize that the grandparents may be transmitting these prosocial behaviors by verbally encouraging helpfulness and communicating the complex web of Latinx social values during mealtimes, while taking walks with the children and through daily interactions with others. The grandparents’ own behavior and the “imitative abilities of young children” may also serve to model these prosocial attitudes and behaviors. The precise ways in which this occurs, and if there’s any difference between the influence of grandmothers in the home versus grandfathers remain questions for future studies, Barragan says.

“We’re going to need more research on some of these questions because one limitation of our studies is that we had to be quick because of COVID and weren’t able to get as much information as we would have liked,” he says.

The researchers write that the current findings underscore the desirability of examining the grandparent-grandchild prosociability link in other groups beyond the Latinx community, such as African American families, and in Native American and Asian American communities, all of which have strong but distinct familial values and frequent involvement of grandparents in childrearing.

“Even though this study was focused on a particular population, it’s really important to extrapolate (to our larger society),” Barragan says. “This study teaches us about the importance of how grandparenting can be important in a culture that’s perhaps more traditional than contemporary mainstream American culture. It teaches us about different ways of being and the diversity of our community.

“And it teaches us that by looking into different communities, we can learn about human psychology in ways that inform our approach. It’s about being open to new ideas and new ways of seeing things.”

Once school or other development programs end, so much is gone all at once — structured days, weeks and years; regular social interaction with peers; non-parental authority figures; speech, occupational and physical therapy; and, critically, the sense that the young adult has a place that belongs to them outside their family. We designed the community to provide some of the components of what was no longer available, with scheduled voluntary activities, support from staff social workers, a 24/7 emergency phone line and, most important, peers with whom they could build independent lives. 

We chose White Plains because it is a small city with a range of housing in a central core, robust public transportation, and a lively retail and business environment that provides opportunities for work, recreation and shopping — all accessible on foot or by bus/train. We partnered with two nonsectarian human services agencies to manage the operation and growth of the community. 

We began with 15 members, some local and others whose families were as far away as California and Kentucky. The community now has more than 55 members, with close to a 50:50 ratio of men and women, representing 10 states.

POINT members live in apartment buildings across White Plains, some with roommates and others alone. Families pay for the POINT program fee, housing, food, etc., supplemented by members’ earnings and federal and local programs including SSI/SSD. All participants are expected to work, do internships, go to school and/or attend day programs. There are planned social activities, and members can create their own. There is a “clubhouse” space for classes, parties, movie nights, etc., within walking distance of the apartments.

We see our son living a life that is far beyond anything we could have envisioned for him when he was a child. He is independent, he works, he manages his calendar, he seeks appropriate recreation and entertainment, and he is a member of a small, comfortable community that interacts with the broader neighborhood. 

How did a third grader with limited social skills, significant learning disabilities and very little interest in doing things for himself get here? Here are some key lessons that we learned:

• Maximize independence whenever possible: Early on, we heard the expression “the dignity of risk.” Overprotecting special-needs kids, while a natural inclination, will limit their abilities and possibilities more than doing so with a neurotypical child. For example, we sent our son to camp from ages 9 to 17, first for one week, then for four, and then for the full summer. He loved being with peers and counselors, and began developing leadership skills while figuring things out without mom and dad hovering. To see our son embrace his independence today is wonderful payback for all those situations when our hearts were in our mouths as he set off on adventures for which he was only marginally ready.
  
• Be flexible: No one answer is right for everyone, or for every time. In elementary and middle school, we placed our son in an inclusion setting, in classes with both neurotypical and learning-disabled students. This provided an environment that had a range of academic achievement and staff to meet students where they were and help them grow. But when it came to high school, we reversed course and placed him at a boarding school for youngsters with special needs. We were able to partially defray the cost with funding from New York State. In this environment, Alex learned some independent living skills, like managing his laundry, organizing his belongings and getting where he needed to be without us overseeing every action he took. At each transition, we evaluated our options and found what was best for him and for at that time. At several points, the correct program didn’t exist — so we joined forces with other parents and created it.
  
• Find professionals with the vision, expertise and flexibility to help your child grow: For Alex, these included an elementary school principal who focused on his potential rather than his deficits; a camp director who pushed all kids to explore their interests and challenge themselves in athletics, performing arts and socialization; and human services agencies committed to building an enviable life for individuals with social and cognitive challenges.
  
• Collect other families: More than once, it took the power of the group to form programs or nudge them in a more positive direction — things individual parents could not accomplish on their own. Just as developmentally disabled children and adults need a community of peers, so, too, do their families. From Alex’s camp and schools, we formed friendships with other parents who became the core of what it took to create POINT.
  
• Stay involved: After high school, we chose a postsecondary residential program to build Alex’s vocational skills, social network and independence (although, frequently, independent skills were left on the doorstep when he returned home for visits). Being active in schools, and supporting them through fundraising and advocacy, created a partnership with school leaders that allowed us a voice in how Alex could best be served. Now that he is part of the POINT Community, we continue the same supports with the organizations that are administering the program. We are seen as partners, not just consumers.
  
• Enjoy the successes: It’s easy to focus on gaps and shortcomings. We’ve learned to take great pleasure in seeing our son blossom into a self-assured young man who has found a comfortable place in the world.  He is productive, has friends and enjoys his interactions both inside and outside the group. Some steps were small and some were huge, such as traveling by mass transit and flying cross-country alone. Some went backward. But we have much to be thankful for.

This reveals perhaps the biggest and most persistent blind spot in the American education system, because engaging families in their children’s learning is the only wide-reaching, cost-effective and culturally responsive way to increase instructional time and accelerate learning recovery.

that parents’ involvement in their children’s learning is a more powerful predictor of academic success than any other variable, including race and class. finds that 80% of the variation in public school performance results from family influences, not the teacher’s. Bottom line: Parents, not schools, are the of children’s learning.

Despite this decades-old body of research, education policymakers and administrators focus almost exclusively on school improvement, fixating on the of waking hours kids spend in classrooms. Sure, hiring tutors and extending the school day and year can marginally increase instructional time, but it’s far and away the and way to do it. AASA, the School Superintendents Association, found that most districts plan to end or decrease summer learning and additional enrichment programs when recovery funds run out. But and tutors, families are not in short supply — and parents don’t expect compensation to read with their kids. Parents’ love for their children is the single greatest, and most underutilized, natural resource in education.

While overinvesting in classroom intervention, policymakers and administrators have dramatically underinvested in students’ time outside of school. Ignoring the role that parents play in their kids’ learning leaves the door wide open for inequity to run rampant. Over the last decade, college-educated parents have their investment of time and money in their children’s education and futures. Case in point: Wealthy parents were able to largely spare their kids from the pandemic’s worst effects by at home and purchasing supplemental services. The result is a vicious cycle of intergenerational wealth inequality and economic immobility.

This is no accident. Structural racism, wealth inequality and a tattered social safety net make parenting in the face of poverty a herculean challenge. Regardless of income, every parent has the same innate drive to nurture their children. Low-income parents want desperately for their kids to have a better future. In a from Learning Heroes, marginalized families said they were more worried about their children’s learning than even their ability to pay the bills during the pandemic. And parents’ single biggest unmet need is “personalized guidance to support learning at home.” Families are demanding support, and it’s past time for the American education system to provide it.

For decades, education reformers have clung to the belief that alone can close the opportunity gap. But that didn’t work before the pandemic, and it won’t work now. The has remained unchanged over the past half-century, despite billions of dollars invested in classroom interventions. When it comes to educating kids, there’s no going around parents. Educators must work with and through them to ensure students learn across the continuum of home and school. Failure to do so will result in low-income learners falling further behind as the wealthy families confer ever-greater privilege on their children.

Parents report having spent an average of on learning at home during school closures. This, of course, is unsustainable. However, even parents with only minutes to spare can help their children learn to read. An found that 15 daily minutes seems to be the magic number for substantial positive gains in literacy. The education system should ask parents to do less, not more, and equip families with the resources and personalized guidance to make the most of their efforts. Families deserve to see their kids make tangible progress toward learning goals, not sink countless hours into the abyss only to read about dismal test results years later in the news.

Winston Churchill famously said, “You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing … after they have tried everything else.” The moment has finally arrived for schools to try something else: a systematic approach to helping families and teachers collaborate in service of student learning. One proven way to do this is through . These are five- to-10-week cycles during which teachers and parents team up to help kids reach academic growth goals. Small wins lead to , enabling families and educators to fulfill their common purpose: children’s success.

As the nation’s schools embark on the long road to COVID learning recovery, instead of reaching for familiar classroom interventions that have only ever failed to move the needle, it is time to rebuild an education system in which families and educators work together to accelerate student learning.

In the United States, there is a deeply held conviction that education is the great equalizer. Indeed, it can be — but only if policymakers, administrators and teachers look beyond the four walls of the classroom and support families as critical partners in student learning.

In the early days of the pandemic, as we worked with educators, families and students to transition to virtual learning, we repeatedly heard a common refrain: Learning from home offered families a unique opportunity to see what their children were doing in school and become more engaged in their education. But these families also weren’t sure what they should be seeing, what their children should be learning in each grade, how best to support them and how to create partnerships with teachers to keep their kids learning under unprecedented circumstances.

The importance of helping families understand what is most important for students to know and be able to do by the end of each grade isn’t new, but the pandemic and shift to remote learning gave it renewed urgency.

Seeking to address this need, we partnered with families, caregivers and educators to create , a user-friendly, jargon-free and accessible resource in Spanish and English designed to ensure that caregivers of K-12 students understand what kids should know and be able to do in each grade, along with tools to help them support their kids’ learning.

Across the country, it’s become clear how the right resources and support can help make families true partners in their children’s education. For example, with support from , parents in Oakland, California, used the Guides as a framework for conversations with other families about shared challenges and successful strategies to help support their children’s learning. They used that new understanding to hold workshops earlier this year on language arts and math expectations, in part to help parents navigate summer learning opportunities. In Brooklyn, parents wanted to know how they could help their children stay on track to be prepared for the following year. By integrating the Guides into their curriculum and conversations with parents, public schools across the borough helped these parents look ahead to what would be expected of their children at the next grade level, laying the groundwork for future academic success.

According to a recent survey, feel more connected with their child’s day-to-day education than ever before. As schools consider summer programming and the transition to a new school year in the fall, there’s an opportunity for districts, administrators, teachers and organizations that work with families to keep this engagement going. Ensuring that families have a deeper understanding of grade-level expectations and engaging them more deeply in academics than ever before is key.

Even before the pandemic, it was understood that the benefits of increased family engagement in schools are crucial and wide-ranging. Kids with engaged caregivers do better in school, and keeping families informed and engaged in their children’s education through transparent and effective communication encourages connection and relationships that benefits students. But there were also significant challenges in keeping many families engaged and informed about their children’s academic progress. Many families didn’t know what their kids should know and be able to do in math and English by the end of each grade. Some families found it challenging to translate and decipher the jargon around their children’s education, and therefore did not feel empowered to ask questions and assess how their children are really doing.

Providing tools and resources that engage families can be especially beneficial for those who have historically received less of this support, including Black, brown and low-income families. Tools like these help families advocate for the education their children deserve, and serve as a foundation for rich discussions, recommendations and new ideas born of strong relationships between families and schools.

Offering resources that help families engage more deeply with the academic content in classrooms is powerful, but simply sharing this information without context or support often isn’t enough. Tools like the Guides are most effective when school or trusted parent communities provide opportunities for families to come together, ask questions and build their knowledge. We saw this in action, when one Connecticut parent created mini-focus groups to help parents determine how to best apply the Guides’ recommendations in their own family settings.

The best engagement happens when families can connect with other families in their community for honest conversations about challenges or questions about tracking their children’s educational progress and implementing strategies that focus on creating a friendly, welcoming environment for both students and caregivers.

As the country transitions back toward mostly in-person learning in the coming school year, schools and educators have a unique opportunity to ensure that the pandemic’s unprecedented level of family engagement in student learning doesn’t wane as children return to the classroom. By making family engagement about building academic partnerships between caregivers and schools and by offering all families the proper resources and support to engage, every student and family can be set up for success and support, next year and beyond.

Sandra Boyd is CEO of Seek Common Ground. Amy Briggs is president of Student Achievement Partners.

More than 30 percent of Achievement Prep’s students became chronically absent from virtual learning after COVID-19 shuttered schools last spring. At the K-3 school where more than three-quarters of the students are considered at-risk, educators knew that something needed to change. Now, the so-called Culture Team ventures out every Wednesday to celebrate some students for their attendance, to support others who are struggling with remote learning, and to suss out the students who have fallen off the map entirely. But, Ms Tilgman says, “Chronic absenteeism is a huge, uphill climb for us.” That means that those home visits are critical for engaging students who need those touch points now more than ever.

Watch how the Achievement Prep team responded quickly to the worsening problem and started to turn it around — by meeting students and families where they are to ensure that families remain engaged and students continue to learn through the pandemic.

— Edited by Jim Fields; Produced by Jim Fields & Emmeline Zhao

While most schools are back in person this spring, they continue to grapple with lagging enrollment.  have been hit especially hard. California’s missing kindergartners, for example, are driving the state’s .

Yet at all age levels, an unprecedented number of families  during an uncertain year. The percentage of Black families choosing homeschool jumped  since last spring. Others found stability by enrolling their children in new options, like  and learning pods.

Because enrollment dictates district revenues and budgetary planning processes, losing families has . While districts will benefit from short-term federal relief next year, unaddressed enrollment losses could drive long-term revenue reductions. Districts also face uncertainty stemming from other funding sources, which can lead to even more lost revenue. For example,  in Maryland not only expects to lose $34.6 million due to an enrollment shortage of approximately 1,700 students, it also expects other state funds to end, leading to a  next year.

How are districts tackling disenrollment among families? The Center on Reinventing Public Education’s latest review of 100 urban and large districts finds decidedly mixed results: About half (49) have communicated strategies or plans to re-engage pre-K and kindergarten families in the next school year and, hopefully, increase enrollment.

Some of the most common strategies:

• Nineteen districts adapted to a remote setting by hosting virtual open houses and shifting their registration process online to better accommodate families and meet health and safety guidelines. California’s  converted enrollment and school information events (e.g., Education Celebration and KinderFest) to a virtual platform this year. in Florida created a live chat feature on its website to enable families to speak with a school choice specialist during the enrollment period.
• Seventeen districts are involving families in the decision-making process for next year. Some, like North Dakota’s , are surveying their remote families on whether they would return in person in the fall, and plan to use the data to inform offerings in the next year. Others, like the , are using community consultations and school-by-school outreach to actively engage families in decisions about reopening for future school years.
• Ten districts are making a concerted effort to capture projected  in pre-K and kindergarten.  in Texas identified lower enrollment in pre-K and kindergarten as the biggest reason for reduced enrollment this year, and is trying to recruit families for next year through extensive outreach, including in-person visits. Likewise, North Carolina’s  hosted a “Hello Kindergarten” week, where it aired a series of videos depicting a typical kindergarten day.

Districts should also anticipate that some students will not return to in-person schooling next year. This spring’s  and family survey data indicate nearly a third of families prefer remote or hybrid learning, even when given an in-person option.

Thirty-six percent of districts we reviewed plan to offer remote or hybrid learning next year — evidence of what may be an enduring change among many urban and large districts.  found 20 percent were interested in offering remote learning after the pandemic, and  expect to have a “much wider array” of remote options.

Twenty-three of these districts are using virtual academies that existed before the pandemic. Both  in Iowa and the  in Georgia, for instance, have virtual campuses for high school students and plan to expand them to include middle schoolers in the upcoming school year.

Meanwhile, 13 districts have created new programs to accommodate families who prefer remote learning.  in Colorado announced it will offer a virtual option for the 2021-22 school year, with live instruction from dedicated remote-learning teachers.  in Maryland also plans to offer a remote learning program for its pre-K through 12th grade students next year called Montgomery Virtual, which will partner with students’ schools to provide both academic and social-emotional support. Additionally, after learning that some families preferred remote learning (and that some remote students scored  on academic benchmarks during the pandemic),  plans to continue to offer its new e3 Online Learning program, incorporating more live instruction.

With teachers experiencing  this past year, some districts are also adjusting staffing for their remote and hybrid learning programs. In Georgia,  remote classes will have dedicated instructors — a notable change from this school year, when teachers taught in-person and remote students simultaneously. Likewise,  in Texas will have their teachers instructing either remotely or in person, rather than doing both at the same time.

With the 2021-22 school year on the horizon, districts must make a greater effort to re-engage families who have enrolled elsewhere during the pandemic, as well as those who prefer to remain remote next year. These families are not looking to return to the old normal.

Federal stimulus dollars shouldn’t be treated as a Band-Aid to plug revenue gaps from potential enrollment declines next year. While the money does not provide a solution on its own to districts’ enrollment woes, it does offer opportunities to create new or revamped offerings with the potential to recapture many families.

We recommend these strategies for districts to consider to curb declining enrollment in the next school year and beyond:

• Expand school choice options by developing partnerships with charter and magnet schools.  in Colorado tackled declining enrollment before the pandemic by building out more school options via magnets, with hopes of drawing more families back in with choice.
• Consider  for high school students that balance the strengths of in-person and virtual learning.These blended options could offer off-campus internships, counseling and peer groups, and flexible schedules on students’ virtual learning days.
• Re-engage and build trust with families by involving them in school-year planning and creating more stakeholder decision-making structures.
• Improve accessibility by offering multiple points of communication.Allowing families to attend virtual enrollment information sessions and register for the school year online can help recapture families with busy schedules.
• Provide remote and hybrid learning as an option for all students. There is clear interest in these programs beyond the current school year, . All learning models must be given the same attention as in-person schooling, and students who choose these options should have access to quality curricula, nonacademic enrichment (e.g., sports) and opportunities for peer engagement. Districts must forge a community within their remote and hybrid programs if they want to .

Families have discovered the options beyond in-person traditional schooling, and districts must respond by working to ensure students in these alternative pathways get the same attention as their peers. Districts that hesitate to provide more customized, quality options for families not only risk a continued decline in enrollment, they also might contribute to a  opportunity gap at a perilous time.

is a research analyst at the Center on Reinventing Public Education. Evelynn Michaud-Spangler is a student at University of Washington Bothell.