Karega Rausch, president and CEO of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers since 2020, was selected Wednesday to lead the Indianapolis Public Education Corporation. The Indiana state legislature created that board earlier in the  year, over opposition from the school district, to give charters a greater say in running the city’s schools.

Rausch, who led the Indianapolis mayor’s education office from 2007 to 2011, will now guide efforts to increase the share of local taxes going to charter schools, create a joint district-charter bus system and find ways to close and share school buildings. The city now has 50,000 school seats for just 41,000 students, a costly surplus of 9,000 seats.

He’ll take the position this fall in the middle of a campaign to pass a tax increase in the November election that will be split equally between the school district and charter schools. That sharing of taxes was mandated by the state legislature after bitter fights between district and charter supporters.

Rausch, a resident of Indianapolis since 2000, told the IPEC board before the vote that he considers himself a “bridge-builder” who will work with both the district and charters. He said the Indianapolis Public Schools has expertise he hopes to tap into.

“I was not looking for a new opportunity,” Rausch told �鶹��Ʒ after the vote. “I love the work and impact we are making at NACSA. This opportunity was very unique and a once-in-a lifetime opportunity to be the founding executive director, allowing me to help make a transformative difference in Indianapolis.”&�Բ�����;

IPEC board member Patricia Castaneda said she believes Rausch is “answering the call of community” in leaving his national post for the job.

“It is not often that someone comes home to their community to do the work that they have so successfully done across not only the state, the city, the state, but also the nation, and that is encouraging to me,” said Castaneda, former chair of a charter school network in the city.

Board member John Hammond said he is happy Rausch wants to “help us lead a very special effort here that is unique in the country.”

“I think he understands the special circumstance that we’re in as a community… and the balance that needs to be struck as we kind of move into a new era, and understands both sides and all sides of the equation,” Hammond said.

Rausch’s selection continues a push, driven by Republican state legislators, to shift more control of schools in Indianapolis from the school district to charter schools, which have gained so many students in recent years that Indianapolis is one of nationwide where more than half of students attend charters 

The legislature’s creation of IPEC, whose members are appointed by the mayor instead of elected like the district school board, moves power away from the school board. 

The tax increase on the November ballot, for example, previously would have been sought by the district just for district schools. Now, only IPEC can ask voters to approve taxes for both the district and charters.

Experts said earlier this year that Indianapolis is rivaling New Orleans, the most charter-friendly city in the country, in its support of charter schools. Charter supporters say the majority of students deserve more say and to close a gap in funding for district schools and charter schools, while critics say IPEC threatens to drain money and resources from district schools. 

Though IPEC members, by law, include members of Indianapolis Public Schools’ board, it still leans heavily pro-charter. A majority of its members have worked for or served on boards of charter schools. Its chairman, David Harris is founder of several charter schools and led the Mind Trust, a local advocate of charter schools, until 2018. 

The selection of Rausch continues that pattern.

Rausch, who has a PhD from Indiana University, was director of the city’s Office of Education Innovation under two Indianapolis mayors from 2007 to 2011. He then was director of Stand for Children, an education advocacy group in the city, before later joining NACSA as vice president of research and evaluation in 2014. 

Long story short, our divisions and the dysfunctional governance are painfully, visibly real. 

As we start the country’s 251st year, we need to restore public confidence in the effectiveness and legitimacy of our whole political system. That starts by showing the country that American public institutions can work, that they can do the jobs that our democratic officials set for them — and deliver the opportunities and outcomes that the public expects of them. 

We need a firm commitment to public accountability in every possible sense. That means more firmly committing to holding our public systems — including K–12 education — accountable to serving public goals. 

Sure, the solution to America’s flagging social cohesion must be more than new school accountability pilot programs. Of course. That would be like bringing a screwdriver to a hazmat cleanup. Our social tensions are far beyond . 

But the depth and breadth of America’s problems now are also why school reforms have a role in resolving our troubles. Public education is uniquely central to the most elemental promises of our 250-year-old creed. If America means anything, it means that people who work hard, follow the rules and find solutions to persistent problems get rewarded. Public schools are our most tangible collective commitment to that promised — however imperfectly — American Dream. Surely that’s something we can all agree on. 

Indeed, if Americans are divided now, it’s at least partly because that basic bargain isn’t as robust as it once was. A kid who grinds out years of K–12 schooling now can’t count on a . Work hard now, and she still might not be able to cover her health care costs, let alone buy a house where there are good jobs or save up for retirement. 

Young Americans feel the frustration. , the share of young Americans who believe the country is on the wrong track has been three to four times greater than the share of young Americans who think we’re going in the right direction. What’s more, just 30% of respondents said that they expect to do better than their parents, financially speaking. also broad pessimism about public schools.

A path forward for schools will require rebuilding public confidence in the public education system’s ability to deliver upward mobility to students — to future graduates — who show up, work hard and follow the rules. 

How? Local, state and federal policymakers need to set compelling, transparent goals for K–12 systems that reflect families’ actual priorities for kids and schools. For instance, fashionable as it might be to posit that public education needs to be remade with AI and other ed tech tools, about in schools is growing. Leaders can’t persuade families that schools are on the right track by ignoring the things families really want. 

And what might those be? While recently took to The New York Times’ opinion page to argue against the country’s accountability focus on math and reading scores under No Child Left Behind, it’s worth exploring whether Wiener has his finger fully on the public pulse. After all, when the Pew Research Center asked what’s taking schools in the wrong direction, more parents — — said that “schools are not spending enough time on core academic subjects.”&�Բ�����;

I’ve long suspected that the pandemic reset American families’ views on schools and testing. Months of uncertain instruction and learning — and a drumbeat of media coverage about the pandemic’s impacts on student learning — left many families eager for more information about how their children were faring. Without some sort of standardized assessment, it’s almost impossible to efficiently track how students are doing. This is easier to appreciate after a major disruption like the pandemic — subjective evaluations or holistic, local rubrics are unlikely to provide useful, comparable data on students’ progress. 

We might not want to return to No Child Left Behind, but education leaders should consider whether schools need stronger incentives to get kids on track in core subjects. It’s not enough to establish public education goals — policymakers also need to make them matter for schools and educators. Whichever priorities we set for schools, we need to 1) track their progress towards these, and 2) build systems that provide resources and pressure for educators to prioritize that progress. 

To work best, accountability requires clarity about the outcomes we want to see. Effective school accountability systems need goals for student growth and benchmarks for academic achievement in each grade. Data on schools’ progress towards those goals should be published in easily accessible formats. Schools that persistently fall short shouldn’t be punished as they might have been under No Child Left Behind — instead, they should be given supplemental resources with strict strings attached that lead to meaningful school-level changes that will support better student learning. 

That’s accountability, and it’s a key element for building trust in public systems. 

If policymakers want Americans to believe in public institutions, they need to build safeguards like these for showing how these institutions serve the public interest. Notably, the simple, blunt, unlovely, unloved, imperfect No Child Left Behind accountability era coincided with , including for . 

Then, after — over my warnings, for what it’s worth — Congress replaced those priorities with a much looser, lower-accountability system under the Every Student Succeeds Act, . (For the record, I was unimpressed, even back then.)

A quarter millennium’s a long time, during which the American experiment has substantially evolved more than once. Like the 2026 reflecting pool — which has been — our collective project needs much more than a fresh coat of paint. 

To move forward, we need to reduce our suspicions of one another, increase our levels of social trust and reimagine just what it is we’re trying to be together as a country. That means rebuilding trust in public, democratically accountable systems. Where better to rebuild that faith than in public education?

The views expressed here are Conor P. Williams’s alone, and do not reflect those of his employer or any other affiliated organizations.

For decades, he said, Washington politicians gave young people “nothing but debt,” he said.

“The government is finally giving money back to our children,” he told the crowd at Wheeler High School in Cobb County, inviting families who have opened accounts to join him on stage with their children.

The event brought together several cabinet members who joined the president in urging families to open Trump Accounts. Before Trump took the stage in the school’s large gymnasium, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Treasurer Brandon Beach, Education Secretary Linda McMahon and Kelly Loeffler, a former Georgia senator who now serves as head of the Small Business Administration, all described the child savings policy as transformational.

McMahon called it “one of the largest generational investments in upward mobility that our country has ever made.”

Under the savings initiative, which went live July 4, the administration will give $1,000 deposits to children born during the president’s term if their parents open a Trump Account. Over seven million children are already enrolled in the program, Bessent told the crowd. 

The child savings account program was included in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Parents and others can contribute to the tax-deferred account until the child turns 18 and converts it into a traditional individual retirement account. 

Philanthropists Michael and Susan Dell expanded on the government’s contribution last year when they to provide an extra $250 for 25 million children 10 and under living in ZIP codes with median incomes below $150,000. Other donors have since made contributions, some for specific states. 

Chris Woods, a financial adviser and Cobb district parent, told �鶹��Ʒ that he thinks the policy is a wise move.

“There are a lot of ways to save for children’s college and their future,” he said. “The difference is you’re getting funds from the government.”

But Eli Speer, a recent high school graduate and Trump supporter, said the program isn’t “fiscally conservative.”

“We have to prioritize shaving down the debt, cutting red tape,” he said.

The agreed, calling Trump Accounts a “government welfare program” that further complicates the tax system and might not be a better investment opportunity than existing options. Others question whether the families who would benefit the most from the program are even aware of it. An showed that higher-earning adults and those who already have at least $5,000 in savings were more likely to know about the program.

Bessent, however, pushed back on criticisms that the policy will favor wealthier families. Of the families who have already opened accounts for their kids, he said 86% earn household incomes of $200,000 or less.

“Trump Accounts are reaching the very people they were designed to serve,” he said. “President Trump is creating assets for the American people, not more debt and broken promises.”

Despite the strong turnout Wednesday, Cobb County is not actually “Trump country,” as several speakers called it. Trump lost Cobb all three times he ran for president. The district, however, is led by a majority Republican board. 

“The school board is the last bastion of Republican control that Cobb County has,” said Heather Tolley-Bauer, a co-founder of Watching the Funds-Cobb, a watchdog group that this week about whether district resources were being used to support what was in part a political rally. District staff handled several logistics for the event, organizing refreshments and helping with security.

“It clearly wasn’t to advocate for public education, our students or to share all that’s great about our schools,” she said. “It was to serve the Republican Party.”

Several students also gathered in a Kroger parking lot a few miles away to protest the president coming to one of their high schools.

Some of Trump’s policies haven’t been popular at the school, where the majority of students are Black and Hispanic. In late January, Wheeler students were among the hundreds across Cobb County schools who walked out to protest immigration enforcement activities nationwide.

“I don’t love the fact that we are using a public school to promote a partisan political agenda,” said Edward Kim, a Wheeler graduate.

Multiple candidates running for statewide office had a chance to make campaign pitches Wednesday.

State Sen. Brian Strickland, candidate for attorney general, said families are relocating to Georgia to leave blue states that supported former President Biden’s agenda.

“In November, we have a big decision to make,” he said. “We have to get this right.”&�Բ�����;

Trump also told the attendees to vote for Rep. Mike Collins, who didn’t attend because of votes in Congress. Collins will face Democratic Sen. John Ossoff in November. Ossoff, he said, will “bankrupt your families.”

Rick Jackson, GOP candidate for governor also greeted the crowd and joined Trump on the platform. While he touted his expertise as a businessman as the solution to Democrats’ “affordability crisis,” he also spoke at length about Trump Accounts.

As someone who grew up in foster care, he applauded first lady Melania Trump’s initiative, in which states can open accounts for children in foster care.

“This is more than just an account. It’s a message,” he said about Trump Accounts. “You are seen, and you are valued.”&�Բ�����;

Many attendees said they just wanted a chance to see a sitting president in person. Melissa Moeller, who has two children in Cobb schools, learned about it because her 10^th grader’s marching band practice was relocated from Wheeler because of the event. 

It didn’t bother her, however, that the school’s landscaping was spruced up for the official visit.

“They’re doing that anyway. With the president coming anywhere, I’m ok with a little pomp and circumstance,” she said. “Will it ever happen again? I don’t know.”

But now, some offices that handled the hundreds of inquiries that pour in each month — from parents, reporters and watchdog groups — have either been eliminated or have no remaining employees, according to a by the agency’s inspector general.

A FOIA group within the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education, for example, had eight employees before President Donald Trump took charge in January 2025. After staff reductions, none remained, the report showed. 

Those cuts have further jammed an already clogged system. A review by �鶹��Ʒ of publicly available shows that out of the more than 4,900 requests the Education Department has received since February 2025, only 3% have been granted in full or in part as of last week. The department doesn’t carry the largest backlog of requests, according to . But its own annual , released earlier this year, said it was unable to reduce a backlog that makes up over 86% of pending requests. 

Officials blamed their lack of responsiveness on an increase in requests, the department’s downsizing and the 43-day government shutdown last year. Experts, including a former FOIA official, say the administration’s push to eliminate the department has especially hampered the public’s ability to understand the inner workings of the agency.

“The people who remain at the Department of Education are either not subject matter experts in the relevant issue or they’re massively overworked trying desperately to do the jobs of all of their departed coworkers,” said Jill Siegelbaum, who spent 15 years as the agency’s senior FOIA attorney. 

With the department offloading key offices to other agencies, hunting down records could become even more difficult, she said. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who will take responsibility for special education, has also .

“No one is going to have any idea what agency has which responsive records,” said Siegelbaum, now a partner with Sligo Law Group. “All of this adds up to a nightmare for FOIA requesters.”

Those include parents whose children aren’t receiving the services they’re entitled to, news outlets covering fast-moving stories in their local schools and student loan borrowers trying to make sense of what they owe after all the changes to in recent years.

The requests frequently become .

In one example, a reporter from the New Bedford Light in Massachusetts asked for civil rights data from the local school district in 2021. The request is still pending, but the reporter has since moved on, according to the outlet’s executive editor.

In early 2023, Callie Oettinger, a special education advocate in Virginia, requested documents from the Office for Civil Rights related to its oversight of Fairfax County Public Schools during the pandemic. After an OCR investigation, to make up for the services students with disabilities didn’t receive during school closures. 

Oettinger wanted to ensure OCR was holding the district accountable, but two years later, she hasn’t received a response. She recently talked to a mom who is still trying to get services for her child as part of that agreement. 

“We’re six years past COVID,” she said. “Kids needed help years ago.”&�Բ�����;

In March 2025, �鶹��Ʒ asked for submissions to the department’s short-lived tip line for examples of diversity, equity and inclusion activity in public schools. The department had to shut down the portal as the result of litigation, but the request is still pending. In all, �鶹��Ʒ has submitted 20 requests since the current administration took office. Seventeen have not been processed and three cases were closed because they were duplicates. A separate request to the Office of Inspector General was fulfilled within four weeks. 

FOIA wasn’t meant for “historical purposes,” said Jon Maier, senior litigation counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “It’s a public disclosure statute that’s designed to get information into the hands of the American public.”&�Բ�����;

The left-leaning watchdog group sued seeking records from the Department of Government Efficiency, which oversaw widespread layoffs and cancelled contracts. Requesters can sue if they haven’t received a response in 20-30 days. The department’s current wait time for simple requests , but many take much longer.

“That these preposterous delays are acceptable goes directly against the purpose of FOIA,” Maier said. The backlog is only likely to grow. “When the government isn’t telling you what it’s doing there will only be more FOIA requests.”

‘Ignoring FOIA officers’

In addition to tallying the staff cuts, the inspector general’s office hoped to evaluate the agency’s ability to process requests. But the department refused to turn over all the information its internal watchdog requested and declined to “permit unrestricted access to its staff,” said Catherine Grant, a spokeswoman for that office. “We were unable to make definitive determinations in several areas, including major activities,” like FOIA requests.

In the largest share of open cases, roughly 41% of them, a FOIA officer has sent the request to the office that is likely to have the records, but is still waiting, often months later, for a response.

Lauren Harper, an expert on government secrecy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, wasn’t surprised. 

If the department is “stonewalling the inspector general’s office, it’s an extremely safe bet that they’re absolutely ignoring FOIA officers who are asking for information,” she said. 

The logs also show:

• Since February 2025, 37% of FOIA requests have been closed, but the majority of those were either withdrawn or were invalid requests to begin with. 

• During the current Trump administration’s first 16 months in office, the department received an average of 295 requests per month. During that same window under President Joe Biden, from February 2021 through May 2022, the department received an average of 185 requests a month. 

• Many requests submitted during the Biden administration and even Trump’s first term still haven’t been processed. For fiscal year 2023, 23% are stuck in that “request for docs sent” category. 

‘Find funding elsewhere’

Problems with the federal government’s FOIA system are longstanding. The law, which turned 60 on July 4, has always been “underfunded,” Siegelbaum said. 

“Congress doesn’t appropriate funding for FOIA, so you have to find funding elsewhere,” she said. “Sometimes it has to struggle to get attention, to get the appropriate resources, both in terms of money and staff at the Department of Education.”

Comparing the handling of FOIA requests from one administration to the next isn’t a simple math problem. Each new team inherits requests that were still pending when the department changed hands. Clearing out the backlog was a priority for Mitchell Zais, former deputy education secretary during Trump’s first term.

“As I recall, we were able to hire some temporary staff,” he said in an email. “As a consequence, we made significant progress, but not as much as I would have liked.”

In 2024, the conservative Defense of Freedom Institute, where Zais is a board member, analyzed the department’s FOIA logs, concluding that the response rate was higher during the first three years of Trump’s first term than during the same period under Biden, 67% to 48%. 

The analysis also showed that during Zais’ tenure, the department was quicker to respond to liberal groups it disagreed with, like American Oversight and the Center for American Progress, than the Biden administration was to conservative advocates and think tanks, including Parents Defending Education and the America First Policy Institute.

Zais suggested that while he was there, some requests “were made with an eye toward harassing the department … rather than generally seeking information that could be legitimately used for any positive purpose.”

But Harper, at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, that whether or liberal groups are flooding the system, the onus is on the government to respond in a more timely manner. The current administration, she said, has been especially hostile toward releasing information, and staff working on FOIA requests have been among the first to go at agencies the administration is “interested in eliminating.”

Last year, the administration put in the U.S. Agency for International Development on leave before shutting down the agency entirely. Trump has the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which for releasing a memo about .

In addition to mass firings at the Education Department, active litigation contributes to the growing backlog of requests, officials said. According to its FOIA report, the agency is facing 57 FOIA-related lawsuits, which have “negatively impacted the department’s ability to keep pace with other requests.” Last week, civil rights groups filed two more FOIA-related lawsuits, one about the department’s failure to release data on cases and another seeking .

ProPublica in February for failing to release information including civil rights investigations. In April, the to the complaint, acknowledged it received the requests and said its search for records is “ongoing.”

‘Proactively’ posting records

Harper gave the department credit for posting up-to-date FOIA logs, something other agencies haven’t always done. The department, however, between December 2023 and mid-2025.

Officials reported that they’ve taken actions to improve turnaround times on requests, like training staff across the agency and “proactively” posting frequently requested records. These include student loan data and a list of involving accusations of antisemitism.

As McMahon moves forward with splitting up the department, spokeswoman Savannah Newhouse said the agency is “complying with all applicable laws and looks forward to restoring excellence in American education through these critical partnerships.”

, agencies that are “reorganizing, terminating or transferring offices or functions” have to work with the National Archives and Records Administration and the receiving agency to ensure records don’t get lost in the process. 

“This all requires a lot of communication,” Harper said. She emphasized that the National Archives hasn’t been spared from or . “Restructuring has not happened on the scale that it’s happening now. It’s truly a perfect storm.”

Notably, however, these effects fluctuated over time. After consistently outperforming district schools for more than a decade, MIT researcher Geoffrey Kocks found that charters forfeited their relative advantage entirely between 2015 and 2019, only to bounce back during the pandemic. By 2022, charters statewide once again enjoyed a meaningful edge, though not one as great as they exhibited before the slowdown. 

The shifts depicted in could reframe perceptions of a school choice sector that has for . They also offer a more textured picture of how one of the most influential education initiatives of the 21st century has evolved during a period of major social and economic changes, including the COVID shock and a lengthy period of academic stagnation that has been felt around the country. 

“I found it really interesting to refresh our understanding of what’s taking place, and to see that these effects were not static,” said Kocks, a doctoral student working under the auspices of MIT’s . “It’s not some kind of fixed charter effect that’s going to be large no matter what.”

A half-decade slide

To track those effects over time, Kocks gathered data from admissions lotteries for 32 Massachusetts charter schools between 2002 and 2025. When charters receive more applications than they have seats, those lotteries determine which families are offered a place. They also create a natural experiment, effectively assigning otherwise-similar students to either charters or their local public school on a random basis. 

Prior lottery-based research — conducted by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joshua Angrist, who helped oversee Kocks’s work at MIT — has demonstrated powerful gains accruing to students enrolled at urban charters embracing the so-called No Excuses model of high academic standards, rigorous behavioral codes, and supplemental instruction through tutoring and extended school days. But much of that literature was published during the Bush and Obama presidencies, with fewer follow-up studies through the 2020s.

Kocks broadly points to similar benefits. By combining the lottery outcomes with students’ academic records from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, he also estimated large improvements to learning in the charter sector. For each year of attendance at a charter middle or high school, he estimated that students’ scores on the state’s mandated MCAS exam rose by six percentile points in math and three points in reading. 

Composite scores on the SAT also rose by 11.5 points per year of exposure to a Massachusetts charter school — a phenomenon driven almost entirely by charters in Boston and a ring of communities in its immediate vicinity, which lifted SAT scores by 25.7 points annually. Black, Hispanic, and economically disadvantaged children also experienced an especially large boost, ascending by an average of 8–11 points in math and 5–6 points in reading on the MCAS.

Yet those impressive results began a steady decline in 2013, eventually receding to the point that charter performance was statistically indistinguishable from that of neighborhood public schools. Again, the trends were highly place-specific, with steep declines in urban charters and much gentler ones elsewhere; SAT scores for Boston-area charter students fell by a disquieting 43.1 points per year of charter enrollment between 2015 and 2019. 

The latest lottery and testing data offers signs of a strong rebound. Boston charters have reversed most of the damage sustained during the late 2010s, with the average student in the 2020s actually outpacing the annual literacy gains seen from 2010 to 2014.That movement is variable, though, with top-performing schools pulling away from scuffling ones.

Jim Peyser, who served a long stint as Massachusetts secretary of education during the period included in the study, said he was glad to see Boston students bouncing back. But he described the recovery in the state capital as “a tale of two cities.”

“Some of the charter schools that fell off a lot between 2019 and 2021 have come back pretty strongly,” Peyser said. “But then you’ve got others that were struggling before COVID. They lost ground during the pandemic, and they haven’t necessarily recovered even back to where they were before.”

Searching for explanations

But what could have caused the mysterious, half-decade slide in relative charter performance?

Kocks first ruled out a set of possible explanations, including modifications to state tests (Massachusetts shuffled through several assessments during this time) and transformations to student demographics (which were mostly small). Instead, he detected two important changes to charter school personnel at a critical time.

First, he found that principals at Boston-area charter schools turned over somewhat faster than those employed by Boston Public Schools in each year from 2015 to 2018. Greater churn was also evident when examining charters in and around Boston against those scattered further afield; just 20% of Boston-area charters were still led by their original CEO as of 2017, compared with 60% in others across the state.

Even more suggestive was a long-running trend in teacher qualifications: Boston-area charters were initially more likely to hire teachers who majored in, or were specifically licensed to teach, their classroom subject. But between 2012 and 2017, the percentage of their teachers with domain-specific knowledge fell from 55% to 40%, while the share of those teachers stayed flat in non-Boston charters. 

Kocks noted that these findings did not represent causal proof. Yet several sources noted the potential importance of changes to Boston’s charter workforce around the time learning began to slip.

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, Orin Gutlerner led a teacher residency program at the highly regarded . During that time, he said there was no difficulty signing up would-be educators with sterling academic credentials. With unemployment still high in the wake of the Great Recession, and the education reform era approaching its zenith, he sometimes received 20 or more applications for each slot.

But as the labor market recovered, many young employees chafed at the long hours and tough expectations at No Excuses schools. Testing evidence was promising, but school leaders were concerned enough about burnout to consider changing their practices. Gutlerner cited the example of a charter that quietly abandoned a requirement that teachers make at least 10 check-in calls to families each week, reasoning that it didn’t rise to the importance of their other commitments.

“When we saw those strong academic results, and the teacher attrition, we said, ‘We need to go all the way in the other direction and be much more mindful of teacher sustainability,’ ” recalled Gutlerner, who now leads in the city’s Roxbury neighborhood. “It’s not that that’s necessarily bad, but these things are very delicate balances, and it started to tip more in that direction.”

At the same time, Boston Public Schools was becoming more aggressive at recruiting high-level talent. In 2014, BPS that it had hired for 82% of its open positions by the end of June — a startling increase from just 9% the year before. 

Sarah Cohodes, a professor of education policy at the University of Michigan who has published a string of influential studies on Boston charter schools, observed that the district’s generous compensation package also helped draw job seekers away from alternatives like Match, Bridge Boston, and Uncommon Schools.

“The BPS salary scale gets you close to $100,000 in nine years,” she said. “So people wanted those jobs, and once BPS got it together in terms of hiring, that was much more appealing than the charters.”

‘Antiracist’ policies under scrutiny

Kocks’s paper does not directly address another prominent hypothesis for charters’ temporary swoon.

In for The Boston Globe, education advocate Steven Wilson asserted that a sector-wide embrace of “antiracist” policies led to the drop in achievement. The former charter leader — who was from the high-performing network he founded after authoring a blog post calling for more rigor in classrooms — last year making the same case in a national context.

The implementation of equity-focused initiatives, such as restorative justice or culturally responsive curricula, can be difficult to document over time. The MIT study did consider the possibility that Boston charters’ gradually decreasing rates of out-of-school suspension harmed learning, but ultimately showed that suspensions fell at BPS schools at the same time (albeit from a lower baseline). 

Gutlerner called Wilson’s views “a pretty narrow analysis,” while noting that increasing skepticism toward many aspects of school reform led to a reconsideration of discipline in some campuses. Charter teachers themselves suddenly became conversant on topics like the then-ubiquitous “,” spurring dissent within schools, he remembered.

“Instead of methodically evaluating and shifting practices and making improvements, there were some wholesale calls to just rip out the entire behavior management system,” he said. “Or to stop retaining students, ever.” 

Besides suspensions, a raft of stringent expectations and customs came to define many successful charters, such as silent hallway transitions and . The , and other moment-to-moment techniques used by school staff to keep instruction running smoothly, could have played a more important role than disciplinary penalties like suspension and detention, Gutlerner reflected. 

Peyser added that, as charter leaders became more distantly removed from the generation of founders who established the schools’ cultures, some of the organizations’ urgency and vision dissipated as well.

“That [turnover] is associated with a weakening of the ‘No-Excuses’ culture, which many of the schools had adopted,” he said. “That possibly led to a general relaxation of school culture, which had been so important to their success.”

Kocks said those historic observations, along with the drifting trajectory of learning outcomes at charter schools, indicated that much of their striking benefits could be contingent upon their own policies and implementation, along with conditions far outside their walls.

“What surprised me was seeing how unstable these effects were, both in terms of the decline and the eventual rebound,” he concluded. “That means that these inputs matter a lot, and we have the potential to make big changes in how effective schools are within a relatively short period of time.”

If communities continue treating facility investment as a secondary concern, they should not be surprised when families decide those schools are no longer the best place to educate their children.

The American Society of Civil Engineers has given for three consecutive report cards, while the rest of the country’s infrastructure improved. Nearly four in 10 public school buildings were constructed before 1970. The funding gap to bring them up to a functional standard now stands at an estimated $429 billion — and it keeps growing because communities keep deferring the problem.

On the ground, that deferred maintenance looks like leaking roofs, asbestos ceiling tiles and mold scraped from between wall coverings. It looks like parking lots full of potholes, playgrounds with rusted equipment, and classrooms that are too hot in summer or too cold in winter because the heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems failed years ago.

Another similarity most of these buildings share is a lack of any real technology infrastructure in an era when students cannot learn without one.

The physical condition of a school building is one of the primary drivers of the educational experience delivered inside it. And the research is catching up to what communities have been living with for years.

The economist Julien LaFortune, working with the Public Policy Institute of California, studied school facility investment using data from the Los Angeles Unified School District and in test scores, attendance and surrounding property values after new school buildings were constructed.

What made LaFortune’s findings notable was that the gains were not primarily explained by changes in class size, teachers, principals or student composition. When researchers stripped away every other variable, what was left was the building. By his analysis, for every dollar invested in school facilities, the program increased housing values.

Research going back two decades has documented a between facility condition and teacher retention. When a school building deteriorates, the teachers with the most options leave first. The ones who stay are often the ones with nowhere else to go.

When a school is modernized, that dynamic reverses. Qualified educators who previously passed over the school begin applying, while teachers who are already there choose to stay. The result is a more experienced, more committed faculty working with better tools in a better environment — and students who receive stronger instruction as a direct consequence.

That instructional improvement shows up in measurable ways. Students in modernized facilities score higher on standardized assessments and miss fewer days of school. Researchers saw this trend emerge during COVID, when they first noted the correlation between better ventilation and . More recent studies have found that boosted math scores and reduced suspensions in schools — because student comfort matters. 

When those results become visible, other families in the community begin seeking out the school. As enrollment grows, schools gain the resources that come with a larger student population and the capacity to expand what they offer.

One example of this is the Detroit Public Safety Academy, a dropout recovery program. It’s a school designed specifically for students who have already left the system or are on the verge of leaving it. The program does not offer a GED. It instead delivers a full, certified high school diploma, the same credential that any other public school confers. Upon graduation, students walk directly into careers in public safety with real wages and real futures. The school now posts a 90% graduation rate among a population that had largely been written off, and Detroit’s public safety workforce has a pipeline it did not have before.

That model wouldn’t work in a building that is falling apart. The aging building underwent a dramatic renovation, which has enabled its success. Without it, the program wouldn’t exist, and those students wouldn’t have that pathway.

Modern workforce-development programs require modern facilities. A manufacturing lab equipped with computer-controlled machine tools and robotic arms requires purpose-built space that a building from 1963 cannot provide. Forty-seven states . More than 11 million students nationally. The demand exists. In too many communities, the buildings to support it do not.

As enrollment grows and school quality becomes visible to the broader community, the effects extend beyond the school itself. Families relocate to be within a school’s attendance boundary. That increased demand for housing near high-performing schools drives up property values.

By tracking housing markets near improved schools, the National Bureau of Economic Research found that roughly $20 in housing value accumulates for every additional dollar in per-pupil spending — a signal of how much families are willing to pay to be near a school that works.

We tend to describe declining enrollment as the cause of deteriorating schools, but the arrow may point the other way more often.

Families leave schools that no longer meet their expectations. They move to districts with better facilities or choose alternatives that have multiplied over the past decade. The school loses students, loses funding and deteriorates further. That cycle is not inevitable. Modernize the building, and the sequence can begin running in reverse.

The question is whether communities are willing to treat the building as the starting point rather than the last priority. Children only pass through the education system once. They should not spend those years waiting for adults to decide that the building matters.

This year, at least six states enacted laws trying to reduce the number of students chronically absent from school.

The measures include requiring monitoring of absences and publicly releasing data, developing new guidance on the best ways to address the problem and increasing punishments for parents and guardians of chronically absent students.

Chronic absenteeism is defined as missing 10% or more of school days in an academic year, which equates to about 18 days or two days per month.

A signed in March creates a student attendance monitoring system and requires the identification of at-risk students. Parents of students in grades 1-6 will receive a notice of violation after five truancies. If parents don’t meet with school officials to address the truancy, they could face a class B misdemeanor.

requires every school district and public charter school to compile data about the students who regularly attend class or are chronically absent, which will be made publicly available by the state’s Department of Education.

overhauls how the state defines and handles chronic absenteeism and truancy. Chronic absenteeism will remain categorized as 10% or more days of missed attendance. Truancy is classified as 20 or more unexcused absences within a school year.

If a student is considered truant and school-based interventions haven’t improved attendance, the law allows the state’s attorney to fine parents a maximum of $1,000 or to file a court petition against the parents.

Additionally, by July 2027, the state’s Agency of Education must develop a model policy on chronic absenteeism and truancy, including guidance on excusing absences, addressing absenteeism among students with disabilities and considering how bullying and hazing could impact a student’s attendance.

Under , a student transferring during the school year will have the number of unexcused absences reported to their next school, and any future unexcused absences will be added on a cumulative record. And it removes the five-hour limit on the amount of community service a judge may order for the parent or guardian of a student with five or more unexcused absences during a school year.

Under a sweeping K-12 education legislative enacted this year in Mississippi, the state is required to fund one attendance officer per 4,000 compulsory‑school‑aged children.

And a recent New Jersey law establishes a chronic absenteeism task force, which will develop recommendations on the best way to address the problem.

According to FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University, lawmakers filed this legislative session about chronic absenteeism.

Of the 44 states and Washington, D.C., that have released 2024-25 attendance data, most states showed improvement, FutureEd found. But Colorado, Oklahoma, Mississippi, New Mexico and the district reported a rise in missed school days. And no state has fully returned to pre-pandemic levels, it said.

According to its most recent data, the U.S. Department of Education says the national rate of chronic absenteeism reached about 31% in 2021-22 and fell to 28% in 2022-23.

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But for microschools, a growing segment of the private school market, the initial guidance from federal officials has left school leaders worried they could be left out.

The law says that students can use scholarships for expenses at a public, private or religious school. But many microschools operate outside of their state’s private school sector — as tutoring centers, homeschool groups and learning pods. Depending on state law, they may or may not be classified as private schools.

In his , Kevin Salinger, the deputy assistant secretary for tax policy, added that “a homeschool would be treated as a school if it is treated as a school under state law.”

His comments have left some microschool leaders scratching their heads.

Even if a state decides to opt in to the new program, “it is my concern that some will exclude microschools,” said Don Soifer, CEO of the National Microschooling Center, who is closely monitoring the issue.

To him, Congress’ intent was clear. The states that if a student is eligible to attend a public K-12 school, then they will qualify for a scholarship as long as their family’s income doesn’t exceed 300% of the area median income, a high bar. Florida, Ohio and Tennessee are among the states that plan to participate in the program but have microschools that don’t fall under the private school umbrella. Some who advocated for passage of the law say microschool leaders should stay tuned for more information.

“We think Treasury misspoke or is misinterpreting the statute,” said Jim Blew, a former Department of Education official who is working to implement the new program. “It’ll all be cleared up by the time they issue the rules for 2027.”

The Treasury Department did not respond to requests for comment.

‘In the hands of the states’ 

Under the program, which starts next year, taxpayers who donate to a nonprofit scholarship granting organization will get a dollar-for-dollar credit, up to $1,700. Opponents, including Sen. Mark Kelly, an Arizona Democrat, want Congress to , and the teachers unions are to opt out. They note that Salinger, the Treasury official, said states won’t be able to “impose” restrictions on SGOs. They can’t, for example, only approve nonprofits that offer scholarships to public school kids and not approve those that serve students attending private schools.

Other Democrats, like former Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Jorge Elorza, CEO of Democrats for Education Reform, have urged blue state governors to opt in. that the program “opens the door to new, private donations, at no cost to taxpayers, that can support students in public and nonpublic settings alike.”

Cecilia Retelle Zywicki, founder of LearningSpring, which is building a system for states to track SGOs and payments, expects the Trump administration to stay out of the debate over how states define a school.

“Details like this are going to remain in the hands of the states,” she said. “The Treasury has made it clear in actions and words that oversight and compliance will remain with the states.”

‘A bummer’

That means even in red states that already intend to participate, some students could be left out. 

“It’s a bummer because I know it would help the families,” said Tonya Kipe, who runs Kipe Academy in Winter Haven, Florida, as a nonprofit tutoring center out of a Methodist church. 

She’s among those microschool founders who prefer not to organize as a private school. In addition to the microschool, which serves 36 students, she offers afterschool tutoring and a monthly science workshop. Becoming a more formal private school, she said, might require them to find a different facility and add testing requirements

As a former second grade teacher and mother of two boys, she knows how students can have vastly different learning needs. Her older son, she said, is the “compliant one,” while her younger son wasn’t motivated by public school routines like earning points for reading books. She launched her own school in 2021 to break out of a “cookie cutter” approach to education. 

The families who signed up for her microschool were looking for the same thing.

“They like the flexibility of being able to just be here for academics from 8 to 11:30 and then join us for field trips if they want to,” she said. While many in her program already use Florida’s various private school choice options, she said the federal program could allow them to “double up” on tutoring, buy more supplies or add other supplemental programs.

Large microschool networks, like KaiPod Learning, are preparing for a patchwork approach across the country.

With locations in 21 states, KaiPod has 91 affiliated schools, about half of them private schools. The others operate as less-formal learning pods or co-ops, said CEO Amar Kumar. 

Kaipod will add about 40 more schools next school year, a third of them in Texas, where the state’s new Education Freedom Accounts program launches this fall. With that growth, he thinks the percentage of private schools in the network will likely climb to 65%.

Microschools, he said, are moving toward “more formalized structures” as public funding for private school choice expands. 

“Our view is that this is healthy for the microschool movement,” he said. “Families want flexibility and personalization, but they also want confidence that the school is stable, accountable and able to access available funding.”

With roughly 1,000 microschools , the Prenda network helped introduce the public to the model during the pandemic when sites began to pop up . While there are Prenda microschools in nearly every state, founder Kelly Smith said the organization has focused on expanding sites, like those in Texas, where they qualify as private schools and families can apply for public funds.

“Wealthy families already participate in microschools by paying out of pocket,” he said. But the federal program “has the potential of allowing lower and middle class families to send their kids to microschools.”&�Բ�����;

He said he was “baffled” that some states were saying no to additional federal funds.

“That is something governors almost never do,” he said.

In a 6-3 decision, the conservative court said that West Virginia and Idaho did not break the law when they passed legislation prohibiting trans athletes from competing against biological women and girls. 

Becky-Pepper Jackson, a transgender 10th grader and track athlete in West Virginia, argued that such regulations are “unreasonable.”&�Բ�����;

“We disagree,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh , bringing his perspective as a girls’ to the case. “Separate sports teams for biological males and biological females are reasonable: Given the inherent physical differences between the sexes, allowing only biological females to play on women’s and girls’ teams can reduce the risk of physical injury and ensure fair competition.”

Attorneys who represented Jackson and Boise State University transgender student Lindsay Hecox called the opinion a “heartbreaking ruling” and “deeply harmful.” The decision, however, doesn’t settle an ongoing legal debate over whether Title IX requires that participation in sports be based on biological sex determined at birth. 

“I’m not terribly surprised by the outcome, given the court’s opinions in the last year,” said Jenny Denny, a specializing in education and Title IX compliance. “I think we could read the writing on the wall.”

Last year, the court upheld a Tennessee law prohibiting gender affirming care for minors, and in April, conservatives sided with California parents who argued that districts should alert parents if their child wants to change their gender identity.

But she said the court’s opinion did not redefine Title IX to suit the administration. 

“Using a sports analogy, which is fitting for today, it’s not a slam dunk for the U.S. Department of Education,” she said. “I think we’ll see the Department of Education cherry pick some language from the opinion today, but it still doesn’t give a clear answer.”

The decision doesn’t prevent states like California from maintaining policies that allow trans athletes to compete in line with their gender identity. But it also means the administration will likely continue its to prevent trans-inclusive policies through and threats to strip federal education funds from districts. 

Education Secretary Linda McMahon suggested as much in her comments on the ruling.

“This is a tremendous victory,” she said, “and we look forward to ensuring that every educational institution in America abides by the law of the land.”&�Բ�����;

The department’s enforcement actions have been based on an President Donald Trump signed last year, but now officials will likely apply the court’s opinion to any future effort to rewrite the Title IX rule, said Joshua Dunn, executive director of the Institute of American Civics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He frequently writes legal commentary for EdNext. 

He agreed that whether Title IX allows schools to include trans athletes in girls’ sports is still “an open question.”

Beth Parlato, senior legal counsel for the conservative Independent Women’s Law Center, called the opinion a “huge win,” but added, “There’s more work to do.”

Congress, she said, needs to “do its job” and pass legislation that would apply to all states.

In a partial dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by the other two liberals on the court, agreed with Kavanaugh on Title IX. But she said the majority should have sent Jackson’s case back to the lower courts for further “factual findings about the state of the scientific debate” under the equal protection claim. 

“A restrained approach, based on all relevant facts, is particularly necessary when the court is faced with a consequential decision of constitutional dimension,” she wrote.

While Jackson will likely not be able to compete in track this fall, Andrew Ortiz, senior policy attorney at the Transgender Law Center, said Tuesday’s decision won’t have a major impact. because there were already so few trans students participating in sports in the 28 states that tried to ban their participation. In those states, intramural sports and private schools, “could still be options,” he said. While the cases now go back to the lower courts, he expects the states to “pretty quickly” prevail in their efforts to enforce their laws.

‘Back of the pack’

As is often the pattern, the justices released opinions with the most nationwide impact at the end of their term, one in which Trump’s agenda, from immigration reform to voting laws, has . While Hecox and Jackson challenged the laws in their states before Trump took office, the administration took part in the case, arguing that states shouldn’t have to carve out a special exception for transgender athletes even if, as their attorneys argued, their physical advantages have been diminished by puberty blockers or drugs to suppress testosterone.

In fact, several months after the oral arguments, Michael R. Williams, West Virginia’s solicitor general, argued that the opposite is happening. In May, he that Jackson finished fourth in discus and first in shot put in a statewide track and field competition. 

“As a high-school sophomore, B.P.J. is not finishing ‘near the back of the back,’ “ , referencing the from Jackson’s legal team in the case. Jackson “is instead defeating every — or nearly every — female in the state in these events.”

But LGBTQ advocates, like the , argue that because transgender athletes represent such of students participating in sports, it’s misleading to say they are dominating competitions or “stealing” first place medals from women and girls. 

The debate continued at the appeals court level even while the Supreme Court deliberated in the West Virginia and Idaho cases.

In April, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit an advocacy group, , in their argument that a Minnesota policy is discriminatory because it allows trans athletes to compete in sports consistent with their gender identity. 

The court said that Trump’s executive order and the administration’s actions against states and districts didn’t settle the legal dispute over the issue. 

“The executive branch’s views on that question may guide its own enforcement approach,” wrote Raymond Gruender, a George W. Bush appointee. “But they cannot independently establish a ‘strong likelihood’ that [the athlete’s] participation violated Title IX or its implementing regulations.”

As Petersburg’s once-booming manufacturing base hollowed out, crime and residents’ health . Along the way, places for kids to be kids disappeared, and many of them stopped coming to school.

Over the last year, about a quarter of students haven’t shown up for at least 10 days of class, even as Virginia overall that had spiked because of the pandemic. While chronic absenteeism is high, state tests show students’ academic performance . Most campuses weren’t accredited until a few . The whole school division and its 4,500 students has essentially been for decades. 

It’s a cycle that seemed unbreakable. Yet for almost four years, something quite extraordinary has been happening here. 

“Petersburg has the worst outcomes of anyone on everything,” said Aimee Guidera, Virginia’s  secretary of education during former Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s term. “That’s why we went in.”&�Բ�����;

Guidera is referring to a 2022 encounter at a community meeting between Youngkin, a Republican, and Petersburg’s longtime Democratic mayor, Samuel Parham, which led to a yearslong relationship, . The partnership drew $447 million in state, federal and private sector investment to this city just south of Virginia’s capital, plus $2 billion in commitments to develop the area. It also helped fast track the city’s grant applications and approval for projects like , which will bring jobs and revenue, and supported small businesses , like the expansion of a Montessori-style childcare center.

In the schools, there is more before- and after-school childcare, more summer programs for kids and a new playground at the YMCA. There’s also more staff to help intervene when students and families are struggling, a new mentoring program for girls and more. 

Despite the intervention and attention, however, Petersburg schools are still floundering and remain under close watch by the state. But there is hope that as the city changes, its schools will keep changing too. 

Parent Lakeshia Tinsley, who leads the school division’s Parent Advisory Committee and can rattle off a list of concerns about the city schools, summed it up this way: “Petersburg has been on the move, slowly but surely.”

‘It’s all connected’

That’s quite different from how Tinsley felt when she first moved here, lured by Petersburg’s low cost of living. The schools were thought to be so bad, she recalled being told that she’d need to move again once her daughter grew to school-age. 

At the time, just one of the city’s four elementary schools offered childcare before and after hours — care that, for many parents, makes working full-time possible. 

In the early days of the partnership, Guidera said members of the community frequently complained about that lack of care, along with the dearth of summer camps and activities for kids in general. 

“You can’t just deal with crime without dealing with health, with poverty, with education,” Guidera said. “It’s all connected.”

In response, the commonwealth leveraged grants and federal dollars to expand care provided by the YMCA, before and after school at every city elementary school. 

For free. 

“Before, I was having to pay daycare at an actual daycare. That’s another bill that you have,” said Tinsley, who is now running for a seat on the Petersburg school board. “It’s more convenient to drop off at school,” she added, recalling that the bus taking children from the private childcare center to her daughter’s elementary school in the mornings sometimes ran late.

A related endeavor led to and giving kids a hand in designing it. 

Girls with Pearls

Those kinds of spaces to play and gather are essential for kids, said Wanda Stewart, who grew up in Petersburg during the boom times in the ’70s and ’80s.

“There were baseball games at the park, Little League games, city events in the parks for families,” she remembered. She attended college in North Carolina and later settled there with her husband. But phone calls home with nieces and nephews distressed her. 

The thriving city where Stewart grew up had gone.

Petersburg, a transportation hub that hugs the Appomattox River and a city , . The mall closed. So did the skating rink and movie theater. Even the bowling alley shut down. 

Family who remained wondered if it wouldn’t be better for Stewart, with her experience in dropout prevention, to use her talents supporting children back home in Petersburg. When a job running Petersburg’s opened up, she seized the opportunity to return.

And because of the Partnership for Petersburg, she had the chance to tell then-first lady Suzanne Youngkin about her organization, which works to keep kids in school, in part by taking stock of needs like food, clothing and mental health. Many Petersburg students’ parents or underemployed compared to those in other parts of Virginia and the country as a whole.

Stewart got Youngkin’s attention. The partnership three of Petersburg’s eight schools to hire its own CIS site coordinator. A dedicated staff member in school meant getting early warnings about students’ and families’ needs and handling them in real time.

Stewart also told Youngkin about “Girls with Pearls,” one facet of Communities in Schools she brought with her from North Carolina. Each participating student is paired with an adult mentor, who works with them on issues like leadership, self-care, etiquette and navigating conflict. The name comes from how the year ends: Selected girls at every Petersburg school are presented with a strand of pearls they’ve earned for their monthly sessions. 

Youngkin attended a sixth-grade center as a child in Texas and took a special interest in working with the Girls in Pearls at Blandford Academy, the Petersburg school for sixth graders. Sixth grade centers can : the year between the safe space of elementary school and the more daunting middle school years, when some students drop out. 

“I have a sweet spot for sixth-grade girls,” said Youngkin, who recruited members of her staff to mentor Blandford students.

Stewart said Communities in Schools staff and other school employees nominate girls they think would benefit from the monthly conversations and mentoring.

They are girls like Lakeshia Tinsley’s daughter, Serenity, and her classmate Zoey Williams, a fellow Blandford sixth grader who was Suzanne Youngkin’s mentee. At the group’s April gathering, Zoey and Youngkin chatted for a few minutes before getting into an ask-me-anything style conversation with a local OB/GYN who was there to explain menstruation. Many girls in Petersburg may be skipping school because they don’t have the menstrual supplies they need. The girls and their mentors filled 145 backpacks with pads and wipes — a two-month supply — so every Blandford girl would be outfitted with what they might need.

Before the Youngkins left the governor’s mansion in January, the girls got to visit. At the end of the school year, each received a strand of pearls as a parting gift. They were also given a journal and a binder filled with lessons to look back on. But “it’s not about gifts,” Youngkin said. “It’s about time.”

“I got to learn stuff I didn’t really know about,” Zoey said, citing sessions on anxiety and how to deal with emotions gone haywire. “I got to meet new people.”

‘Not … a finger snap’

Though the Partnership for Petersburg is over, and the Youngkins moved some 120 miles north, Youngkin said she plans to return when the next group of Girls with Pearls participants is selected in the fall. 

“It’s just sort of gotten to be what we do,” she said.

Like Tinsley, Stewart said she’s noticed positive differences in Petersburg, even if there’s a long way to go on the school system’s biggest concern, student performance in math and reading.

The school division offers a glimpse of the changes: Several schools are now accredited. The division has had , offering a sense of stability at the top, after running through several others in the last few years. Brown has for every student to be ready for college, the military or a career upon graduation.

But getting them to show up to school, every day, remains one of Brown’s top priorities. For example, absences are now tracked by a school division website , and Brown to the school that cuts down the most on absences every month. Still, chronic absenteeism remains above 20% at every Petersburg public school and is greater than 30% at a few. 

The school board and superintendent also adopted to guide how it will improve student achievement and hiring qualified teachers, among other goals. At the same time, , its first in 50 years. 

A Petersburg City Public Schools spokeswoman said neither the superintendent nor any of the division’s five board members would answer questions for this article.

Before- and after-school options grew because of the partnership. Girls with Pearls and the broader services afforded by Communities in Schools remain. But another effort directly tied to helping Petersburg students academically was short-lived.

Guidera helped hash out an agreement with the school division to bring in a surge of tutors, including students from nearby colleges, to work with students in person. Done right, it’s the kind of strategy can effectively address learning loss — “huge in Petersburg even before COVID,” she said — and something Virginia throughout the commonwealth. 

But the arrangement, started under a superintendent who has long since left, lasted just a single school year. Another tutoring program hasn’t gotten off the ground, though talks with the current schools chief are ongoing. 

Guidera also said the commonwealth’s oversight of schools in Petersburg, and elsewhere, was revamped so it is supportive, not punitive. “It’s not shaming and blaming. It’s very much focused on what works, and how do we use data … as a flashlight rather than as a hammer to identify what’s working, and learn from that.”

For Guidera, however, the truth is that Petersburg schools have not improved enough — “not as much as I want,” she said. But she recognizes it will take time: “It’s not going to be a finger snap.”&�Բ�����;

Nevertheless, she thinks the intense investment of time and money was worthwhile.

“This is about partnership, community, relationships and building hope and using data.”

The Texas State Board of Education on Friday adopted new social studies standards for the elementary and middle grades that take an America-first approach to history and feature Christianity more prominently than other faiths. 

While standards for several high school courses were approved, the board postponed the final votes on U.S, Government, World History and World Geography. 

In a separate vote, the board adopted a that includes biblical stories like Daniel and the lion’s den and passages from scripture, like the 23rd Psalm and excerpts from the Book of Exodus.

The Texas State Board of Education will vote Friday on a set of that have drawn fire and fervor for espousing pro-American views and Christian values. 

If approved, the vote would typically mark the beginning of a long, and probably divisive, process to design curriculum based on the standards. But �鶹��Ʒ has learned that Education Commissioner Mike Morath jumpstarted the process a year ago, signing a $67 million contract with a Tampa-based consulting firm for a series of social studies instructional materials. The standards, with topics like the spread of Christianity and the role of religious freedom in America’s founding, dovetail with the controversial Bluebonnet reading program adopted in 2024, which also came under fire for the perception that it promoted Christian nationalism. A required reading list, including some biblical passages, is also scheduled for a Friday.

The contract, with MGT Impact Solutions, wasn’t accessible to the public for a year because the Texas Education Agency failed to submit it to the state legislature, as required by law, until April.

In a state where the education chief holds over schools, some board members feel left in the dark.

“Of course, I had no idea,” Staci Childs, a Democrat, told �鶹��Ʒ.

“Those agreements should be public knowledge,” said Evelyn Brooks, a Republican. “There should be a considerable amount of transparency because we’re dealing with public money.”

Jake Kobersky, a spokesman for the agency, said MGT has been working from “publicly available drafts” of the new standards in preparation for the final approval. The contract wasn’t submitted to the legislature because officials “originally planned to award multiple contracts” and were still negotiating with other vendors, he said. He declined to state whether officials made additional awards, but said the agency followed the standard contracting process. State law doesn’t require the board to approve requests for proposals or contracts.

“The State Board of Education has no role in this solicitation,” he said.

The contract is the latest development in the state’s four-year quest to overhaul what students learn about history and government. In 2022, the board came close to . But like many red states, Texas had recently passed limiting classroom discussions on race and gender, and conservative groups argued the proposed standards were unpatriotic and violated the new law. The board voted to delay the revision until 2025. Now members have renewed the debate. call the standards “unbalanced” and say they lack diversity, while Republicans are pressuring the board not to dilute them with changes.

Kelsey Kling, a government relations specialist and policy analyst with Texas AFT, the teachers union, called the MGT contract “a little bit of a cart-before-the-horse scenario.”

“Is this whole vote by the State Board of Education simply a formality for a curriculum that’s already been in the works?” she asked. 

Supporters of the new standards, namely the powerful, right-wing Texas Public Policy Foundation, say they replace a vague in the current standards with a chronological study of history and would allow students to see how ideas and events build over time. 

But Democrats in and on have called for delaying Friday’s vote because the foundation paid the Texas Center at Schreiner University $70,000 to develop the standards. The center’s director, Donald Frazier, is a member of a on the rewrite. Robert Koons, a senior fellow at the foundation, is also an adviser.

“Given the scope and significance of this work, which impacts more than 5.5 million public school students across Texas, it is essential that the process remain transparent, objective, and free from undue influence,” wrote the five Democrats on the 15-member board.

Brian Phillips, spokesman for the think tank, called the Democrats’ demand

Critics, like the American Historical Association, say the draft standards exclude major events throughout history from Africa, the Middle East and Asian countries, and minimize the effects of racism and the contributions of women. In April, the board deleted a standard that would require students to learn about Muslims’ role in developing astronomy and algebra.

But conservatives, like state Sen. Mayes Middleton, called the statements “a clear victory for pro-America, pro-Texas education.”

Students, he wrote in a letter to the board, must “receive an honest understanding of the ideologies and threats that shape the modern world, including the evils of Sharia law, the realities of Islamification, and the documented threat of Islamic terrorism.”

Some in the state are frustrated with Morath’s outsized role, with support from Gov. Greg Abbott and the state’s GOP leaders, in directing what students learn. Critics say a top-down approach to curriculum is wrong for such a large, diverse state. 

State Rep. Gina Hinojosa, a Democrat running to unseat Abbott in November, said that if she wins, one of her first moves would be to , who has served for 10 years. 

‘Political interests’ 

But the legislature in 2023 to enter into contracts with groups like MGT to develop open educational resources and pay districts up to $60 per student if they adopt them. Morath argues the state-owned materials will improve test scores and ground students in “classic works,” including the Bible, he told �鶹��Ʒ in 2024. 

That was the process the state followed when it originally purchased reading materials from Amplify, a curriculum provider, during the pandemic. Under an $84 million contract with Public Consulting Group, a Boston-based firm, the state made sweeping changes to the program, adding biblical passages like the Prodigal Son and the story of Queen Esther. PCG brought in conservative groups, like Hillsdale College and a media company founded by Mike Huckabee, now ambassador to Israel, to work on the materials. 

Some educators argue that Bluebonnet has of the world with lessons on figures like King Solomon and say critics have overreacted to the biblical material. 

The Amarillo Independent School District is among those using the Bluebonnet reading program. Jennifer Wilkerson, assistant superintendent, said she appreciates that the social studies lessons will cover some of the same topics. 

But the top-to-botton revision of the social studies standards, with a planned 2030-31 roll out, was bound to attract controversy and, if adopted, will require major shifts for teachers.

“Any time you do a complete overhaul of standards, it begins to be about political interests and not about what’s best for kids,” she said. She’s among the hundreds of educators, parents and advocates who have traveled to Austin to address the board. In April, she said, arguments over the standards “got so intense, that there were shouting matches happening outside of the boardroom.”

The temperature of the crowd was similar in 2024 when the board adopted Bluebonnet. And as with the MGT contract, board members were largely unaware the work was underway until the state unveiled drafts of the reading lessons. 

says that an agency can’t spend money on a contract over $10 million until it notifies the , which provides oversight of state government and develops budget recommendations. That notice is supposed to come within 15 days of when a contract is awarded. 

Whether the agency was still considering other bids “does not have an effect on determining when a contract is to be reported,” said Dushyanth Reddivari, assistant general counsel and the communications officer for the budget board. 

A Texas Education Agency shows that as of Tuesday, the state has paid MGT over $1.8 million on the contract since Nov. 19.

Worth over , MGT has a big footprint in Texas and is represented in the legislature by Daniel Hodge, a who previously served as Abbott’s . The company has multiple contracts with state agencies and universities for projects ranging from economic impact studies to software services. In K-12 education, the firm specializes in . 

MGT directed questions about the contract to the state agency.

The contract, which includes work on multiple subjects, listed several organizations as potential subcontractors, including TNTP, a New York City-based nonprofit, and Success Academy Charter Schools. Ann Powell, a spokeswoman for Success Academy, said the network, also in New York, is not involved and didn’t know it was named in the contract. 

Kathryn Zielony, a spokeswoman for TNTP, said there’s a potential the organization could work on the project, “but there is currently no finalized contract in place.”

Kobersky, the Texas Education Agency spokesman, said MGT is still in the “planning phase.”

But Rabbi Joshua Fixler, who has three children in the Houston schools, suggested one reason why supporters of the standards are adamant about the board rejecting any last-minute revisions is because the work is already under way. He spoke to the board on Monday with concerns about items related to Christianity in both the social studies standards and the reading list.

“If work is already happening behind the scenes using these proposed [standards] that haven’t even passed yet to build curriculum,” he said, “it would make sense that the message would be ‘Don’t change this.’ ”

Rep. Suzanne Bonamici, a member of the House education committee, filed three articles of impeachment against McMahon, noting the secretary’s “willful intent to unilaterally dismantle and eliminate the Department of Education.”

Bonamici a week ago, prompting a swift response from McMahon defending her track record.

“It speaks volumes that House Democrats think an impeachable offense is working to improve student outcomes and reduce the federal bureaucracy,” she .

The resolution accuses McMahon of compromising the ability of the department to fulfill its duties. That’s also the conclusion that the department’s Inspector General reached in released Wednesday detailing how the administration has slashed the agency’s staff by 40% and canceled billions of dollars in grants and contracts. 

McMahon has been forced to backtrack. The department currently has several job openings posted, including and .

Democrats have introduced articles of impeachment against multiple members of President Donald Trump’s cabinet, including Health and Human Services Secretary and Defense Secretary . But historically the attempts have rarely succeeded. Two years ago, the House impeached Biden Homeland Security for what members said was a failure to stop migrants from crossing the border, but the Senate dismissed the two articles against him.  Before him, the last cabinet member to be impeached was William W. Belknap, secretary of war under President Ulysses S. Grant, on , in 1876. 

Critics of Betsy DeVos, Trump’s first education secretary, called for her to and some groups advocating impeachment. But lawmakers never took formal steps to do so. A federal judge, however, held her in 2019 and fined her $100,000 when she continued student debt collections in violation of a court order. The department .

While some Republicans have also been critical of McMahon, Rep. Tim Walberg, the Michigan Republican who chairs the education committee, called the action “political theater.”

“Secretary McMahon is doing exactly what voters elected President Trump to do: rein in a bloated bureaucracy and put students, parents, and taxpayers first,” he said in a statement.

The effort is also largely “symbolic” and unlikely to succeed, said Jeffrey Henig, a professor emeritus at Teachers College, Columbia University. 

“Symbolism can be important, and a case can be made for using this as a way to draw attention to the dismantling of the department,” he said.

The resolution says McMahon has “decimated” the agency and “created a culture of fear and chaos” that has harmed education programs.

Specifically, the articles of impeachment are:

1. Willful and systemic refusal to comply with the law

The text cites McMahon’s actions to transfer responsibilities, which under law rest with the Education Department, to other agencies. Just last week, she announced that the office overseeing special education would move to the Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of Civil Rights would transfer to the Justice Department.

2. False statements before Congress

The resolution accuses McMahon of lying to Congress during her confirmation hearing that she would follow the law in disbursing education funds appropriated by Congress. Instead, the text reads, she has defended the cancellation of several research contracts and discontinued grants for programs like community schools.

3. Breach of public trust

Again focusing on funding, the resolution states that the administration held up payments for services like migrant education and afterschool care and put “critical” K-12 programs at risk.

Bonamici said parents, especially those of students with disabilities are “distraught” over splitting up the department. “They are asking us to take action to stop these illegal transfers,” she said. “To them I say, ‘We hear you.’ “

Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank, suggested McMahon’s actions aren’t grounds for impeachment.

“The race to the bottom continues, in this case regarding the definition of ‘high crimes and misdemeanors,’ ” he said. “This is just politics, but I can appreciate that Congressional Democrats don’t feel like they have any other recourse right now.”&�Բ�����;

That gave her an idea.

The staff at Legacy Prep built a three-week summer schedule around the theme of “Lights, Camera, Action,” blending drama, music and dance, culminating in a final performance. But between learning choreography and exploring careers related to content creation, students this month are spending three hours a day polishing the math and reading skills they’ll need for next school year.  

After three years of the program, Johnson sees more confidence in kids when they come back in the fall and considers it one of the reasons why Legacy Prep’s elementary school went from a D to on the state report card.

“Our test scores were in the tank,” she said. During summer school, “our kids have more time to talk to the teacher. They know what they need to focus on.”

It’s a model that prevents what’s known as the summer slide, not just at Legacy Prep, but at nearly 460 charter schools in seven cities. Standardized assessments show that over 39,000 students in gained, on average, nearly a month more learning in math and two and a half extra weeks in English language arts, according to a new study. While the growth is significant, the fact that the study found improvement across so many sites makes the findings stand out even more, said Geoffrey Borman, a researcher at Arizona State University who led the study.

“A key thing to keep in mind is the scale at which these impacts are being made,” he said. “We’re talking, in this case, about tens of thousands of students per year.”

In education research, he added, there are examples of small, “one-off efforts” that produced “groundbreaking impacts.” But those effects often fade when a program — high-dosage tutoring, for example — expands to more students and locations. 

Bloomberg Philanthropies, founded by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, spent $50 million to launch Summer Boost in 2022 to from academic decline during the pandemic. The program served over 16,000 students that year in New York City and has since spread to six more cities, including Baltimore, Nashville and San Antonio.

Students retained the skills and material they learned into the next school year, even though they often didn’t take follow-up tests, either i-Ready or NWEA’s MAP tests, until months after the summer program ended.

“These kids are going back to school better prepared to engage in instruction and benefit from it,” Borman said.

The study design didn’t include a comparison group, but the researchers looked at whether scores were higher than what they would have predicted if students hadn’t attended the program.

The positive effects in math are similar to what the when it studied summer learning programs in five urban districts, several years before the pandemic. The Rand sample, however, was much smaller, about 5,000 kids, and the researchers found no improvement in reading, attendance or social-emotional skills.

In another study, after the COVID-era school closures, a team from Harvard, NWEA and the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research examined the use of federal relief funds for in 10 districts, serving nearly 450,000 students. Students gained two to three weeks of learning in math on MAP tests, but as with the Rand study, the researchers saw no impact on students’ reading skills. 

In the Arizona State study, Borman noted that because students often lose more math than reading skills when they’re out of school, a summer program can have a bigger impact in math. 

The expectation that sites prioritize phonics-based instruction, a shift that has picked up momentum since the pandemic, may help explain why students in Summer Boost made gains in reading when the earlier studies didn’t find impacts on literacy, said Harvard University researcher Thomas Kane, who served as an adviser on the Summer Boost study. 

Small classes also contributed to the reading gains, Borman wrote. The results were weaker when class sizes exceeded 21 students.

Consistent student attendance, a rate of at least 70%, matters as well. It’s a principle Summer Boost reinforces by holding back 30% of the funding to sites until the program is over. Students exceeded the target with a 75% rate last year. 

“The more kids attend, clearly, the better they perform,” Borman said. “This is something that has been a problem with a lot of summer school programming in the past.”

‘The big question’ 

The findings clarify what it takes to run an effective summer learning program. But districts no longer have federal COVID funds to spend on summer school. Foundation funds, like those for Summer Boost, are limited.

“The big question is how to sustain summer learning programs now that the federal [relief] funding has lapsed,” Kane said. 

One source will likely be the new federal education tax credit, he said. Advocacy organizations like the Afterschool Alliance are to form scholarship-granting organizations that focus on public school students. 

In Alabama, districts are already required under state law to offer summer instruction for students who are significantly behind in and . But the $29,000 Legacy Prep received from the state would have only been enough to pay three teachers, Johnson said. Without the $200,000 Summer Boost grant from Bloomberg, she would have had to narrow the focus of the program to third graders who needed to pass the state reading test to advance to fourth grade. 

She found, however, that just reaching the proficiency level at the end of third grade doesn’t mean kids are strong enough readers and writers to tackle challenging material. The Bloomberg grant allowed the school to hire 12 teachers. 

On a Thursday morning earlier this month, the school was busy with activity as younger students worked on reading and math skills while middle schoolers danced to a hip-hop beat in the gym. After lunch, they switched. 

Using that’s specially designed for a compressed summer schedule, teacher JaMeshia Moore worked with rising first graders on words they should learn by sight. She wrote “because” on the board, carefully demonstrating where each lowercase letter should fit on the lined pages in their workbooks. In math, students worked out subtraction problems by hand, using small strips of paper that represent hundreds, tens and ones. 

Before opening enrollment to all Legacy Prep families, Johnson prioritizes students who are significantly behind and often need one-on-one instruction to catch up. The research showed that students who often fall below grade level — English learners, those from low-income families and kids with disabilities — benefitted the most from the program. They gained over four weeks of learning in math, compared to three and a half weeks for the overall sample. 

At Legacy Prep, the staff works just as hard to make sure students attend as they do during the regular school year. They call students if they’re absent, and for the first time this year, Johnson offered door-to-door bus service if students needed it. Some students come from as far as Huntsville, roughly an hour and a half away. 

Daniel Runner, a rising eighth grader, said he hoped to get some extra help on percentages, while Malaysia Speight said she didn’t have a lot of choice over whether to attend.

“My aunt said that me and my sister were not going to be sitting around in the house all summer,” she said. 

But she was drawn to the line up of activities, like learning how a storyboard illustrates the scenes that make up a film and the chance to work with professional musicians. The Summer Boost grant paid for the artists’ involvement as well as special T-shirts, a field trip to a local theater and a red carpet awards show. 

The academic and attendance requirements combined with the flexibility for schools to design an engaging program is why Bloomberg Philanthropies has seen a positive return on its investment, said Sunny Larson, who leads K-12 programs for the foundation.

“We really need to do everything we can to catch back up to where we need to be,” she said. “Beyond that, we didn’t want to be too prescriptive. We really wanted to leave a lot of flexibility, creativity and ingenuity up to those individual schools.”&�Բ�����;

On Thursday morning, Kenyan McDuffie , effectively clearing the way for Democrat Janeese Lewis George to become the city’s next mayor.

The Associated Press had not formally declared a victor as ballots continue to be counted under the District’s new ranked-choice voting system. But Lewis George maintained a substantial lead, and McDuffie acknowledged that the remaining votes were unlikely to change the outcome.

The result marks a significant turning point for a school system that has been governed by Mayor Muriel Bowser for more than a decade. For education advocates, Lewis George’s victory raises new questions about the future of a reform agenda that has driven notable gains in student achievement during that time. The Democratic nominee has proposed some changes to school governance — including an end to the IMPACT teacher evaluation system, as well as a move toward greater independence for the superintendent’s office — and her breakthrough suggests that voters are willing to embrace a broader shift in political leadership.

Correction appended June 16

The mayor’s race in Washington, D.C., technically won’t be settled until this fall. But on Tuesday night, the winner of the Democratic primary will assume presumptive leadership over a school system educating nearly 100,000 students.

That expectation is a function of sheer partisanship: Over 90% of local voters , opening a wide path for the party’s nominee to march to City Hall in November. But the road ahead for public education is much less certain. After nearly two decades of outstanding growth in both student enrollment and academic outcomes, as well as 12 years of leadership from a largely consensus-minded incumbent, the next mayor will need to provide answers to a range of new problems afflicting K–12 schools.

The District’s long economic expansion of the 2000s and 2010s, which drew into its orbit, finally stalled in the face of federal job cuts and a pandemic-fueled flight from the urban core. Combined with a decline in birth rates, the slump has caused the student rolls to go negative for the first time in recent memory — just as on the horizon. Even a promising recovery from post-COVID learning loss is imperiled by a collapse in daily attendance, with missing one-tenth of the school year or more.

The two leading candidates to succeed Mayor Muriel Bowser are widely seen as ideological opposites. Attorney Kenyan McDuffie has courted business groups with a moderate pitch to bring down crime and avoid overextending city finances. Janeese Lewis George, a city councilor and self-described democratic socialist, won over the Left with a huge proposal to offer subsidized to all Washington families.

The broader clash in visions — playing out in the national Democratic Party — is overshadowing a K–12 debate that could be more consequential in the long run. signal continuity with foundational policies enacted in the hard-charging reform period of the 2000s, including direct mayoral control over schools and holding teachers and schools accountable for student performance. Lewis George has issued a subtle challenge to that settlement, voicing a desire to grant education leaders more independence from the mayor’s office and scrap a framework.

The progressive favorite’s eagerness to break from the status quo secured the support of the Washington Teachers Union, which has long sought to de-emphasize teacher quality metrics and win more bargaining latitude for its members. WTU President Laura Fuchs, a frequent critic of the leadership of both District of Columbia Public Schools and D.C. charter schools, said teachers “worked very hard to minimize the harm” imposed by top-down reforms. Under Lewis George, she argued, educators would enjoy much better relations with city leaders.

“We do believe we will have a much friendlier and more listening ear” with Lewis George in power, Fuchs said, while adding that she did not believe the candidate would necessarily supply every item on the union’s wish list. “What Janeese represents, in so many ways, is that she takes us seriously and believes that we are partners.”

Neither of the two contenders could be reached for comment for this article. But the differences between them highlight a fissure in their party that has widened since the Obama-era peak of ambitious experimentation in public schools. Washington has seen some of the in student achievement of any American school district in this century, with student test scores climbing persistently during a time when they were stagnant almost everywhere else. But national Democrats have made little hay about the generational gains, which have attracted fewer boosters and national headlines than similar turnarounds in red states. 

Thomas Toch, director of Georgetown University’s FutureEd research institute and a defender of the District’s model of educational improvement, called the city’s approach “a beacon nationally” and warned against a change in direction.

“It is one of the most important reform success stories in the country, in part because the city has continued to do well by its students for a long time,” Toch said. “The leaders have sustained the reforms, and the reforms continue to make a difference for students.”

Michelle Rhee’s legacy

When Toch and others refer to “the reforms,” they are largely describing a package of policies that began in 2007, when Mayor Adrian Fenty overhauled school governance in what was then one of the lowest-performing urban districts in the country.

Virtually overnight, the governance of DCPS was transferred to Fenty himself, who also wielded substantial influence over a rapidly growing charter school sector. His hand-picked schools chancellor, Michelle Rhee, soon rolled out a new evaluation system known as IMPACT, which ranked teachers based on their students’ test scores; top performers received hefty raises, while .

The groundswell seemed to crest in November 2008, with Rhee posing for in Time magazine and president-elect Barack Obama embracing a similar suite of K–12 recommendations in his national agenda. But Washingtonians grew weary of the pace of change, including the that received failing grades, and turned the mayor out of office.

But his successor, a reform critic who challenged Fenty , surprised many by opting away from a course correction. After another — particularly alienating to some parents in the wake of a — voters again soured on their leadership, selecting Muriel Bowser as the city’s mayor and reelecting her twice.

Part of Bowser’s success may lie in the public’s in local schools. While the tumult over the initial reforms quickly stirred anger, subsequent data on student learning has proven highly favorable.

Findings from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (a federal exam commonly known as the Nation’s Report Card) show that D.C. fourth and eighth graders comparable to virtually any other major city between 2003 and 2019. A 2021 by the research group Mathematica estimated that Washington’s ascent through the 2010s was comparable to the massive leap made by New Orleans schools in the wake of the district’s post-Katrina restructuring.

While the pandemic pushed achievement downward for a time, local testing from the past few years shows that year-over-year academic progress since the COVID nadir preceding the public health emergency. The Education Scorecard, a data project led by scholars at Dartmouth, Harvard, and Stanford, that DCPS schools saw the fastest recovery of those in any city between 2022 and 2025.

Chelsea Coffin, and education policy specialist for the D.C. Policy Center, called the latest round of state assessments “a very good sign for D.C. students.”

“What we saw last school year were really large gains — even compared to what D.C. had been posting pre-pandemic — in both math and English, across almost all wards and most major subgroups,” Coffin said. “D.C. has a long way to go in terms of all students being on grade-level, but this new forward momentum is really exciting.”

David Grosso, a former city councilor who chaired the body’s education committee between 2015 and 2020, said in an interview that the stream of good news has mostly quieted the consternation that greeted Fenty and Rhee’s dramatic shakeup.

At the time of his election, Grosso recalled, “people were clamoring for success right off the bat. After five years of reform, they were asking, ‘Why aren’t our schools all better?’ The challenge was to explain to people that when you have 100 years of bad schools, you can’t turn it around in five years.”

Teacher evaluations under fire

But dissatisfaction has lingered among detractors of the reform regime, none more energetic than the Washington Teachers Union. 

Pointing to the District’s , which have exceeded 20 percent in some years, the WTU’s leaders lay the blame with IMPACT. Fuchs dismissed the evaluation system as “a tool of control,” saying that it mandated an overreliance on testing and made teachers fear for their livelihoods. 

“Any time they find the union finding a quote-unquote ‘loophole,’ so people could keep their jobs, they cut it off,” Fuchs remarked. “Anything that gives teachers a little bit of power or wiggle room, they cut it off.”

Indeed, refinements to IMPACT have been ongoing since its debut. led to over 20 instructors being ranked lower than they deserved in 2013, denying bonus payments to several and resulting in one mistaken termination. More recently, DCPS officials intended, in part, to combat perceptions that evaluations . 

Echoing some of these complaints, Lewis George has declared that she will end IMPACT if elected. In circulated by WTU, she claimed the system “undermines educators’ expertise and students’ joy of learning.” While committing to retain mayoral control, she has also suggested that she will transform Washington’s office of the superintendent into an independent agency — an idea that could lead to less direct oversight over student data and standards, .

Ongoing resistance from the union and its allies may help to illustrate the somewhat muted response to D.C.’s positive trajectory. While states like Mississippi and Louisiana have emerged as widely cited examples of educational success in deeply conservative locales, Democrats are less likely to harp on the consistent growth attained in the single bluest jurisdiction in the country. Toch said the critiques of progressives and unionized workers now make the story an awkward fit with the party’s national profile.

Still, he added, it would be a profound mistake to walk away from teacher ratings, even if IMPACT could potentially benefit from tweaks. The data organized through the rubric provided the “foundation” for many other workforce improvements realized in recent years, including the opening of new leadership opportunities for teachers receiving good ratings.

“It’s discouraging to hear someone even consider abandoning it,” Toch said. “How would you do pay-for-performance? How would you create a career ladder if you couldn’t distinguish between good teachers and bad teachers? That’s the problem we had in the District in the past, and it still exists in much of the country.”

Whether Lewis George or McDuffie ultimately claims the Democratic nomination, the next mayor will have to navigate structural challenges that go beyond old battles around reform. The city faces mounting budgetary shortfalls that threaten its ability to spend at the level to which both charter and district schools have become accustomed.

Funding for school renovations and new academic programs will likely need to wait until the District’s financial picture adapts to a post-COVID, post-Trump reality in which both businesses and the federal government have shrunk their local presence. Even the pay incentives provided through IMPACT add to the fiscal pressure.

Bisi Oydele is the CEO of Education Forward D.C., a reform-friendly advocacy group. While stressing the need to pursue retrenchment equally, among both DCPS and charter providers, he acknowledged that educators and families might have to prepare for leaner times.

“You can track the CFO revenue projections, and they’re not great,” Oyedele said. “D.C. spends about $2 billion on education per year, and that is obviously tied to revenues and economic forecasts.”

Grosso also noted the long set of issues that the mayor and city council will confront through the end of the decade, including the likely need for schools to tighten their belts and the immediate task of finding a replacement for outgoing Chancellor Lewis Ferebee, who announced his resignation last month. 

Amid that flurry of contingencies, he cautioned policymakers against pursuing “reform for reform’s sake.” While he had previously pursued some major policy changes through the Council — including one resembling Lewis George’s notion of making the superintendency more autonomous — such moves needed to be carefully studied before action was taken, he concluded.

“If I didn’t learn anything else in all the years I was making education policy, at least I learned this: If you make massive changes… and you don’t have a real understanding of what the outcome will be, then you shouldn’t make the change.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the first female mayor of Washington, D.C.

But over 40% of those planning to launch new schools in the coming years are Black, according to the latest national report on the growing sector of small, unconventional learning programs. Just 18% of current school founders are Black.

New leaders include Monette Mottenon, a retired educator who will open in Montgomery, Alabama, this summer. It’s a goal she’s had for 15 years, ever since realizing her middle schoolers would “bomb the test” because they could barely read.

“They knew the material, but they couldn’t understand what the questions were asking,” she said. When she learned more about microschools at a conference in Atlanta, she thought, “I have found my people.”

The National Microschooling Center’s annual update also shows that a slightly higher percentage of Asian and Hispanic leaders plan to open microschools. The latest analysis doesn’t include the racial and ethnic makeup of students served, but Don Soifer, the center’s CEO, plans to gather that data in the future. 

Microschools are “shifting to more closely reflect the communities in which they operate,” he said. One reason is because “leadership positions for educators of color are lacking in many communities and states.”

The report, based on a survey of 1,000 microschools in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, also covers topics such as tuition, enrollment and government regulations. Here are some of the other top findings:

Half of all microschools receive more than a quarter of their tuition funds from state private school choice programs.

That’s a big increase over last year, when 38% of microschool leaders said their students use state school choice funds, like education savings accounts. Another 18% said they have students who use an ESA for a portion of tuition and pay the rest themselves.

Soifer attributed the jump to the proliferation of ESA programs like , which went into effect this school year, and the addition of more survey respondents in states with existing ESA programs.

Next year, the percentage could be even higher. Texas’ program launches this fall. In addition, during this year’s legislative season, a restriction on microschools participating in the state’s private school choice program. 

In South Carolina, however, some families are in limbo. The state has allowed one segment of homeschoolers, known as “unbundlers,” to receive ESA funds. These families often supplement homeschooling with a couple days a week in a microschool. But lawmakers are that would lock unbundlers out of the program. Some homeschool advocates, worried about government involvement in homeschooling, pushed for that provision in the law. 

Over 1,000 families are now “eagerly waiting and wondering” what the legislature will do, said Ryan Dellinger, director of education policy at the Palmetto Promise Institute, a school choice advocacy group. If the proposal passes, the unbundlers might be restricted to homeschooling only or “may need to scramble to get themselves on a waiting list and find a private school or a charter school” for the fall, he said. 

Future microschool leaders are heavily focused on nonacademic learning.

In a subsample of 199 “prelaunch” founders, 172 said their greatest hope for students is growth in nonacademic learning. Specific skills might depend on the school’s model, Soifer said, but would likely range from self-management and social awareness to resilience and workforce readiness. That category was followed by 163 who said students’ academic proficiency or mastery was their top goal. 

A from the center last December highlighted a few schools using online platforms, such as IXL and i-Ready, to track progress.

But the field still lacks independent comparisons between microschool students and their peers in traditional schools. Last year, the Rand Corp. said it was “nearly impossible” to measure the impact of attending a microschool on students’ academic outcomes. A lot of schools didn’t have enough assessment data to determine growth in reading and math over time.

1 in 5 microschools have been open at least six years.

The largest share, 45%, have been in operation for three to five years. While the movement exploded during the pandemic, the numbers show that the small programs are more than a short-term solution to a crisis. 

The Success Center, operating out of a former courthouse in South Carolina’s Lowcountry, began as a tutoring service and expanded to offer a microschool when COVID hit. Joining the state’s independent school association was a way to “avoid looking like we just put out a shingle,” said Alicia Dickerson, who co-founded the program with her husband Doug. 

The small schools can also form close relationships with families, which contribute to a longer lifespan for a program, Alicia said. According to the report, the majority of current microschool leaders, 70%, said they expect to operate for 10 years or more.

Those who have closed their microschools are staying in the business.

Microschools shut down for a variety of reasons. The lease on a facility might run out, or the founders’ children age out of the program, Soifer said. 

Some leaders lack the skills to run a business, said Allison Serafin, vice president of the Building Hope Impact Fund, which offers loans and financial tools to founders. Tasks like budgeting, invoicing and getting business insurance are time-consuming, she said, “but they make the business durable.”

But 78% of former microschool leaders said they’re still part of the movement.

With a background in management consulting, Sheila Banister didn’t struggle with the administrative aspects of the microschool she co-launched in the Huntsville, Alabama, area during the pandemic. But there were other rough patches.

“It’s definitely a challenge finding a teacher who is willing to teach in this type of environment because it’s so different from public school,” she said. The teacher they hired had experience in early childhood, but lacked the skills to teach higher-level math skills to older students. 

Banister’s expectations for the program also didn’t line up with those of the other parents who co-founded the school. 

“I think they wanted more of a co-op experience, not necessarily focused on academic growth,” Banister said.

They decided to discontinue the program at the end of this school year. But Banister said she still believes in the microschool approach. She leads the state’s affiliate of Love Your School, a nonprofit school choice advocacy organization that began in Arizona, and coaches prospective founders on administrative aspects of the business, like how to incorporate.

Like many former microschool leaders, she said opening another one is “not off the table.”&�Բ�����;

Public microschools are bigger than private ones.

The median number of students attending private microschools is 20. But with more districts and charter schools launching small, individualized programs, this year’s report notes that the median enrollment figure for public microschools is 30. 

There’s growing interest from public school leaders in opening microschools. Some examples include in Middletown, New York, in the Hudson Valley region, and a new in the Elizabeth City-Pasquotank district in North Carolina. But Soifer said it’s too early to get an accurate count. 

The Eastern Hancock district, in a rural community outside Indianapolis, enrolled 62 students in Nature’s Gift Microschool this school year, with 140 students on a waitlist. Several more public microschools will launch across Indiana this fall, and Superintendent George Philhower said he’s “in discussions” about creating a multi-state collaborative.

The term microschool, he said, has more to do with a “mindset” that emphasizes personalization and flexibility than with a specific enrollment number.

93 hours per year — that’s the average amount of time microschool leaders spend on compliance issues.

Getting government approval, whether that’s obtaining a business license or passing an inspection, takes up about 20% of that time, the respondents said. Business permits, zoning and facility regulations, and fire or safety code requirements top the regulatory categories that microschool leaders would like to see eliminated.

While standardized test requirements and ESA reporting rules only apply to some microschools, 8% of founders said they would like to see these requirements go away. 

School choice advocates argue that state and local laws haven’t kept up with the . The Institute for Justice, for example, which has won major school choice cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, also provides legal assistance to microschool founders originally meant for traditional schools.  

of the movement say those rules exist to protect students and that if microschools receive ESA funds, the public should know how the money is spent and whether children are learning.

Some states have tried to make it easier for founders to open and operate. Because of a legislative change this year, microschools registered as private schools will be able to operate out of former churches, libraries or other community facilities without getting zoning changes or making facility improvements. 

But many other jurisdictions require extensive renovations to run a school during the week in the same church classrooms used for Sunday school, Serafin said. 

“Life safety is critical, no argument there,” she said. “But I’m not sure the International Building Code leaders or local planning commissions envisioned a world of 20- to 50-student schools.”

Historically, those are the three pots of funding districts have relied on to educate America’s students. One of the nation’s leading school finance experts says leaders should start planning for a fourth — the new from the IRS.

Advocates for the program, which Congress passed last year as part of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, have promoted it as a way to expand for parents who want to leave public schools. But according to Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab, district schools could also be big winners.

Under the program, which kicks in next year, taxpayers will get a dollar-for-dollar credit, up to $1,700, if they donate to a scholarship granting organization. Just like an SGO can provide scholarships to private and religious schools, another could direct awards to kids in district schools.

“Given that 90% of the kids in our country, and their families, have attended public schools,” Roza said during “these SGOs could have …broader appeal, to the average taxpayer.”

The Treasury Department further confirmed that public school students will be eligible for scholarship funds during a Tuesday with advocates, according to reporting from the New York Times. The agency is still finalizing rules for the program, and states that opt in [] will have to approve a list of SGOs to accept donations. With the vast majority of U.S. K-12 students eligible for the scholarships, a variety of organizations, like the , have already envisioned how the tax credit could support public school kids who need afterschool and summer learning programs. Chad Aldeman, an education analyst and frequent contributor for �鶹��Ʒ, , including public school foundations, to become SGOs. 

But some who oppose the program warn that districts shouldn’t get their hopes up, arguing that the Trump administration’s ultimate goal is to weaken public schools.

The federal tax credit “will give tax money that should be used on public goods, like public education, to unregulated SGOs to fund mostly private school tuition and other private education expenses,” Jessica Levin, litigation director for the Education Law Center, said during .

She suggested that it’s unrealistic to expect the administration to make it easy for public school students to benefit from the program “now that they finally achieved their dream of a federal voucher law.”&�Բ�����;

Cecilia Retelle Zywicki, founder of LearningSpring, which is building a system for states to track SGOs and payments, attended the closed-door meeting at Treasury Tuesday. While excited about the prospects for helping more students, she urged caution until the administration releases rules for the program later this year.

“This is big, and represents a lot of opportunity for a lot of people,” she said. “But this means the details matter. Compliance and accountability are paramount. It’s exciting, but requires outstanding management and unbiased information.”&�Բ�����;

‘Maximize those dollars’

Before Congress passed the law that included the new tax credit, organizations supporting public schools worked hard to stop it. In March 2025, Sasha Pudelski, director of advocacy for AASA, the School Superintendents Association, the “greatest threat to public education we’ve ever had at the federal level.” She noted how private schools accepting scholarships would be able to discriminate in admissions based on students’ religion, disabilities or academic performance.

But the potential for public school kids to benefit is one reason Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, opted into the program. Gov. Kathy Hochul in New York, also a Democrat, plans to participate as well. 

Scott Smith, chief financial and operating officer in the Cherry Creek district, southeast of Denver, is among those who have been skeptical that the tax credit will be a windfall for public schools. 

“This administration has shown that it doesn’t support traditional public education,” he said. But he’s still hopeful, and said across the district’s 70 schools, there is uneven access to opportunities like summer camps and afterschool enrichment. “If the rules get written in such a way that allow public schools to benefit, we will most certainly do everything we can to maximize those dollars and invest them into the students who need them the most.”&�Բ�����;

The tax credit will pay for a broad range of , including supplies, fees, field trips, uniforms and digital devices — a lot of the items that public education foundations already provide to supplement district budgets across the country, said Mike Taylor, CEO of the National Association of Education Foundations. 

Many public school districts currently charge tuition for students who live outside of their boundaries. A district, Taylor said, could accept more of those students through scholarships. 

There has been “a sea change” in attitudes toward the program, he said. “It’s happening, and we’re going to make sure we take advantage of this.”

Even Josh Cowen, one of the nation’s most outspoken voucher critics, , “It’s important to squeeze every dollar out of the new federal scholarship tax credit for public school families.”&�Բ�����;

He urged nonprofits to learn from the well-established SGOs supporting private schools and said he wouldn’t “” public school supporters if they need guidance on how to use this new “revenue stream.”&�Բ�����;

At least one group, which worked to expand internet access in schools and students’ homes, has already reinvented itself as an SGO. plans to deliver scholarships for high-quality literacy tutoring to kids nationwide who enter first grade off track in reading. 

“This is the pathway to take tutoring to scale in public school,” said Evan Marwell, the organization’s founder and CEO. The challenge is getting taxpayers without kids in public schools to donate, but he thinks he has the right approach. “A message of ‘America has a reading crisis, this is our way to fix it and here’s the evidence that shows it works’ is going to be incredibly compelling.”&�Բ�����;

After the legislation passed, he began meeting with governors in both red and blue states to encourage them to add his organization to their approved SGO lists. He said it was clear they all care about improving literacy, but existing states and districts can’t afford to provide tutoring to all the students who need it. 

Roza described a more expansive scenario in which a district would set a price on a “bundled set of enhanced services” for every student, not just those with specific needs.

That bundle, funded by an SGO, might include field trips, a robotics lab or special assemblies — offerings that go above and beyond the basic education that schools are legally required to provide. She doesn’t think it would be hard for district leaders to convince local taxpayers to donate to an SGO that would direct scholarships to students in a specific district. 

“Donating a portion of your federal taxes to our SGO helps us go beyond the bare minimum to better serve our students,” is one pitch a school board might make to the community, she said.

‘Financial gaps’

Levin, with the Education Law Center, slammed the idea and said it’s wrong for districts to start charging parents for things that they don’t already pay for. The logistics of offering such a “premium package,” she added, would be difficult for districts to manage. 

“There are way too many variables for public schools to try to control,” she said, including the SGO raising enough every year to cover all students and ensuring parents apply for the scholarships.

Others wonder if district-focused SGOs would attract major donations in some communities, but not others — similar to cases in which PTAs in wealthier districts can collect enough donations for facility upgrades and while others can only raise enough for small grants to fund teachers or field trips.

“Taxpayers are most likely to fund an SGO that directly benefits their own school district,” said Katie Roy, executive director of the . An acronym for Strategic Public Education National Data, the new effort aims to preserve and collect education finance information after the many large surveys. “The benefits of these tax credits — and the resulting funding — are poised to flow primarily toward more affluent school districts, potentially widening existing financial gaps between schools.”

To take advantage of the full $1,700 credit on their income taxes, a donor must have that much to contribute to an SGO each year. In lower-income communities, many residents don’t earn enough to .

But the extent to which an SGO can narrow its scholarship eligibility to students in specific schools or districts will depend on the rules the Treasury Department sets for the program, said Kristin Blagg, a principal research associate at the Urban Institute, a left-learning think tank. 

“For those seeking to develop an SGO, I’d imagine it’s difficult to plan for the future without knowing what those federal regulatory guardrails are,” she said, “and what additional guardrails, if any, a host state may be able to impose.”

Newly released data from America’s longest-running measure of student learning have delivered a decidedly split verdict on the state of schools.

Math and reading scores from the “Long-Term Trends” edition of the National Assessment of Educational Progress — a federally administered test commonly referred to as the Nation’s Report Card — offer some of the first proof of recovery from COVID-era learning loss, with the average 9-year-old improving by 4 points since 2022. Surprisingly, those gains were driven in large measure by struggling students, who enjoyed their first major leap in several decades. 

But 13-year-olds made no similar progress, with scores in both subjects flat or declining for virtually every demographic group. Average performance in reading for these students was no higher than in 1971, when the exam was first conducted.

The differing trajectories underline a critical split among U.S. pupils in 2026. The youngest test takers were still in preschool when COVID-19 emerged, and largely avoided the most severe educational consequences of the public health emergency. But today’s middle schoolers were second- and third-graders at the beginning of the pandemic, which led to several years of school closures and virtual instruction in many areas of the country. As this micro-generation of children proceeds through their K–12 careers, they bear the scars of that upheaval.

Kirsten Baesler, who leads the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education at the U.S. Department of Education, said she was “very excited” by the progress made by 9-year-olds, while adding that the prolonged stagnation experienced by teenagers was somewhat predictable.

“They were in some of their most formative years of both literacy and numeracy [at the onset of the pandemic], and it was a seismic event,” she said in an interview. “It’s going to take equally seismic effort to ensure that those students are coming back to where they need to be.”

Learning recession

Others placed the downturn on a timeline extending much earlier than 2020. John White, Louisiana’s former state superintendent for public instruction, argued that Wednesday’s revelations were consistent with earlier research showing that students transitioning from elementary to middle school have had “a particularly hard decade-plus.” A recent analysis from scholars at Dartmouth, Harvard and Stanford labeled the period since 2012, marked by declining achievement for all but the top students, as a “learning recession.”

“We have plenty of evidence that [a] learning recession in the middle grades predates the pandemic,” said White, now serving as CEO of the educational publisher Great Minds. “You can imagine two compounding problems: One, a general challenge in the success that American schools are having with adolescents, and two, a pandemic that hit this group of soon-to-be adolescents particularly squarely.”

Both core subjects showed signs of the division between younger and older students. 

After seeing a 4-point boost since the last version of the Long-Term Trends test, 9-year-olds have now caught up to their performance level in reading from before COVID. Their average score is now 10 points higher, on a 500-point scale, than in 1971 — if not a gargantuan leap, at least measurable upward movement. In math, while significantly lower than the pre-COVID status quo, average scores are 19 points higher than in the late 1970s.

Remarkably, growth over the past few years has been powered overwhelmingly by the students performing at the lowest levels. Nine-year-olds scoring at the 25th percentile (i.e., lower than three-quarters of their same-age peers) made strides of 7 points in math and 6 points in reading since 2022; those at the 10th percentile gained even more ground, ascending by 9 points in math and 8 points in reading. That momentum flies in the face of the defining pattern of the 2010s, when only the highest-performing NAEP participants posted significant gains.

By contrast, the average performance of 13-year-olds has remained flat since 2022, and is statistically worse than in 2020. Even among those scoring at the 75th and 90th percentiles in math have endured a significant dropoff during that time.

In 2012, 85% of test takers in the older age group exceeded 250 points in math, a benchmark signaling their ability to solve one-step word problems involving addition and subtraction; in the most recent iteration of the exam, only 70% met that standard. The share of 13-year-olds scoring 250 or higher in reading fell from 66% to just 58% over the same period.

There was little variation between NAEP participants of various demographic categories, with children from various racial and socioeconomic groups generally following the same trajectories. But one notable exception related to sex: While nine-year-olds surpassed their overall results from 2022, only boys made statistically significant gains, jumping by an average of 7 points in reading and 5 points in math. Girls improved by a single point in reading and 3 points in math. 

Drop in reading for pleasure

A few other secondary findings were drawn from a survey traditionally accompanying the exam, which generates thousands of student observations in order to construct a representative picture of their day-to-day experiences. Responses revealed that in-school attendance is still much lower than before the pandemic, with the proportion of 13-year-olds absent at least one day in the previous month climbing from 44% in 2012 to 61% in 2025. Meanwhile, the fraction of 9-year-olds saying they’d been assigned no homework the previous night rose from 19% to 39% over the past two decades.

Perhaps most striking of all, far fewer students reported that they routinely read in their downtime. Just 37% of 9-year-olds, and 14% of 13-year-olds, said they read for fun “almost every day” in 2025; those numbers peaked at 58% and 37%, respectively, over 30 years ago.

Education leadership consultant Julia Rafal-Baer is a member of the National Assessments Governing Board, the entity that helps design and administer NAEP. She observed that the reading results are indicative of a widespread and concerning decline in literacy that is likely linked to increased use of smartphones and social media.

“We’ve got to put real books back into kids’ hands,” Rafal-Baer said. “Libraries matter so much, and we’ve got to have adults helping kids to be curious.”

The importance of the Long-Term Trends exam, she continued, lay in its consistency over time: The test has presented students with similar content, in a paper-and-pencil format, for a half-century. Even amid the education community’s often-loud debates over curriculum and accountability, the same fundamental skills have been assessed and recorded. In her view, that makes this version of NAEP “the closest thing we have to a long-term memory of how kids are doing.”

“There have been periods of time when we really did see growth,” Rafal-Baer reflected. “We were climbing for decades, and then we peaked around 2012 and have dropped ever since.”&�Բ�����;

Bringing the ‘clouds in’ 

For Eric Hanushek, a Stanford economist who sat on the governing board from 2019 to 2023, the lengthy slide in student outcomes is the central phenomenon of K–12 schooling since the Obama administration. Even the apparent progress made by the youngest group of test takers has not dislodged his view that transformative changes are needed for the education system to turn things around.

“Every time we see a little bright spot about what 9-year-olds are doing, for example, people jump on it as though it’s a long-run trend,” Hanushek said. “It’s going to take a lot to convince me that we’re not still in a general downhill slide, even with some nice green shoots here and there.”

A longtime skeptic of various school improvement efforts, he noted the long list of policies adopted throughout the U.S. since NAEP debuted, from increasing per-pupil spending to reducing class sizes to heightening academic accountability requirements. While some growth had been achieved, particularly in math, his assessment of the situation was largely disappointing.

“I’m here to bring the clouds in,” he joked.

Beyond the immediate questions of student learning, some ambiguity even surrounds the future of the test itself. Baesler voiced some doubts about the validity of the Long-Term Trends assessment, noting that its testing format and some of its content could be seen as antiquated by today’s standards. The disjunction between some of the verbiage and expectations of the Ford administration and those of the Trump era may argue for an update, she continued.

At the outset of Trump’s second term, rumors circulated Washington of a forthcoming purge of NAEP exams, possibly to include Long-Term Trends. The assessment for 17-year-olds was, in fact, cancelled early last year.

“There is discussion being had” about the fate of the test going forward, Baesler said.

“There needs to be serious consideration whether we should continue the Long-Term Trends, whether it is valid and accurate.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the peak percentages of 9- and 13-year-olds who read routinely for pleasure, as well as the date at which they reached that peak.

Like them, she’s part of a Latino family from East Tulsa and wanted to give back to the community she loved. She kept her word. The new charter middle school quickly performed among the best schools in Oklahoma with an A on the state report card. 

But on a recent sunny morning in May, she sat in a conference room in the former paper mill the school purchased and renovated and spoke words uttered by countless school leaders since 2020: “Then the pandemic happened.”

The school’s ranking fell. Chronic absenteeism spiked, and instead of being two or three grade levels behind academically, some students arrived as much as four years off track. Even as she worked to expand the network, Pollock that she would be able to fulfill her commitment to get kids in and through college. Students went to work to help their families during the crisis or cared for younger siblings.

“The mindset of school being a top priority had shifted,” she said.

But there are signs that recovery is now underway. All 74 seniors in last year’s graduating class were accepted to at least one four-year university, and the small network’s two middle schools for growth in reading and math from a national charter school organization. 

As the network prepares to take its next major step, opening an elementary school, Tulsa Honor Academy is “back on an upward trajectory,” Pollock said. “Our goal was to get back to a level of excellence, both in terms of academic growth and school culture.”

The new school will open as a Spanish-English dual language program. It’s something parents have wanted for a long time. Roughly half of the students Tulsa Honor Academy serves are not only first in their families to go to college, they’re also the first to graduate high school. 

That means some students’ “home language skills are not fully developed at home, and our kids also need to learn English,” she said. “By the time they get to middle school, they will be completely fluent in both languages.”

Teachers at the school already use strategies that build fluency and new vocabulary among English learners. On a morning in May, sixth grade science teacher Miguel Ramirez led a lesson on the nervous system. In their matching uniform sweatshirts and khaki pants, students read aloud definitions of terms like nucleus and dendrites and turned to a partner to repeat the material.

“Constantly hearing people say the words gets them to internalize it,” explained Justine McGovern, the school’s development director. 

The academy celebrates Latino culture by being the only one in Oklahoma, as far as Pollock knows, that offers full courses for elective credit in , cultural dances from Mexico. In authentic dresses that represent the regions of Mexico — white for Vera Cruz or vibrant colors for Chihuahua — the students perform all over Tulsa, and many compete nationally.

‘Unapologetically college prep’ 

Inspired by her mother, an engineer who moved from Mexico to Tulsa to pursue a career,  Pollock originally planned to become an immigration lawyer. At a time when there weren’t many Latinos in Tulsa, her mother advocated for a Spanish mass at a local church and started a free GED program.

But Pollock abandoned the idea of pursuing law to join Teach for America, and developed the drive to launch her own school while working in St. Louis and Chicago. 

From the beginning, Tulsa Honor Academy has been what she calls “unapologetically college prep.” College campus visits start as early as fifth grade. Juniors work on personal statements in class. They research different careers and share their insights with sophomores, and because navigating college life can be overwhelming, staff in the school’s college readiness office encourage alumni to return for one-on-one help.

“If we want more Black and brown, first-generation, low-income students to eventually become teachers, lawyers and doctors,” Pollock said, “then we need to make sure that they’re being educated to be able to go to and graduate from college.”

with hospitals, nonprofits and city agencies are another hallmark of the school’s model. After his semester interning with Reading Partners, a tutoring organization, Oscar Gutierrez was convinced that teaching wasn’t for him. 

“I don’t want to work in the education field whatsoever,” said Gutierrez, who graduated this year. 

The experience still gave him a glimpse of behind-the-scenes operations like scheduling and recruiting volunteers. It eased anxiety over finding his way around an unfamiliar place and interacting with people he hasn’t met.

“You had to talk to the kid,” said Gutierrez, who plans to study accounting at Tulsa Community College and then transfer to the University of Oklahoma or Oklahoma State University. “It teaches those communication skills and just being confident within yourself.”

Kimberly Perez, part of the first graduating class of 2023, landed an internship at Miller-Tippins, a leading construction firm in Tulsa. She learned how to prepare bids for projects and estimate the cost of materials. Now a rising senior on a full-ride scholarship to Oklahoma State University, she’s already received job offers from companies in Dallas. 

She still remembers when Pollock visited her home in 2016, sat on the couch and promised her mother that Tulsa Honor Academy was a better option than the district middle school. She was in fifth grade at the charter at the time, but only reading at a first grade level. 

“I would come crying to my mom, like ‘I don’t want to be in that school,’ ” Kim said. Her mother considered pulling her out. “But Elsie said, ‘She just needs extra time.’”

‼���������ٱ�Ի���’

Those were the years that Pollock was still leading just one school. In 2019, the high school opened, housed in a trailer on the same property. In early 2020, just as schools shut down because of COVID, Tulsa Honor Academy of a building for the high school, an accomplishment in a sector where schools often face challenges securing facilities.

Financing for the project, however, required enrollment to grow, so Pollock and her board fast-tracked the opening of a second middle school in the fall of 2021 — three years early. The expansion to three schools, in some ways, marked a temporary setback. The challenge, Pollock said, was managing a major renovation while also responding to families’ needs in a community by the virus. 

“During the critical years of growth that other schools get to methodically establish network systems and structures,” she said, “we had to pivot and start to focus on surviving the pandemic.”

Student behavior worsened, turnover rates among staff increased, and the principal hired for Flores Middle quit just after the new school opened. 

Brent Bushey, CEO of Fuel OKC, a nonprofit that provides financial support to charter schools, has watched Pollock’s journey from the beginning and recognized where the network stumbled.

“They overextended, and that came through in the academic results,” he said. 

Since 2021-22, the original middle school hasn’t earned higher than a C. Flores, the second middle school, has been stuck at a D since it opened. But those are 2025’s scores, and Pollock is hopeful about where Tulsa Honor Academy is headed. Last year, Flores Middle saw the highest fall-to-spring growth in reading and the third highest in math on NWEA’s MAP assessments among the 60 schools that submitted data to , a national nonprofit formerly known as Building Excellent Schools. Tulsa Honor Academy Middle was second in both reading and math.

Overall, the high school earned a C from the state, but was graded a B for postsecondary opportunities, better than the state average 

Overcoming the pandemic hasn’t been the only crisis Pollock has had to weather. In March, a former middle school teacher following accusations he texted a 12-year-old student and inappropriately touched the child. The school fired him in January and released a of the steps taken to report the situation to police. According to Tulsa police, the investigation into whether other students were affected is ongoing.

‘Tipping point’

As she focuses on Tulsa Honor Academy’s growth, which is expected to reach nearly 1,800 students with the new elementary school, Pollock also has a larger goal of inspiring and supporting more Latino educators to start charter schools. She helped to launch , Latino Educators Advancing Leadership, a word that also means loyal in Spanish. 

She was the first and remains the only Latino charter school leader in the state. It’s both a point of pride and what she calls a “gross disservice” when the majority of students attending brick-and-mortar charter schools are Latino. She’s encouraged that another Latino leader, Robert Ruiz, will open a in Oklahoma City in 2027.

The biggest barrier, she said, is the lack of educational attainment among Latinos in Tulsa. data shows that less than 20% of Latino adults have a bachelor’s degree or higher. Pollock sees that void in her own work. Two years ago, she knew of four Latino charter school assistant principals in Oklahoma, two of them in her own schools.

“The tipping point is going to be once our scholars graduate from college and we can start hiring them back,” she told �鶹��Ʒ. “My biggest dream is for one of our scholars to eventually sit in my seat.”

The routine offered a helpful reminder of why she’s stayed in the field for 26 years. 

“I look at where these babies have started. Some of them might have known two or three alphabet letters,” said Jarvis, who teaches in the Chickasha district, southwest of Oklahoma City. “Now, looking at their test scores, I’m sending six to first grade on a third grade reading level.”

But when she looks at her paycheck, she doesn’t get the same satisfaction.

Her take-home pay has increased about 17% since 2018, about half the rate of inflation. Gov. Kevin Stitt signed a bill last month raising teacher salaries by $2,000, but when Jarvis calculated the amount after taxes, it translates into less than $6 a day.

“I definitely don’t do it for the money,” she said, “but that was an eye-opener.” 

Eight years ago, she was part of a massive, nine-day teacher walkout that saw more than 30,000 educators descend on the state capitol to demand increases in education funding. Then-Gov. Mary Fallin had already signed a $6,100 raise, but teachers wanted $10,000 and increases in the education budget. They also saw raises in and .

But since that historic “Red for Ed” movement, teachers like Jarvis say the incremental progress is barely noticeable. Starting teacher pay in the state still hovers near the bottom in the country, while neighboring states have climbed in the rankings. Some districts say they’ll have to come up with to extend the $2,000 increase to non-teaching staff, and teachers are likely to return next year asking for more.

“We have to have substantial increases annually to catch up,” said Shawn Hime, executive director of the Oklahoma State School Boards Association and a former assistant state superintendent. He applauds lawmakers for increasing teacher pay 37% since 2018, but high numbers of teachers still either leave the field or for better pay. “We’re all in the same race, and we started a lap behind.”

Districts can pay higher salaries above the state scale, but there are limits. That’s because to avoid large gaps in funding between poor and wealthier communities, the state caps how much they can raise .

“If you’re an equity warrior, in theory, this is like the perfect funding formula,” said Rebecca Sibilia, executive director of EdFund, a nonprofit focusing on school finance. But in a state that’s reluctant to increase taxes, she said, districts are often “forced to decide between hiring more people and giving pay raises.”&�Բ�����;

To deliver the 2018 salary increase, the legislature overcame a 75% supermajority threshold to increase taxes. But now, in an election year, some lawmakers who voted for it are “getting hammered” by their opponents as they seek higher office, said Hime, with the school board’s association. 

One of them is Charles McCall, the former House speaker and now a Republican candidate for governor. , Chip Keating, a challenger in the June August GOP primary, accuses McCall of passing “the largest tax increase in Oklahoma history. “That’s why taxes are too high.”

The state needs a long-term plan for funding education, Hime said, but lawmakers’ hands are tied because they can’t obligate money for future years. One former legislator has been arguing that point for years. 

“We have this year-to-year budgeting and that’s got to stop,” said Mark McBride, a Republican who chaired an education appropriations committee in the House. He recalled voting against a previous $2,000 pay raise prior to the walkout because he preferred to support a substantial hike over several years. Educators, he said, “got really irritated with me.”

‘Disrespect crept in’

Pay is not the only reason teachers in Oklahoma leave the classroom. Some advocates say mandates like making struggling readers repeat third grade will force more out.

“This is going to exacerbate our teacher shortage,” said Erika Wright, a community organizer for the Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice and the founder of the Oklahoma Rural Schools Coalition. “Who the hell wants to teach third grade now?” 

When former state Superintendent Joy Hofmeister was in office, she commissioned a of thousands of teachers who were currently certified but not teaching. While pay was a factor, nearly a quarter said their views rested on “the inability to make decisions related to instruction” and “burdensome standards and curriculum requirements.”&�Բ�����;

Rhetoric that teachers found demeaning hasn’t helped either. Former state Superintendent Janet Barresi, Hofmeister’s predecessor, once said she wouldn’t let the “education establishment lose another generation of Oklahoma’s children.”&�Բ�����;

She was the first to remove an educators hall of fame display from the state Department of Education building, former Superintendent Ryan Walters repeated when he took office in 2023. He sought to from educators, publicly criticised them in videos from his car and instituted a to weed out applicants from states he deemed too liberal.

“Disrespect crept in,” said Bryan Duke, dean of the College of Education and Professional Studies at the University of Central Oklahoma. “Job creep,” was another factor, he said, as teaching became more complex and behavior problems escalated. “It’s like screaming into the wind. I think many teachers felt that their voices weren’t heard.”&�Բ�����; 

Lawmakers introduced this year to lower class sizes in the elementary grades, a frequent request from teachers, but it died in committee.

Some years, Jarvis, the Chickasha teacher, has had as many as 28 students in her class. This year, she had 21, but doesn’t have a classroom aide. With about eight more years until retirement, she feels more fortunate than some of her colleagues who work a second job at a nearby steakhouse because the tips are so good.

But she often puts off vacations and big-ticket purchases now that she’s paying health and car insurance for her two sons. Eight years ago, they demonstrated with her at the state capitol. 

“I remember sitting them down and explaining why we were going,” she said. Her youngest made a poster with the names of his teachers. “It was very meaningful to see the kids there.”

“We’re in the middle of an industrial revolution that’s bigger than the dot.com revolution, and the world is not prepared for it,” Weingarten told �鶹��Ʒ. “And our country’s leaders have a laissez-faire attitude about it. So I feel a huge responsibility to try and get it right.” 

Weingarten has proposed reshaping how U.S. public schools navigate AI in particular and technology more broadly, saying our kids are experiencing a crisis of attention and well-being — and that teachers are getting precious little guidance on how to help young people navigate these challenges.

Her proposal: Trim tech use, especially for younger kids, and teach all students how to think critically, communicate, collaborate and persist.“One of the worst things we’ve done in education was to call collaboration and communication ‘soft skills,’” she said, “because applied learning, problem solving, communication, collaboration, persistence — all of these — are the skills that any young adult is going to need in an AI world. In fact, these are the skills that are going to be much more competitive in an AI world.”

In a May 27 at the National Press Club in Washington, she proposed a near-ban on computer screens for students through second grade, including for assessments. She proposed banning student-facing AI in elementary schools, arguing that young children need to build foundational skills without algorithmic shortcuts. 

And she said that young people should not have access to “social companion” chatbots that simulate human relationships until age 16.

The speech makes Weingarten and AFT, the second-largest teachers union in the nation, new and potentially powerful supporters of a growing parent-powered movement to trim technology from U.S. classrooms, even as the union pushes to train thousands of teachers on how AI works. 

Weingarten proposed that schools redesign their offerings so that “active learning, including project-based, experiential and career-connected learning,” is the norm across all grade levels. She decried “drill-and-kill” rote instruction, saying that in an age when any fact is retrievable with a single prompt, the ability to apply knowledge, think critically, communicate and collaborate matters far more than memorization.

“To really prepare young people for complex challenges, our true goal is to have students who can work together and problem solve,” she said.

Weingarten noted that 31 states have now adopted some form of phone ban, and that several countries that were early adopters of education technology are pulling back. Sweden, she said, has returned to printed textbooks. Estonia, where research linked higher screen time in young children to weaker language skills, is calling for more human-to-human interaction. And Italy is re-emphasizing handwriting and traditional instruction.

Weingarten also called for establishing a rigorous new national safety and privacy standard for AI products sold to schools and creating an independently funded research consortium to study tech’s effects on children. And she proposed a new tax on Big Tech companies’ earnings to offset the environmental and societal costs of AI-driven disruption, including workers “being displaced by AI.”

In an interview Monday, Weingarten said AFT’s own $23 million AI academy, launched last year in New York City to help teachers understand and shape how AI enters their classrooms, exists in part to provide crucial guidance on how to understand the technology. Over the next five years, the National Academy for AI Instruction is expected to provide hands-on workshops for 400,000 educators, or one in 10 U.S. teachers, effectively reaching the more than 7.2 million students they teach. 

She said the institute’s mission and her new stance on tech aren’t incompatible.

“The AI Institute is really about teachers teaching teachers, and how the tech companies are not in control,” she said. “It is a people-first, safety-first focus.”

When she announced the academy in July, Weingarten said teachers face “huge challenges,” including navigating AI wisely, ethically and safely. “The question was whether we would be chasing it — or whether we would be trying to harness it.”

Nearly a year later, she said the institute now serves a crucial role in the absence of guidance from the Trump administration, which last week issued a U.S. Surgeon General’s urging families and schools to reduce children’s screen time. It suggested that schools limit school computers to computer labs, invest in physical textbooks and “prioritize pen-and-paper curricula, hands-on activities and social activities for all grade levels.”

In a media appearance last week, U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said schools “need to embrace A.I., and to use it .”&�Բ�����;

Weingarten said it’s “crazy” that the U.S. Surgeon General’s office is offering more detailed recommendations than the Education Department. 

“When you actually have two-thirds of teachers in the United States having no idea how to use AI in schools, and when you have one-third saying there’s no formal guidance, and then you have the Education Secretary saying they should use it ‘appropriately,’ I mean, this is part of the problem,” she said. 

U.S. Education Department Press Secretary Savannah Newhouse said McMahon “has highlighted the many types of schools that are successfully and responsibly integrating AI in the classroom to help our nation’s students meet the challenges of today.”

Weingarten also took a swipe at Melania Trump’s recent tech-and-education event, in which the First Lady the White House alongside a humanoid robot to highlight the potential benefits of robots replacing teachers. The stunt, Weingarten said, “spoke volumes. So did the responses from teachers wondering how a robot was going to build trust with students or know when someone was having a bad day. There’s no algorithm for that. Students need their teachers — real human beings, not robots and not chatbots.”

Newhouse didn’t address Weingarten’s allegations about the administration’s leadership on AI, instead criticizing union priorities more broadly: “If there’s finally going to be an honest conversation about the damage done to American students, it should begin with the teachers unions’ enthusiastic support for a federal bureaucracy that has spent over $3 trillion only to watch student outcomes decline, along with their relentless push to keep schools shuttered during COVID,” Newhouse said. 

‘Kids are getting burned’

The effort to curb tech in schools comes on the heels of a similar one, led in large part by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, to limit cellphone use in schools.

Weingarten on Monday said she has steeped herself in research on educational technology and artificial intelligence. But it wasn’t until she spoke to Haidt last summer about young people’s worsening that she knew she had to draw a line. 

“What really drove me was the issues around attention,” she said. 

Haidt, author of the best-selling 2024 book The Anxious Generation, has said short-form videos and other social media tools have decimated our kids’ ability to pay attention in school, resulting in fewer books read, poorer basic skills and worsening mental health. A more recent book, The Digital Delusion, by the educational neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath, argues that basic classroom technology has had a similar effect on skills.

In her speech, much of Weingarten’s criticism centered around increasingly widespread fears that our society is losing its way when it comes to young people’s technology use. She noted that more than half of 11-year-olds already carry smartphones, a figure that climbs to 95% among teenagers. Four in 10 teens report being online almost constantly, she said. “The pace of this tech revolution has been blisteringly fast, and kids are getting burned.”

She pointed to Haidt’s research linking heavy smartphone and social media use to rising rates of social isolation, anxiety and depression among young people, with academic consequences as well from the rollout of classroom technology. Scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which had been climbing steadily, have in many cases worsened after widespread digital adoption. Weingarten acknowledged that correlation is not causation, but said the pattern, appearing consistently across states, grade levels and subjects, deserves serious attention.

She also pointed to research showing that 88% of teachers in a survey reported that their students’ attention spans were shrinking, which she attributed in part to the instant-rewards of online platforms such as TikTok and YouTube. Cognitive scientist work, she said, suggests students are not incapable of focusing, but are increasingly unwilling to do so when schoolwork feels dull by comparison to their online lives.

But she cautioned that she’s not anti-tech.

“I’m not calling for an AI ban or a Chromebook bonfire,” she said. “What I am calling for is getting the balance right to harness the benefits of technology while mitigating the harms. I’m wary of the dangers of AI, but it is here to stay. We need enforceable guardrails and help to cushion the disruption to people’s lives.” 

Alex Kotran, the founder and CEO of , said Weingarten is “right where it counts” about limiting AI for younger students but giving teachers access to the tools. “It’s about getting the balance right,” he said. “And I really don’t talk to anybody that believes that we shouldn’t have some sort of balance.”

Kotran said he’d recently spoken at an National Education Association meeting and saw that, like AFT, they’re focused on understanding AI. “There’s this almost-meme, ‘Oh, the unions are getting in the way of AI transformation, AI readiness,’ and I really disagree with that fundamentally. The unions have a very sophisticated understanding of what really matters here.”

Weingarten’s push to give teachers a better understanding of AI makes sense as well, he said. “When teachers feel like they are the main characters of the story of AI transformation, their willingness to really lean in and learn, it’s a lot more. You see a lot more buy-in.”

More broadly, Kotran said, supporting active learning, project-based and career-connected learning is “what all the smartest people in the field,” including CEOs and labor economists, are recommending. “What everybody’s basically saying is that the skills that matter now are people who can just get shit done, who can work independently and proactively on projects, who can create and build. And so it’s really, really important to hear a union actually naming that.”

On Monday, Weingarten said parents are leading the way on this issue — and that schools risk being caught between parents who opt their children out of classroom technology and those who want to keep it. “How does a teacher in kindergarten work in a classroom where half the kids opt out of screens and half the kids are on screens?”

“Blah blah blah.” That’s all I heard during story time, sitting on a colorful checkered carpet in kindergarten, feeling like a stain that didn’t belong, yet somehow stood out. English was not my first language, and mastering it took time. Years later, I became the one other students would ask, “What clicked?” or “How’d you do it?” 

The answer I always heard from upperclassmen was simple: “Just do the work.” But as a first-generation student in East Tulsa, I learned that doing the work was not enough. Balancing school, homework, extracurriculars, home responsibilities and applications all before turning 18 is tough. 

Like most of my classmates, fitting in was a priority. Many were Hispanic like me, but they often had siblings or parents who spoke English. I didn’t have that privilege. As the oldest, I became the bridge between home and my community: the translator, the example, the one who had to “walk” so my siblings could run. My mom was just as lost as I was, a non-English speaker herself, navigating a school system nothing like the one she grew up in. Nevertheless, she found a way to support me. 

She enrolled me at ReadSmart Learning, a tutoring program in Tulsa. I still remember the big cartoony bluebird at drop-off and the pins I earned for completing lessons. Slowly, my grades rose and I spoke English with more confidence. My mom noticed, rewarding me with packs of Shopkins figurines and saying, “Ya vez? No hay mal que por bien no venga mija, siguele echando ganas.”&�Բ�����;

Every cloud has a silver lining, sweetie. Keep working hard.

Her faith in me made me believe that effort could change everything. For first-generation students like me, programs like ReadSmart aren’t extras. They’re essentials. 

Middle school brought a new challenge, an all-English environment. Although it was intimidating at first, it also brought math. Numbers became a language I could master, and that love followed me into high school. Tulsa Honor Academy’s College Readiness team was a constant presence, always helping me navigate hands-on opportunities that I wouldn’t have found on my own, including Tulsa Technology Center’s dual enrollment program. Tulsa Tech offers a two-year program that allows students to take classes and get a real view on what engineering or pre-med tracks might look like. It was here that I found that electrical engineering was the career path I wanted. 

I’ll never forget the project in which my team and I used programming sensors to detect a chocolate chip cookie. Our clay “chips” had a mind of their own and tumbled off the conveyor belt, scattering everywhere. Hours of troubleshooting, reshaping and laughing with my team taught me more about perseverance. I learned that pushing through the struggle is what makes the result feel rewarding and worth it. 

That same perseverance carried me through applying for programs and scholarships such as , and Imposter syndrome creeps in sometimes, but I always keep going. 

Perseverance has helped me become a and earned me a full ride to Washington University in St. Louis.

Now, when students come to me and ask “What clicked?” or “How’d you do it?” I don’t tell them to just do the work. I tell them to look for scholarships, apply to summer programs, build their extracurriculars, keep their grades up, and most importantly, take every opportunity in their path. I give them the guidance I had to piece together for myself, because nobody handed it to me. 

My story isn’t about being exceptional. It’s about dreaming big for your future and creating a plan. It’s about dedication to your goals and being relentless, no matter what obstacles stand in your way. It’s about the power of having someone who believes in you and is willing to walk alongside you, even if they don’t have all the answers. 

The truth is, your circumstances do not define your future. With perseverance, hard work and the courage to keep going, kids like me don’t just get by. We succeed academically. We become professionals. We go back and tell the next kid on that carpet: “You belong here, too.”

“Resting up from my vacay.”

“Netflix binge last night.”

Those were among the “lame excuses” for missing school that Oklahoma’s Union Public Schools featured during the 2024-25 school year, part of a humorous campaign intended to reduce chronic absenteeism.

Behind the comical posters, however, leaders were troubled by the data. During the 2022-23 school year, 29% of students missed at least 10% of the school year. At Union High School, the rate soared to 43%.

“I think there have been huge changes in behavior since COVID,” said Chris Payne, spokesman for the Tulsa-area district. He echoed what policy experts and school leaders nationwide have been saying since rates skyrocketed after schools fully reopened. “I think people reprioritized and decided, ‘You know, I’ve got things I need to take care of.’ ”

In addition to the attendance campaign, staff met with parents and visited students’ homes to find out why they were missing school. But starting in 2027, Oklahoma schools will no longer be judged on whether those chronic absenteeism rates go up or down. The legislature voted last year to remove the indicator from the state’s education accountability system as a factor that contributes to a school’s overall grade and can determine whether a school is labeled in need of improvement. 

Among , teachers and administrators, there’s a sense of relief.

“I’m not sure that it’s fair to evaluate schools based on something that we cannot control,” said Mike Simpson, superintendent of the Guthrie Public Schools, north of Oklahoma City. Originally in favor of making chronic absenteeism a factor in schools’ A-F grades, he no longer thinks it’s a good way to assess schools.

Oklahoma’s most , for 2024-25, gives the state a D for the percentage of students with good attendance. Its chronic absenteeism rate of 19% is far from the worst in the nation, but it’s still 5 percentage points above the state’s pre-pandemic level of 14%. Data from shows the rate stands at about 21%. 

“It’s not just an Oklahoma thing,” Simpson said. “I’ve got colleagues and friends all over the country, and they’re fighting some of the same challenges.”

Oklahoma isn’t the first state to remove chronic absenteeism from its accountability system. Arkansas took it out in 2024 as part of . Illinois officials have recommended replacing chronic absenteeism with , and now reports broader attendance data rather than just chronic absenteeism.

‘States already had the data’

The federal Every Student Succeeds Act requires state accountability systems, and the report cards available to the public include indicators of academic performance, graduation rates, progress in learning English and an additional measure of student success. For that last metric, 38 states chose chronic absenteeism.

The U.S. Department of Education confirmed that it’s currently considering the state’s request to replace chronic absenteeism with a new measure, but so far, state officials haven’t said what that’s going to be. The challenge will be landing on a K-12 data point that is comparable across Oklahoma’s more than 500 districts, said Paige Kowalski, executive vice president for the Data Quality Campaign. The nonprofit has published reviews of state report cards since 2016.

Chronic absenteeism “was an inexpensive indicator to implement because states already had the data,” she said. Adopting a new measure, she said, could require districts to pay for changes to their student information systems and spend time training staff to collect and input the data. In addition, she said, it takes two years to ensure data is reliable enough to use in decisions about school ratings.

But the connections between chronic absenteeism and student achievement are backed by years of research. , for example, showed that a 1% increase in attendance was linked to a 1.5% jump in third graders passing the state reading test. showed that students who were chronically absent in middle school had lower math scores and were less likely to graduate on time than those who didn’t miss as much school. 

Kowalski said there’s plenty schools can do to improve attendance. Reducing bullying, increasing teacher retention and challenges, she said, can address some of the reasons students miss school.

Transportation surfaced as a barrier when the Union district surveyed parents, teachers and students on the issue. But teachers were far less likely than parents to say that reliable transportation would improve attendance — 25% compared to 47%. There were also stark differences between parents and students. Twenty-three percent of students said mental health reasons kept them home, while 12% of parents said that was a common explanation. 

Tulsa makes progress

Some communities in Oklahoma have adopted a tough posture toward parents whose children are frequently absent. Erik Johnson, a Republican district attorney in the southeastern part of the state, has prosecuted and jailed parents to force compliance with the law. 

Prior to the pandemic, Guthrie allowing police to fine parents for their kids’ truancy, but Simpson, the superintendent, said those measures didn’t “move the needle.”

In Tulsa, the state’s largest district, Board Member Stacey Woolley said she’s glad chronic absenteeism is no longer part of the grading formula because the indicator lowered schools’ scores. 

“At the same time, we have to continue to make it a priority,” she said. When leaders examine student data, they find that students who struggle are chronically absent, regardless of their socioeconomic status. 

The district’s work shows that reductions are possible. The rate has declined over the past two years from 44% to 37%, and have seen drops of at least 10% compared to last school year. 

Such efforts won’t go completely unrewarded. Under the to the Education Department, schools that lower chronic absenteeism could still score “bonus points” toward their grade but the indicator won’t be used in determining which schools are identified as needing improvement. 

By the end of the Union district’s campaign, chronic absenteeism had dropped by about 1.4%, well below the goal of 7%. Still, Payne said, the progress equated to 200 fewer chronically absent students. 

Leaders also realized something else: Students in the district’s career-tech programs, like aerospace and construction, had lower absenteeism rates than those in the general student population. Now, in response to local workforce shortages, the district has launched a healthcare career pathway as well. 

“I had students that didn’t really have a direction,” said Jason McMullen, who teaches aviation courses at the district’s Innovation Lab. “Then they see a helicopter land and that lightbulb goes off.”

On a recent Wednesday morning, some students at the lab learned how to secure safety wire to the nuts and bolts that hold planes together, while others patched holes in sheetrock. 

The change to the state’s accountability system, “doesn’t mean we’re going to quit working on it,” said Payne, the district’s spokesman. “The reality remains that if students are not present, they’re not going to perform and have success in school and life.”

To Lila Byock, one of two California moms suing Curriculum Associates over its product i-Ready, the advisory was the right move. Thousands of school districts use the program, with its animated alien characters, to give students practice in math and reading.

“Excessive classroom screen use is a public health crisis,” she said, adding that district leaders should “reduce the use of individual devices, reinvest in paper curricula and stop letting Big Ed Tech exploit our kids for profit.”

Districts like and , are already rethinking their use of i-Ready or in response to growing backlash from parents. , led by the Austin-based EdTech Law Center, could be one reason. The complaint argues that the company gained “virtually unfettered access” to children’s personal information, like birth date, gender, race and disability status, and shared it with “myriad third parties.”&�Բ�����;

Curriculum Associates denies the accusations. 

“Curriculum Associates takes student data privacy extremely seriously, and the claims in this litigation are without merit,” a spokesperson told �鶹��Ʒ. “We do not sell student data, use it for advertising, or create commercial profiles of students. All use of student information is limited to supporting the educational services requested and authorized by schools and districts in compliance with applicable federal and state laws.”

Ed tech vendors rely on long-standing federal that says “schools may act as the parent’s agent,” provided the data they gather is for educational, not commercial, purposes. 

The lawyers taking ed tech companies to court are challenging that guidance. Linnette Attai, a data privacy consultant and founder of Playwell, LLC, said the complaint over i-Ready is based on “a lot of speculation,” but it has still put vendors and education leaders on alert.

“Curriculum Associates is facing significant legal bills, but also a public relations and customer retention issue. The industry is sitting up and taking notice,” she said. But she said the issues the complaints raise are “better suited for legislators and not a courtroom.”

‘Theories of consent’

Congress passed the in 1998, requiring online sites to verify parents’ approval before they collect, use or share information from children under 13. 

Last , the Federal Trade Commission’s FAQ on the law says that schools “can consent under COPPA to the collection of kids’ information on the parent’s behalf.”

But with that put students’ privacy at risk and that digital tools benefit kids, the attorneys representing parents like Byock hope to defeat that interpretation of the law. 

“These theories of consent that companies rely on in order to bypass actual consent from parents are all bogus,” said Andrew Liddell, one half of the husband-and-wife legal team behind the EdTech Law Center. “They have no basis in the law whatsoever.”&�Բ�����;

The FTC updated its COPPA regulation in early 2025, but left the school consent issue alone. The agency, however, it was “concerned about the use of and other engagement techniques to keep kids online in ways that could harm their mental health.”

Last summer, the FTC submitted an in support of EdTech Law Center in a separate , an online learning platform used by more than 18 million students. The Liddells sued on behalf of three Kansas families who said the company uses “deceptive design techniques” to keep kids hooked and shares their data with a “host of private companies.” The families have asked for monetary damages.  

The law, the FTC wrote, does not create an “agency relationship between schools and the parents of school children.”

The Liddells say the brief is the most definitive statement yet that parents, not schools, have the final say over what data ed tech vendors can access. But the FTC hasn’t changed its existing guidance, and other student privacy experts say schools can continue to it.

A spokesperson for the FTC told �鶹��Ʒ it doesn’t “have anything to add to the amicus brief.”

‘The long game’

Meg Leta Jones, founder of the Center for Digital Ethics at Georgetown University, said there is tension in Washington over this issue. On one hand, the administration is “trying to be pro-AI,” she said. First lady Melania Trump entered a White House education summit in April alongside a saying, “The future of A.I. is ‘personified,’ ” 

At the same time, Republicans support parental rights, and a few months earlier, a Senate committee held to examine the harms of ed tech.

“It’s hard to move when both of those things are happening,” Jones said. The lawsuits are important, she said, because they take the issue out of federal officials’ hands. “Clarity around this consent issue is what will come in the long game.”

Outside the courts, the litigation has inspired more parents to push for restrictions on i-Ready and other ed tech platforms. Parents in New York City’s District 4, on Manhattan’s East Side, noted the i-Ready lawsuit in a calling for screen time limits. 

Kaliris Salas-Ramirez, a mom of two who chairs the Community Education Council for District 4, has already opted her kids out of i-Ready and NWEA’s MAP tests. But she said she remains “a thousand percent” concerned about her 14-year-old’s use of programs like Google Classroom, IXL and JumpRope, a grading platform.

The resolution cited a recent finding 141 data breaches or “unauthorized data releases” between 2023 and 2025. The district, the New York comptroller’s office said, doesn’t have an “accurate inventory” of all of the software programs schools use or the privacy risks involved. 

“It’s like ed tech on steroids,” said Salas-Ramirez, also a neuroscientist who trains future doctors. “We don’t have the data to validate that these quote unquote tools, instruments or assessments provide us anything worthwhile.”&�Բ�����;

‘Administrative nightmare’

Ed tech experts say schools wouldn’t be able to function if vendors had to get consent directly from parents for all the online products students use in the classroom. 

It’s an “administrative nightmare” said Mark Williams, a California attorney who specializes in ed tech contracts and student privacy. “Throw that out the window; it doesn’t work.”

Vendors share data with third parties. That part isn’t in dispute. The question is if it’s being shared, as the FTC says, “for the use and benefit of the school” or falling into the hands of companies that use it for marketing or targeted ads based on students’ characteristics.  

A last year offered another look into what happens when kids click answers or type personal information into a program. The state board turned to , a nonprofit that tests software products, to investigate 100 apps commonly used in the state’s schools. 

The review found that over a third shared student information with advertisers. shared data with six advertisers. Others shared data with dozens of advertisers as well as with sites like Google and Microsoft.

The report stressed that the “presence of sharing alone does not necessarily constitute a contract violation.” Some sharing is necessary for an app to function properly, the authors wrote.

It’s “common sense” for a vendor to share data they collect to fix bugs or security flaws, said Steve Smith, executive director of , a global network of vendors and schools. But legally, it’s “a little bit of a stretch” for a company to create a new program with that information.

Vendors go too far when they share “incredibly sensitive student data” from a school monitoring app to develop a new product, said Amelia Vance, president of the nonprofit Public Interest Privacy Center. Many schools use such programs to monitor for online threats or risks of self harm.

“The companies have everything the kid has done online, everything that they’ve written in the Google Drive,” she said. “You can think about that extremely personal information then being used to create a personalized learning platform that they sell back to schools.”

‘Pretty opaque’

Inspired by Utah’s work, Access4Learning is developing a tool that districts can use to track what vendors do with student information. Leaders expect to launch it later this year. 

But that might not satisfy the concerns of some parents leading the charge against ed tech. They often point out that such organizations or have received funding from some of the very companies the screen-free lobby opposes. The growing mistrust surfaced at last December that the National Telecommunications and Information Administration held to discuss kids’ “excessive screen time.”&�Բ�����;

“Ed tech is so devious that it’s created dozens of nonprofits cloaked as online safety organizations,” Lisa Cline, a Maryland parent who has advocated against screens in the Montgomery County Public Schools, said at the event. “Some of them are here today. Look closely. These guys are bankrolled by big tech and frankly, they mock the work that unpaid people like myself do to educate parents.”&�Բ�����;

While the lawsuits between parents and vendors could drag on for a while, districts should at least be transparent about the products they’re using, said Williams, the California attorney. 

Parents are allowing districts “to collect and give to a third party data that they would not otherwise be entitled to,” he said. In return, educators should explain what data they take and what they do with it. “Unfortunately, that process can be pretty opaque.”

Last year, WalletHub, , ranked the state 50th — just above New Mexico — on a mix of criteria including test scores, graduation and teacher certification rates. More recently, a University of Oklahoma researcher zoomed in on the , where the state places 48th overall in math and reading.

The unwelcome attention typically prompts a wave of finger-pointing from politicians and . 

Sometimes, teachers like Sarah Clifford.

A single mom of two who relocated from New York, she’s among the thousands in the state who entered the classroom without completing a teacher training program. In 2023, as a new teacher in the Edmond Public Schools outside Oklahoma City, she struggled to write lesson plans and hated teaching math, a subject she disliked as a child. Districts statewide have increasingly depended on emergency certified educators like her to fill vacancies. In 2023-24, the number topped 5,000, state data shows. Since 2022, the state has also allowed schools to hire , who may have no more than a high school diploma.

“We don’t want to demonize any person who is stepping up to be a teacher, regardless of the pathway,” said Bryan Duke, dean of the College of Education and Professional Studies at the University of Central Oklahoma. “But the difference in preparation launches people successfully or unsuccessfully into careers.”

Duke’s program has been part of the solution. In 2024, the university received nearly $2.5 million in from the state for scholarships to help teachers like Clifford complete their certification programs and earn a master’s degree. She graduated with last December after spending nine months instruction so she could “help students feel confident and start to love something that’s hard.” Most of her third graders students who were “on watch” in math ended up on grade level by the end of the year.

“Our state doesn’t look like we’re doing well,” she said. “But if you go inside a classroom with people who have the passion and want to be there, those kids are thriving.”

The data on the state’s decline is undeniable. In the mid-’90s, the state ranked 17th in math and reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. With the 2024 scores, the state had fallen to 48th.

In a , University of Oklahoma researcher Adam Tyner described how Oklahoma missed the “southern surge” that brought academic turnarounds to states like Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. Those states saw improvement after pouring millions of dollars into teacher training, strong curriculum and coaching.

Oklahoma’s results have also affected public opinion. Less than a third of Oklahomans graded their local schools an A or B in from the university’s Oklahoma Center for Education Policy. Two years ago, 41% gave their schools high marks.

At about $12,500, the state’s per-pupil spending is . One reason is because it takes a in the legislature to approve a tax increase. District budgets could take another hit if voters this fall approve on property taxes. 

“If it’s really hard to increase revenues, you have to take away things from other areas,” said Deven Carlson, a public policy researcher at the University of Oklahoma. “It’s going to be hard to improve outcomes, if you think that money matters.”

One possible off-ramp for parents is school choice. Many charter schools their local district schools, data shows, leading to push for expanding the charter sector.

This year, lawmakers took a dual approach to tackling the state’s education challenges. They gave teachers a $2,000 raise — but the is still well below neighboring Texas and Arkansas. Gov. Kevin Stitt also signed a increasing the minimum number of days in the school calendar from 166 to 173. That will make it harder for some districts with four-day weeks to maintain that schedule.

“We’ve lost a lot of instructional days,” said Education Secretary Dan Hamlin. “It’s not the only thing that matters; you need other things, too. But it is a component that’s meaningful.”

‘Art of teaching’

State data shows that 184 districts are in session for 166 days or less, which they can achieve through four-day weeks with longer days. 

shows four-day weeks don’t necessarily improve retention, but districts that don’t adopt them can to nearby ones that do. The model is generally popular with teachers, who trade off longer hours for three-day weekends.

Superintendent Rick Cobb’s experience in the Mid-Del School District, outside Oklahoma City, illustrates the problem. When he became superintendent in 2015, he was “alarmed” that the district had 20 emergency certified teachers, he said. Now 114 either have emergency certifications or are adjunct teachers, according to .

His district, which serves a blue collar community near an Air Force base, never shifted to a four-day week. But others around Mid-Del did, luring away his teachers.

Knowledge of the subject matter generally isn’t a weak spot for emergency certified teachers, he said. But they often lack the skills to manage classrooms and modify lessons for students working at higher and lower levels.

“That’s the art of teaching,” he said.

Mike Simpson, superintendent of the Guthrie Public Schools, north of Oklahoma City, has faced the same challenge. His district, where nearly 60% qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, has lost teachers to districts with four-day weeks. But he never went that route because parents in his district depend on schools not just for education, but also for school meals. 

“If the parents go to work, who’s taking care of those kids? Who’s feeding them?” he asked. “I take that very seriously.”

The small, rural Jennings Public Schools, west of Tulsa, is among those that run four days. It received a waiver from the state to operate a 156-day calendar.

Superintendent Derrick Meador doesn’t struggle to find certified teachers. He had three job openings recently and about 10 applicants for each one. It was the first time in three years he’s had to hire a teacher. Families, he said, support the four-day week and don’t want to lose it. Fewer than 2% of students are chronically absent, and the district performs well academically.

“If we weren’t getting the results that we were, I would have ended it a long time ago,” Meador said. He doesn’t appreciate districts with four-day weeks getting for dragging the state down. “I don’t like being lumped in with other districts. We stand alone on our merits and should be judged accordingly.”&�Բ�����;

He hopes the state will continue to allow waivers from the new 173-day requirement, but without it, Jennings will likely have to give up its four-day week.

‘Life experience’

It’s difficult to tie student outcomes to any one education policy, whether that’s the academic calendar or teacher certification. But Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research at the American Institutes for Research, said if performance is falling, teacher quality “is one of the very first things that I would look toward.”

Oklahoma is certainly not alone in lowering the bar to teach, especially since the pandemic. Goldhaber examined post-COVID outcomes for students in Massachusetts and found that those whose teachers had emergency licenses in math and science than their peers. 

In Texas, a third of teachers were unlicensed in 2023-24. aims to reverse that trend by gradually reducing the share of unlicensed teachers that districts can hire to 5% by 2029.

Oklahoma took a small step in that direction this year when it tightened restrictions on adjunct teachers, who are only required to have “distinguished qualifications in their field,” but not a college degree. Stitt signed that stops schools from hiring adjuncts to teach core content areas in K-5.

that educators with temporary or emergency certifications are more likely than those who are fully certified to leave the profession. But they often take positions that would otherwise be nearly impossible to fill. 

In the Union Public Schools, which serves southeast Tulsa and part of Broken Arrow, several teach at the district’s Innovation Lab, a hub for career and technical education courses. They include Jeremy Weber, a who teaches students the basics of aircraft maintenance. On a recent morning, he showed students how to use safety wire to secure nuts and bolts to parts of a plane.

“That life experience is pretty valuable,” said Kenneth Moore, the district’s executive director of secondary education.

Earlier this month, newly certified teachers with years of life and career experience gathered at the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond to celebrate their graduation from the two-year alternative certification program. 

Grabbing refreshments at a pre-graduation reception and posing for pictures with their families and fellow graduates, they talked about wanting to reverse the stigma attached to teachers who take a nontraditional route to the classroom.

They included Cherice McDonald, a teacher in Oklahoma City schools who previously worked in the oil and gas industry, and is now being recruited to work as an assistant principal. 

Melanie Whitekiller Lawrence, a member of the Cherokee Nation, stayed home to raise her four kids before taking a job as a long-term substitute. When she took charge of a fourth grade class in Edmond, she said she “had no idea” there were academic standards in math and reading she was required to teach under state law. She’s come a long way since the days when a colleague in the classroom next door would supply her with ready-made lessons for the week.

Last fall, her colleagues at Chisholm Elementary chose her to represent their school as . 

“Sometimes, I feel like I’m more knowledgeable about current and best practices than my colleagues who have been teaching for a very long time,” she said at the reception. “We’re not just warm bodies.”

RAY LAKE, Wyo. — There was a lot of giggling in the parking lot as teenagers plunged bare hands into coolers filled with small, slippery rainbow trout fry. 

The objective was to catch the fish in clear plastic cups, but the juvenile trout were fast and very squirmy, and the effort elicited shrieks, splashing and laughter. 

The kids — middle and high school students from Fort Washakie, Wyoming Indian and St. Stephens schools — were pretty comfortable handling the baby trout. That makes sense, given that they hatched them from eggs and reared them in classroom tanks over the previous four months. 

Thursday’s fish release under leaky rainclouds was the culmination of the Trout in the Classroom program, which schools on the Wind River Reservation have participated in for three years. 

The Wyoming Game and Fish Department funds the program, which Trout Unlimited facilitates and the Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative coordinates. Trout in the Classroom allows students to learn an array of scientific lessons as they do the hands-on work of raising the fish. 

After circling up in the Ray Lake parking lot, talking about watershed ecology and listening to a tribal blessing, students and their teachers got busy transporting dozens of fry from coolers in the parking lot to the nearby lake’s muddy shores. There, they released them, cup by cup, into the shallows, nudging them to their new wild home 

“OK, goodbye fishies!” a girl called as she knelt by the water. 

“Swim free!” a boy chimed in. 

Connecting the students directly to wildlife and its habitats helps foster emotional investment, Wind River Tribal Buffalo Initiative Education and Culture Coordinator Jeremy Molt said. That contributes to the ultimate goal, “which is to inspire responsible cultural stewardship of the land.”&�Բ�����;

Molt has seen the shores of reservation lakes like this one grow less littered since the trout program began, which he links to young people’s increasing awareness of ecological health and a desire to protect it. 

Through the program, he said, “we’re kind of healing some of those disconnections” with the landscape and natural food sources. “We’re trying to rewire some of that.”

Fort Washakie science teacher John Gookin was among the fish transporters. The program gives educators like him opportunities to teach about topics like beneficial bacteria, the chemistry of water, how trout extract oxygen through their gills and the life cycles of freshwater swimmers.

“It engages the kids, and gives something operational for things like biochemistry,” he said. 

For example, in the classroom, his students “test how much ammonia is in the water,” Gookin said. “Then we learn about the shape of the ammonia molecule, the cycles of it and why that even matters.”

Because his students are all anglers themselves, he said, they were excited to help stock the lake and perpetuate healthy waters. 

And though they became wet with rain and mud, the giggles never died down.

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