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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They framed their inquiry around two questions: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One-on-one learning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tulsa, Oklahoma

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

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

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

She didn’t have much time.

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

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

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

That’s hardly surprising, experts say.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Human realities’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘A sensitive manner’

ImpactTulsa’s work began with a disturbing realization.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘They grab what they can’

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

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

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

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

They usually have about an hour to collect belongings. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Legal first aid’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The urban system, just off one of Los Angeles’ major freeways, was headed for state takeover and had a 58% graduation rate. When the opening was posted, “I thought, ‘Compton, I don’t want to be in Compton,’ ” Brawley said.

But Brawley saw a “pocket of success” at some elementary schools that he could build on. Accepting the job in 2012, he instituted a set of routines, like in-school tutoring and frequent multiplication practice. Weekly quizzes let teachers know precisely which students need extra help.

Fourteen years later, the district, with a 91% poverty rate, is one of the nation’s .

“If you go back 15, 20 years ago, Compton was not the place where most parents would have kept their kids,” he said. In fact, it was the first district in California where families tried to convert a low-performing elementary school into a charter under a . “Now, we see a reversal.”

The district is also one of only 78, out of the nation’s 500 largest, that has maintained consistent leadership at the top since the pandemic, according to a from ILO Group, a consulting firm. At the state level, all but seven have changed education chiefs at least once, with more turnover coming once new governors take office next year.

As in Compton, ILO’s data shows, students are better off when district leaders stay longer.

In those with no leadership changes between 2019 and 2025, kids performed better in reading and math — showing at least a month of extra learning — than those in districts with turnover. In women-led districts, the advantage was nearly two extra months of learning in math, based on the Stanford Education Data Archive, a comparable measure of student learning across states. 

“Stability really matters within a community,” said Julia Rafal-Baer, the ILO Group’s CEO. In those with high turnover, the kids who were in kindergarten at the start of the pandemic have likely seen multiple reading programs “or their parents were asked to start one more strategic planning process. It gets old.”

Other districts in the top 500, sometimes embroiled in controversy, have experienced multiple leadership changes since the pandemic. , for example, is on its fourth chief since 2020. Former Superintendent Devon Horton was on charges that he assaulted his wife in front of his two children. 

The East Baton Rouge district in Louisiana is also on its fourth superintendent since 2020, with current leader Lamont Cole facing charges for bribery and money laundering stemming from his time as a . He denies the accusations, and board members say they support him. But they’ve also tightened up . 

Overall, ILO’s latest review shows that churn is down for the first time since the pandemic. Last year, it appeared that districts had reached a “new normal,” with turnover ranging from 20% to 23% for five years straight. But this year, among the top 500, it has dropped to 17%, which is closer to the typical pre-COVID levels of reported by AASA, the School Superintendents Association.

Rafal-Baer cautioned that while the “carousel of leadership seems to have slowed down,” the results are just a snapshot. “This isn’t a return to normal so much as the system finally catching its breath.”

The decline in turnover, she added, could point to the current financial constraints on districts as they adjust to the end of federal relief funds and ongoing declines in enrollment.

“These searches are very expensive,” she said. A recently spent about $48,000 to find a new leader, while the Clark County district’s search in 2024 . “There may be less of a desire to tell your community, when you’re cutting assistant principals, that you’re now going to spend money on a search firm.” 

A ‘flashpoint’

Rachel White, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and founder of a on school superintendents, suggested the pandemic years were an anomaly. School board fights over COVID-related closures, masks and culture war issues “were obviously quite volatile,” she said, and in multiple districts, led to superintendents being abruptly dismissed. 

That was “hopefully a once-in-a-lifetime flashpoint,” she said. “Maybe school boards 
 are less likely to do away with the superintendent who they disagree with ideologically on one thing.” 

Her own research on superintendent turnover echoes connections ILO made between student learning and consistent leadership. While studies prior to the pandemic showed of turnover on student outcomes, “chronic instability” can hit neediest students the hardest, White said. 

According to a new , she found that students in high-poverty districts with repeated leadership turnover were about two months of learning behind in math and six weeks behind in reading compared with those in systems with the same leader since 2019.

Leaders who stay in a district longer are more likely to transfer knowledge throughout the organization, she said, and often build up trust with the public.

“The longer a superintendent stays, the more people believe they are committed to that community,” she said. “You can take some risks. It’s really important to be able to say, ‘Hey, this might not work out, but I think there’s potentially some return on investment here.’ ” 

Policy experts like to talk about “durable” learning and success for schools. , a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, says that not only is leadership churn “one of the greatest threats to durability,” but that school boards need superintendents who view instruction as the chief priority, not just one of many initiatives.

Brawley, who was a science teacher and principal in other districts before moving into leadership, has such a “strong convictions” about improving math and reading, White said, that he’s been able to keep the district moving forward despite other political issues that superintendents often navigate. 

“There’s a real belief that these students are brilliant and they just need the right resources and a stable teacher workforce,” she said. 

His methods aren’t popular with everyone. The Compton teachers union president has on testing. But Cecilia McDuffie, principal of Foster Elementary, said the emphasis on data, combined with practices implemented at all schools, has helped her students rise from the bottom.

On a recent morning, a week after school started, Foster students spent time responding to the writing prompt: What do you like about your teacher? Leaders increased their focus on writing — and significantly cut back on screen time —  after observing that students couldn’t recall what had been taught. 

“We know that writing elicits a connection,” Brawley said. “If you don’t write it down, you’re not really learning it.” 

Foster was not a “pocket of success” when Brawley arrived in Compton. In 2014, less than a quarter of students met or exceeded state standards in reading and math. Last school year, 77% of students scored that high in those subjects, and 73% reached that level in science, nearly hitting the goal of 75%.

McDuffie said that Brawley has created systems that will outlast him.

“If he were to leave tomorrow, I would know that I always need to have a plan. I need to always refine my plan based on data,” she said. “And I need to start all my interventions early. You can’t wait until March.”

While ILO’s data captures the pandemic period, some districts, like Bridgeport, Connecticut, have experienced frequent turnover across a much longer period. Since 2005, the district has had eight superintendents, and former leader Carmela Levy-David left in late 2024 after a near-unanimous from the teachers union. Each transition “carries some costs,” said Joseph Sokolovic, vice-chair of the board. 

“New leaders often bring new priorities, and different approaches to implement those priorities,” he said. “Community and board relationships must be rebuilt. Trust must be earned again.”

But he said it’s important to put the instability in context. Two turnovers occurred while the district was . The district also has one of the highest-poverty rates in the state, and spends than wealthier districts like Greenwich, which has seen even in the past 20 years. 

“No superintendent, regardless of talent, can eliminate concentrated poverty or erase decades of economic neglect,” Sokolovic said. With the district currently conducting another search, he said the district needs “a leader willing to commit for the long term, someone who understands the complexities of an urban district and is willing to confront difficult issues directly.”

‘Route to the superintendency’

School boards should also look for instructional expertise, said Rafal-Baer.

A women-owned organization, ILO Group keeps close track of where women are becoming district chiefs and their routes to the position. shows that women are twice as likely as men to have an academic post, like curriculum specialist, on their resume. But just a handful of current superintendents came from a position leading curriculum and instruction.

“Given where student outcomes stand right now, you would expect the academics seat to be the surest route to the superintendency. It turns out to be one of the rarest,” she said. “Boards keep saying instruction is the priority. Their hiring says otherwise.”

Overall, 34% of superintendents in the top 500 districts are women, a 1 percentage point increase since last year and a 6-point jump since 2019. Fifty-one of the nation’s women superintendents are also a first of some kind in their districts — first woman superintendent, first Black woman or first Latina superintendent. California has the most, with 11 leaders who fit one of those descriptions, while Texas has six.

In 2018, when the Aldine Independent School District, near Houston, was looking for a new superintendent, two of the board members wanted a Hispanic leader. With a 73% Hispanic population, Superintendent LaTonya Goffney, who is Black, understood why. 

“I didn’t take it personally,” she said. “But I’ve been intentional about building relationships and connecting with the community.”

As another one of the 78 districts that has kept the same leader since the pandemic, more than neighboring districts to bounce back from academic declines. Too many inexperienced teachers was one reason, an . But the board gave Goffney more time and in 2022 through next year.

The district in state accountability rankings, but the number of F-rated schools has fallen from 21 since 2023, and the district’s overall score increased this year from .

Still, in a state where districts with low-performing schools are increasingly , Goffney feels constant pressure to show steady progress. As enrollment begins to decline in the state, the district sees competition not just from charter schools and a new private school choice program, but from neighboring districts trying to “cherry pick” Aldine’s students, she said.

“My focus, she said, “is on making sure that Aldine is the best choice.”

I was an assistant principal at the time, popping into dozens of classes each month, and I remember thinking: This is both the hardest and most important part of teaching. It’s almost like watching Olympic athletes; they make their sport look easy, and great teachers do the same.

The instinct Mrs. Johnson displayed — noticing what a student needs and responding in the learning moment — is a practice called responsive teaching. It isn’t new, as teachers have always adapted on the fly. We reteach a concept when someone looks confused, pull a small group together mid-lesson, catch a student who’s uncharacteristically quiet and check in before it becomes a pattern. In short, teacher judgment is the engine behind responsive instruction. 

But that judgment is now being asked to cover more ground, with less support to draw on. If schools want to address the issues facing education today, they need to empower teachers to see and respond to every individual in real time — without adding to their workload or stress. 

Teachers face mounting, intersecting challenges

Classrooms today hold a wider range of needs than ever. from this year shows that even before the pandemic, elementary classrooms were academically diverse: In a typical fifth-grade class, only about a quarter of students were on track for grade-level proficiency. After the pandemic, that overall proficiency level hasn’t changed dramatically, but the depth of the gap has. Lower-achieving students are now further behind and need accelerated growth just to catch up by year’s end. 

Practically, that means teachers are managing abilities that are further apart than they used to be in classes that, especially in upper grades, might contain 30 or 40 students.

At the same time, teachers are being asked to cover more than academics. Kids walk in carrying social and emotional weight that shapes their ability to learn, and it’s up to the teacher to make sure they succeed. In fact, when TPT (a marketplace for classroom resources, thousands of educators this summer, meeting emotional and behavioral needs was their top concern, even above academics.

There’s no question over whether educators are capable of helping every student thrive. Teachers like Mrs. Johnson don’t need to dig through yet another data system to know their classes. But they do need the time and support to act on their judgment, for every student, all day, without sacrificing their own happiness or passion for the job.

Helping teachers scale what they’ve always done instinctively 

Enabling responsive teaching in today’s landscape doesn’t have to be complicated. 

It can start with something straightforward and often overlooked: encouraging teachers to build routines that create space for judgment to work. The best teachers I’ve seen add intentional structure into the day, to help kids stay in the learning mindset. 

I visited a public school in New York City where every student wrote a personal goal on a sticky note each morning, something like “I’m going to be kind today” or “I’ll do well on my math test,” and circled back to it before dismissal with their teachers. Another simple practice is pairing students with different classmates for a few minutes of guided conversation before class or between topics.

Neither takes more than five or 10 minutes or requires a new program. The value is in giving teachers a read on their students throughout the school day, while also giving students practice naming what they need.

Technology has a role here too, if done right. It’s important to remember data points don’t capture everything. An assessment score won’t convey that a student did poorly on a quiz because he was distracted about a field trip that afternoon, or that a tough week had more to do with what’s going on at home than the material. Teachers are able to bring those insights because they know their students.  

What technology can do when it’s thoughtfully designed is sharpen the teachers’ hunches by providing immediate insight into which skill students understand. It can flag issues even before they’re visible, then help teachers respond right away by offering personalized next steps to deepen learning for every student. In other words, tech doesn’t override judgment, but it should make exercising that judgment faster, more precise and scalable.

With any new tech, rolling it out correctly is the most important piece. I’ve seen effective tools and smart initiatives fail because teachers were trained once and left to figure out the actual usage alone. Instead, schools should build in ongoing support: a dedicated tech leader who can answer a quick question, regular time for teachers to explore resources and compare notes, and leadership that rigorously assesses what’s working and actually drops what isn’t. 

None of this is complex, but it’s not going to happen without effort. It requires administrators to protect teachers’ expertise as fiercely as they protect instructional minutes, to resist piling on disparate tools that lead to fatigue more than results, and to treat teacher judgment as the thing worth building systems around rather than a variable to be managed by those systems.

If we focus on making responsive teaching easily achievable in every classroom, we have a real opportunity to improve outcomes for our students while making life better for teachers — and that benefits everyone.

On Wednesday, she abruptly stepped down, just as roughly 100 staff members from the office handling the day-to-day management of those programs move from the Department of Education to the Department of Health and Human Services. 

“Acting Assistant Secretary Rogers is returning to her home state of Florida to take on a great opportunity and be closer to her family,” Savannah Newhouse, Education Department press secretary, said in an email. “We thank her for all of her hard work and dedication to bettering education and employment outcomes for individuals with disabilities.” 

Rogers, who oversees the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, or OSERS, joined the department after leading Florida’s Division of Vocational Rehabilitation. She stepped in to implement the department’s effort to give HHS more control over services for students with disabilities. With HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy’s comments about people with autism, parents have been strongly opposed to the move. He has linked autism to and environmental toxins and suggested children with autism won’t grow up to live .

As the mother of a son with autism, she said she could relate to parents’ worries and tried to project calm in the face of what she called “false and misleading information spreading online” about the potential impact of the handover to HHS.

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act “is an educational law, not a medical law,” she said in a . “This partnership does not and cannot change that. Your child’s rights to a free, appropriate public education remain fully protected.”

But she from most advocacy organizations, who are concerned that the move, part of President Donald Trump’s long-range plan to eliminate the Education Department, would create confusion for districts and families. The department did not respond to questions about who would replace her. 

On Wednesday, the department from Erin McHugh. deputy director of the Office of Special Education Programs, who shared a report from the office’s August conference in Arlington, Virginia. The agreement with HHS, she wrote, will increase “access to critical wraparound services and the use of research to inform early intervention and special education practices.”

But members of Congress are also skeptical and have taken steps to prevent the transfer. In late July, the Senate education committee advanced a bipartisan bill that would keep oversight of K-12 and services for students with disabilities at the Education Department. So far, it’s not scheduled for a full Senate vote. Last week, House members introduced a , but Republican leaders haven’t scheduled a mark-up. 

Meanwhile, the process of “detailing” education staff to other agencies as part of has accelerated. 

Along with OSERS relocating to HHS this week, several teams from the Office of Civil Rights will move next week to the Department of Justice. That follows the relocation of career and technical education staff to the Department of Labor last year and more than 60 employees from the Office of Elementary and Secondary Education who joined them last month.

In addition, some Education Department offices are moving to other government spaces so the can take over the Lyndon B. Johnson building. Throughout the process, the union representing Education Department employees, has argued that the interagency agreements are illegal and inefficient.

“These moves to new facilities and the interagency agreements only make it harder for federal workers to do their jobs on behalf of the American public,” Rachel Gittleman, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Local 252, said in a statement Tuesday. “This is an insult to the tens of millions of students and families who rely on Education Department services and the taxpayers who count on federal oversight to prevent waste, fraud and abuse.”

Rogers’ resignation came as a surprise to some advocates who want to ensure there is no disruption in services.

“Having the OSERS leader step down during this transition from the Department of Education to HHS adds chaos and uncertainty, raising concerns among educators, families and advocates,” said Chad Rummel, CEO of the Council for Exceptional Children. “Department of Education staff should be focusing on supporting educators, strengthening special education, and improving outcomes for students with disabilities, rather than getting bogged down in reporting structures, internal agreements and unclear priorities.”

The Council of Administrators of Special Education, the professional organization for district special education officials, was also unaware of Rogers’ departure. The group said it “ hopes her successor is appointed quickly and has the experience and deep expertise needed to administer education programs for students with disabilities.”

A former health industry reporter, Singer sees parallels between Silicon Valley’s campaign for coding, among other measures, and Big Pharma’s influence on medicine, noting huge school investments over the past few years by Apple, Google and Microsoft, among others.

“Never has so much market power lined up behind a single curriculum cause,” she writes.

As a result, a movement that could have helped build data science or other less glamorous, evidence-based reforms has in many cases ended up offering students “only half an education in computing, the rosy upbeat half that casts tech giants as benevolent, world-changing innovators.” 

In one chapter, Singer examines a 2019 Advanced Placement Computer Science course developed by Apple that teaches students how to code in Swift, Apple’s programming language for building iPhone apps. It’s as if schools embraced a “Raytheon-branded AP physics course or DuPont chemistry course or Pfizer AP Biology course,” she writes.

Singer finds both problematic and promising moves by tech over the past decade or more. While she calls out the nonprofit for skewing the idea of computer science to coding that often helps serve corporate interests, she lauds its founder, Iran-born entrepreneur , for making coding appealing and fun to millions of young people, telling Âé¶čŸ«Æ·â€™s Greg Toppo that U.S. public schools likely wouldn’t offer computer science at this scale if not for Partovi.

“I don’t know anybody else that’s been able to do that,” she says. “I think that did change the world.”

Ahead of the book’s release on Tuesday, Toppo and Singer talked about her findings and the lessons that the tech industry is now taking into the fight to get into schools. 

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The book spends a lot of time with Partovi and Code.org. Would you say it is basically a positive influence?

Natasha Singer: Code.org catalyzed computer science in schools. They also partnered with a lot of big tech companies and brought in commercial things — the Hour of Code has the lessons and Elsa the lessons and the Microsoft lessons and the Code Your Own lessons, and so it also brought in a kind of commercialism that I have questions about. I don’t think we would have computer science at this scale in schools if not for Code.org.

One of the key takeaways of this book is that there are other ways to do computer science in schools. In fact, if there’s a hero, it’s , who says Code.org and other groups are mostly just getting middle-class white boys interested in coding. Can you tell us about her? 

Jane Margolis is an incredible researcher. She grew up in Berkeley, Calif., during the ’60s, and she went to UC Berkeley. She was a Vietnam War protester and then she was a labor activist. She worked for the telephone company — at the time, it was Pacific Telephone and Telegraph, and there she saw these gender biases at work because she worked as an operator, the person who sat at the switchboard with all those wires plugging in calls. Male employees were allowed to be linemen, and they would go outside and climb these telephone poles and install phones, and she was trying to unionize the women to say that job should be open to everyone. Her view was that women need to have technical skills and equal opportunity to technical careers. Eventually, she goes to Harvard and gets a Ph.D in education, and she’s looking at gender disparities. Harvard has this government department, and it was inhospitable to women, and so she did her thesis about why boys were shouting down girls and pushing girls out of political science. 

She starts in computer science in the ’90s at Carnegie Mellon University. Carnegie Mellon, as you know, is at the forefront of computer science education and robotics and computer vision. They were one of the first to start a dedicated college of computer science, as opposed to a major. But a couple of years in, they realize that only 7% of the people majoring in computer science are girls, and they can’t figure out why. 

, who’s the associate dean at Carnegie Mellon, hires Margolis, and together they do a study looking at why it is that women are not going into computer science and are dropping out. And they find there are all these factors, one of which is that families are buying personal computers. She found by interviewing male and female students that the boys would be like, “Oh yeah, my dad or my uncle went to Radio Shack and brought home this TRS-80 computer and put it in my room, so I fooled around and learned to code, and then my neighbor came over — he’s a software engineer.” So by the time the boys show up at Carnegie Mellon, many of them have already taken computer science in high school. They know what they’re doing. And some girls have no experience, so they’re already feeling behind by Day One. 

It wasn’t just that girls were left out. It’s that when girls tried to take computer science in high school, often the guidance counselors would say to them, “Oh, you don’t really want to do this,” or “You’re not going to do well,” or “It’s going to hurt your grade-point average.” There were all kinds of socio-cultural things going on â€” sexism and a whole bunch of other stuff that dissuaded girls. 

And so they wrote this report at Carnegie Mellon, and they did all kinds of things to attract girls to computer science. There had been a requirement that if you wanted to major in computer science, you had to have taken it in high school. But of course, girls were dissuaded from taking it in high school. So one of the things that Carnegie Mellon did, they looked at other students who might have been good at math or sciences but didn’t necessarily take computer science, or who were leaders in their schools — perseverance qualities that make you good at computer science. Within a few years, the percentage of girls taking computer science shot up. 

And then Jane Margolis was like, “O.K., we now understand how to get more girls in computer science, but the percentage of African-American students, Latino students, lower-income students is even worse. She then becomes a researcher at UCLA. She works with Los Angeles public schools. They find similar problems of Black and brown and low-income students being dissuaded from taking computer science. So they come up with a course to make computer science more welcoming. 

Her whole idea is that if you do not grow up with a computer in your house, or you don’t know how to code, and you show up to computer science class and the first thing is computer programming, and the second thing is computer programming, and the tenth thing is computer programming, you may be turned off before you even know what it is.

So they created a class to explain to students who were first-timers: How does the internet work? How does a computer work? What is a motherboard? What is a central processing unit? And how are you using tech in your life? And do you know how an email gets to you? How are platforms — at the time it was more like and Facebook — shaping your life as a student? And then eventually, when they learn a whole bunch of stuff about how the technology works and why it’s interesting, then they start programming. 

And it’s not programming for programming’s sake. They made wearable computers — they had wristbands that had LED lights so they could make creative patterns. They could spell out their name, these wristbands, but they had to use computing to make it work. They had to program the designs. They made a lot of progress with this course, not just in Los Angeles but in Chicago. It was called Exploring Computer Science, and it began to grow slowly. 

Then the tech industry comes along and says, “We have this crisis: We need more programmers and software engineers, and every kid needs to learn to code.” And a lot of those courses were programming-centric, and I have to say some of them also included social aspects such as the ethical use of computing. But this notion that we live in a world surrounded by machines and it’s crucial for young people to understand how these things work in order to have agency and navigate them, that’s the idea that Jane Margolis was arguing for 20 years ago.

I want to ask about this story from 2015 that you tell about the course, which brought together the National Science Foundation, Code.org, Apple, and others. Can you briefly tell that story?

There was a leader at the National Science Foundation named . She was running a program called . And she was charged with broadening participation at the university level — that is, getting more women and African-American students and Latino students and students with disabilities and Native American students and others in computer science, because they’ve been historically marginalized. And she’s watching what Jane Margolis and others are doing in Los Angeles and around the country. And she realizes that the problem starts before kids get to college. 

So she gives millions of dollars to universities to develop different AP courses. The kind of course she envisioned to broaden participation in computer science didn’t exist at universities because universities took hardcore first-semester computer science that was designed to weed out people, and so she funded different universities, including UT Austin and the University of Washington and Trinity College, to develop more like Computer Science Zero, an online course that would look similar to what Jane Margolis was doing. It would teach you how the internet worked, it would teach you some data science, it would teach you some programming, it would teach you to think about the social impacts of technology. It would be a new AP course called Computer Science Principles, and you could take it as the intro. And then if you liked it you would go on and take AP Computer Science, which was much more rigorous and much more programming oriented.

So she convinces the College Board that they need to do this. And then, from Jan Cuny’s point of view, out of nowhere, The College Board announces that it’s partnered with Code.org to launch , a Code.org course, and then they announce that they have endorsed specific curriculum, including the Code.org one, but they later endorsed an AP Computer Science course from , which teaches kids to code in , Apple’s programming language for iPhone apps, and they also endorse a Microsoft course called . And Jan Cuny — NSF has funded a lot of this — is really stunned because nobody had told her beforehand that the College Board was going to . But also: Why weren’t they endorsing the ones that she funded? 

So she called The College Board and was like, “You’ve got to endorse all these courses then.” And by the way, the [AP] course was a smash success. Hundreds of thousands of kids took it. It was an introduction to computing that was broad for a lot of kids who didn’t know what it was. It did diversify who was taking computer science, although it’s still very skewed toward boys. 

But her point was that if you are trying to make a broad course that tries to get more kids of different backgrounds into computer science, Apple products skew to higher-resourced schools and higher-resourced kids. I read some of the Apple textbook, and there are lines like, “You can use this to make an app for your iPhone or even your Apple Watch.” This Apple course assumes that you have an Apple Watch. And Jan Cuny was like, “That’s not what we were doing when we were trying to broaden participation in computer science.”

I went back to the College Board, and they said, “When you’re broadening participation in computer science, you have to broaden it to everybody, and there are schools that do have MacBooks, and so maybe this course will work for them, whereas other courses won’t. It’s an array; you don’t have to use this one. You can use all of them or different ones.”

But for me, there are anomalies with having companies operate in schools, and the AP Apple curriculum and AP Microsoft curriculum show the unusual ways that tech companies influence schools that many other industries do not.

Fast-forward to 2026: Now we’re dealing with AI, and obviously tech is reading from a similar playbook. But it feels somehow different to me. I mean, we’ve had social media trials and , and these tech bros aren’t the white-hatted heroes we used to think they were. Does this moment seem different to you?

This moment is different, but also similar. We are in a moment in society where a lot of people have increased distrust of these huge tech companies, and we see a wave of parents pushing back against tech in schools. But we also see waves of people pushing back against , against , that there’s this feeling that tech has taken so much, and that people feel like they have lost control — that tech is being enacted on them.

And then when we talk about the social media trials and the big verdicts against Meta, both the one with dozens of states where Meta now has to pay $17 billion, but also the one earlier in the summer where New Mexico got in a judgment against Meta, those companies are no longer our darlings. And parents are worried about the effects of unfettered tech access and kids’ compulsive use of social media and phones, and so there’s a different climate. And yet there seems to be a disconnect in some ways with AI because you see that Microsoft and OpenAI and Anthropic and Google are all competing to get their AI tools into schools, and you see school districts across the country say “We’ve partnered with OpenAI.” “We are a ChatGPT Pioneer School,” or “We’ve partnered with Microsoft, and we’re going to use 10,000 licenses of CoPilot.” It’s amazing to me. We have had these cycles of tech in schools where there are all these promises about the latest tech, laptops, learning apps, massive open online courses, virtual reality, big data’s going to revolutionize schools and like democratize access to education for kids and get them these great career skills, and we keep having these cycles. My concern is that we don’t learn anything.

One of the reasons I wrote this book is because it feels like we have collective amnesia. Now we’re in the sixth or eighth cycle of this — and shouldn’t we be asking questions about the push for AI in schools, based on what we’ve learned about the push for all the other things that came before? 

I visited this school in Newark where two teachers had launched an AI literacy class because they were worried their high school seniors were going to graduate into a world with AI and not know anything about it. I went to the first class, and the teacher said, “We need to be honest with you. You’re the first kids we’re gonna do this class with. We don’t know how to teach this. We don’t know what you want to learn. And a year from now, this is gonna look completely different.” And there was this kind of honesty and humbleness: We, the teachers, are in it together with you, the students, and we’re gonna learn how AI works. 

They learned rigorous stuff, and they also learned to make stuff with AI. They weren’t just critical of AI, but they did it together. And if kids found something interesting, they went with that. And it’s a really hard thing for schools to know that we actually need to prepare kids about AI because they’re using it already, but in fact, we don’t know what to do yet, and this is going to rapidly change. That’s a really big challenge.

I was heartened by the chapters near the end where you go into classrooms. People are really embracing a new way to do this stuff.  

You know, I feel optimistic and upbeat about this new generation of teachers that want to equip students with broad critical thinking skills — and that involves both learning how the tech works and learning to use the tech and make stuff with AI, but also to understand the provenance of these AI tools and to understand that we have companies with more power than most countries, and we’ve never had that before. They are setting the rules we live by. So you have to understand how the tools are steering us.

For students starting at a , the first day holds many questions: Will they see any familiar faces? Who will they sit with at lunch? Who will they play with at recess?

“I’m this much nervous,” said Iman Fair-Seldon, 5, holding her hands about 4 inches (10 centimeters) apart. Iman will start first grade next month at a new school in southern New Jersey, near Philadelphia. Despite the nerves, she said she is excited to make new friends.

Starting at a new school or making a big transition, such as moving from elementary school to middle school, can be challenging. Parents may want to help but aren’t always sure what to say or do. Here’s some advice from both grown-ups and the ultimate experts: kids who have gone through transition themselves.

Schedule playdates and go to birthday parties

Parents of young children have significant influence over where their children spend time and with whom, experts say. They can seek out activities that create opportunities for connection, such as parks, playgrounds and birthday parties, and decide when their children are ready for activities like sleepovers.

“Initially, parents have a huge impact when it comes to the friends that children have,” said Dr. Asha Barber Sutton, a licensed marriage and family therapist and an associate dean of academic affairs at National University in San Diego. “More than we would like to believe, our actions as caregivers make a difference in terms of how children experience the world.”

Amira Fair, Iman’s mother, says she prefers to keep to herself, but she pushes past those feelings to help her daughter develop relationships. “I make it my business to exchange numbers and try to schedule monthly playdates,” she said. “One thing I tried to do, especially at her old school, was go to every single birthday function, say hi to the parents, get a present, see the family.”

Let kids navigate their own friendships

Parents can’t manage every friendship for their children, experts say. Instead, they can help children develop their own sense of what makes a good friend: Are they kind? Are they honest? Can you be yourself around them? Some difficult interactions can help children learn what they value in a friend and how to handle conflict, Sutton said.

Parents can also ask questions to help their children think about what they value in friendships: What qualities do you like in your friends? Who makes you feel comfortable being yourself? Those conversations can give children a framework for evaluating their own friendships when problems arise, experts say.

Jaiden Journet, a 14-year-old starting at a new high school in North Carolina, suggests parents ask their kids: “Have you found anything you have in common with anyone?”

Help kids get involved

Parents also can support their children through encouragement, especially if they are shy or anxious. Encouraging children to get involved in  or to try something new can help them meet people with similar interests.

Shia Watts, 16, says trying something new led her to some of her friends at Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks, California.

“Last year, I was part of . I’d never done that before, but I met so many amazing people,” she said.

When Jamir Gonzalez transferred last year to Uncommon Camden Prep High School in New Jersey, he joined the baseball and debate teams.

“If you have any hobbies, find out if they have that at your school, and if they do, talk to the people that are there,” said Jamir, now a 16-year-old senior.

Once students find opportunities to connect, starting the conversation is the next step, experts say. Smiling, complimenting others and asking questions can help start a conversation and keep it going.

Iman, the New Jersey 5-year-old, remembers how she met her now “B-F-F-F-F-F.” It started with a compliment.

“I think I said, ‘I like your shirt,’ and then she said, ‘Thank you.’ And I said, ‘So what’s your name?’” she recalled.

Put down the cellphones — sometimes

Students may find it harder to start conversations when their peers are , wearing headphones or focused on screens. Experts say parents can encourage children, particularly teens, to put devices away at times so they can be more present and engaged with the people around them. One way to help:  at school, some teachers and experts say.

But being too harsh with older children’s  can isolate them socially, Sutton said. Still, parents should talk with their teens about expectations around technology, social media and gaming, including  online.

Technology can also help children maintain friendships when circumstances separate them, Sutton said. “If you move away, it’s no longer like, ‘Hey, I moved out of state, and I can never see you,’ ” she said. “We have FaceTime, and we can still stay connected to friends in that way.”

Even one friendship counts

Feeling connected and having a sense of belonging at school can have an important effect on students’ well-being. If a student feels staff and peers at their school care about them, they are less likely to have poor mental health, use substances or , according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and they are more likely to have better grades and attendance.

But a student needn’t have a large friend group to feel connected. Even one relationship can make a meaningful difference, said Nicole Hockley, co-founder and CEO of Sandy Hook Promise, a nonprofit that focuses on gun violence prevention in schools.

“Even if you only have one really strong friendship or one strong trusted adult, one strong sense of belonging, that can be enough to really positively affect your well-being and your trajectory through school and life,” she said.

For students who are nervous about starting over, Hockley said, it can help to remember that other students may be looking for connection, too.

“There’s also someone else just like you in that same space who’s also saying, ‘I would like to meet someone. I’d like to make a friend,’ ” she said. “It can be intimidating, but it’s not hard once you practice it.”

This story has been updated to correct that Jamir Gonzalez joined the baseball team, not the basketball team.

–

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But the “techlash” took a turn last week when seven families in a Philadelphia suburb sued their school district in federal court for not allowing families to opt their children out of using the internet.

The 8,500-student Lower Merion School District adopted a Aug. 17 that limits the use of devices in elementary school and doesn’t assign laptops or iPads to students until they’re in fifth grade. 

The policy tries to strike a balance between recognizing that “families have different perspectives on student access to technology,” while still “maximizing the educational value of technology resources.” But in June, the board repealed a that allowed  parents to refuse internet-connected devices for their kids. 

Citing research on the addictive nature of online sites and the harmful effects of social media, the parents accuse the district, Superintendent Frank Ranelli and seven board members of creating “an environment that is unhealthy, unsafe and invasive for students.” The complaint argues that the policy denies parents’ rights to make decisions about their children’s “upbringing and education” and puts kids at risk of accessing online pornography and violent videos. One child, according to the lawsuit, began “compulsively playing an online poker game on his school device.”

In a statement, the district said it “denies the allegations and will respond further through the judicial process.” But officials also noted that not all of the parents have students in the district. Of the seven families bringing the lawsuit, just three have students still enrolled. The rest have children described as “eligible to attend” this fall. One family enrolled their kids in a private school, according to the complaint.

An ‘unusual lawsuit’

The case is the latest move by the EdTech Law Center, led by a husband and wife legal team in Texas, to force districts to significantly restrict internet use. Andrew and Julie Liddell, who are working with a representing the parents, also have several active cases against ed tech vendors, including , an online learning platform, and  , a student information system. In a statement, Andrew Liddell said he believes the case “is the first of its kind.” It’s not typical, experts say, for disputes between parents and districts over tech use to end up in court. 

“This is an unusual lawsuit,” said Stacy Hawthorne, board chair for the Consortium for School Networking, a professional organization. It’s difficult, she said, to bring a constitutional challenge over a school board’s policymaking authority. “Courts generally have not given individual families a veto over a district’s instructional or technology policies.”

The lawsuit comes about a week after Education Secretary Linda McMahon said during a CNN interview that to request something different if they think an ed tech tool, especially one using artificial intelligence, is not right for their child. 

In response to parents’ concerns and warnings from researchers about the effects of too much screen time, several states are . Last week, New York lawmakers that would make paper-and-pencil tasks the predominant means of instruction in elementary classrooms. 

Kelly Clancy, a Brooklyn mom of three who serves on a local community education council in the New York City Public Schools, said parents are “really excited” about the bill and that advocacy groups “are planning a major statewide push.” But she thinks most parents are more interested in seeing districts adopt strict screen time policies rather than opting out. 

“Parents want to trust their kids’ schools to put learning first,” she said. “No one wants to reach the point of litigation.” 

Ed tech organizations and the have called for limiting overuse while thoroughly vetting programs to ensure they improve learning.

“Nothing should replace that one-on-one teacher interaction with students,” McMahon said during her CNN spot. “Are we looking at it as recreational screen time or are we looking at it as tutorial screen time? There is a right balance to be used in the classroom.” 

Hawthorne, chair of the Consortium for School Networking, said she doesn’t expect similar lawsuits to become common, and that most disputes over screen time, privacy and AI “will continue to play out through school board deliberations, elections and state policymaking.” 

But she urged districts to take parents’ concerns seriously and to explain how their use of technology supports learning and protects kids online.

‘Teacher-led education’

The debate between Lower Merion district leaders and parents flared up in the spring when, according to the complaint, device use “had grown intolerable to many parents.” 

Yair Lev, the lead plaintiff, has two children at Cynwyd Elementary in the district and helped organize Pencils Over Pixels to advocate in favor of maintaining the opt-out policy. When Ranelli, the superintendent, and local school administrators began telling parents they couldn’t opt out, the conflict escalated.

Lev, a cardiologist and professor at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, sent numerous emails to board members asking them not to “eliminate parent protections.”

In a July message, he described an earlier conversation in which he said the superintendent told him that parents who object to Chromebooks and online curriculum “were welcome to leave the public school district and go to private school.”

at previous meetings by some parents demanding to opt their children out of using devices, the district ultimately moved the final vote on the policy to Zoom and allowed no public comments. The district is also adopting a new program that allows both to monitor device use.

In a statement shared with Âé¶čŸ«Æ·, Lev said he has no plans to pull his kids out of the district.

“We are not willing to sacrifice the public schools and community we love,” he said. “We simply seek to preserve our right as parents to choose a teacher-led education for our children without mandatory technology requirements.”

Now he’s likely to be the next state superintendent after defeating teacher and conservative pastor James Taylor in the Republican runoff Tuesday. 

“I thought to myself, ‘If we lose, at least it edifies the work that you’re doing. You’ll have a much more grounded perspective,’ ” he told Âé¶čŸ«Æ· in an interview.

He’ll face the Democratic candidate Jennettie Marshall, a pastor and former Tulsa Public Schools board member, in November. But in such a conservative state, Franklin is expected to be the frontrunner. 

With strong support from pro-public school networks, Franklin’s primary win represents a clear departure from the state’s last elected state superintendent, conservative firebrand Ryan Walters. The former history teacher pushed Bibles in classrooms, threatened to revoke teachers’ licenses for teaching topics some view as divisive and filled his calendar with appearances on conservative talk shows. Critics said he neglected the state’s education system. 

Franklin, a moderate Republican, has more than 40 years in education as a teacher, administrator and associate superintendent at Tulsa Tech, an independent district offering career training to high school students and adults. As a former member of the state’s now-defunct virtual charter school board, he voted against allowing the state to open the nation’s first religious charter school, separating himself from Walters and other officials who battled unsuccessfully all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to establish the school. With the state now trying to improve its poor educational rankings, where it is nearly last in the nation, one political expert said Franklin seemed “like the safer choice.”

“Ryan Walters is pretty fresh in a lot of folks’ memories across the state, including Republicans,” said Deven Carlson, a public policy researcher at the University of Oklahoma. As an inductee into the state’s Educator Hall of Fame, Franklin, he said “is kind of a known quantity in the education space.”

Franklin stepped into the race after Rob Miller, former superintendent of the Bixby Public Schools and an outspoken critic of Walters, withdrew . Teacher groups quickly shifted their support to Franklin, who along with Taylor, edged out five other candidates in the June primary, including state Sen. Adam Pugh.

Walters, who had been expected to run for governor, left his job a year early and now runs an organization that encourages teachers to opt out of their unions. Gov. Kevin Stitt appointed Lindel Fields, a retired career and technical education administrator, to complete the term and has since appointed him as education secretary. 

Fields some of Walters’ policies, like requiring classrooms to have Bibles and expecting applicants for teaching positions from blue states to take an , a conservative media company. The multiple choice test covered civics and history topics, but also included ideological questions about parental rights and gender issues.

Education advocates see Franklin as one who can further mend the relationship between school districts and the department.

“Franklin is hands down the most qualified person that we’ve ever seen run for this position in the history of the state,” said Erika Wright, founder of and now a community organizer with the Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law and Justice.

Taylor, meanwhile, appealed to many of the same groups that helped Walters win in 2022, like the . He for more Christianity in the classroom and teaching students “the word of God” through historical documents. 

He proposed to under countywide school boards as a way to save money, but Franklin warned that such an approach would take away local control.

The state’s Republican party ahead of the runoff. It has historically remained neutral until the nominees are named. Some in the party criticized the move as an attempt to influence voters ahead of the runoff.

Taylor said his job as a history and government teacher in the Little Axe Public Schools, outside Oklahoma City, would give him the insight he needed to lead the state education department. But some called his success as an educator into question after records showed that he taught in an Advanced Placement U.S. Government class took the exam. He only taught the class once in 2024.

After his defeat Tuesday night, Taylor posted on , “I exit this race with zero regrets.”

‘Pockets of excellence’

Franklin faced his own controversy during the campaign, a 2014 incident in which he accidentally with disabilities at a camp he co-founded in 1986. The issue came to light when the child’s mother warned not to vote for Franklin and accused him of having “explosive anger issues.”

In a statement, Franklin, a former special education teacher, explained that he was trying to get control of a child who had become aggressive. When he grabbed the boy, he left scratches behind his ears. 

“I’ve worked with thousands of individuals with special needs,” he told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·. “I’ve had to intervene a lot with young people. Sometimes it just doesn’t go according to script.”

The camp’s director confirmed that he was trying to de-escalate a situation and said the camp’s leaders took appropriate action.

Whoever wins in November will oversee implementation of a that requires struggling readers in the early grades to be held back or receive extra help. Third graders not proficient in reading would be required to repeat the grade unless they qualify for an exemption. This year’s state test scores show that about 24% of students reached the proficiency level, a slight drop from last year.

“Oklahomans expect both candidates in the general election for state superintendent to make the case for how they will lead the successful implementation of our state’s landmark reading reforms,” said Dave Bond, vice president for advocacy at the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, a conservative think tank. “Those reforms passed our state legislature with overwhelming bipartisan support earlier this year, and our next state superintendent has a mandate to approach them with a no-excuses focus on student success.”

Franklin or Marshall will also inherit a system in which districts often rely on emergency certified teachers to staff classrooms. 

Franklin said it’s important to look for “pockets of excellence” in the state where schools are outperforming in reading outcomes even though they serve a higher-poverty population. He suggested establishing regional support centers to make expertise more readily available to districts.

But “we just don’t have enough trained educators in front of young people,” he said. Turnover rates are higher among teachers with emergency credentials. “We’re just kind of spinning our wheels, trying to train people and get them up to speed.”

The state, he said, should consider tax breaks for teachers, like it has for . 

Marshall, the Democratic candidate, has also made teacher recruitment and retention a part of her platform, and has said that serving on the school board in Tulsa, the state’s largest district, to lead the state education agency. She said she would focus on being a smart steward of state funds and that a lack of resources “is one of the main reasons that we’re struggling.” 

Her diverse career includes 17 years with the Department of Corrections as a parole officer and three years as a child welfare investigator.

Like Franklin, Marshall has pledged to keep policies focused on core academics and not politically divisive topics that put children and teachers in the middle of polarizing debates.

But the future state chief may have to work with a governor who, during , said the state has “541 school districts that are run by liberal, left-leaning radical socialists.”

Businessman and former state senator narrowly defeated Attorney General Gentner Drummond in the GOP runoff Tuesday. Endorsed by President Donald Trump, he’s called for partisan school board elections as a way to tip districts toward more conservative policies. He’ll face Democrat Cyndi Munson, minority leader in the state House, in the general election.

Governors appoint the state school board, which the future superintendent will have to work with to implement any new policies. Carlson, with the University of Oklahoma, said Mazzei doesn’t have much of a “political track record.”

“We really don’t know what we’re getting,” he said.

Mazzei has promised to appoint a state literacy director, but Marshall sees a potential conflict with that arrangement. 

“That person is going to usurp the authority of the department and there’s going to be a whole new battle,” she said. “That’s why education is hurting; there are too many irrelevant distractions.” 

But Wright, with Appleseed, said Franklin is capable of navigating political differences as they arise. 

“If there’s anyone that can bridge that divide,” she said, “it’s Dr. Franklin.”

It’s time to start talking about what we’re prepared to give them instead, especially as courts begin holding tech companies accountable. 

With news of Meta’s $17.1 billion settlement with 47 states and Washington, D.C., communities are beginning to see the scale of initial payouts. They now have the opportunity to move the conversation from accountability to repairs. 

This and other lawsuits moving through the legal system — brought by state attorneys general, school districts and families — focus on how much the social media company executives knew, whether they created a public nuisance and whether the companies should be held liable for rising rates of anxiety, depression and other mental health challenges among young people. 

The settlement agreement explicitly mentions funding for solutions, from youth programs to sports and dance, but not at the scale or scope of the harm that social media platforms have done. The work moving forward is to pay close attention to where the money actually goes, and .

So where should the funds go?

That question deserves as much public attention as the lawsuits themselves, because this isn’t simply about accountability. It’s about what comes next, and what to learn from past missteps.

The answer is simple: Fund real life.

When our nonprofit organization has done focus groups with young people, they’ve told us exactly what they hope those investments will look like. More places to gather with friends and caring adults to talk to. More mentors, leadership opportunities and access to youth programs. In fact, an of more than 87,000 Crisis Text Line conversations found that, during moments of crisis, young people consistently pointed to sources of relief that had little to do with technology: relationships, sports, music, books, movement, nature, counseling and places where they felt connected.

In short, they want more real life experiences and opportunities. So, if we’re serious about helping young people thrive, then we have to do more than reduce screen time.

As social media companies are required to pay for the harm their platforms have caused to young people, communities can’t let those dollars disappear into state budgets or unrelated priorities. There are critical decisions to make now.

History tells us that large-scale lawsuit payouts can either create lasting change or get lost in the political and economic shuffle. Following tobacco settlements, many states diverted funds away from prevention and public health. More recently, opioid settlements have prompted ongoing debates over whether resources are reaching the communities most affected.

State attorneys general, the courts and state legislative bodies have an opportunity to write a different story and ensure these dollars do more than compensate for harm, but infuse new support and opportunities — offline — that young people are craving and calling for.

As we speak, the courts and Congress are deciding how to regulate social media: limiting harm, focusing on less screen time, better age verification, more parental controls and safer platform design. 

While those measures are crucial, they only answer one question: How does society reduce exposure to what hurts young people?

They leave an equally important question unanswered: What should young people experience instead? The answer is: funding real life.

That means investing in the afterschool programs where students discover new passions and community organizations where they find trusted adults. It means supporting the recreation centers where friendships are built and the arts programs where confidence grows. Opening doors to libraries that spark curiosity and summer learning programs that keep kids engaged. Helping youth explore employment and apprenticeship opportunities that give them purpose. 

It also means addressing limiting factors, from transportation to funding, that reduce access to parks, sports leagues, community organizations, employment and mentoring programs that create connections long before a social media feed ever can. And it means doing the important work of creating forums for safe digital engagement, as well as mental health services and support.

This isn’t wishful thinking. It is supported by decades of research showing that these experiences strengthen mental health, increase belonging, build resilience and help young people develop the confidence and relationships that protect them long after they put down their phones. Yet, these are often the investments communities struggle to sustain. With an estimated annual revenue of $422 billion across Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Snap, Inc., the irony couldn’t be more clear.

While leaders debate the effects of digital platforms on childhood, our communities continue to underinvest in the very experiences that bolster youth health and wellbeing.

That’s why the launched , bringing together a growing coalition of leading youth development, mental health and community organizations around a shared vision. We believe that if social media companies are required to compensate communities for the harms associated with their products, those resources should strengthen the very experiences that help young people flourish offline.

Lawsuits will determine whether social media companies bear legal responsibility for the harms alleged against them. State leaders will determine something equally important: whether these settlements become another missed opportunity — or a once-in-a-generation investment in childhood itself.

Lightning McQueen from “Cars,” Nemo the clownfish and the Parr family from “The Incredibles” are among the animated personalities starring in the agency’s social media posts in recent months. 

“KA-CHOW! The Freedom 250 Grand Prix is coming to DC!” a department staffer posted July 23, using McQueen’s well-known catchphrase to promote the event that took over the streets of the nation’s capital last weekend. 

Disney fans on Facebook were quick to catch that the department had replaced the cartoon car’s number, 95, with 47 to represent President Donald Trump. Racing enthusiasts corrected the team for using a NASCAR-type vehicle to publicize an IndyCar event. But others jumped on the potential legal issues involved in the government’s use of copyrighted material.

“Does Disney know you’re using the likeness of Lightning McQueen in this way??” one Facebook commenter asked.

Disney is just one of several entertainment giants whose characters have inspired the department’s posts over the past several months. Sometimes, as in the “Cars” example, the messages have nothing to do with education. In other instances, the department clearly used the characters to promote its agenda. 

Last December, it employed kind and sensitive to plug its signature policy goal: getting rid of the agency. “Franklin knows the Department of Education doesn’t do any educating,” the post on X read. Similarly, twice this month, appeared on the department’s social media feed in support of what Education Secretary Linda McMahon calls her “final mission,” closing the department. 

Following a Monday, the White House used the same tactic, turning The Magic School Bus, a popular children’s book series, into The Magic Deportation Bus. Josh Cowen, a Michigan State University professor and former Democratic candidate for Congress, suggested the altered image, which showed main character Ms. Frizzle transporting passengers in handcuffs, was offensive.

“The entire right-wing education reform network was at the White House yesterday — will a single person denounce a back-to-school message based on a bus full of children in chains?” he . 

Agency officials did not respond to multiple requests from Âé¶čŸ«Æ· seeking to find out whether it had permission to use the images or how the re-creations might meet the standards for fair use. But one First Amendment scholar said she doubts officials sought approval from Disney, Nickelodeon, Scholastic or any of the other businesses that own the rights to the characters.

“This administration doesn’t ask for permission; it thinks that doing so is weak,” said Rebecca Tushnet, a law professor at Harvard Law School with expertise in legal issues affecting the .

The company is known for frequently to protect its content. In one example, it joined Warner Brothers, Discovery and Universal Pictures last year to sue a Chinese AI image generator for . It once sued three for painting Disney characters on their walls.

The fact that the Education Department’s use of its characters hasn’t sparked the same response suggests that “the administration’s tactics of seeking vengeance and punishing disagreement are factors weighing against legal action,” Tushnet said. 

Disney might also have more important legal matters to contend with.

Last week, the Federal Communications Commission over the agency’s review of its broadcast licenses in eight markets, including New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The company argues that the Trump administration is trying to control what hosts say on “The View,” a morning show, and retaliate for late night talk show host calling first lady Melania Trump an “expectant widow.”

At press time Tuesday, the department released a statement making light of the controversy.

“It’s always great to see the 74 writing a hard-hitting piece about social media posts — and not the fact that 3 in 10 students are not proficient in reading or math, 1 in 10 students may be a victim of sexual misconduct prior to graduation, or chronic absenteeism rates skyrocketing across the nation,” wrote Ellen Keast, a department spokeswoman. “Those are just three-story ideas for you that parents, local leaders, and educators are tracking across the country, not an irrelevant opinion about high-performing social media posts.”

Inspiring ‘generations of children’

Most of the companies that Âé¶čŸ«Æ· contacted for reaction did not respond. But Peanuts Worldwide, which manages copyright and licensing for Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the  gang, said in an email that the department’s meme showing the characters reading books around the iconic red doghouse was “almost certainly an unauthorized reinterpretation.” 

“Peanuts does not take a political stance,” the statement said. 

The production company that owns , however, is suing the Department of the Interior. The complaint says the agency used the version of “O Tannenbaum” from “A Charlie Brown Christmas” on its social media accounts without permission.

The Snoopy doghouse image was seemingly innocuous, promoting literacy as the “foundation for a lifetime of success.” But the Super Mario image, like the use of Franklin, delivered a clearly partisan message. The Franklin post about shuttering the department came about a week after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted an image that reimagined the gentle turtle as hanging out of a helicopter and firing a machine gun toward a boat. “Franklin Targets Narco Terrorists,” the imitation book cover said.

Kids Can Press, which owns the rights to Franklin, .

“Franklin the Turtle is a beloved Canadian icon who has inspired generations of children and stands for kindness, empathy and inclusivity,” the Canada-based children’s publisher said. “We strongly condemn any denigrating, violent or unauthorized use of Franklin’s name or image, which directly contradicts these values.”

But the publisher chose to stay quiet on the Education Department’s use.

“We would prefer not to be involved,” spokeswoman Michaela Cornell told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·.

Since the December Franklin post, roughly two dozen others have employed movie or book characters. One of the latest, published after the Monday White House event, features Sesame Street’s Elmo in a red Make Education Great Again hat.

Respecting boundaries

At the Education Department, career staffers have historically been diligent about adhering to copyright laws, said Hussien Salama, a Democratic political appointee who served as a video producer at the department under former Secretary Miguel Cardona. 

He recalled an instance in which Sally Harris, managing director of digital media and creative services at the department, warned him against using a CNN clip that featured Cardona unless he had “express permission, written down” from the network.

Harris, he said, worked to establish a “firewall,” in which the secretary’s account was used for more political messaging, like one about being “bullied for who they are,” while the official department account stayed more neutral. The political team, he added, understood that the career staff would still be there after the administration changed.

“One of the most frustrating things in the world is to leave the department, having done all of this stuff to try to respect these boundaries, and see it all thrown in the garbage,” he said. 

Under Cardona, the department frequently posted messages about supporting LGBTQ students and forgiving student loans, policies on which the Biden and Trump administrations sharply disagree. But the memes didn’t use well-known characters to convey those policy statements and often featured drawings created by an in-house graphic designer, Salama said. 

He said he “100%” suspects political appointees who work for McMahon are posting the copyrighted material. 

Meanwhile, Harris and the career staffers are likely “cringing every moment they see blatant copyright violations posted on the Department of Education’s social media channels,” Salama said. “We had arguments about splitting hairs on fair use news clippings, not using Disney characters to endorse a political agenda.” 

There are situations in which using copyrighted material is allowable under the law. But legal experts couldn’t say for sure whether the department’s depiction of the characters, from the to , would apply.

The fact that the government isn’t making a profit off the posts would “favor fair use,” said Tushnet, the Harvard law professor. In Hegseth’s case, she added, the secretary could argue that his Franklin meme was . 

The Education Department, however, hasn’t altered characters enough to fit that standard, said Matthew Sag, a copyright expert at Emory University. 

“Most things that end up being bound to be fair use are transformative,” he said. “They take something that was used for one purpose and use it in a very different purpose.”

Teacher appreciation

One policy expert defended the department’s use of the material and expressed support for their underlying messages. The “Finding Nemo” post, for example, shows Nemo and his father Marlin with the slogan, “Parents know best.”

“Families matter for student success, and reading and math scores are at or near historical lows,”  said Jonathan Butcher, acting director of the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.

In response to its “Parents know best,” memes, a few expressed agreement or touted homeschooling as better than public schools. With the “Finding Nemo” post, one person , “Parents do know what is best. No school should keep secrets from parents.” But most noted that in the Pixar story, Marlin lost Nemo because he was overprotective.

The department also used a series of fictional educators to mark Teacher Appreciation Week in May. They included Ms. Fowl, from Nickelodeon’s “Jimmy Neutron,” known for making bird-like noises, and Elizabeth Hoover, from “The Simpsons.” Under the heading, “Teachers are mentors,” Hoover, often described as jaded after decades on the job, is depicted with a red MEGA (Make Education Great Again) book under her arm. In a separate post, Mrs. Puff, the teacher from SpongeBob SquarePants, was shown .

The posts drew widespread criticism from real teachers.

“I think we are being trolled,” one commenter . 

Stephanie Toliver, an assistant professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, saw the choices of characters “who are often well-meaning but marred by burnout, incompetence, eccentricity and paranoia” as a not-so-subtle dig at the profession.

“If we appreciate teachers the way McMahon has, we won’t have many left,” .

Journalist John Ortved, a , offered a different take on Hoover. 

“Initially, she was written as a stand-in for ‘teachers’ in the public school system, who are exhausted or beaten down and perhaps just uncaring about their jobs,” he said. “But she’s there every day, in the world of the Simpsons, for the past 35 years. In some ways it’s a testament to the commitment of these people.”

There’s no way to know whether the staffer behind the Hoover post perceived the character that way. But one education policy expert said it doesn’t matter.

Neal McCluskey, formerly with the libertarian Cato Institute, supports shutting down the department. Still, he that the government should “stop paying for people at the department to create social media memes. Which would, of course, make it smaller.”

McCluskey, now with Florida State University’s Institute for Governance and Civics, said he hasn’t considered the copyright issues, but said, “If they’re belt-tightening, people who make cutesy tweets seem kind of nonessential, especially for a department that shouldn’t exist.”

With the state of Michigan enacting a that restricts students from using their phones during instructional time, lawmakers have left it up to school districts to create their own policies on how to enforce this ban.

A team of University of Michigan researchers parsed through and compiled nearly 800 schools across the state, some of them already in place, to examine the different approaches they are taking to enforce this statewide ban. While many schools have enacted their own approaches to limiting cellphone use in recent years, the data reveals that schools believe there are a number of different ways to keep students off their phones after the bell rings.

In fact, U-M’s research collected on policies enacted as of the 2025-26 school year reveal an even 50-50 split on when these bans are put in place. Half of the state’s schools have implemented “bell-to-bell” restrictions that don’t allow students to use their phones at any point during the day, while the other half have “schedule-based” restrictions that allow them to use their phones at designated times, including during lunch and between class periods.

U-M Education Policy Professor Brian Jacob said the research is intended to provide guidance on the trade-offs of different approaches as the state law goes into place this fall.

“We want to make sure state leaders and district leaders were cognizant of this as they were imposing mandates on their individual schools because I have a feeling restricting cellphone use in schools is going to be a nuanced, challenging, multi-year process,” Jacob said. “This is one big genie that is out of the bottle, and figuring out the best way to get it back in the bottle and stay in the bottle, I think, is going to take a little practice and iteration on the part of schools.”

Two years ago, Novi Community School District took a nuanced approach to putting its cellphone restrictions in place. 

In grades K-4, students aren’t allowed to have them in the building. In fifth through eighth grades, students can bring their phones to school, but they are locked up in at the beginning of the day and kept there until school lets out.  Phones are placed in pouches by staff and sealed shut, with a designated magnetic device used to unlock them when appropriate. While high school students also are issued their own pouches, the phones are locked up during instructional time, with students being able to unlock and access them between classes and during lunch.

Superintendent Ben Mainka said the different approaches are intended to give high school students more autonomy that mirrors how they might experience using a cellphone in the workplace.

“As students go through school, they’re learning and they’re maturing, and so we know that as they grow and mature, we want to be able to open up more freedom and responsibilities,” he said. “The other part is, as they get to high school, we’re really helping them understand what it is like in a workplace, and we know that they’re going to have their phones on them, but they also need to know how to manage that. So, basically, giving them the autonomy to know that there are certain times that the phone needs to be off limits and put away, and then there are times when you can check it.”

U-M’s research found that just 2% of schools in the state have taken this approach. The most common type of enforcement of cellphone restriction is described as “no-show,” with 62% of schools requiring students to keep their phones in their backpacks or pockets. 

Another 17% of schools allow students to bring cellphones to school, but keep them in their lockers throughout the day, while 9% of schools collect students’ phones and keep them in a designated place. Some schools (8%) have taken the approach of keeping cellphones out of schools completely, while another 3% have a centralized collection of phones with an administrator when they enter the building.

The research also showed that the type of school and its location impacted the type of policy the school enacted, with charter (79%) and urban schools (76%) substantially more likely to require bell-to-bell policies than suburban (49%) and rural (41%). 

Jacob said charters and urban schools might be more attracted to having complete control over when students can have access to their phones with options like centralized collection or lockable pouches, he said, because they might believe phones are more “problematic” in schools than suburban or rural schools do.

“Now, whether they actually are, I think many suburban schools might be fooling themselves by thinking, ‘Oh, the phones aren’t really much of a problem,’” Jacob said. “But I think there’s a perception in urban school districts where there might be more chaos and more distraction that there’s something attractive about these more restrictive policies.”

While Pellston Public Schools in Northern Michigan only enrolls around 500 students, the district has taken a more restrictive approach to enforcing its cellphone policy, which was enacted at the suggestion of middle and high school Principal Chris Schlappi in 2024.

Superintendent Stephen Seelye had initial concerns that Schlappi’s suggestion to have students lock their cellphones in Yondr pouches would be met with opposition from parents who were concerned about being able to contact their children in the event of an emergency. 

With several other avenues for students to contact their parents, Seelye said it made sense for the school to spend $15,000 to purchase the pouches for students in grades 6 to 12, with a complete cellphone ban in place at the elementary level.

Students aren’t able to access their cellphones throughout the day after locking them in their pouches and leaving them with their home room teacher; Seelye said enforcement of the policy has gone better than he ever could have expected.

“I really think it’s one of the best decisions, if not the best decision I’ve made in education,” Seelye said.

Rather than relying on teachers to keep an eye on whether students are taking phones out of their backpacks or pockets as “no show” policies do, locking cellphones into pouches has greatly reduced the burden on teachers to enforce the ban, he said, with the occasional “bad actors” quickly being discovered.

“Teachers have got a lot of things to juggle and they’ve been given their time back,” he said. “They no longer have to worry about if (a) kid has their cellphone and is seeking it. I would say I probably have 5% of my kids on a daily basis that are trying to hide their cellphones, and we catch most of them.

“Before, when every kid had a cellphone and there were seven of them out in class and one might buzz or beep, it was hard for my teachers to figure out where that came from, but now it’s not hard. Now everybody else has their phone locked up, and you know they can pinpoint who it was.”

U-M’s research lays out three considerations for districts still working through enacting policies: Phone policies present difficult trade-offs for educators and policymakers; establishing and communicating a clear cellphone policy likely enhances adherence; and unintended consequences may occur in classrooms and broader school settings.

While no-show policies remain popular among Michigan schools, Jacob said teachers told him that the most effective approaches take them out of the role of being the “bad guy.”

“I think there’s a lot of pressure among teachers in that regard,” he said. “Teachers that I’ve talked to really do like school-wide policies where some of the burden of enforcement is taken off of their shoulders.”

The physical school environment is usually treated as an operational concern: square footage, maintenance, compliance, safety and cost. Those matters are real. But they are incomplete.

A school building is also an instructional system.

In my rural Midwestern school district, we drew on research in learning environments and early literacy development to create a new 108,000-square-foot elementary school that serves 900 pupils across 932 square miles.

We used the Framework, which connects physical design to instructional capacity, student experience, measurable outcomes, and equity impact.

Designed by CMBA Architects, our new campus serves many students facing poverty, geographic isolation and limited preschool access that has affected their readiness for school. 

Since opening our new campus in 2024, we have seen mixed results, but the strongest gains appeared among students most likely to benefit, especially those from low-socioeconomic households and groups affected by access gaps.

Architecture alone doesn’t drive these achievement gains. Instead, the findings suggest a stronger and more defensible claim: Intentional school design can improve the daily conditions that shape instruction, intervention, belonging, regulation, enrichment and student opportunity.

Students enter school with unequal early-learning access. In rural communities with limited or distant preschool options, many begin kindergarten without the vocabulary, routines, stamina, executive-function practice, and early-literacy exposure some peers already have. 

For low-income students, these gaps can be deeper. Poverty does not define potential, but it can limit enrichment, health care, transportation, routines, academic language, and early childhood access.

Schools designed for access, flexibility, belonging, movement, regulation and intervention can reduce barriers, save time, and make the building part of the learning infrastructure.

In our former four-story building, kindergarten transitions to recess, special events, services, and other activities required going up and down stairs multiple times a day. The daily minutes lost were small but cumulative. After the move, kindergarten teachers reported gaining two or more weeks of instructional time because students no longer navigated multiple stairways each day. 

This illustrates design as an instructional variable: Removing a physical barrier increased instructional time without changing curriculum or assessment. For early literacy, recovered minutes matter because repetition, oral language, small-group support, and predictable routines create opportunity.

Classrooms and shared spaces included mobile furniture, flexible seating, and layouts that let students sit, stand, move, collaborate, and reconfigure spaces with little disruption. The goal was not novelty, but access.

Because students learn differently across tasks and developmental stages, adaptable rooms allow instruction to shift quickly — from direct teaching to small groups, collaboration, independent practice or intervention — without the space becoming a barrier.

Flexible seating and movement-friendly spaces align with research linking classroom movement to attention and engagement. For students who need support with regulation, stamina, or focus, appropriate movement is not a luxury; it is part of access.

The facility includes murals that incorporate South Dakota history, geography, wildlife, agriculture, and phrases in the Dakota language. In a district serving a significant Native American student population, this decision matters.

Cultural representation in the physical environment signals that students are not merely accommodated, they are recognized.

When students see local language, landscapes, and identity embedded into the school, the building communicates belonging before a single lesson begins.

Murals and visual learning elements also expand background knowledge. They turn hallways into instructional spaces. A student walking past a mural of the Missouri River, the Black Hills, bison, prairie animals, crops, or Dakota vocabulary is repeatedly exposed to content, language, and place.

In that sense, the school becomes an environmental text. Students read the building long before they read the day’s lesson.

The results from the first two years in the new building include improved benchmark rates on the K–2 Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills or DIBELS, a smaller gap for low-income students and fewer of them scoring Well Below Benchmark. The share At or Above Benchmark rose from 61.8% before the new facility to 67.9%. Scores for other students remained relatively stable, increasing from 70.7% to 71.2%.

Grades 3–5 Smarter Balanced results showed similar equity-aligned gains, particularly for students eligible for free and reduced price meals and American Indian/Alaskan Native students in English language arts.

In other words, the largest movement occurred among students from low-socioeconomic households.

The district’s K-2 DIBELS data adds an important early-literacy lens to the Opportunity-by-Design Framework, since it provides multiple checkpoints within the year. The Smarter Balanced Assessment measures achievement at the end of the school year.

The data alone does not prove that a building, by itself, caused the achievement to rise. It does not show that every grade, every subject and every student group improved. The data does not erase the importance of the curriculum, teachers, intervention systems, leadership, attendance, family engagement, or student mobility. But it does suggest that intentional school design can positively impact students and educators and, in turn, produce better educational outcomes.

Two recent studies seek to provide an answer, assembling compelling evidence of public opinion but arriving at separate conclusions. One shows that firsthand experience with school choice makes people more likely to support its expansion, particularly if they were skeptical of the policy at first. Another indicates that greater proximity to charter schools once made Democrats more likely to favor them, but that the relatively good feelings disappeared over the last decade.

While not diametrically opposed, the two findings heighten the ambiguity surrounding the public’s reception of K–12 education. Parents continue to rate their community’s schools highly, while eagerly making use of alternative options when given the chance. Meanwhile, Democrats have shown early signs of a split on federal initiatives to bolster parental choices, including by directing federal funds to private schools.

Michael Henderson, a professor of political communication at Louisiana State University, said his paper on charter schools pointed to the challenge of attracting buy-in for new programs or services. This is doubly true when most voters and taxpayers do not directly access them.

“It’s either going to mean that you need to get the vast majority of people directly participating in the policy — something like Social Security — or you have to build a broad base of support in response to the policy,” he observed.

gathers data on charter enrollment in U.S. school districts from 2005 to 2021 — a period marked, especially at the outset, by rapid growth in the sector. He then added nearly a decade’s worth of geographically targeted responses from the Education Next poll, which ran continuously through 2022, to determine whether subjects tended to like charters more as their enrollment grew in the surrounding areas.

Overall, he finds, proximity to higher numbers of charter schools and students did not have an impact on public views. But that average masked an interesting partisan trend. Democrats’ opinions of charters slightly improved as their student enrollment rose, while Republicans’ views headed downward. As a town or city’s share of students attending charter schools rose from 0 percent to 20 percent, average Democratic support rose from a 3.2 (on a five-point scale) to a 3.4. Average Republican support dipped from 3.4 to 3.1 during the same period.

In other words, charter schools have the potential to be a depolarizing issue, bringing the views of left and right into closer alignment. 

Henderson added a caveat, however. The partisan gap decreased during the earlier part of the period, from 2014 to 2016, while seeing no change from 2020 to 2021. In other words, whatever lifted Democrats’ favorability toward public schools of choice appears to have petered out toward the end of the 2010s.

Henderson said the changing views might reveal something about how people form political assessments generally. Most people are only hazy on the details of charter schooling, meaning that they are somewhat more likely to take their cues from leaders of their political party. As each side hardened their stances on school choice during the first Trump administration, with elected Democrats voicing more hesitancy around charters, a message was likely sent to voters as well.

“On the whole, we don’t see expanding polarization,” Henderson said. “But we do see the earlier depolarization going away, which is consistent with the idea that people are attuned more to the political discourse than to the policy itself.”

David Houston, a professor of education policy at George Mason University, has studied the ways in which parties sometimes inadvertently divide the public simply by discussing K–12 questions. In an interview, he noted that the shift in opinion coincided with the Democratic Party’s Trump-era pivot away from charter schools and toward priorities like universal pre-K, which carry less divisive potential.

During the Biden presidency, Houston remarked, “you don’t have a whole lot of elite opinion leadership on K–12 education issues, at least on the ones that had united leaders of both parties for a couple of decades beforehand. And in the absence of that elite consensus, you start to see partisan polarization among the general public as well.”

The power of precedent

But , also released this spring, points to positive and lasting results from more direct contact with school choice.

James Shuls, a professor at Florida State University, examined survey responses from families that had experienced choice in a variety of forms — including charter schools, vouchers, education savings accounts, homeschooling, and open enrollment — and compared them with those of respondents who had not. He and his co-authors discovered that participants with personal experience expressed greater support for expanding educational choice. The effect was statistically significant for all types of choice except ESAs.

“The paper confirms what school choice advocates have long thought intuitively,” Shuls wrote in an email. “School choice is the type of reform that builds a constituency over time.”

The researchers also conducted a separate experiment, randomly prompting some survey participants with the information that various school choice policies already existed in places familiar to them — open enrollment in Colorado, as well as voucher-like programs in Florida, Arizona, Sweden, and Ireland.

Those “real-world” cues led to increased support, particularly among those who initially said they opposed the spread of school choice. Self-described liberals’ likelihood of approving more choice measures increased by 14 percentage points after hearing about Sweden’s national subsidy for private school tuition.

But an opposing pattern emerged at the same time. Conservatives actually became six points less favorable toward choice after receiving the same information. And both liberals and Democrats notably soured on the idea (by eight points and five points, respectively) after hearing it couched in the example of Florida.

Shuls said the experiment showed the power of precedent. The Democratic governors of Colorado and New York have said they will opt into a newly passed federal school choice tax credit, which will provide money for parents to spend on a variety of educational expenses — including private school tuition. More blue and purple states could follow once the Trump administration on how the funds can be used. 

If people in Democratic-leaning states could be shown that vouchers or ESAs are not “some crazy right-wing plot,” Shuls said, it might generate a groundswell.

“If choice begets more choice, as our study suggests,” he wrote, “the expansion of choice programs in blue states will likely lead to greater support for school choice among blue voters.”

A note of caution

Yet there is reason to interpret the results of each paper with a degree of caution.

Families who make the decision to apply for a voucher are likely more open to private school choice than those who don’t take the opportunity; their rising appreciation for the policy may  have been baked in already. A similar point might be made of the subjects in Henderson’s study, since they were living in a community that elected to permit charter schools to begin with. 

“It’s not altogether surprising that you would see higher rates of support among folks who opted into these programs,” said Houston. “If you had asked me that research question, what they found is what I would have expected them to find.”

What’s more, polling on education has proven to be highly sensitive to the details of individual programs, and even the wording used to describe them. A by Paul DiPerna, a researcher at the advocacy group EdChoice, showed that education savings accounts attracted much greater backing when they were characterized as universal. Support for “school vouchers” specifically fell among Democrats and independents after 2023. 

Shuls and his collaborators stipulate that their study does not establish that school choice caused parents to become more supportive. But neither does it support the idea that families generally become disillusioned after using such programs, he added.

Henderson sees the two papers as complementary, with his own research focusing on the indirect political consequences of policy expansion. Even if someone living in a charter-dense community never visits the campus, for example, she might hear about it from neighbors or view its billboards along the side of the highway. Political signals from each party clearly influence their response even further.

“They’re related projects,” Henderson said. “You’re going to be concerned about people who directly participate, but you’re also going to be concerned about people who don’t directly participate, but might be exposed in other ways.” 

High school came with more responsibility and less accountability for Josiah Ulukita. Courses were much harder, teachers were less strict about attendance and it was easier to skip school with friends or go on his phone during class, he said. 

Ulukita went from easily passing middle school to failing freshman English and social studies. After missing roughly half of his freshman year due to poor attendance, he found out he needed to repeat ninth grade. The shame of being held back led him to lose motivation and skip more school, he said, until his counselor warned him that he may not graduate on time. 

“I was acing all my classes, and then I hit freshman year,” Ulukita said. “I thought it was going to be easy.”

More than a thousand students in Hawaiʻi share Ulukita’s experience each year. Roughly 1 in 10 students failed their freshman year in the state’s public high schools and had to repeat the grade in the 2021-2022 school year, the most recent year for which federal data is available. That’s more than double the national rate for this group of teens that year, according to an analysis of national data by Big Local News, an initiative of Stanford University.

In the school years since, the rate has decreased somewhat but remained high. In the 2024-2025 school year, 1 in 13 freshmen were held back, according to the state education department. 

HawaiÊ»i’s status as a national outlier is made all the more jarring considering younger HawaiÊ»i students rarely repeat a grade –  of elementary and middle schoolers overall. But that progress seems to come to a screeching halt in high school when more rigid requirements kick in to advance to the next level.

Other states like Mississippi and Florida are taking a more proactive approach to retention, holding students back as early as kindergarten through third grade. More than two dozen states require or allow schools to  who aren’t proficient in reading. HawaiÊ»i has no such law on the books.

While research on the effects of retention is mixed, some studies find that students have better outcomes when they’re held back in their younger years and receive additional support to catch up academically to their peers. There’s little evidence that holding teens back in high school improves their learning, and some researchers argue that it actually hurts students’ chances of earning their diplomas.

“In earlier grades, basically grade retention could work if retention is supplemented with educational supports for these kids,” said Umut Ozek, a senior economist at RAND, a nonpartisan research and policy organization. “In contrast, in middle and high school, the evidence suggests that retention could actually harm students.” 

HawaiÊ»i students and teachers attribute the high number of ninth graders being held back to a number of factors. Some say there’s more peer pressure to skip class and dodge assignments. Classes are harder and require students to have strong foundations in reading and math. Many students are unaccustomed to the strict credit requirements they need to fulfill to move to the next grade. 

“It’s a shock for the kids to understand that unless they receive a certain amount of credits, they can’t move on anymore,” said Dean Cevallos, principal at KeaÊ»au High School on the Big Island. 

Schools try to avoid holding students back by offering summer school, counseling, personalized learning plans and other resources, state education department Deputy Superintendent Heidi Armstrong said in a written statement. Freshman year can be academically challenging for some students, she said, and some teens might have challenges earning the credits they need to move on to 10th grade. 

The education department has declared a goal of promoting more freshmen to 10th grade by doubling down on students’ academic readiness and engagement beginning in middle school, according to its .

“The Department’s goal is to ensure students are prepared for continued academic success and remain on track toward earning a high school diploma,” Armstrong said.

Repeating ninth grade comes with consequences, including the possibility that students drop out without earning their diplomas. Some say the embarrassment of taking classes with younger students led them to attend school less frequently and fall further behind in their studies, while others said it motivated them to take their academics more seriously and catch up with their peers. 

Ulukita, who had to repeat ninth grade, was able to earn the credits he needed to complete both his freshman and sophomore year through additional courses, after-school work and a better attendance record. Now a junior at KaimukÄ« High School, Ulukita is on track to graduate with the rest of his peers in 2028. 

“You’ve got to lock in more, do all your classes, make sure you get all your credits and graduate on time,” Ulukita said. “You don’t want to be that super senior.”

Why Ninth Grade?

Freshmen must earn five credits – the equivalent of five yearlong classes – to move on to 10th grade. Most high school students take several classes during their freshman year, meaning that kids can fail one or two courses and still earn enough credits to move up. Students must continue to accumulate credits and pass their core classes throughout high school until they earn the  needed to graduate. 

When students repeat ninth grade, they’re not starting from scratch, said Elise Hannigan, Keaʻau High School’s Freshman Academy coordinator. Instead, students retake the freshman classes they failed but move on to 10th grade coursework whenever possible.

If students don’t have foundational academic skills by the time they get to high school, teachers say, it can make passing freshman classes more difficult. Students often take heavier course loads once they get to high school, and teachers may move through material more quickly. 

Students who scored below standards on eighth grade reading and math tests were less likely to pass all of their ninth grade courses and complete high school in five years, according to a 2024 report from , which studies students’ progress from preschool through college. 

It’s sometimes hard to determine if students are failing ninth grade because of academic or social issues, Hannigan said. 

If students attend school regularly, she said, they’re usually able to pass their classes, even if they need extra support from their teachers. But it’s difficult to get students up to speed if they’re not at school, she said, and teens may be less willing to engage in class if they already feel behind.  

“I would say, of the students who are not getting their five credits, the majority of them, it’s because they just have not been in school enough to do the work necessary to pass the classes,” Hannigan said. “If they’re not in school, it’s really hard to support a student.” 

Coming out of the pandemic, ninth graders were struggling academically, especially in math, said Kim Williamson, principal of Pāhoa High and Intermediate on the Big Island. At the time, the school was retaining nearly a quarter of its freshman class,  from the 2021-22 academic year. 

The school strengthened its academic support for its students, Williamson said, offering after-school tutoring and setting aside blocks of time for kids to receive extra instruction in reading and math. Because ninth grade algebra can be especially challenging for some students, he said, the school has created a pre-algebra course to make sure freshmen have foundational skills before they start on the high school coursework. 

“If they didn’t get a basic skill when they were younger, it does amplify as they get older,” Williamson said. 

In the 2024-25 academic year, the school’s ninth grade retention rate was 12%, a significant improvement from a few years ago.   

Lasting Effects

Shylyn Jimenez didn’t want to be at Leilehua High School in Wahiawā during her freshman year. She had been dealing with bullying since middle school and fell in with the wrong crowd, she said. When she needed to repeat the grade, she lost motivation to attend class and complete her course requirements.  

“The more I kept messing up in school, the more I didn’t care, and the more it made it easy to not show up,” she said. “In my head at that time, the things that I was doing outside of school were way more fun than school itself.” 

Only 57% of students who failed two or more classes in ninth grade completed high school in five years, compared to the state average of 89%, . Roughly 12% of freshmen who enroll in HawaiÊ»i high schools  within four years, although the education department doesn’t specify how many of these students had to repeat a grade.

After her freshman year, Jimenez appeared in court for truancy. She was referred to an alternative learning program, which offered extended school days and year-round classes for kids who fall behind and need significant help catching up on their credits. While she initially resisted coming to class, the staff never gave up on her – sometimes showing up at her house to make sure she came to school.  

“I needed somebody to tell me, ‘If you don’t get your ass in school, there’s going to be consequences,’” Jimenez said. 

It took Jimenez an extra year to complete high school, but she earned her diploma last year and is now enrolled in a cosmetology program at Honolulu Community College.It’s hard to say how repeating ninth grade affects student achievement, said Francisco Martorell, a professor at the University of California Davis School of Education. Most studies focus on students who were held back in elementary or middle school. 

Generally, holding older students back can negatively affect their chances of completing high school and enrolling in college, said Ozek, the senior economist at RAND. Schools run the risk of students aging out before they earn their diplomas, meaning they can drop out at any time, and the stigma of repeating a grade may be stronger among older students. 

“The bottom line is grade retention in later grades, especially in high school,” he said, “is not really a good idea.”

Gearing Up For High School

At Keaʻau High School, students’ transition to ninth grade starts weeks before the school year begins.

Incoming freshmen spend three weeks on campus in June taking classes, learning how to participate in clubs and athletics and painting a class mural in the ninth grade building. The most recent addition was a gray and white shark sternly folding its arms, surrounded by maroon and black block letters reading “2030 SHARKS.” 

While the program isn’t mandatory, it typically draws 80 to 90 students – roughly 30% of the incoming freshman class. The summer initiative focuses on helping students develop a strong sense of belonging and community with their peers, which can translate to better attendance and lower retention rates during the school year, Hannigan said.

Typically, she said, around 6% of students need to repeat ninth grade at KeaÊ»au. 

Over the summer, freshman Tristan Hanley was worried about choosing the right classes and adjusting to Keaʻau’s campus before entering the school’s summer transition program. He came out of the program excited to join the school’s band program and football team and had gotten to know some of his teachers.

“It just allowed me to see all of these new opportunities at the school and hear about them and try them out a little bit too,” Hanley said.  

While many schools are trying to ease students’ transition to ninth grade, some challenges start well before teens enter high school, prompting national debates on whether kids should be held back earlier.

Danni-Cheree Lee’s son began falling behind in elementary school. He frequently asked to stay home from school and felt ashamed to ask for help in class, she said. 

Despite his struggles, Lee’s son continued progressing through the grades until his attendance issues caught up to him in middle school, when he needed to repeat sixth and seventh grade. At the time, Lee was dealing with back and neck issues and didn’t have a car, she said, so it was hard to force her son to attend school.

Lee said her son might have benefited from being held back earlier, when his elementary school first began noticing problems with his attendance. While repeating grades in middle school gave him more time to learn the material, he also experienced teasing as his classmates noticed he had fallen behind.

Principals rarely hold kids back before high school and tend to have more discretion around student retention in the younger grades. The HawaiÊ»i Board of Education only specifies that schools must promote students based on their  and social development, and students must  like English, math, science and social studies to complete middle school. 

At Jarrett Middle School in Pālolo Valley, Principal Reid Kuba said it’s a balancing act when deciding whether to move some students up to high school. Teachers offer after-school classes and summer school to prepare students as much as possible for ninth grade, he said, but he also knows that students who need to repeat a grade in middle school face a greater risk of aging out of the system before they earn their diploma.   

“For me, and I think all the middle school principals, that’s the main thing, is trying to get them to graduate,” Kuba said. “So they’re not only looking at grades, but their age.” 

Ideally, Kuba said, it would be beneficial for some kids to repeat a grade when they’re much younger, such as kindergarten or first grade, when they’re developing fundamental skills and less aware that they’re a year behind their peers.

For Lee’s son, the turning point came when he enrolled in an alternative learning program, where the classes were smaller and teachers were strict about attendance, she said. Having adults who genuinely cared about his education motivated him to complete his high school classes and explore new topics like finance, she said. 

Even though he fell behind in middle school, he earned enough credits to graduate on time with the rest of his peers in 2022. 

“I do not think any child should have to wait to be held back once in high school because that’ll make it worse,” Lee said. “Imagine how much schooling, how far behind they are in these subjects, and then they’re only going to be given four years to catch up on everything.” 

 about being held back was produced in partnership with Big Local News and The Hechinger Report. Data analysis was conducted by Eric Sagara, senior data journalist with Big Local News.

. Civil Beat’s education reporting is supported by a grant from Chamberlin Family Philanthropy.

Just as the technology has rewired the relationship between young writers-in-training and their teachers, it has also changed how student journalists and their editors work together — or, in some cases, don’t. 

And AI has created headaches for these journalists that mirror those afflicting their professional peers, with school newsrooms struggling to figure out how to respond.

As with their schools more broadly, student newsrooms have spent these years deploying surveillance software and, in many cases, drafting zero-tolerance policies for AI. Different newsrooms have developed different answers to the same basic question: How much do we trust teenagers to not let a chatbot do their work? 

Âé¶čŸ«Æ· spoke recently to three student journalists from three very different newsrooms about their experiences:

• Cid Frydman, a rising senior at Berkeley High School in California, who writes for the ;
• Veronica Mollod, a rising senior and current events editor at , the student newspaper at the High School of American Studies at Lehman College in the Bronx, N.Y.;
• Tova Weiss, a recent high school graduate in Ann Arbor, Mich., who has split her time between Pioneer High School and . Weiss has written and edited for the and , a publication written by and for Jewish teens.

Here are eight-and-a-half ways — including one counterintuitive, not-for-attribution observation — in which AI is changing their realities:

1. In a few schools, AI has overturned the culture of newspapers.

Frydman, the Berkeley student, said strict AI use policies at her publication have bred resentment among student writers. 

“I think a lot of the people higher up on my paper, and in journalism in general, don’t have a lot of trust in writers anymore, especially with so many AI resources that are out there,” she said. 

Editors are “very harsh on writers” over worries that they’ll use AI, keeping strict controls over documents, she said. They’ll poke around writers’ search histories and analyze their typing speed and word choices, matching drafts to previous work. 

“It’s very strict when you put it all together,” Frydman said. “They don’t have a lot of faith in our ability to actually produce real journalism, and so just assume the worst automatically, which can be a little frustrating when you’re just trying to do your best as a writer.”

At the Berkeley High newspaper, staffers have been let go over suspected AI use. 

Frydman sees the high cost of such heavy-handed policies: “We’re here because we love journalism,” she said. “We’re here to write about things that we’re hopefully passionate about, and the heavy approach of ‘There’s no tolerance whatsoever,’ and not even giving writers the grace and the trust to make their own decisions and do this work on their own — just minding it and monitoring it so heavily, I think it’s very discouraging.”

More broadly, getting caught using AI to write academic assignments carries weighty consequences, she said. You’re unable to get a letter of recommendation from any teacher, Frydman said. 

And a single infraction travels fast: Get caught using AI once, she said, and teachers will tell all of their colleagues “to watch out because this student has used AI before — they might use it in your class.”

2. AI is changing how — and how much — students write.

Frydman said she’s adopting what’s basically a minimalist approach to writing these days, holding back details so she doesn’t draw suspicion from editors or teachers. 

Though she doesn’t use AI for writing, she said, “A lot of times, I find myself sort of slimming down my writing to not go so into detail on things because it’ll be suspected to be something that’s not original. You don’t have a lot of room to be creative in this process, so it’s definitely been a little challenging.”

Ann Arbor’s Weiss said she’s also seeing many young journalists “adjust their writing voice” to avoid being flagged as relying on AI. Many students, she said, now intentionally add typos to their writing to support its legitimacy. “It’s absolutely devastating to watch how many people are intentionally damaging or diminishing the quality and authenticity of their work,” she said. 

At Berkeley High, school-issued Chromebooks are locked down to block access to ChatGPT, Claude and other major AI tools outright — and any attempt to reach them gets flagged. “It notifies the teacher through this program that we have called Go Guardian, which is embedded into a lot of the Chromebooks, where they can sort of see what you’re doing and be able to call you out on it,” Frydman said.

3. A few newsrooms are writing AI policies.

At Youth Environmental Press Team, where Weiss is an editor, staffers have been talking “in pretty much every director’s meeting” about the implications and problems surrounding AI. “We are an environmental publication, which means a lot of us are very climate-conscious.”

The environmental impacts of AI data centers are a cause of great concern, Weiss said.

After fielding a wave of questions from reporters, the publication developed formal guidelines rather than instituting an outright ban on AI. “It was always very clear for us that we would not publish or even entertain the idea of publishing anything that was written by a chatbot or any kind of generative AI,” Weiss said. But they soon got queries from reporters asking if they could use AI for outlining, for formatting statistics, for interview transcriptions and the like.

The policy that emerged prohibits AI-written and AI-edited work, including work that heavily uses tools like Grammarly. But transcription services and basic spell-check are still allowed. 

The organization, she said, wants to make writing “as accessible as possible so people can have their work published — but not if that means it’s not really their work, and especially not if that’s at the cost of the environment.” 

4. Other newsrooms rely on experience and vibes.

Weiss helped craft the formal AI policy at the environmental journal. At jGirls+ Magazine, by contrast, she said there’s no written policy. But in practice the standard is clear: Submissions and even staff applications that appear to be AI-generated are not accepted. In one case, she recalled, an obviously AI-written editorial board application — with a stiff style that lacked personal voice — tested with an AI detector as 100% AI, “which was really something none of us had expected.”

Weiss said AI detectors should be used only “when there is already prior reason to suspect something might have been AI generated” — a student with a track record of misusing AI, for instance, or because something just simply reads a little “off.”

5. In most cases, AI detectors are widely seen as unreliable.

Weiss described a tiered system in the environmental outlet’s workflow, with writers operating on an “honor system” but with student editors flagging “sketchy” pieces such as those that are missing statistical sources or those that quote dubious ones — or writing that doesn’t sound like a typical teenager’s.

“The thing about student voices is typically each writer has a distinctive style of writing,” she said. “We’re high schoolers: We have typos, we make mistakes in there. And if we’re finding something that’s void of personal style or just generally reads in a way that doesn’t seem like it was written by a student, we’re going to look into that further.” 

But she and others worry that using an AI detector could unfairly flag strong writing as suspicious simply because it’s polished — a phenomenon that happens more than you’d think in many schools, Weiss suggested.

AI detectors aren’t really reliable, said Frydman, the Berkeley senior, “so even if you write something really well, it’ll just automatically assume that it might be AI and your writing will get flagged, which has happened to a lot of my friends.” 

6. A few simple rules can keep AI from taking over, journalists say.

Mollod, the New York City journalist, said a somewhat arcane editing rule at her publication basically serves to help keep AI-generated content at bay: At Common Sense, every article is required to include a quote from a student in each grade level — a structural feature that makes it hard for AI to intrude, since students typically remember what they’ve said to a reporter. 

7. In a few cases, teachers are using AI more than students.

The journalists described several instances in which teachers, not students, were the ones turning to AI, relying on the technology to formulate lesson plans, create assignments and grade them.

One student who asked not to be quoted directly spoke of a teacher who “will just copy and paste straight off of Chat GPT or Claude, and just give us assignments that are so clearly AI that it’s ridiculous.”

Others rely on it for grading assignments, which “leads to a lot of people getting unfair grades, because AI can mess up,” said the student.

The more teachers rely on the technology, “the easier it is to just forget that you’re there for a reason, you’re trying to do your job for a reason — and AI should not be teaching kids Spanish or English or math or anything like that. It can’t reproduce real thinking. So it’s definitely a little dystopian.”

8. For many students, refusing AI isn’t a school rule. It’s personal.

Weiss, the Ann Arbor writer, said she has never used Open AI’s popular ChatGPT, due to environmental concerns over data centers as well as personal concerns over AI more broadly. “It just does not align with my morals at all,” she said. 

But casual AI use has become normalized among many of her peers, she said, with students openly saying, sometimes within earshot of teachers, that they ran an assignment through a chatbot the night before it was due.

The best way to fight AI, she said, is basically to boycott it. “The strongest way anyone can combat artificial intelligence is just by refusing to have anything to do with it,” she said.

While AI-generated writing more broadly can damage the way that people learn and is worth thinking about, Mollod said, she’s not sure that it has gotten to the point where “just everyone is just cheating, and no one’s really actually taking their work seriously.”

She reads the coverage and believes most people who don’t spend time in schools overestimate how much teens use AI. “People not in school are like, ‘Well, I didn’t have this great tool. If I had it, I wouldn’t have done anything,’” she said. But relying on the technology, which showed up in the middle of her eighth-grade year, isn’t yet common practice for most students she knows. 

Whether future students will warm to it more isn’t yet clear, Mollod said.

Weiss, the Michigan student, said her work — especially at the environmental publication — has taken on a new significance in the age of AI, pushing to celebrate and highlight “authentic youth journalism and youth narrative” in the face of encroaching technology. “In my view,” she said, “demonstrating our talents as humans and as youth is a form of silent protest against AI by proving that artificial intelligence isn’t necessary to produce professional-quality journalism.”

Bonus: Non-AI cheating abides. 

On background, one of the students said she thought a lot of the news coverage about AI cheating, while serious, simply misses the point. The old-fashioned kind of cheating, for now, remains much more common. In 2026, students are still relying on copying each other’s homework, just as generations before them did. 

“Mostly it’s just, like, circles of people, where there’ll be a math class and five people do the homework — and the other 20 got it from this person, [who] got it from this person, [who] got it from this person — which has always kind of been going on.”

As superintendent of Desert Sands Unified in California’s Coachella Valley, Kelly May-Vollmar has a hard time naming a system that’s not somehow connected to the district’s broadband network.

Parents can check a school bus tracking app to make sure their child arrived on time. Cafeteria staff don’t use cash registers; kids’ meal accounts are linked to the cloud. Even grounds crews depend on external wireless access points to maintain the fields and landscaping at the district’s 34 schools.

“They’re running our sprinkler systems off iPads,” May-Vollmar said.

Her district is like the across the country that apply each year for discounts on broadband service through a federal program called E-Rate. High-poverty districts like Desert Sands save up to 90% of the cost of connecting their schools and classrooms to the internet.

But the Federal Communications Commission, which oversees the program Congress created 30 years ago, has launched a “top-to-bottom” evaluation that has leaders of the nation’s school districts on edge. The FCC is collecting views on how the program should be reformed or even whether it should be abandoned altogether because it “has fulfilled” its mission. In addition to asking whether the benefit should be restricted to rural districts, the agency links E-Rate to present-day concerns over screen time. Oct. 13 and replies are due Nov. 12.

The proposal is “aimed at empowering parents and ensuring that our E-Rate program produces the great educational outcomes stakeholders have intended,” FCC Chairman in early June when he announced the review. In , the far-right Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the Trump administration, Carr said because of advancements in technology, decisions about the program “should be made with an eye to right-sizing the federal government’s existing broadband initiatives.”

The review process has left ed tech leaders both confused and ready to fight.

“They’re asking us to comment on a potential rulemaking and they haven’t told us what the rules would be,” said Keith Krueger, CEO of the Consortium for School Networking, a leading ed tech professional organization. He called the initial the FCC released “so extraordinarily broad and comprehensive” that they’re too overwhelming for the average district leader to address. “We’re going to have to be very loud and noisy as a community to our members of Congress and to governors to say ‘Hands off the E-Rate.’ ” 

As in Desert Sands, districts depend on internet access for a lot more than classroom instruction, including taking attendance and managing payroll. But it’s how students use the internet at school that has taken over the discussion about updating the program.

“Historically, underserved students lacked access to computers and technology, and efforts were made to ‘close the digital divide,’ “ said Emily Cherkin, a Seattle-based consultant and leading figure in the battle against “big tech.” In 2026, she said, “the pendulum has swung too far.”

In January, she , saying that children’s access to the internet has led to “catastrophic” impacts on their mental health, learning and development. In response to those concerns, some states are . Parents are demanding the chance to of apps and learning platforms, and others, including Cherkin, are suing and publishers, accusing them of and .  

‘A connectivity program’

Groups like the Consortium for School Networking have called for a balanced approach before the valid concerns over kids’ time online threatens the loss of a program that saves schools and libraries over $2.5 billion each year. 

The discounts apply to high-speed internet service as well as Wi-Fi access points, routers and switches. Desert Sands, for example, is currently upgrading such equipment district-wide — a $1 million project that is only costing the district $200,000 because of the discount. But E-Rate benefits don’t extend to devices for students, digital content or software licenses. 

E-Rate “is a connectivity program,” Krueger said. “It’s not an education program.” 

Last week, CoSN released highlighting examples of “purposeful” technology use and stressed that there’s a difference between a student scrolling social media during the school day and another working with a classmate on a multimedia project. 

“The goal is not simply to reduce or increase screen time,” the report says. “The goal is to ensure that every use of technology has a clear instructional purpose.”

But Cherkin is skeptical of what she calls the industry’s “.” As long as students are spending time on a device, she wrote that it doesn’t matter whether they have high-quality materials. Her years as a former middle school English teacher in Seattle private schools, from 2003 to 2015, helped to shape her views on technology. Schools had computer labs and a dedicated technology teacher, a model she’d like to see reinstated. That arrangement evolved into reserving a cart with laptops that she would bring to her classroom when needed.

The turning point, she said, was when she started uploading grades into a digital portal.

“Instead of coming to talk to me directly and having a conversation about what they might need to do to improve 
 they were instead directed to a digital platform that had a number or letter grade, which told them very little overall,” she said. “I saw it devaluing the experience of learning to be a student who could self-advocate.”

Parents, whom she described as “highly anxious,” constantly checked the portal and emailed her about why their children didn’t get an A or were missing a grade. Despite her concerns over the internet’s impact on students, she still supports the argument that access should be universally available. 

‘Pulling out the rug’

For Krueger and others who fought to increase access for students in schools and homes, this moment feels like a giant step backward. As founder of EducationSuperhighway, a nonprofit, Evan Marwell advocated for a fiber connection to every school in the nation, reaching . 

“There are a lot of good uses of technology in classrooms,” he said. “Pulling out the rug from teachers and students on all those good uses would be, in my opinion, a big mistake.” 

During the pandemic, his organization pivoted to signing up low-income families for discounted high-speed service at home so students wouldn’t have to sit in McDonalds’ parking lots to pick up Wi-Fi to do homework.

Last fall, in its first move toward rolling back federal broadband initiatives, the FCC at-home and school bus Wi-Fi access from the program, features that were added during the Biden administration. The move, Carr said in , would end what he called “illegal funding” of young kids’ unsupervised screen time.

Sen. Edward Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat who wrote the E-Rate program as part of the 1996 Telecommunications Act said in that the decision would “leave low-income, rural and marginalized communities disconnected.” 

The FCC asks whether E-Rate should be “limited or sunset,” considering the nearly universal access in schools. But Kevin Taglang, an executive editor with the Benton Institute for Broadband and Society, a nonprofit, that high-poverty districts receiving the largest discounts serve more than 16 million students. In Desert Sands, those kids have parents who work at the resorts, golf courses and restaurants across Palm Springs.

“Any eligibility change that removes these schools from the program, or substantially reduces their discount levels, would fall hardest on the students and districts least able to absorb the loss,” he wrote.

Preventing fraud

Conservatives first tried to end E-Rate through a 2023 lawsuit. Consumers Research, a nonprofit, argued that the FCC’s arrangement with the Universal Service Administrative Company, the private entity that , was illegal and gave too much power to a federal agency. But in a 6-3 decision last year, the U.S. Supreme Court .

The Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog agency, highlighted E-Rate in a , saying that out of five government programs evaluated, it was the only one following all nine recommended practices for preventing fraud, waste and abuse. That was a big improvement over a , which flagged the program for “several key fraud risks.” 

Krueger, with CoSN, said some improvements to E-Rate are needed, like more “serious funding” for cybersecurity. 

“Having broadband that is at risk for cyber attacks isn’t helpful,” he said. 

Between July 2023 and December 2024, 82% of schools experienced some type of cyber incident, such as a ransomware attack, a data breach or a phishing attempt, according to last year from the nonprofit Center for Internet Security. When the FCC opened up a $200 million E-Rate cybersecurity pilot program in 2024, the demand was huge. The agency totaling $3.7 billion. 

Krueger, however, questions whether the FCC is the right agency to determine whether Wi-Fi access is harming students’ learning. That, he said, should be the responsibility of the Office of Educational Technology, which the Trump administration gutted last year when it eliminated roughly half of the Department of Education’s staff.

At a late July gathering in Washington, Amber Davis, chief of staff in the Department of Education’s Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development, told advocates from about 22 states that there is still an ed tech office at the agency, according to CoSN Chair Stacy Hawthorne. The attendees, Hawthorne said, joked that it may only exist on paper. 

The department did not respond to questions about the makeup of the office. But on Thursday it issued that tries to redirect the debate over ed tech away from screen time. Ed tech “should not be evaluated solely by the amount of time students spend using it,” it said, adding that district spending on technology should be “guided by evidence of effectiveness.”

The July event was one of several likely to occur over the next couple months as leaders advocate to preserve E-Rate. With this year’s application period already complete, the FCC on July 29 that the program still exists and that its “notice of potential rulemaking” won’t immediately result in a loss of funding. 

If the administration scales back or discontinues E-Rate, district leaders say they’ll have to make up the difference somehow. LaTonya Goffney, superintendent of the Aldine Independent School District, near Houston, said with 86% of her district’s budget tied up in personnel, she would have to cut staff or programs to replace the more than $2 million saved each year from discounts.

“The utilities, the transportation — all of those things we can’t eliminate,” she said. “We still have to provide those for our students.”

In Desert Sands, May-Vollmar added that because E-Rate requires , the cost of broadband service for schools would likely increase if the program is gone. For her, unlimited Wi-Fi in the classroom replicates the real-world for students. 

“You and I don’t schedule time to go to a computer lab,” she said. “At work, if I say ‘Everybody, go get your computer,’ we have that ability. I want that ability in the classroom, too.”

OKLAHOMA CITY — Hundreds of thousands of Oklahoma children returned to school this week for their first academic year under . It will be their final school year before reading scores carry even higher stakes.

More than 21,100 Oklahoma third graders, or 44%, scored below a basic level on statewide reading tests this past spring, according to . Future third graders, starting in the 2027-28 school year, would risk being held back a year for scoring below basic, which the state defines as failing to demonstrate even partial mastery of grade-level expectations.

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State leaders enacted more rigorous this year in hopes of emulating Mississippi, which progressively rose in national academic rankings after implementing similar regulations.

Mississippi, though, retained only 6% of its third graders in the 2024-25 school year, . The Magnolia State , or 3,000 students, in its first year of retentions in 2014-15.

The fact that Oklahoma could have significantly more students at risk of retention indicates that “our state tests are not the same” as Mississippi’s, said Chris Brewster, superintendent of Santa Fe South Charter Schools. That’s a signal Oklahoma might have more work to do on its methods of assessing students, he said.

“There are certain schools where the vast majority of all of their third graders, historically speaking, haven’t met that standard,” Brewster said of the potential statewide impact. “I don’t know if that’s the intent of the law, but it seems very punitive to children and not really a way to progress the work.”

Brewster, though, said he’s not at all against holding schools accountable for ensuring all children learn to read. His charter district, based in south Oklahoma City, had 46% of its third graders score below basic in reading in 2026, but he said he’s optimistic about future growth.

How are schools accelerating learning?

This past spring, 66% of Santa Fe South’s first graders, who will be among the initial third graders to take the high-stakes literacy test, scored at or above their grade level in reading on districtwide benchmark assessments.

That’s the result of six years of steady improvement since spring 2020, when 34% of the district’s first graders performed near or above their grade level, Santa Fe South leaders said. Rather than making significant changes this year, they plan to continue with the methods behind that success.

Santa Fe South students, many of whom come from low-income and non-English-speaking homes, take a mix of assessments that test specific reading skills.

Once students’ weak points are identified, they begin a three-week cycle of daily small-group instruction focused on the skills that need improvement, said Missy Stotler, Santa Fe South’s content and curriculum coordinator for early childhood. That’s in addition to daily class time dedicated to literacy.

“It’s the idea of short bursts of intense, very focused work with a group of kids, and then quickly assessing, ‘Did they move the needle? Where are the needs now?’ And then, quickly putting them back into new groups that meet their new need of learning,” Stotler said.

Key pieces of reading law still undefined

Still, “there’s a lot of question marks” for schools about the new reading laws, said Meg Wheeler, executive director of elementary education at Santa Fe South. Right now, the number of students scoring below basic is one of the only clear indicators school leaders have of how many of their students might face retention, she said.

Under the new law, students would have to score below basic on state reading tests and fail a second literacy assessment to be held back in third grade, unless they meet limited criteria for an exemption. State officials haven’t decided yet what that second test will be.

Also, all districts will have to implement the same reading screener to check students’ literacy levels and determine how much intervention each child needs. The universal screener hasn’t been chosen yet, either.

“For schools who have not previously used that screener — (it) could be us, we don’t know — we won’t have any historical data to pull from,” Wheeler said. “We don’t get very much information (from state tests) about why a student is scoring at below basic at the third grade level, and we don’t know that we’re going to have any historical data from the screening assessments to help us understand what is happening with a student.

“So, there’s a lot of blindness in the data that I think we have some fear of right now.”

Districts prepare for high-stakes testing

The question in Edmond Public Schools Superintendent Josh Delich’s mind, he said, is how training and staffing can support the literacy initiative — and whether the state will help with the cost of educators’ professional development.

The state already began rolling out teacher academies for educators who want to earn a reading specialist credential. The state Department of Education’s .

Edmond schools continue to focus on building teachers’ capacity for literacy instruction, Delich said. A major emphasis has been the quality of general classroom reading lessons, which are provided to all students in a class regardless of their performance level.

Thirty percent of Edmond third graders scored below basic in reading, according to 2025-26 state test results.

“What is that first level of teaching and learning instruction that students receive in the classroom, and how do you support that?” And then through that, you look at how do you spiral in learning objectives that students may struggle with. How do you reteach areas and content in which students are struggling?” Delich said. “We want to make sure we’re moving every single student through individual growth.”

Oklahoma City Public Schools found reason for optimism during the 2025-26 school year when after only the fall semester. Adding a second reading curriculum on top of the district’s original lesson plans helped accelerate learning, administrators said.

But, “there are many students who would fall in that retention window,” said Jason Galloway, the district’s chief of academics.

Sixty-six percent of third graders in the district scored below basic, according to state test results.

So, Oklahoma City schools made further changes following the new reading law.

Daily reading instruction time has increased to 150 minutes in many elementary schools from the previous standard of 90 to 120 minutes, said Alisha Suffield, Oklahoma City’s chief of schools.

The district also added more reading interventionists, paraprofessionals and teaching aides to work with students in small groups, Suffield said. All kindergarten and first grade classes will be staffed with a certified teacher rather than someone holding an emergency certification, who might not have traditional classroom training.

“Emergency certified teachers have a very valuable place in our system, but we don’t want them to be placed in those early primary reading years of kinder and first grade,” she said. “So (we’re) just trying to protect those reading spaces and ensure that our kids get the strongest start possible with a certified staff person.”

Reporter Emma Murphy contributed to this report.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janelle Stecklein for questions: info@oklahomavoice.com.

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. —  can conjure a familiar scene: adults crammed into child-size chairs, listening to teachers run through a list of students’ achievements and struggles.

For many families, they can also mean frustration. Today’s school conferences are sometimes 15 to 20 minutes, with little time for parents to ask their own questions. Adults may arrive with their own baggage about their time in school. They may be worried about being judged or dreading what a teacher may say about their child. 

For teachers, conferences can mean pressure to give a snapshot of a child’s progress, with the next opportunity to connect months away — if at all.

The conference may be brief, but it can set the tone for a family’s relationship and partnership with the teacher. Parents, teachers and school administrators have these tips to make the conference productive and help build a stronger connection between home and school.

Communicate early and figure out what works

Schools typically offer several early opportunities for parents and teachers to connect, from meet-the-teacher events and  nights to open houses. By the time conferences are on the calendar, parents and teachers should already be communicating.

But sometimes it can take weeks, or even months, to hear from your child’s teacher, who must establish relationships with dozens of families. Don’t wait, say parents and teachers alike. Take the initiative and reach out yourself.

“Do you want to set your child up for success? It’s a yes or no. And if it’s a yes, then you have to be very involved,” said Bell White, a Houston mother of two.

When her son Lennox, now 8, was in preschool, four teachers came and went during the school year. White quickly learned how important it was to stay engaged with the school.

Since then, she has introduced herself to each of her son’s teachers at the first opportunity, even if virtually. She tells them how she prefers to communicate — whether over email, phone or via a school app — and when she’s most reachable. 

Technology can make it easier for parents with multiple children or busy schedules to stay connected and for teachers to send quick messages or reminders. But with , some parents say it helps to establish a preferred way to communicate.

Early in the relationship, parents and teachers should focus on building trust, said J.B. Robinson, a clinical psychologist and dean of students at National University in San Diego. Positive interactions are like putting money into a relationship bank that can be drawn on when challenges arise, he said. For parents, that can mean showing interest in the classroom and recognizing the effort that goes into creating a positive learning environment. Teachers can similarly begin with questions about the individual child, rather than immediately moving into classroom expectations or academic performance.

Whatever the nature of your first communication with a teacher, try not to worry that you’re bothering the teacher. Your child’s growth is the priority, and communicating with you is part of the teacher’s job.

Make the time count

Parent-teacher conferences are designed to address students’ academic and social progress, identify concerns and discuss what comes next, but there may not be time to cover everything parents or teachers want to discuss.

“The teacher and the parent need to go in with realistic expectations as to what can actually be accomplished in one parent-teacher conference and see that more as a starting point for a conversation,” said Robinson, the psychologist.

The meetings can also be ripe for tension. Teachers may be having dozens of back-to-back conferences, while parents may arrive with weeks’ worth of questions, all seemingly valid. Depending on the school and the child’s grade, some teachers follow a set agenda, with presentation slides, packets or lists of topics to cover.

Emily Henderson, who teaches first and second grade at BASIS Charter School in Flagstaff, Arizona, says her conversations are mostly individualized, with some focusing more on academics and others on social-emotional needs.

“We use parent-teacher conferences to really talk about strengths, talk about weaknesses of students, and then come up with a plan together to address those concerns or address those needs,” Henderson said.

Given time constraints, parents should come with just a few thoughtful questions, teachers say. But remember this is a starting point. It’s totally reasonable to set up another conference later in the year, even if your school doesn’t have one scheduled. Or you can continue the conversation online or over the phone.

What to do if your kid is present

Some schools recommend that students join the conference, and in other cases, a parent may want to bring them along — or need to, if they lack child care. For younger students, teachers recommend asking in advance whether they should attend, if that is an option. If you do plan to bring the student or younger siblings, let the teacher know ahead of time so they can prepare for a more engaging meeting or set up a few distractions.

If younger students are present, it is up to administrators and teachers to engage them and speak directly to them, said Kellie Hintze, head of school at BASIS Flagstaff.

“When I have younger students at a meeting, we typically have a mini meeting with the student and the parent,” she said. “Then we can dive a little deeper or have those long, drawn-out conversations that a student wouldn’t want to be a part of or be able to focus through.”

Older students have more agency over their learning and are better positioned to contribute to discussions about their progress, challenges and possible next steps, experts say.

“We’re doing students a disservice when we’re not teaching them how to advocate, when we are not teaching them those communication skills, to have the tough conversations when they need to be had,” said Kendrick Friendly, who is a high school assistant principal with Denver Public Schools. “This is a safe space for those conversations to happen.”

Questions to consider

Parents don’t need to arrive with a long list of questions. A few thoughtful ones can help clarify what a teacher considers success, what they are seeing in the classroom, what support is available and how to stay connected throughout the year.

Consider asking:

1. How do you prefer to communicate with parents, and how often should we check in?

2. What does success look like for my child this year?

3. How do you identify when a student is falling behind, and who should I speak with about getting additional support?

4. What are you noticing about my child that I might not see at home?

Leave with a plan

Parent-teacher conferences do not resolve every concern, but they should identify next steps, whether those are regular check-ins, strategies for improved behavior or additional resources, such as tutors, specialized instruction or extracurricular activities.

Before leaving, make sure everyone knows what happens next, who is responsible for it and when you’ll check back in. Don’t be afraid to request another conference later in the year. Remember: Your child’s growth is the priority, and it will take everyone in the room to get there.

This story was originally published by The Associated Press

The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s  for working with philanthropies, a  of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

In a last week, Chuck Cohn, CEO of Nerdy, Varsity’s parent company, wrote that leaders would “wind down” the online service they launched during the pandemic as districts nationwide spent billions in federal relief funds to help students recover lost learning.

Instead, Missouri-based Nerdy will focus on its original Varsity Tutors model, which targets services directly to parents and college students, rather than schools. That, Cohn wrote, is “our core business, where the opportunity is significantly larger and where our resources and management bandwidth earn better returns.”

In a Friday note to Accelerate, a nonprofit that funded Varsity last year as part of a research study, a representative from the company wrote: “Today we are communicating to our school customers that we will be discontinuing services effective today.” 

The end of Varsity Tutors for Schools follows the abrupt termination of another large provider, FEV Tutor, in early 2025 as relief funds dried up. But tutoring experts say this shutdown is not just another example of districts running out of extra federal money. In fact, multiple states, , now provide ongoing funding for high-impact tutoring, including virtual models. With districts increasingly demanding strong results, Varsity Tutors for Schools, they say, wasn’t able to deliver proof that their services increased student performance.

For-profit providers, like Nerdy, have to answer to investors and shareholders. But regardless of the business model, those “that adhere closely to the research are going to be the ones that are more likely to have stronger outcomes,” said Kathy Bendheim, strategic advising director at the National Student Support Accelerator, a tutoring research center at Stanford University. 

A forthcoming paper from the center on state policies says that the 2024 results from the National Assessment for Educational Progress provide ample evidence that the need for high-impact tutoring “remains urgent.” Reading and math scores have not rebounded to pre-pandemic levels. 

Research supports models in which students meet at least three times a week, one-on-one or in small groups, with the same tutor over several weeks. In addition to following that structure, districts, Bendheim said, want tutors who “work closely with them to make sure their program meets the needs and the context on the ground.”

‘Paying the piper’

Matt Montaño, superintendent of the Bernalillo Public Schools in New Mexico, said Varsity Tutors for Schools didn’t live up to his expectations. 

“We actually stopped working with them after one year,” he said. “They were not able to meet the promises of the service.”

The district opted for Varsity in 2024 when the New Mexico Department of Education struggled to roll out a statewide program. Varsity pledged to “immediately” connect students with a tutor day or night if they needed help. But the company, Montaño said, was unable to provide support “in a timely fashion.”

The company did not return calls requesting comments, and Cohn did not respond to email or a message on LinkedIn. Âé¶čŸ«Æ·â€™s attempts to reach Jason Pello, who was as chief financial officer in April, were also unsuccessful. According to with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Pello still serves as a consultant to the company.

In a , Kevin Huffman, CEO of Accelerate, wrote that both FEV and Nerdy didn’t prioritize evidence of student gains.

“Other programs — nonprofits and for-profits — have pushed for strong external evaluations including randomized control trials,” he wrote. “The tutoring companies that pushed (or were pushed by funders) into rapid growth ahead of evidence-building are now paying the piper.” 

Some providers entered into “outcomes-based” contracts with districts that reward tutors with higher fees if students show enough improvement. shows it’s a promising approach, but there’s no evidence that Varsity was involved in such a contract. 

±·±đ°ù»ćČâ’s website includes some that point to success in raising student achievement. One from 2022 describes a small study in the Garden Grove district in California in which fourth graders who were at or below grade level in math were randomly chosen for afterschool sessions with a Varsity tutor.

According to of the study, i-Ready scores increased by 9.82 points for students in the treatment group, compared with an average of 4.52 points for those who didn’t receive the intervention. The researchers ruled out students’ prior math performance and background characteristics as possible explanations for the results. 

But the description doesn’t cite the names of the University of California Irvine researchers who conducted the study, and Bendheim at Stanford said there wasn’t enough information to “understand how the study was designed and implemented to know whether it is rigorous enough to rely on the findings.”

Accelerate was trying to help them establish that research base. A year ago, the nonprofit listed Varsity Tutors for Schools as in a study aimed at learning more about high-impact tutoring using “AI-enabled” tools. 

Working with Mathematica, a research organization, the project gathered data in three districts using Varsity during the 2025-26 school year. At least two had planned to stick with the provider this fall, said Nakia Towns, Accelerate’s president. While the study is not yet complete, her initial impressions weren’t positive.

“Only 15% of students were hitting their recommended dosage,” she said. Educators and policymakers are getting “more savvy” about where to spend funds for tutoring, “and unfortunately, I think Varsity Tutors was just late in their market positioning to understand that’s where folks were moving.” 

‘Random tutoring’

As one of the nation’s largest providers, Varsity Tutors benefits from significant brand recognition among parents. But it struggled to translate that success into a structure that satisfied districts, said a former employee, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. 

“A parent is thrilled that there’s somebody there to help them with their child,” he said. “When there’s no structure in place, and it’s just random tutoring, that doesn’t meet school districts’ needs.” 

Cohn in 2007 while he was a student at Washington University in St. Louis. Under the new name Nerdy, he took the company public in . While Varsity Tutors, the original service, phased out in-person sessions , the American Rescue Plan, which sent $122 billion to schools for recovery efforts, offered an to scale up quickly.

At the time, Cohn said school administrators needed personalized learning “implemented immediately at a school-wide, or even district-wide level, without requiring each student to register individually.”

According to , Varsity Tutors for Schools provided services to over 1,000 districts and schools. Other materials say they were , including like Broward County in Florida, Montgomery County in Maryland and Gwinnett County in Georgia. 

“We had great momentum, even from last school year,” said the former employee. “We had great results in a lot of cases.” 

Last October, Frederick Heid, superintendent of Florida’s Polk County Public Schools, in support of Varsity’s Live+AI feature, which the company said can “speed up proficiency gains.”

The combination of live tutoring and AI support for students, he said, ensures “that every student has the tools they need to succeed while offering teachers an unparalleled support system.”

But because of the expiration of federal funds, Polk was among those no longer planning to use the program this fall, said Jason Geary, a district spokesman.

A review of GovSpend, a data company tracking government purchases, shows that districts’ business with Varsity Tutors for Schools saw a steep decline following a peak of more than $28 million in 2023.

In his report to shareholders, Cohn estimated that ±·±đ°ù»ćČâ’s revenue for this year would drop by $12 million to $15 million because of the shutdown of its district work. The company expects “exit-related costs” of $2 million to $4 million due to canceling contracts early.

±·±đ°ù»ćČâ’s , which reached over $12 , fell to 74 cents on Monday. 

It’s unclear how many districts planned to use the service this fall, but according to GovSpend, the Winton Woods City School District, near Cincinnati, made two payments totaling $56,350 to the provider on July 13 for the 2026-27 school year.

The 3,900-student in January 2025 that it had chosen to contract with Varsity Tutors for Schools. District officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Varsity Tutors for Schools is also on a list of approved providers for a Missouri literacy tutoring grant. Bendheim at Stanford said she personally doesn’t know districts that have used the service, but added, “We just hope that they were able to work with their districts closely enough so that students don’t miss out on tutoring they were supposed to get.” 

It’s 2026. Satellites connect to devices in our pockets, artificial intelligence algorithms can drive cars and scan X-rays, and Homer’s 3,000-year-old poem is the basis for the summer’s hottest movie.

But there’s always a but. And right now, in a time when public school absences remain stubbornly high since Covid closures five years ago, it seems amazing not that educators can’t fix this problem, because it is complicated and occurs for many reasons, but that they can’t even agree on how to count whether a student is absent or not.

That’s not an exaggeration. While the number of chronically absent students nearly doubled after schools returned to in-person schooling in 2022, there is no universal consensus on how to determine the extent of this problem.

In fact, when Iowa put together comprehensive legislation in 2024 to address the state’s attendance problem, it became clear that different counting methods made it impossible to compare attendance statewide. Starting with the 2025-26 school year, the state mandated that all districts use the same method to count attendance. 

For the most part, school attendance policies fall into three buckets:

• If you are present for any part of the school day, you are counted as attending.
• If you are present for at least half of the day, you are counted as attending.
• Your attendance is tracked at the period or even the minute level.

While Iowa has chosen the minute-level attendance as its state standard, there is no universal agreement or any research about which method is the best. Sixteen states leave that decision to local discretion. In fact, two experts, Hedy Nai-Lin Chang, the CEO and president of Attendance Works, and Justine Oliva, the director of Policy & Research for the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council, stay away from endorsing any one method. But both call for standardizing how attendance is counted within each state.

“The lack of a common definition of a day of attendance continues to make it difficult to interpret and compare data within and across states,” reads a 2025 report from Attendance Works.

Attendance throughout history

While the first school law in the country is the, passed by the Massachusetts Bay Colony, it is not known when schools first started taking attendance. But there’s a good record of the initial attendance complaint. Near the end of Horace Mann’s in 1838, Mann wrote about the state’s inability to collect even basic “information respecting the number of scholars attending the public schools, and the regularity of that attendance.”

By 1918, all states had laws mandating school attendance, but truancy did not become a federal focus until 2001’s bill made it mandatory for all states to report truancy data to the federal government. Fourteen years later, the pushed attendance further into the spotlight, when many states recognized chronic absenteeism’s importance in student outcomes. Unlike truancy, this indicator reflects both excused and unexcused absences. As part of ESSA, 36 states and the District of Columbia included chronic absenteeism as one of the markers of educational progress in their states.

The first thing to understand about attendance is how schools use their data. In six states, is used to determine state funding; the rest of the states use enrollment counts assessed once or twice a year to decide how much money districts receive. But even within a school there can be different uses for attendance. For instance, at Ponus Ridge STEAM Academy in Norwalk, Connecticut, principal Damon Lewis said the middle school reports its homeroom attendance to the district and state, but uses its period-by-period attendance to keep a closer eye on each student.

Before the pandemic, about were chronically absent, meaning they missed at least 10% of the school year or about 18 days. When schools reopened after Covid shutdowns, student behavior had changed, with nearly twice as many learners chronically absent, said Nat Malkus, deputy director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute.

Research proves the link between attendance and achievement, Malkus said; for every day a student is absent, the average achievement for that student decreases. “It’s not just kids who are chronically absent,” he said, the effect of attendance on achievement “is pretty much linear. Every day matters.”

A new report from NWEA last month backed up those findings, showing that chronic absenteeism played a major role in students failing to reach pre-pandemic academic levels. “Improving attendance should be part of the academic recovery strategy in most districts rather than seen as a distinct issue,” the report concluded.

While chronic absenteeism is a big issue for many state education leaders, Malkus warned that it can be an arbitrary distinction. “One of the shocking things [about attendance] is that 7% of kids miss over 20% of the school year,” he said, adding that these absences can affect an entire school’s achievement.

Best ways to count

While there is no research that measures one method of counting attendance versus another, it’s also difficult to know even how most schools measure attendance. In an Attendance Works 2026 , only eight states require districts to use a per-minute attendance calculation, while 24 states require attendance for a half day or more to count a student as present. But there are some signs that a growing number of schools are opting to get granular and track student attendance per minute. Arkansas and Oklahoma moved to period-based attendance in the 2025-26 school year, and both Ohio and Iowa will make that move in this year.

Jesse Roy, the senior director of education value for PowerSchool, said his customers are trending toward wanting more information. “We see states going from daily to half-daily to per-minute. More data is kind of what you’re after.” PowerSchool is a student information software company used in 90 of the country’s largest 100 school districts.

Oliva of Rhode Island mentioned that counting attendance so closely could have some pitfalls. “More granular methods (like per hour) may better capture instructional time if the data are accurate but may be more difficult to implement consistently at the local level,” she said.

When Rhode Island tried to pass a comprehensive attendance bill in 2024, it was using “at least half the day” method of counting a student present, she said, adding that this method is the more widely used benchmark in education. Even though that bill never became law, the state did implement several components of the proposal and has had success improving its attendance rates. Rhode Island’s chronic absenteeism rate posted the fifth largest decline in the country from 2021-22 to 2023-24, according to a from the state’s Public Expenditure Council.

Iowa’s push to improve attendance originally focused on how schools must take specific steps to notify parents as students’ absences piled up, as well as a major publicity push to inform the public about the importance of good attendance. But the next year, the state’s legislators passed some smaller changes that specified not only how schools must count attendance, but also what could count as an excused absence.

“They are sweating the details on this, and that is what state leadership looks like,” Malkus said.

Des Moines has been tracking per-minute attendance for years, well before Iowa’s new requirement. “The per-minute calculation really matters,” said Jennifer Stalder, who oversees the case managers who track attendance in district schools. “It allows us to home in on what’s happening and have more meaningful conversations with parents.”

Even though Cedar Rapids, Iowa, had not yet gone to per-minute attendance last school year, Jennifer Van Fleet, the district’s executive director of student services, said she imagined the extra information might help each school discern which student has an aversion to math or highlight a student who is late everyday. “We can match the support and intervention to be specific,” she added.

Ohio is another state that uses the per-minute method as part of its statewide goal to reduce chronic absenteeism in half by the end of the 2028-29 school year. The state has shifted to trying to predict and prevent students from becoming chronically absent, instead of only intervening after they have missed 10% of school. Part of this effort is not only collecting more information about student attendance, but sharing that data quickly and accurately.

The state’s , shows weekly updates statewide, including the number and percentage of students in each district who are both chronically absent and at-risk of becoming chronically absent.

Even though PowerSchool’s Roy wondered if data overload could reach a point of diminishing returns for school officials, he did express wonder at how specific schools can be now when tracking student attendance. “Fifteen years ago,” when he worked in a school district, “I would have to walk around with binders and do two hours of work per student” to find out all this information, he said.

An earlier version of this story misstated the school district where Jennifer Van Fleet works. It is Cedar Rapids Community School District.

Joe Biden that he will soon release a memoir of his time in office. That volume follows on the heels of Jill Biden’s , which triggered controversy when some Democrats was attempting to gloss her husband’s delayed decision to not to seek reelection. And recent polls have toward the former president, with voters favorably comparing his economic record to his successor’s.

So far, however, only one published retrospective has provided deep insight into the education legacy of the Biden White House. Written by New School Professor Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, the account appears as a chapter in , an essay collection featuring contributions from over a dozen historians. 

The author of , Petrzela examines President Biden’s K–12 efforts within the longer context of a political life stretching back to the 1970s. At the outset of that half-century career, the 30-something senator was billed as a different kind of Democrat, and doubtful about the benefits of directing more money to schools. 

That early record stood in contrast with the first few years of his presidency. In early 2021, Biden signed the American Rescue Plan, a gargantuan spending bill, while also backing off from the education reform goals of his Democratic predecessors, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Neither that local schools move away from virtual learning as the COVID pandemic wound down. Perhaps the boldest executive move on education came in the form of a failed bid to cancel billions of dollars of student loan debt. 

After four years, the result was a muddle, Petrzela concludes. The increasingly embattled president advanced some ambitious K–12 priorities, from massive ESSER expenditures to a revision of Title IX around LGBT rights in schools. But his education initiatives largely unfolded far from public attention, and the absence of assertive messaging allowed .

In an interview with Âé¶čŸ«Æ·â€™s Kevin Mahnken, Petrzela spoke about the recurrence of cultural conflicts in schools, the public’s COVID-era frustrations with Biden’s party, and why the president seemed to dart left on education and other issues.

“During Biden’s presidential administration, he wasn’t much of a leader,” she said. “He was a one-term president, very old, and he was following the whims of the party quite a bit.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Âé¶čŸ«Æ·: You do a great job examining the Biden administration’s education priorities in the light of Joe Biden’s early political career, which began during the busing controversies of the 1970s. Was there anything about that period that surprised you during your research?

Natalia Mehlman Petrzela: I knew something of Joe Biden’s political evolution. But when I went back to the primary sources, I was actually surprised at about Great Society programs, and about this abiding faith — which others in his party had — that Big Government could fix really thorny social issues. 

When you already know that his presidential administration oversaw this huge outlay of money called the American Rescue Plan, and that his whole career was really about expanding federal spending in education, it was really something else to read . I’m paraphrasing, but he was essentially saying that America can’t spend its way out of its problems, and that Democrats shouldn’t see government spending through rose-colored lenses.

Biden’s reputation for being a new kind of Democrat — implicitly contrasted with the Great Society consensus, as you say — is ironic because, once he became president, the predecessor he was most often compared with . So he seems to finally end up in the same place he departed from.

If you think about what happened in both parties across the intervening decades, you really see the lines harden in terms of who’s onboard with expanding government spending and who comes down against it as the root of all evil. 

But early in the 1970s, the jury was still out on how this would fall. You had hardcore right-wingers in the John Birch Society, who thought that the New Deal was one step away from socialism. But it still wasn’t totally clear that the Great Society would establish the political architecture of the Democratic Party until today, or that the Republicans would define themselves against it. For that reason, it would be increasingly untenable for Democrats in the mainstream of the party to resist it in the way that Biden raised those questions early on.

So in the scope of that long political history, his trajectory makes perfect sense. But it’s still jarring to look at the primary sources and see how that shift happened.

Conservatives seemed to acculturate themselves to the New Deal in ways they never did to the liberalism of the ’60s and ’70s. The movement has usually pushed to shrink the government, even if Medicare was here to stay.

And we thought the Department of Education was here to stay! One of the things we teach in the history of education is how Ronald Reagan vowed to get rid of the department, and instead, under his administration, it was expanded. That’s a moment that is often used by political historians to show the enduring power of these agencies, and how they have a kind of permanence to them. But under Trump II, we’re seeing that they’re not so permanent.

But that move isn’t just a Trump-era relic. The era of big Washington-led initiatives like No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, and the commitment to education reform that they embodied, petered out during President Obama’s second term. In retrospect, the Biden administration seems like the first glimpse of a post-reform Democratic Party. 

I agree with that. But the big turning point we’ve got to think about, especially in terms of what my chapter was responding to, was COVID. More than the end of NCLB, COVID redraws the lines of politics and discourse around education. 

Prior to the pandemic, I wouldn’t say education was off to the side — because we’re always fighting about education — but there was a lot of stuff that came into being, largely through Democrats during the Great Society and its aftermath, that people were not fundamentally questioning. Everyone wants their kids to read and write at school, and they want special education to be available at their kids’ schools. 

I’m a cultural historian, so I’m not trying to underplay the conflict that existed, but in 2020 and beyond, you have a series of converging circumstances that really put schools at the center of lots of people’s concerns about what’s going wrong in society. And it’s very easy to point at the Democrats as the villains who created those circumstances.

You point to a handful of major education pillars of the Biden education agenda, all grouped under the general theme of equity: Close to $200 billion in federal funding to states and districts to cope with the pandemic, and an overhaul of Title IX, but no real action on NCLB-style accountability and no immediate pressure on schools to reopen for in-person learning. Would you agree that these pillars largely reflected the growing influence and importance of teachers’ unions in Democratic politics?

That’s very accurate. You see the disappearance of the accountability agenda, which, to be clear, had some major problems. But there was a combination of a long-term push to loosen accountability, often led by the heads of unions, with the move to keep schools closed. And added to that was an emphasis on social justice content that a lot of people would say is both politically biased and irrelevant to fundamental academic skills. 

At the same time, due to the school closures, a lot of parents had a much closer perspective on what their children were learning or not learning. That made it a complete powder keg, and one that seemed to have been created by Democrats — particularly because of the role of unions at the heart of things.

During the 2020 primaries, you might have predicted that a Biden education platform would resemble that of President Obama, to whom he closely tied himself. But right after becoming the nominee, he’s naming an education task force with two teachers’ union heads and no notable figures from the party’s reform wing. I’m wondering whether a decision like that reflects coalitional politics, Biden’s authentic beliefs, or some combination of the two.

Early in his career, Biden really cared about education and made it a big part of his politics. Jill Biden is obviously an educator, which may have contributed to that. So it’s kind of a surprise that he turned away from it in some ways, to the extent that I don’t think there really was a coherent educational agenda under the Biden administration. Democrats, in general, were really struggling with the issue, so who’s going to step in to create a unified agenda? It’s going to be the teachers’ unions, and they make it their agenda. 

In the article, I give the unions credit for some things. In other places, I think they’re totally off-base. There are a lot of different interest groups that find a way into policy conversations through union advocacy, and not all of those union priorities are working to improve education or to make Democrats look particularly good on education. 

And all of this is part of why you saw the Biden administration not really saying much about schools. You could say they were actually doing a lot, especially with the American Rescue Plan, but they’re not saying much. It’s a passive or surreptitious cession of power, and not a lot of control over messaging. If you think about it through the left-right perspective, it did allow the parts of the left that were aligned with unions to have a ton of latitude. But it also allowed the right to paint the Bidens as the vanguard of this radical leftist takeover of America. That’s totally unfair and over the top, but the administration didn’t do much to resist that characterization.

How much do you think these developments were accelerated by the first Trump term? Following the deep resistance to the views and policies of Betsy DeVos, it would have been really hard for President Biden to enter office in 2021 as an unreconstructed advocate for high-quality charter schools, for example.

Just think of how the discourse moved around education policy during that time. It really accelerated throughout the Biden administration because they didn’t do anything to change course. There was such a push-back against standardized tests, accountability, and charter schools, and a determination to attack “white supremacy culture” — with that term used to encapsulate all of these ideas that had been central to the education reform movement, from hard work to punctuality. There was no way Biden could come back and align himself with that agenda.

I think this gets at why Biden chose Kamala Harris as his running mate after she’d been so critical of his views on school busing. I’m not saying he was insincere in making that selection, but it was an important political move to show, in a very efficient way, how he’d changed his tune on education and race.

The exchange between those two during the Democratic primary debate, on an issue that was last relevant to national politics in the 1970s, seems even more significant in retrospect than it was at the time. Are there themes from that era of liberal politics that dovetail with similar debates today? 

Yeah, it’s bizarre in some ways that policies from 50 years ago can play such a central role in politics today. But and its aftermath — both the boldness of that idea and its unfulfilled legacy — kind of remains the central fulcrum point of educational politics, especially as it relates to race. 

When the LBJ was in office, there was an ongoing debate on the left about equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome. The Great Society, I would say, still came from the opportunity side of that spectrum. It’s shifting through the ’60s, but you had a lot of mainstream Democrats talking explicitly about opening the doors to opportunity. 

On the other hand, you’re just starting to see commitments to differential funding to achieve equal outcomes. Even though Title I exists by that point, it’s not as much a part of the discourse as today, when there’s so much talk about equity — and not just that, but lots of arguments that equality of opportunity, or meritocracy, or a level playing field, are just fantasies. That’s not how people were talking about these issues at the beginning of Biden’s career, even as they were creating the infrastructure for equity-centric policies.

I’m reminded that, in his Senate career, Biden was a kind of bellwether of the Democratic mainstream, always managing to . Maybe the simplest explanation for his migration on schools is that, rather than any kind of personal conviction, he moved with the party away from what had become an uncomfortable position in the 2010s.

I think so. 

I’m going to sound pretty critical saying this, but during Biden’s presidential administration, he wasn’t much of a leader. He was a one-term president, very old, and he was following the whims of the party quite a bit. Particularly on education, which was at the center of the intense political discord of that moment, he wasn’t really staking a claim to move the discourse in a new direction. 

And that was in spite of the fact that these were big policies: the American Rescue Plan, which was a very big piece of spending, the equity agenda, the focus on racial justice, the willingness to put union leaders front and center. In the article, I highlight the moment when Randi Weingarten and Becky Pringle [presidents of the American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association, respectively] were brought as kids were still learning from home. As a parent, I remember that felt like a huge slap in the face.

You also write a little about the “,” which has seen college-educated voters move left and non-college-educated voters trend rightward. I wonder if that phenomenon has seen both sides polarize against the kind of liberalism Biden represented.

Biden found himself in a difficult position during his presidency. It was the culmination of his political career, but it came at a very awkward moment for someone of his age and background and beliefs. The last 10–15 years have just been a very strange moment in thinking about the Democratic Party’s positions on all these things. Particularly for a lifer like Biden, who cares about party, it’s very hard to navigate all of that.

I’m critical of Biden in this article because I wish he’d done some things quite differently. But I also think he was in a very hard position, and playing it safe on education might have been an understandable move politically. 

Another objection that many parents raised during the COVID period was that schools were slipping political content into classroom lessons, particularly around “culture war” issues. Where did that come from?

Issues like sexuality, morality, and race are not necessarily about schools. But they are often framed through curricular or educational sites, with the school — I use that term generally, but it could be teachers, administrators, or whatever — being the promoter of radical, leftwing, elitist values. Schools and educators are very often characterized as out of touch with everyday people.

That is a remarkable thing. Public schools are a bedrock, free institution that most American kids go through, and it takes a lot of skill to present them as being in the thrall of an elitist project. But Democrats, and the cultural left more broadly, have sometimes made it too easy to paint that picture, and a lot of that has to do with the effect of education schools. There’s a lot of good work that comes out of ed schools, but it’s another institution that is way too easy to caricature as peddling wild, progressive thought about children that is immoral, probably un-American, and taking over U.S. schools. 

This distrust of schools has been a long-running divide in U.S. politics. And sometimes, some of these critics are right! I wrote my first book about culture wars in America, focusing a lot on sex education. And if you’re asking me, I think rightwing people who believe you should never talk about sexuality in school are wrong. It’s actually important to educate kids about these things. 

But they were making pretty good points sometimes, like when they pointed out that a lot of teachers of this newfangled sex education curriculum had no training themselves. It was true; there was no training at that time. People wanted to know what their kids were being taught, and they thought it was inappropriate for a teacher to be able to go off-script about these intimate things. Those are all legitimate questions to raise.

But it was easy to take those legitimate concerns and spin them into much larger, unfounded claims, like the idea that sex education was a Communist plot to turn children into sex slaves. That was something that got national coverage, and it’s not so different today from the “groomer” discourse that we hear about all the time: Radical, leftwing indoctrinators are grooming your kids.

And of course, some of this stuff does exist because the teaching force is massive, and we have a media environment that spreads all this stuff. But the idea that most teachers are like this, or that you should pull your kids out of public school, is crazy.

Does it surprise you that this suspicion of public schools has been such a consistent narrative for President Trump? As you mentioned, there’s nothing necessarily new about this distrust in the history of American politics, but it seems odd that a populist movement would position itself against the schools that 90 percent of American kids attend.

You’re right that it’s not a new thing, but there is something different about this moment of right-left polarization around education.

You could point to a lot of parallels with today’s education politics in the ’60s and ’70s. But what’s different about that time is that both right and left were fighting over public schools. They both want to control this institution that they acknowledge is really important for American society. So there’s a question of who will win and take over.

That’s basically gone right now. You have people on the right — Trump, but also lots of bloggers and podcasters and various other folks in rightwing media — saying that “government schools,” as they call them, are completely ideologically unsound and a systemic overreach of government power. Their view is that you shouldn’t have to pay taxes for these things, and you shouldn’t have to send your kids somewhere where government appointees will have control over them eight hours a day.

The solution that a lot of those folks offer is, yes, under the banner of privatization. But it’s not in the Mitt Romney way, or even the broadly understood way of advocating for private schools. There’s also been a big boom in homeschooling, and there’s a growing sense that education is a family responsibility for people to educate their own kids.

The way that is presented by Trump and other followers, is not to say, “Let’s find a way to get your kids an elite private school education.” It’s more like, “This is a time for the family to take control of raising their kids again, not outsourcing it to government bureaucrats, who are either lazy or scheming and nefarious.”

The National Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation, Inc, led by former Democratic Congressman Peter Deutsch, the Statewide Charter School Board in March, saying that Oklahoma’s law requiring charter schools to be nonsectarian qualifies as religious discrimination. 

“Many parents, both Jewish and non-Jewish, want the kind of rigorous, faith-based education Ben Gamla would provide,” said Daniel Chen, an attorney with Becket, a nonprofit law firm focusing on religious liberty. 

The earliest the virtual school could open would be the fall of 2027. 

Ben Gamla is the second religious charter school that has tried to open in Oklahoma, where Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt and former state Superintendent Ryan Walters encouraged the first online Catholic charter school. Last year, a lawsuit over St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in a 4-4 tie deadlocked over the question of whether charter schools are private and can, therefore, explicitly teach religion. That leaves the question unanswered, say supporters of religious charter schools. Similar efforts in other states, including Tennessee and California, mean there are many routes for returning the issue to the high court.

In the Ben Gamla case, U.S. District Judge David Russell, for the Western District of Oklahoma, will consider two issues. In addition to asking the court to allow the school to open while the case proceeds, Ben Gamla’s organizers also want the court to block Oklahoma families, now “intervenors” in the case, from accessing information about the school, like proposed admission and student conduct policies.

“Intervenors are going on a fishing expedition, seeking sensitive information about schoolchildren, donors and the like,” Chen said.

But attorneys representing the families, , say any planning documents should be publicly available.

“To what extent will those policies discriminate against students or employees based on religion or sexual orientation or gender identity?” asked Alex Luchenitser, vice president and associate legal director for Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. “How religiously coercive will school operations be?” 

In June, Russell granted requests from two groups of parents to intervene in the case. They argue that the school would force taxpayers to subsidize religion. Because the charter school board is not opposed to the Ben Gamla school in theory and even welcomed the lawsuit, that leaves the parents, including those whose children attend charter schools, as “the only litigants seeking to defend the constitutionality” of the state law, he wrote.

The judge is expected to rule in a few weeks, but Luchenitser said he could issue a decision on the documents sooner.

Luchenitser is also Americans United’s lead attorney on a federal case in Tennessee in which , a proposed “Christ-centered” charter school in Knoxville, is suing the Knox County Schools because the district wouldn’t allow the organizers to submit a charter application. 

U.S. District Judge Charles Atchley Jr., for the Eastern District of Tennessee, has set a trial date in that case for the week of Jan. 12. As in Oklahoma, the judge allowed a group of community members to intervene in the case when the school board said it wouldn’t take a position on Wilberforce’s legal argument. The organization says that while the state supports families who want a religious education for their children through its education savings account program, it shows “hostility” toward religious charter schools.

‘Not freestanding’

In Colorado, a over a Christian “contract” school, similar to a charter, was another potential test case for faith-based public schools, But the 30-student Riverstone Academy shut down permanently at the end of last school year after health and safety violations as its facility. The state legislature also , making the school ineligible for funding. 

In a fourth case, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled earlier this year that a homeschool program in California that operates under the umbrella of the Blue Ridge Academy charter school is still a public school, and, therefore, can’t practice religion. Parents and grandparents sued the state when officials said using public funds to purchase religious curriculum materials would violate state law. 

Liberty Justice Center, the conservative law firm representing the families, has until Aug. 20 to to the Supreme Court. 

But while supporters of religious charter schools plan their legal strategy for getting the issue back before the conservative justices, some advocates are sharpening arguments saying that charters are, without question, public schools.

According to a from the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, these schools of choice “are not freestanding private institutions.” They exist only because of state action and operate with public resources.

Kevin Welner, an education and law professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, called the paper a “valiant effort,” but one unlikely to sway the court the next time they hear a case over religious charter schools. 

The only reason the St. Isidore case ended in a tie is because Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself. While she didn’t give a reason, Barrett is close friends with a law professor who advised the school’s founders. That won’t happen a second time, and given that Barrett typically sides with those wanting on religious expression. Welner said he’s convinced that the Alliance “will lose that argument.”

Along with Carol Burris of the Network for Public Education and Preston Green of the University of Connecticut, in a policy paper that if the court ultimately rules that charter schools are private entities, such schools will not only be able to practice religion, but potentially ignore other “basic laws governing public schools,” like open meetings requirements and conflict-of-interest rules.

To prevent that possibility, the three recommend that states should have districts govern charters instead of independent nonprofit boards. This change, they said, would make charters “unambiguously governmental entities” that are “fully subject to constitutional requirements and civil rights laws.”

Watching Florida

Starlee Coleman, president and CEO of the Alliance, rejected the idea, saying their proposal “would open the door to more regulation that will basically turn charters into district schools.” The Alliance and other choice advocacy groups, like the , favor charter laws that allow for a variety of authorizers, including nonprofits.  

Meanwhile, in Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier issued stating that the First Amendment doesn’t prevent states from “encouraging” religion and that excluding religious groups from opening charter schools violates the Constitution. 

So far, the Alliance hasn’t seen any religious groups trying to launch charters based on Uthmeier’s statements, Coleman said.

“But it doesn’t mean we won’t,” she said. 

After all, Deutsch represented Florida in the House from 1993 to 2005 and that’s where he built a successful network of secular charter schools that teach Hebrew language and culture. In 2023, he told Âé¶čŸ«Æ· that if he had known education savings accounts and private school choice programs were about to take off, he would have founded a “Jewish voucher school.”

“We know there are people in Florida who are interested in advancing this issue,” Coleman said. “We are expecting that Florida could be the next state with an active case.”