About 63 percent of Ohio third graders — the grade educators have long considered the most crucial for mastering reading — scored as proficient on spring 2026 state tests, up two percentage points from 61 percent in 2025.

Statewide reading proficiency also rose for all grades combined, as did proficiency for groups of students who often struggle.

That increase is cause for optimism for science of reading supporters, who cheered the progress as the state released spring 2026 test results this week. But the evidence isn’t clear yet that Ohio’s adoption of the science of reading in 2023 has students on a consistent path upward.

Third grade proficiency is still below pre-pandemic levels. It’s also below the 65 percent proficiency third graders had just two years ago in 2024 when the science of reading was being phased in. This year’s 63 percent proficiency is right in the middle of the 2024 and 2025 results.

Large changes in test scores could take a few years to show up, reading experts nationally have told Âé¶čŸ«Æ· since the science of reading has caught on in most states, particularly with schools needing to replace books, help teachers learn new ways to teach and then have the lessons start helping students.

Other factors could be holding scores back, including teachers not embracing the science of reading fully and still using old methods as well as Ohio’s decision to drop its hotly-contested requirement that students score well in reading to advance to fourth grade.

“It’s too early to tell in my view,” said Aaron Churchhill, Ohio research director of the Fordham Institute, a nonprofit education advocacy group that backs the science of reading. “We need to keep at it and give it a few years.”

Ohio Excels, a partnership of Ohio’s chambers of commerce, called the reading gains “encouraging” and said they suggest the science of reading is starting to take hold.

“At the same time, proficiency rates remain much too low, with nearly four in 10 students not proficient in reading,” said Ohio Excels President Lisa Gray. “We cannot be satisfied when so many students are still falling short of the skills they need to succeed.” 

Ohio’s adoption of the science of reading in 2023 is a source of pride for two-term Gov. Mike DeWine, who leaves office at the end of this year. That year, Ohio became one of the earliest states to ban “cueing” — having young students figure out what a word is through context or pictures — in favor of more direct, phonics-based instruction.

The state also required all teachers to take online training in the science of reading; and for all schools to use only state-approved science of reading textbooks, workbooks and online lessons.

Though many schools had already started using science of reading methods before the law and many made the shift quickly, others moved more slowly. The 2025-26 year was the first all schools had to use it.

After third grade reading scores dropped in 2024-25, state officials and science of reading backers said last fall that spring 2026 test scores would be “pivotal.” 

Backers of the change to the science of reading had several points to crow about in test results released this week. In addition to the third grade proficiency increase, the reading proficiency rate for all grades combined rose nearly two percentage points as well, to 62 percent.

And every demographic group the state measures — such as racial groups, disabled students and low-income students — also had improved reading proficiency from last year. Leading the way were Hispanic and Black students with gains of 3.5 and 3.4 percentage points and economically-disadvantaged students with a 2.7 percent gain.

“When you look at this year’s state report cards and see what has been done in a relatively short amount of time, it is a tremendous accomplishment,” DeWine said in a press release announcing the scores.

Schools that were early adopters of the science of reading also suggest that persistence in using the science of reading, and other training and ongoing coaching of teachers, can bring results.

The Elyria school district 30 miles west of Cleveland had stagnant reading results and even a decline in 2025 scores, despite receiving an award from DeWine for its science of reading efforts. But district leaders and teachers told Âé¶čŸ«Æ· last fall they were poised for gains in 2026.

They were right: Third grade reading proficiency in that district’s five elementary schools jumped from about 45% in 2025 to about 52% in 2026.

 The district was delighted with the gains, but also cautioned keeping them going will take constant work.

“We have talked about things taking time and just what a long term process it is to implement anything, and lots of different factors we have, whether it’s staff turnover or different knowledge levels of our teachers and things like that,” said Courtney Griffiths, associate superintendent of academic services. “Yes, it’s very nice to see those results. It doesn’t mean that we back off on anything that we’re doing or we feel like it’s mission accomplished.”

Literacy specialist Andrea McKenzie said early diagnostic tests of those third graders as they started as fourth graders this school year show the improvements are persisting.

“I think it’s real,” McKenzie said. “We’re not seeing a setback
 It’s really sticking in fourth grade right now too.”

There are still reasons to be unsure if the science of reading shift is bringing sustainable results, along with the third grade proficiency rate still lagging behind 2024. Multiple reasons could account for gains, including drops in chronic absenteeism over time and students having had more time to catch up from missing school because of the pandemic.

And the science of reading isn’t achieving one of its most important goals — helping the worst students read better by giving them more explicit directions on the sounds letters make and how to decode words into something they can understand.

More third graders are scoring as “limited,” the state’s lowest rating, an equivalent to an F, than before the state passed the science of reading — 21% this year, compared to 20.9% in 2025 and 19.1% in 2023. 

The inability to help the students that read the worst bothers Fordham, which wants Ohio to bring back the “Third Grade Reading Guarantee” the legislature passed in 2012 requiring mandatory retention of third graders who can’t score well in reading. 

Churchill said that the percentage of students scoring as limited had dropped under that law in the years before the pandemic — falling from 27% in 2016 to 14% in 2019.

“(It) pushed schools to help struggling readers —now it’s gone,” Churchill said. “The science of reading holds great promise for students, but it needs to be paired with the accountability that a retention mandate brings.”

That decision won’t come until next April when the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce chooses between competing visions of how math should be taught and names textbooks and other learning materials low-scoring schools will be forced to use.

In the meantime, schools will be in a holding pattern of what lessons to use while advocates and state education officials duel behind closed doors over which approaches win out.

With Ohio’s math scores still below pre-pandemic levels, the Ohio legislature and Gov. Mike DeWine passed a law this summer that mirrors Ohio’s 2023 law mandating the use of the science of reading in classrooms by requiring schools to better track math skills and give students extra help. 

The new law also requires elementary school teachers to show they are proficient in math skills before they can teach math.

But unlike the science of reading law which sets a clear path for how schools should teach, there is no consensus — both nationally and in Ohio — on how students can best learn math, with ongoing debate nationally between a self-proclaimed science of math movement and more holistic approaches favored by many educators.

The differences in math approaches are nuanced — simplified by some as focusing on teaching concepts versus teaching procedures — and have not become a full public debate in Ohio, at least not yet.

But educators are watching cautiously as the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce follows the model of the reading law and creates a list of “high quality” math textbooks and other learning materials by April 2027.

Most schools can still pick their own textbooks, but an estimated 450 schools with low test scores will have to use only books from that list. 

The department won’t clear up concerns by saying which studies or resources will guide its evaluation of materials. Asked by Âé¶čŸ«Æ·, if the science of math was under consideration, the department did not respond, only saying it is still in the planning stages.

“It would be premature to speculate on those details,” the department told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·.

Both the state superintendents association and the Ohio Federation of Teachers union said during debate over the law they oppose letting the state, not each local district, decide what to use.

Ohio’s math teachers also object to the state taking that control.

“I don’t like the state telling me I have to use a certain textbook,” said Mike Lipnos, president of the Ohio Council of Teachers of Mathematics. 

Lipnos wants the state to follow a state math learning plan he helped create last year that prioritizes teaching math concepts and making sure students develop problem-solving and reasoning skills. But he sensed some opposition within the department to the plan and worries the state will instead approve science of math books he believes teach math as a set of procedures to memorize.

His organization has criticized the science of math as trying to “capitalize” off of the science of reading.

“We want to say clearly to all mathematics stakeholders that OCTM rejects the outdated and inappropriate instructional practices that are being repackaged and promoted as some sort of new ‘scientific’ ideology,” the group

The science of math wasn’t an issue in debate over the bill: Backers did not testify and have not made any public comment. University of Texas professor Sarah Powell, leader of the movement, also told Âé¶čŸ«Æ· she is not talking with Ohio officials to promote her approach.

The movement’s While backers favor teacher-led lessons with explicit instruction on how to solve math problems — prioritizing them over lessons on concepts that Powell has said can “ waste students’ time” — they say schools need a balance.

How schools teach reading has become a major issue nationally in the last several years, with the majority of states passing laws mandating use of phonics-heavy science of reading lessons. Low math scores on the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress then focused states’ attention on math. 

Ten states have passed policies to change math instruction just this year, said Lindsey Henderson, the senior policy director for math of the ExcelinEd nonprofit education advocacy group.

, such as having math coaches, teaching math at least 60 minutes a day, or making sure students can take advanced math classes. Alabama, an early adopter of some of the policies, leads the way with eight of the 11 approved and Ohio, as one of the ten states setting math policies this year, is also a leader in the effort, Henderson said.

But Henderson and other experts concede that math research is a few years behind where reading was when the science of reading caught on.

“Math doesn’t have a nice short term like the science of reading, and everybody knows what it means and everybody knows where to look for the research,” Henderson said.

The Center for Reinventing Public Education, another nonprofit research and advocacy group, characterized the two sides of the “math wars” as favoring “traditional” teacher-led classes as opposed to “reform-oriented” classes in which student exploration takes priority. 

In a recent survey of states, CRPE found that as of late last year 18 states and Washington, D.C., have passed math policies, “many of which emphasized priorities associated with the science of math.”

But the report notes that both sides claim to be “evidence-based,” which makes it hard to decide what’s best.

“The Science of Math has not achieved the academic and professional consensus that the Science of Reading eventually did, and the gap matters,” the report states. “Whether the field will eventually reach comparable agreement, remains unclear.”

In Ohio, the bill enacted this summer by the Ohio legislature and Gov. Mike DeWine comes as just 55 percent of students across all grades scored as proficient or better in math in 2025, while more than one in four scored at the lowest level, the state equivalent of F grades on state tests.

“This problem has not developed overnight, but its severity grows ever more prevalent as students who were knocked off track by the impact of the pandemic, or who were already struggling academically, continue to be promoted to the next grade despite showing very clear signs of needing significant intervention,” said State Sen. Andrew Brenner, the law’s author and chair of the Senate Education Committee.

The law passed this summer has drawn praise for several changes, including requiring tutoring of students who struggle, schools where fewer than 51% of third graders score proficient in math to develop a plan to improve and letting high-scoring middle school students combine seventh and eighth grade math into one year and start algebra in eighth grade.

The bill has been praised widely for calling attention to math and for taking steps to help improve math skills.

The law falls far short of Ohio’s 2023 science of reading bill in a few important ways, however. The reading bill budgeted over $160 million to pay for new teaching materials and teacher training, while the math bill provides no new money.

The reading bill also mandated that teachers learn the basics of the science of reading, while the math law only requires the Department of Education and Workforce to develop training by December.

Good training in how to teach math is considered crucial by wide-ranging advocates, including ExcelinEd, Lipnos’ math teachers association and its national organization.

The portion of the law that could lead to debate going forward — the requirement that the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce approve a list of “high quality instructional materials” in math â€” did not spark much discussion during hearings for the law.

In the end, the final law calls for all schools required to set math improvement plans — the 450 schools with fewer than 51% of students testing as proficient in math on state tests — to use only state-approved books and other materials.

And unlike with the reading law, which specifically banned some discredited teaching approaches and mandated phonics-heavy lessons, the law offers no definition of “high-quality.” The new Ohio law only requires that books help students build their math skills toward mastery.

The department declined to answer questions from Âé¶čŸ«Æ· about whether schools are using bad textbooks, whether bad books are leading to bad scores or which methods of math teaching need to be added or cut.

“That’s precisely the gap,” Steve Dackin, the department’s director told Âé¶čŸ«Æ· by email.

“Historically, the Department has not been able to collect data on math materials, and there is currently no approved list to compare materials against in Ohio,” Dackin said. “As a result, we are not in a position to characterize what districts are using.”

Dackin and the department declined to say what it would base its “high quality” judgment on, saying only that books should have “coherent learning progressions, strong alignment with standards, embedded assessments that inform instruction and help teachers identify student needs, and evidence-based strategies that create more opportunities for students to engage deeply with core concepts.”

“It’s not about stopping certain materials,” he said. “It’s about ensuring classrooms use resources that truly support strong instruction.”

Davis often heard from family and friends that Juri was smart and she should consider enrolling her granddaughter in preschool early.

And a new literacy screening at one of her granddaughter’s primary care checkups confirmed it.

In recent years, literacy has become an issue that’s extended far beyond the classroom and a child’s home, reaching government — and now hospitals.

At six of Nationwide Children’s Hospital’s 13 clinics, in Columbus, Ohio, 3 to 5 year olds are receiving reading screenings during their pediatric visits. Since 2022, more than 7,000 children have received the screenings.

“When kids come into their primary care pediatrician, if they’re coming into all of their checkups, they would come in 15 times before they start kindergarten,” said Sara Bode, medical director of school-based health at Nationwide Children’s. “That was a really opportune setting for us to really think about where we are in intervening, assessing or understanding where kids are with their literacy and supporting that from the clinic.” 

The 5-minute screenings are done annually at the beginning of a regular check up by a team of “Kindergarten Readiness Coordinators,” who are former early childhood educators and now work at the hospital.

The screening does not check for learning disabilities, but can identify some challenges with language development. The screening mainly focuses on foundational skills that are learned at home through activities like reading with a parent before bed or letter games.

By doing a small read aloud with a board book, the coordinators assess a child’s letter and shape recognition, rhyming and fine motor skills — like turning a page. Afterward, they’re able to tell parents if their child is ahead, on track or needs additional support, providing an opportunity for early intervention well before a child enters a formal classroom setting.

“We have light bulb moments. 
 One is in a good way when we do this literacy screening and the child is knocking it out of the park 
 and the parents are like ‘I didn’t even know they could do this,’” Bode said. “Another light bulb moment is when kids are struggling and parents will say to us ‘I had no idea they were supposed to know these things before kindergarten,’ and we’re like ‘That’s OK. That’s why we’re doing this now, because at the age of 3 
 you have all the time in the world.’ ”

The coordinators provide learning kits with different reading materials including magnetic letters and activity books. Coordinators maintain a relationship with families in the weeks, months and years to come, with additional resources like care coordination to get students enrolled in preschool, access to library readings and where to find adult education programs if a parent struggles with reading.

Families are given a personalized literacy plan, with checklists for parents to go over where their child is performing well and where they can improve. Check-ins after the initial screening occur a month and three months later, with updated assessments when the child turns four and five.

“Most of our parents, if you ask them, ‘What should your child know? What are those early literacy skills before kindergarten?’ they can’t really tell you,” Bode said, “So, this is just a real learning opportunity.”

For families, like Davis, the guidance is a helpful launching pad.

“I didn’t know where to start,” Davis said, adding that while she read to her granddaughter often, she didn’t feel like she “had the right materials to get her started the right way.”

“When you’re at home, you just think of things that you think the child would need to know, but with a coordinator, 
 you’re given things you should be working on. 
 It’s good to know I’m not jumping ahead or giving her too much that she doesn’t need now,” Davis said. “The screening really helped me get focused and to engage more with my granddaughter with different techniques.”

The majority of the children are from low-income backgrounds, Bode said, adding that the primary care clinic serves more than 85% of people and families who are on Medicaid or uninsured with “many kids who are really struggling on these assessments.”

“These clinics are all chosen because they’re in locations where, typically, we can tell by the school district, that a lot of the kids don’t start school ready,” Bode said.

Across Columbus Public Schools, about 64% of third grade children are not reading on grade level, according to , but hospital staff are hopeful early intervention is beginning to move the needle.

In Ohio, kindergarten students are required to take a at the beginning of the school year that measures social-emotional development, physical well-being and skills in literacy and math.

Recent data from the hospital found its first cohort of 332 students had over a 71% passage rate compared to the district’s average of 60%.

In the of Columbus, a predominately Black and low-income area, only 22% of children pass the readiness assessment on average, but children who partook in the screening process were over 70%, Bode said.

“We’re getting these kids connected because these are some of our highest risk populations,” Bode said. “We’re really seeing gains where we’re able to intervene, connect them to programs, teach parents what to do at home and it’s actually now translating to their language and literacy scores when they get to kindergarten.”

With the help of the kindergarten readiness coordinators, Juri has been enrolled in a local preschool for a year, where she’s ahead of the curriculum.

“She has grown from knowing her name to writing her full name. 
 She writes A through Z. She knows her sight words. She can write her birthday,” Davis said. “Juri has an advantage because [our clinic] saw she was ready at 3. 
 By the time she gets to kindergarten, she’s going to be ready. She’s going to be advanced.”

Bode is hopeful the screenings will expand to all of the hospital’s 13 locations and that it’ll work with national initiatives like , a program that gives children books at every pediatric visit and , which gifts kids books from birth to 5.

“There’s a big difference between not being delayed and being ready for school and thriving, and I do think there’s a gap and misunderstanding in the medical field about what is needed,” Bode said. “So this idea of mixing health and education is just so important 
 because if a kid’s not ready for kindergarten, then they are more likely to fail that third-grade reading test, then they’re less likely to graduate and their adult health outcomes are probably more affected by that than anything I’m treating in the clinic.”

Hoping to make sure high school students don’t waste time earning career credentials that won’t help them find jobs, Ohio is slashing the credentials counted towards graduation, axing easy ones that thousands of students earn, but don’t lead anywhere.

High schools nationally are increasingly encouraging students, especially those who don’t plan on going to college, to earn certificates and licenses in trades or office skills so they have a chance to earn a living after graduating. Ohio, since 2019, has made earning a credential that’s recognized by employers a key path to earning a diploma.

But concerns have grown in recent years over a mismatch nationally between what schools offer and businesses want, with one study estimating that

Criticism has increased in Ohio of schools helping students with poor academic skills use weak credentials that aren’t sought by employers as a “workaround” or “shortcut” to graduate, but give them little chance of making even $30,000 a year.

In response and at the direction of the state legislature, the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce this summer cut its list of credentials that qualify students to graduate from 164 to 70.

The list notably drops two groups of credentials — one for retail sales and one for government management of emergencies — that several thousand students use each year to graduate despite little demand from employers. In the most extreme case, about 9,000 students earned credentials wanted for just three jobs.

“This is a little bit of a game changer when we think about workforce readiness and kids coming out of K-12,” said Steve Dackin, director of the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce.

Dackin said too many students are skipping college without having a plan to make a good salary. The state needs to help these students before leaving high school, he said.

“It’s really, really important that while we have them, that they are earning the kind of credentials and skills that are going to make them employable right away,” he said.

Ohio is also tightening how students can combine more than 700 approved, but lesser, credentials to earn enough credential “points” to graduate, a tactic that one expert described as “random acts of credentialing.” That loophole let students seek easy and basic credentials scattered across different fields, such as drivers licenses, CPR and OSHA safety classes, without learning any skills deeply enough to matter to employers.

Ohio has cut that list from more than 700 credentials to 126, available only as part of 21 pre-determined “bundles” of specific credentials in five fields  — agriculture, business, construction, health care and manufacturing. Each bundle includes “foundational” credentials such as OSHA safety training, but only as first steps toward more advanced training.

Adriana Harrington, managing director of policy for ExcelinEd, a national education advocacy non-profit, said including credentials as a way to earn a diploma is a “slippery slope” that can lead to states approving too many low-value credentials.

“Ohio is a kind of cautionary tale,” Harrington said.  “The intent was very strong a few years ago
but then their list ballooned to over 700 that students could earn. I think we’re just seeing the reckoning and the pendulum shift back.”

Ohio Excels, a nonprofit created by the state’s major chambers of commerce, helped create the new list along with a way to evaluate each credential by how many students find jobs within a year, how much money they earn, whether a field is growing, and if the classes can count toward earning a college degree.

“Grappling with divining exactly what value is for an industry-recognized credential is something that the country has been asking questions about for the last 10 plus years,” said Cassandra Palsgrove, Ohio Excels’ vice president of strategic partnerships and government affairs. “Ohio is really going to take the lead on that.”

Collecting wage and hiring data to fully analyze the value of credentials are important steps all states should take, said Emily Passias, deputy executive Director of Advance CTE, the association for state directors of career technical education.

She had previously helped create Ohio’s early list when working at the since-renamed Ohio Department of Education and is glad the state is one of just a few aggressively using better data available now to refine it.

“We have to move from essentially identifying credentials based on vibes, which is what many, many, many states are doing,” said Passias. “Things would get on the list and then never come off again, and they just led to these enormous lists of credentials that were divorced from actual impact.”

“What Ohio is trying to do here is sort of right the ship and really focus on credentials that are going to create impact both for learners and for the employer community,” Passias added.

The Fordham Institute, a non-profit education advocacy group active in Ohio, also praised the changes. Fordham has reported multiple times the last few years on ways some districts, notably urban, high-poverty ones where some students struggle to graduate, have large numbers of students earning low-value credentials just to earn a diploma.

“Credentials are intended to signify students’ acquisition of technical skills and help them gain an edge in the labor market, not simply be a workaround to a diploma,” wrote Fordham’s Aaron Churchhill. “Ohio schools have discovered the easiest ones to attain and used them to get students to the finish line (and inflate their graduation rates as well as ).”That system, Churchill and Fordham’s Jessica Poiner reported, had more than 9,000 students earning RISE UP retail sales and customer service credentials in 2023 — credentials that, combined, allow students to graduate — but were sought by employers for just three jobs statewide that year.

In addition, more than 4,000 students earned a series of National Incident Management Systems credentials sought for fewer than 300 jobs that year.

In announcing the list, Dackin conceded, “we know this is going to have a large impact on graduation rates.” 

He and the department declined to elaborate on an issue  at the heart of any debate over  graduation requirements — how to balance making diplomas hard enough that they carry meaning vs. making them so hard it shuts out students and leaves them with no diploma and chance to find a job.

The department would say only that the requirements would start with freshmen entering high school this fall, so schools have time to adjust, and that schools can apply to include other credentials, though they should meet standards for pay and employer demand.

The Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati school districts, all flagged by Fordham as having large numbers of students using weak credentials, also declined to address that question directly, other than to say they support having credentials that matter and that other credentials could be added later.

Adding new credentials to the list is the likely next battleground, since districts and businesses are open to apply to include any they can show have value. Fordham’s Churchill said the state’s decision to include cosmetology licenses on the new list of standalone credentials despite low pay, raises concerns for him. He hopes the state will stand its ground, stick to its standards and keep a “clean” list.

“Vendors and industry groups with financial interests and schools looking to maintain sky-high graduation rates could urge the committee to approve their favored credential or pressure it to set a low bar,” he wrote. “If cosmetology is in, what about others?” 

Correction: An earlier version of this story was missing some words in the second to last paragraph.

Public school librarians in Ohio are raising alarms about book bans and funding cuts.

School librarians have been navigating challenges in their work as long as they’ve been among the stacks in their local districts.

Proposed legislation to filter the reading choices students can make has brought concern, and budget reductions make some worry about the future of public school librarians as a mainstay in schools.

“Right now, a lot of administrators and school boards look at having school librarians as a luxury,” said Gayle Schmuhl, president of the Ohio Educational Library Media Association. “I think a lot of school librarians (in Ohio) are just hoping to stay employed.”

Schmuhl said many members of the association were wondering about the future of their jobs with cuts to public school funding in Ohio and debate over property taxes that go to education.

Cuts to state public education has been talked about for decades, especially after multiple Ohio Supreme Court decisions that said .

In 2022, a model called the Fair School Funding Plan came about with bipartisan sponsorship, and was passed in what some saw as a new era for Ohio. The plan was to fund schools based on actual need from school district to school district.

The model almost made it through the six-year phase-in as planned, but Ohio Republican lawmakers abandoned it in the last operating budget.

While the most recent state operating budget included a $226 million increase in school funding, the Fair School Funding Plan model to maintain its initial calculations and keep up with inflation.

Lawmakers, however, increased private school voucher

Courtney Johnson was a school librarian in Columbus for 10 years, and seeing funding plans decrease for public schools played a part in her move back to teaching English.

She worried that though the funding priorities for schools hadn’t been spelled out, the cuts might mean she’d be splitting her time as the librarian in multiple district buildings.

“I’m a person who likes to have roots in a place and go to my ‘work home’ every day,” Johnson told the Capital Journal.

Johnson said returning to the classroom also means following an entire class through their year-long experience, and still means helping kids with reading and writing, two things that are among the passions that brought her to the profession.

“Every kid has a story, even if they don’t trust that they do at first, and I love making space for them to tell their stories,” Johnson said.

As a librarian, she saw the importance of parents reading to their kids, students receiving the context of other subjects in school for “full background knowledge” to help them decode the words they’re reading, and encouraging the connection between kids and books.

“We’ve known this, that when kids see themselves represented in books, they feel more connected to the books, they’re going to like reading better,” Johnson said. “Likewise, kids can see how other people live in books, and develop empathy that way.”

Part of the job of the modern school librarian is discussing material with parents that they may find objectionable enough to demand it be taken off the shelves.

Sharon Hawkes, a retired librarian who is also part of the group Right to Read Ohio, decided to survey school librarians, with the help of the Ohio Educational Library Media Association’s member list.

Of those who participated in Hawkes’ study, 56% “experienced censorship incidents” between 2021 and 2025.

While she only received responses from 32 school librarians, about 10% of the total school librarians in the state, she said the experiences were still indicative of a challenge in Ohio.

“We’re getting some clues about what’s going on,” Hawkes said, noting that because there’s no standard survey system in each state to study censorship in libraries, the count made by organizations like the American Library Association may be less than the actual amount happening across the country.

The American Library Association reported 98 attempts to censor 355 books in Ohio from 2021 to 2024, and last year, there were seven attempts to censor 129 books, according to the ALA.

Schmuhl agreed that the study was representative of the experience she’d heard of in the state.

“I did see that school librarians in our areas were being proactive and trying to have good communication within their school districts (about attempts to ban books),” Schmuhl said.

In Hawkes’ study, of the 16 censorship requests in Ohio between 2021 and 2024, eleven were “challenges without removals,” while eight resulted in a book ban of some kind, and three involved “relocations of books or other materials.”

According to the researcher, librarians use “objective criteria” in decisions about what materials are age-appropriate and relevant for the school libraries. Their training qualifies them to decide on the inventory, and to deal with challenges from parents, where the majority of material challenges came from in the study.

The majority of school librarians who responded to Hawkes’ survey had between 11 and 15 years of experience as the director or manager of their current library, and more than 62% had a Master’s degree in Library Science.

“More than anything, I wanted people to understand that parents do have the right to guide what their children read and when they read it 
 they can approach their librarians about it,” Hawkes said. “What they can’t do is ban books for other people’s children.”

For Johnson, moving back to English doesn’t mean she’ll avoid the topic of censorship.

“I think I’m going to deal with that in public schools under what we have going on right now, no matter what my position is,” she said.

The legislature approved one measure to compel public libraries to relocate “inappropriate” materials out of the sight of minors, but  as “not workable.”

Another bill still in consideration by the legislature would order that go to public libraries and schools to create protections to prevent “inappropriate” content from making it to kids’ eyes.

Opponents of the materials have said the bill could have unintended consequences, removing materials that are educational as well.

Johnson’s classroom goals include helping kids maintain reading to “get them ready for this really difficult world that we’re navigating,” and bring the parents in as part of it.

“We need to work together as parents and school communities to make sure kids are achieving literacy, and we know that having access to books at home, and at school, at their fingertips, is just the beginning of it,” she said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com.

Ohio lawmakers have passed a bill that would require schools to teach students to graduate high school, get a job, and get married — in that order — before having a baby. They call this order of events the success sequence.

 passed 58-36 during Wednesday’s House session and the Ohio Senate concurred with the changes made to the bill later that night before going on summer break.

Ohio Republican state Reps. Haraz Ghanbari, Gayle Manning, and Jason Stephens joined Ohio House Democrats in voting against the bill.

State Sen. Kristina Roegner, R-Hudson, introduced the bill, which originally began as legislation that would allow Ohio to join the Interstate Compact for School Psychologists, which allows licensed professionals to provide services across state lines.

The bill passed the Ohio Senate unanimously in November.

The Ohio House Education Committee made changes to the bill, including adding the success sequence.

“Young people are statistically far less likely to live in poverty when they complete high school, work full time, and marry before having children,” said Ohio Rep. Sarah Fowler-Arthur, R-Ashtabula.

“This gives young people tools to make informed decisions about education, work, family, and their future stability.”

The Heritage Foundation — the right-wing think tank that published — provides model legislation for the success sequence.

The bill requires the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce to have a curriculum list for the success sequence for grades 6-12 and this would be a graduation requirement.

Following these sequences of events means people are “overwhelmingly less likely to live in poverty in adulthood,” the says.

However, a found those who finish high school, work full time, and get married are less likely to experience poverty, but the order did not matter much.

“I feel like some of us must have missed the basic statistical lesson that correlation is not causation,” said state Rep. Beryl Brown Piccolantonio, D-Gahanna.

“It completely misses the fact that there are so many other explanations for why so many people struggle in life so much. 
 Teaching that graduation, then work, then marriage, and then kids equals success also leaves out all of the unique ways that people live in our state.”

, a standalone success sequence bill,

State Rep. Sean Brennan, D-Parma, shared the story of his mom who graduated high school, got a job, got married, and eventually gave up her job to raise her two children.

“Her path did not follow a fairytale outcome,” Brennan said. “She suffered horrible abuse from her husband, lost everything when he left. She’s forced to work two low-paid, non-union jobs, supplemented by public assistance to keep clothes on her kids’ backs, food on the table.”

She later died of breast cancer.

“The so-called success sequence did not save my mother,” Brennan said. “It didn’t shield her from poverty or systemic societal problems. 
 Just because some individuals who follow a certain pathway avoid poverty, it doesn’t mean those steps cause success for everyone.”

Brennan also said teaching the success sequence is one more burden on teachers.

“They’re already stretched thin, and this part of this bill adds another requirement,” he said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com.

The school lets students skip traditional classrooms and lectures if they don’t fit how a student learns best. They can work independently at their own pace, earning credit based on what they learn, not for sitting in a class all year.

Or students can leave school each afternoon to complete a paid internship, earning credit for what they learn in the workplace.

Mayfield High School, with an enrollment of 1,200 students, is one of many high schools across the country increasingly offering students flexibility to shape their class schedules and how they earn credits toward diplomas, as career demands keep shifting and students grapple with family and life challenges.

It’s an approach that has grown as students mix high school classes with early college courses or seek different ways to try out jobs and train for them, none of which fit neatly into days divided by class periods.

“Let’s be real, our students have many more responsibilities in today’s world than we did back in the day,” said principal Brian Linn added. “They may be working to support their family. They may need that internship, because they need to go right into the world of work.”

Students “live in a personalized world outside of school,” said Linn, “so we have to personalize (school) to meet their needs.”

It’s a shift that has drawn and Battelle for Kids. Personalized learning has also become a greater priority for states, including , Vermont and , while schools that adopt the approach are cropping up from Washington, D.C. to

Two new paths have taken hold at Mayfield High School with this flexibility:

• A Learn and Earn program that offers 127 of the school’s 1,200 students paid internships in fields such as manufacturing and construction. Students often pick the chance to learn on the job over being trained in a trade in a school workshop as part of a career technical education program. 
• An alternative schedule and class experience that gives students more independence, simply called The Option. It’s a mix of study hall and class time with its own open space as big as a gym where students can do as much math or English as they want each day, as long as they finish all their work each week.

“We wanted to create a self-paced option for students,” Linn said. “To be very frank, we couldn’t think of a better name for it, so we called it The Option.”

It’s a program about 20% of the school’s students choose over taking classes the traditional way, with teachers leading a lesson. The Option allows them to do classwork at their own speed, while teachers act as guides instead of lecturers. Students read materials or watch videos, then answer questions or write about the lessons independently, seeking teachers when they need help.

“Option time, for lack of a better word, is a structured study hall,” said Paige Zenovic, an English teacher who chairs the program. “It’s basically the idea that the students are with their teacher for study hall.”

Students study multiple subjects – such as math, English, history — all within The Option’s high-ceilinged study space larger than a basketball court that was once a building trades workshop. It’s now renovated for tables that seat a handful of students and with a balcony and wide staircase where students can work. 

Teachers for multiple subjects are based there, so they and students can interact whenever they are there about any option classes at any time. Lessons are given to small groups of students and sometimes just in one-on-one sessions, in this version of what some call a “flipped classroom.” 

“You just will not see a 50-minute specific lecture with 25 students in the class,” Linn said. “You’ll see one 10- to 15-minute mini lesson.”

Superintendent Michael Barnes called The Option a “fully customizable” school day that lets students pick what subjects to work on when, so long as regular assessments show they are on track in a limited form of mastery-based learning, in which students work on academic material until they know it and can show competency in it.

“We allow our students to exercise agency over their own learning so they have voice and choice,” Barnes said. “They set their schedule every single day. They can determine what they want to work on, when they want to work on and when they want to assess.”

That independence helps teach students responsibility to do their work and time management skills.

“That’s a really important piece that doesn’t typically happen in the traditional class, because everyone’s supposed to be doing the same thing,” Zenovic said.

Because The Option is voluntary, students can choose to return to traditional classes. Some do, but many continue it all through high school. Senior Giovanna Zahedi has used The Option all four years of high school because she considers lectures unfocused and rambling.

“I find it really hard to concentrate in classrooms,” she said. “I just want to get straight to the point, just finish my schoolwork.”

Sophomore Madilyn Senning splits her classes between traditional classrooms and The Option, but says she prefers The Option.

“I have a hard time focusing when they’re lecturing the whole class,” she said. “I can work ahead, because a lot of the time I get things done faster than some other people in my classroom. It’s just easier for me to get my work done.”

The Option is joined by Learn to Earn as the two most aggressive ways the school gives students choices.

The school belongs to a consortium of 10 suburban school districts that share career technical education classes such as welding and auto repair between them. But those have become so popular that 17 out of 19 CTE programs are oversubscribed and turn students away. Welding, for example, has room for 35 students but had 175 applicants this year. 

“We don’t want to have to tell a student, no,” said Deanna Elsing, the school’s director of innovation. 

“A typical high school isn’t in a position to build a million plus dollar facility
to support the needs of our students’ personalized interest,” Elsing said. “But for the bargain price of free, we can partner with local industry, organizations and businesses and they can become the classroom.”

So Elsing started recruiting local businesses to bring in student interns — and pay them. That’s rare nationally, with fewer than five percent of high schoolers doing an internship or apprenticeship before graduating, according to federal data and surveys by the American Student Assistance nonprofit, now known as Britebound.

Started with just nine students three years ago, Learn and Earn now has 127 — about 10% of the school — doing internships in fields that include welding, manufacturing and home construction.

The program is open to juniors and seniors, who spend their first semester learning workplace etiquette, doing tours of companies and hearing presentations from different businesses. They then move on to working about 20 hours a week for businesses over the next year and a half, often including summer work.

That meant the school altering its schedule so the students can take academic classes in the morning, leave by 11:45 a.m. and be at their internships by 12:15. That lets them work all afternoon, often staying after school hours to keep working until the end of the work day, as many employers requested.

The school also added training sessions for employers, not just students, before interns would start at a company.

“It’s so important for our students to be able to look someone in the eyes, shake their hand, dress appropriately, test drug free, and have those professional skills,” Elsing said. “But we found over the last three years that some of these industries have not quite yet mastered how to properly engage and train a Gen Z or Gen Alpha student. Because they are 16, 17, 18-year-olds, they’re not going to come in as polished as your college graduate is going to come in.”

Jacob Reed, 19, who graduated from the high school last May, started working for nearby Kerek Industries, a manufacturer of parts for municipal transit systems, about 20 hours a week as an intern his junior year, continued as a senior and was hired after. He now works part-time while studying engineering at the local community college.

“I’ve already been in a professional work environment for over two years now, so I know what it’s like working jobs, coming every day, knowing what’s expected of me,” he said. “I think that gives me a leg up for sure.”

The company even adjusted his work schedule to accommodate final exams and for practices and games for the school’s football team. Because he could leave school to start work around noon, he could leave at 3 p.m. for practice.

Company owner John Kerek said he knows he has to train students more than when hiring adults, but he said manufacturing companies need employees and everyone has to start somewhere.

“I expect from day one I’m going to start at the very ground-level basics of ‘This is a machine shop..this is what this machine is capable of doing
this is what we’re using it for. ..this is how we check the parts that it’s making,” Kerek said. “I’ve learned repetition is key. The more I say something, the better it sticks, and the more I let them fail a little bit, the better it sticks too.”

Senior Mackenzie Lofton has a very different internship learning how to be a project manager for a construction business through the Brookes & Henderson Building Company, a builder of luxury homes. He first tried to do the traditional construction trades program through school, but too many students applied and he was shut out.

He has no regrets. Officially, he is a laborer that does low-skill jobs at houses under construction around the region. But the company is also giving him a look at construction he’d never see in class — how to run a project.

Zak Mowry, the company’s operations manager, said schools are good at teaching students specific trades, such as carpentry, electrical or plumbing work. But schools, he said, don’t provide an overarching look at how to plan and manage all those trades to finish a home. 

So most days Mackenzie sweeps floors and moves construction materials to help skilled workers. But he is also invited to company meetings to plan houses. And every Thursday, he shadows managers as they oversee different aspects of construction, ranging from foundations to heating and cooling. The company even created a hardcover manual and workbook for interns that explains key terms for each specialty and has questions they answer after each shadowing day.

“You see all the trades come into action,” he said. “ So you see the foundation being made, you see the electrical running wires, you see the plumbing coming in, you see all the hardware coming in. All those things that are behind the scenes, you get to see out in the field that they don’t teach you in the classroom.”

Just as importantly, Mackenzie is learning management skills by watching managers navigate disputes between different trades, architects and customers on multi-million dollar homes.

“I feel like I have way more experience because I’m actually in the field, while they’re just learning in classrooms,” he said. “You’re interacting with people, getting your social skills up. You also have to be on time, so you’re becoming more responsible as a man and as a person.”

Disclosure: XQ provides financial support to Âé¶čŸ«Æ·. 

The school lets students skip traditional classrooms and lectures if they don’t fit how a student learns best. They can work independently at their own pace, earning credit based on what they learn, not for sitting in a class all year.

Or students can leave school each afternoon to complete a paid internship, earning credit for what they learn in the workplace.

Mayfield High School, with an enrollment of 1,200 students, is one of many high schools across the country increasingly offering students flexibility to shape their class schedules and how they earn credits toward diplomas, as career demands keep shifting and students grapple with family and life challenges.

It’s an approach that has grown as students mix high school classes with early college courses or seek different ways to try out jobs and train for them, none of which fit neatly into days divided by class periods.

“Let’s be real, our students have many more responsibilities in today’s world than we did back in the day,” said principal Brian Linn added. “They may be working to support their family. They may need that internship, because they need to go right into the world of work.”

Students “live in a personalized world outside of school,” said Linn, “so we have to personalize (school) to meet their needs.”

It’s a shift that has drawn and Battelle for Kids. Personalized learning has also become a greater priority for states, including , Vermont and , while schools that adopt the approach are cropping up from Washington, D.C. to

Two new paths have taken hold at Mayfield High School with this flexibility:

• A Learn and Earn program that offers 127 of the school’s 1,200 students paid internships in fields such as manufacturing and construction. Students often pick the chance to learn on the job over being trained in a trade in a school workshop as part of a career technical education program. 
• An alternative schedule and class experience that gives students more independence, simply called The Option. It’s a mix of study hall and class time with its own open space as big as a gym where students can do as much math or English as they want each day, as long as they finish all their work each week.

“We wanted to create a self-paced option for students,” Linn said. “To be very frank, we couldn’t think of a better name for it, so we called it The Option.”

It’s a program about 20% of the school’s students choose over taking classes the traditional way, with teachers leading a lesson. The Option allows them to do classwork at their own speed, while teachers act as guides instead of lecturers. Students read materials or watch videos, then answer questions or write about the lessons independently, seeking teachers when they need help.

“Option time, for lack of a better word, is a structured study hall,” said Paige Zenovic, an English teacher who chairs the program. “It’s basically the idea that the students are with their teacher for study hall.”

Students study multiple subjects – such as math, English, history — all within The Option’s high-ceilinged study space larger than a basketball court that was once a building trades workshop. It’s now renovated for tables that seat a handful of students and with a balcony and wide staircase where students can work. 

Teachers for multiple subjects are based there, so they and students can interact whenever they are there about any option classes at any time. Lessons are given to small groups of students and sometimes just in one-on-one sessions, in this version of what some call a “flipped classroom.” 

“You just will not see a 50-minute specific lecture with 25 students in the class,” Linn said. “You’ll see one 10- to 15-minute mini lesson.”

Superintendent Michael Barnes called The Option a “fully customizable” school day that lets students pick what subjects to work on when, so long as regular assessments show they are on track in a limited form of mastery-based learning, in which students work on academic material until they know it and can show competency in it.

“We allow our students to exercise agency over their own learning so they have voice and choice,” Barnes said. “They set their schedule every single day. They can determine what they want to work on, when they want to work on and when they want to assess.”

That independence helps teach students responsibility to do their work and time management skills.

“That’s a really important piece that doesn’t typically happen in the traditional class, because everyone’s supposed to be doing the same thing,” Zenovic said.

Because The Option is voluntary, students can choose to return to traditional classes. Some do, but many continue it all through high school. Senior Giovanna Zahedi has used The Option all four years of high school because she considers lectures unfocused and rambling.

“I find it really hard to concentrate in classrooms,” she said. “I just want to get straight to the point, just finish my schoolwork.”

Sophomore Madilyn Senning splits her classes between traditional classrooms and The Option, but says she prefers The Option.

“I have a hard time focusing when they’re lecturing the whole class,” she said. “I can work ahead, because a lot of the time I get things done faster than some other people in my classroom. It’s just easier for me to get my work done.”

The Option is joined by Learn to Earn as the two most aggressive ways the school gives students choices.

The school belongs to a consortium of 10 suburban school districts that share career technical education classes such as welding and auto repair between them. But those have become so popular that 17 out of 19 CTE programs are oversubscribed and turn students away. Welding, for example, has room for 35 students but had 175 applicants this year. 

“We don’t want to have to tell a student, no,” said Deanna Elsing, the school’s director of innovation. 

“A typical high school isn’t in a position to build a million plus dollar facility
to support the needs of our students’ personalized interest,” Elsing said. “But for the bargain price of free, we can partner with local industry, organizations and businesses and they can become the classroom.”

So Elsing started recruiting local businesses to bring in student interns — and pay them. That’s rare nationally, with fewer than five percent of high schoolers doing an internship or apprenticeship before graduating, according to federal data and surveys by the American Student Assistance nonprofit, now known as Britebound.

Started with just nine students three years ago, Learn and Earn now has 127 — about 10% of the school — doing internships in fields that include welding, manufacturing and home construction.

The program is open to juniors and seniors, who spend their first semester learning workplace etiquette, doing tours of companies and hearing presentations from different businesses. They then move on to working about 20 hours a week for businesses over the next year and a half, often including summer work.

That meant the school altering its schedule so the students can take academic classes in the morning, leave by 11:45 a.m. and be at their internships by 12:15. That lets them work all afternoon, often staying after school hours to keep working until the end of the work day, as many employers requested.

The school also added training sessions for employers, not just students, before interns would start at a company.

“It’s so important for our students to be able to look someone in the eyes, shake their hand, dress appropriately, test drug free, and have those professional skills,” Elsing said. “But we found over the last three years that some of these industries have not quite yet mastered how to properly engage and train a Gen Z or Gen Alpha student. Because they are 16, 17, 18-year-olds, they’re not going to come in as polished as your college graduate is going to come in.”

Jacob Reed, 19, who graduated from the high school last May, started working for nearby Kerek Industries, a manufacturer of parts for municipal transit systems, about 20 hours a week as an intern his junior year, continued as a senior and was hired after. He now works part-time while studying engineering at the local community college.

“I’ve already been in a professional work environment for over two years now, so I know what it’s like working jobs, coming every day, knowing what’s expected of me,” he said. “I think that gives me a leg up for sure.”

The company even adjusted his work schedule to accommodate final exams and for practices and games for the school’s football team. Because he could leave school to start work around noon, he could leave at 3 p.m. for practice.

Company owner John Kerek said he knows he has to train students more than when hiring adults, but he said manufacturing companies need employees and everyone has to start somewhere.

“I expect from day one I’m going to start at the very ground-level basics of ‘This is a machine shop..this is what this machine is capable of doing
this is what we’re using it for. ..this is how we check the parts that it’s making,” Kerek said. “I’ve learned repetition is key. The more I say something, the better it sticks, and the more I let them fail a little bit, the better it sticks too.”

Senior Mackenzie Lofton has a very different internship learning how to be a project manager for a construction business through the Brookes & Henderson Building Company, a builder of luxury homes. He first tried to do the traditional construction trades program through school, but too many students applied and he was shut out.

He has no regrets. Officially, he is a laborer that does low-skill jobs at houses under construction around the region. But the company is also giving him a look at construction he’d never see in class — how to run a project.

Zak Mowry, the company’s operations manager, said schools are good at teaching students specific trades, such as carpentry, electrical or plumbing work. But schools, he said, don’t provide an overarching look at how to plan and manage all those trades to finish a home. 

So most days Mackenzie sweeps floors and moves construction materials to help skilled workers. But he is also invited to company meetings to plan houses. And every Thursday, he shadows managers as they oversee different aspects of construction, ranging from foundations to heating and cooling. The company even created a hardcover manual and workbook for interns that explains key terms for each specialty and has questions they answer after each shadowing day.

“You see all the trades come into action,” he said. “ So you see the foundation being made, you see the electrical running wires, you see the plumbing coming in, you see all the hardware coming in. All those things that are behind the scenes, you get to see out in the field that they don’t teach you in the classroom.”

Just as importantly, Mackenzie is learning management skills by watching managers navigate disputes between different trades, architects and customers on multi-million dollar homes.

“I feel like I have way more experience because I’m actually in the field, while they’re just learning in classrooms,” he said. “You’re interacting with people, getting your social skills up. You also have to be on time, so you’re becoming more responsible as a man and as a person.”

Disclosure: XQ provides financial support to Âé¶čŸ«Æ·. 

A new bipartisan bill would require more transparency for Ohio private schools receiving Education Choice and Education Choice Expansion vouchers.

Ohio Sens. Kent Smith, D-Euclid, and Bill Blessing, R-Colerain Township, recently introduced , also known as the Take the Dough, We Gotta Know Act.

“The key point with this piece of legislation is that if you are going to take state dollars, there has to be a degree of transparency and oversight,” Blessing said.

“This is a cornerstone of conservative philosophy in this state, where we have a program 
 and we have oversight over something like that. This is no different.”

The bill would require Ohio’s auditor to audit the funds of each school that is using EdChoice and EdChoice expansion vouchers each fiscal year.

The Ohio Department of Education and Workforce would be required to create a report card for chartered non-public schools in order to “hopefully get an apples-to-apples comparison,” Blessing said.

Schools accepting EdChoice vouchers would have to submit weekly attendance records, conduct criminal background checks of its employees, report the tuition and fees charged by the school in a five-year cost trend, report how many of their students have an Individualized Education Program, and publish their dropout and graduation rates.

“The current voucher system is doing two things — providing tuition coupons for wealthy Ohio families to be able to send their children to private schools, and it’s underfunding Ohio’s public school districts with drastic ramifications for Ohio students,” Smith said.

Lawmakers increased the EdChoice expansion eligibility to 450% of the poverty line in 2023 through the state budget — creating near-universal school vouchers.

This means K-8 students can receive a $6,166 scholarship and high schoolers can receive a $8,408 scholarship in state funding under the expansion.

Ohio spent more than a for the 2025 fiscal year, the second full year with near-universal eligibility. Nearly half of the money — $492.8 million — was from the EdChoice expansion.

“Why on earth would we spend billions of Ohioans’ hard-earned money on schools that don’t have to provide that level of transparency and accountability — it doesn’t make any sense,” said Ohio House Minority Leader Dani Isaacsohn, D-Cincinnati. “It’s what taxpayers deserve, that there would be accountability and transparency into all schools that receive public dollars.”

Students in some counties don’t have the option to attend a private school.

“Many of us barely know what vouchers are because we simply don’t have private schools,” said Ohio Rep. Justin Pizzulli, R-Scioto County. “Our best schools are our only schools, and those schools are public schools.”

Carroll, Champaign, Hardin, Harrison, Holmes, Meigs, Morgan, Noble, Preble and Vinton counties had .

Pizzulli said rural Ohio is frustrated with how schools are funded.

“We see our tax dollars supporting a voucher system that largely benefits areas with access to private schools, while communities like mine receive no or little practical benefit at all because those options don’t exist,” he said. “When vouchers were expanded, many of us were told, well, private schools would begin magically appearing and popping up all over the state, that simply has not happened.”

Nonpublic Ohio schools had 181,244 students enrolled in fiscal year 2025 — a 4.6% increase compared to fiscal year 2024.

“What frustrates us is seeing our taxpayer dollars increasingly flow towards families who already had the means to afford private tuition, and so we’re just asking for fairness,” Pizzulli said.

The lawmakers stressed Ohioans deserve to know how their tax dollars are being used.

“The taxpayers deserve to know where the money is going, who is benefiting, and whether the investment is producing results,” Pizzulli said.

Cleveland Heights Teachers Union President Karen Rego said her district is expected to lose $7 million over the next two years in layoffs and other cutbacks.

“I don’t know where that’s going to happen, we feel very stretched thin already, and to lose staff members that we’ve lost this year, and the possibility of losing more next year is a really tough pill to swallow,” she said.

Rego is not against people choosing what school they go to, but wants to see more accountability as far as how the taxpayer money is being spent.

This bill is being introduced late in the General Assembly — any bill that does not pass before the end of the year must be reintroduced in the new General Assembly to be considered.

“If it goes nowhere in this General Assembly, or even next, that isn’t the point,” Blessing said. “We have identified a major problem here. We also have a solution.”

Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman, R-Lima, questioned how serious the senators are about this bill since they waited until now to introduce it.

“Once that money goes to those private organizations, we don’t audit that, and I think if we’re going to come up with a scheme where something like that would happen, we need to make sure that the privacy part of it for people — kids and families going to school, and the people running the school — all of those things are intact,” he said.

More than 300 public school districts are suing over EdChoice. A trial judge ruled last summer that the program was unconstitutional, but a this month before the 10th District Court of Appeals.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com.

Thousands of Ohioans were in line to get a break on their massive childcare costs. Then the Trump administration .

has gone final and is expected to take effect July 13. Some Ohio families will the be hardest hit in the United States.

In the midst of an already-existing affordability crisis, the government on Tuesday reported that inflation had . The spike has been driven — and before that by .

At the same time that Trump last summer , he . Trump and Republicans in Congress also allowed healthcare subsidies to expire, which is .

In the midst of all that, the administration moved in January to scrap a 2024 attempt by the Biden administration to cap the cost of childcare for families making $77,000 or less a year. The Trump administration did that by proposing a rule that goes beyond the 7% cap.

“The rule rescinds the requirement to cap childcare copayments at 7% of household income, rolls back the use of grants and contracts for care that the market doesn’t readily provide for (like care for infants, toddlers, and kids with disabilities), rescinds prospective payments to providers and also enrollment-based pay, which risks destabilizing provider payment schedules, since they rely on predictable, reliable payments to cover fixed operating costs,” Hailey Gibbs of the Center for American Progress said in an email.

by her organization showed that some Ohio families will be hardest hit by the loss of the benefit. The researchers estimated that without the 7% cap, some eligible Ohio families are paying as much as 27% of their income on daycare.

For the maximum-earning family of three, that’s $1,700 a month. Under the Biden cap it would have been $452.

In other words, some Ohio families will now have to pay nearly $15,000 more for childcare than they otherwise would have. That’s nearly $4,000 more than the next-closest state, Vermont, the analysis said.

An extra bill of that size would plunge a huge number of Ohioans into poverty.

of government data earlier this year found that a $15,000 surprise expense would swamp the resources of single-earner, median income household of four in the Buckeye State.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com.

A recently added carveout to a math interventions bill would exempt some Ohio schools from teaching the science of reading curriculum — despite a statewide mandate.

Lawmakers in the Ohio House Education Committee recently approved changes to that would excuse Ohio’s classical schools from having to teach the science of reading, which is based on of research that shows how the human brain learns to read and incorporates phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.

“This legislature and the governor placed a major emphasis 
 on science of reading to great effect, and now is not the time to start carving out loopholes for certain schools,” said Devin Babcock, senior legislative director for ExcelinEd in Action.

Ohio school districts were required to starting with the 2024-25 school year after the law took effect in 2023 through the state’s two-year operating budget.

The budget gave $86 million for educator professional development, $64 million for curriculum and instructional materials and $18 million for literacy coaches.

“We’ve held the line as a state for the last few years, as have all the other states that have made this move,” Babcock said.

“If you’re a public school taking public money, then let’s do the best thing for kids and use the science of reading that we’ve adopted here as a state.”

have passed laws or implemented new policies related to evidence-based instruction since 2013, according to Education Week. the second-worst state for fourth-grade reading in 2013 to being ranked 21st in 2022 after implementing science of reading policy.

that follow the K-12 curriculum of Hillsdale College, a Christian liberal arts college in Michigan.

Some tenets of include teaching Latin and a close reading of Western classics, among other things, according to Hillsdale College.

Ohio S.B. 19 — which passed in November — originated as an academic intervention bill to help students who score below proficient on state assessment tests.

The bill would allow a public school student who scored below proficient in a state assessment test in math or English language arts to receive academic intervention services at no cost.

The Ohio Education Association testified in opposition to the bill in March,

“The bill is well-intentioned, but the details matter,” OEA President Jeff Wensing said in his testimony. “These tests provide useful information, but classroom educators have more information about a student’s knowledge and abilities in the subject.”

The bill would require school districts or individual schools to come up with a math achievement improvement plan if 51% or less of the district or school’s students who took the third-grade math achievement assessment scored at least a proficient score on the assessment.

Under the bill, schools would be required to develop math improvement and monitoring plans for each student that qualifies for math intervention services within 60 days after getting the student’s third-grade assessment math results.

A math improvement and monitoring plan would identify the student’s “specific math deficiencies,” describe the additional instructional services they will receive, offer a chance for their parent or guardian to be involved, outline a monitoring process and offer high-dosage tutoring at least three days a week.

“From the experience of Reading Improvement and Monitoring Plans (RIMPs), I can tell you that this is an onerous task that will often fall on classroom teachers,” Wensing said in his testimony. “Educators’ time is in too short supply to add more paperwork, administrative tasks and exercises in compliance.”

Ohio Sen. Andrew Brenner, R-Delaware, introduced the bill, which has had five hearings in the Ohio House Education Committee.

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But now, in the wake of a new focus among Ohio lawmakers on supposed fraud in the state’s childcare system, they are on the verge of ditching the idea altogether. A under consideration would require providers to be paid based on attendance rather than enrollment as they are by parents who pay out of pocket.

In December, conservative YouTuber Nick Shirley posted a video claiming to uncover widespread fraud in Minnesota’s childcare program, particularly among daycare centers run by Somali American residents. The video went viral and reached federal officials, and the Trump administration cited it as motivation to pursue an and various efforts to restrict federal childcare funding. Despite the video offering no verified evidence of fraud — and the fact that the state was several cases of fraud in its childcare system — some states have responded by intensifying their focus on supposed fraud. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott agencies to launch investigations into childcare fraud, while Idaho’s Department of Health and Welfare heightened reviews of funding. (The reviews found of providers guilty of any wrongdoing.)

Shirley’s video sparked an immediate reaction in Ohio, according to Tamara Lunan, a childcare organizer with the Ohio Organizing Collaborative. The state has the Somali American population, just behind Minnesota. in Columbus, Ohio claimed centers were receiving public funding for nonexistent children even though evidence at least two of those claims. According to the at The Ohio State University, just 0.43% of all the providers who accept vouchers through the state’s publicly funded childcare program were found to be misusing funds in 2025. In a of 124 complaints sent to the state’s Department of Children and Youth last year, the agency found no evidence of fraud in 100 of them.

In January, Ohio lawmakers two proposals — House Bills 647 and 649 — they said were aimed at combatting fraud in the state’s publicly funded childcare system.  

Marquita McClendon, who has operated a childcare program in Cincinnati since 2023, acknowledged that fraud exists. “But I feel like the systems that we already have in place already do the job necessary,” she said. “We’re changing laws over an unsubstantiated claim. It’s just beyond me.”

The state made some changes ahead of implementing the new enrollment-based payment system that have led to sacrifices for providers. It a requirement for counties to use presumptive eligibility, which allows families to receive childcare vouchers if they already qualify for another program like food stamps, and allows parents to enroll immediately once they get a new job, rather than waiting weeks for their paperwork to be approved. Some providers accept children into their programs during that interim period anyway, Lunan said, but often aren’t paid for all of that time. The state also reimbursement rates for some types of in-home providers and increased the threshold for children to qualify as full time, which allows providers to be reimbursed at a higher rate. 

“There were things taken away from us,” McClendon pointed out. With those reductions, she’s making $10,000 less each month, she said. “We’re in the red.” The loss of revenue has meant she can’t buy new equipment for the children in her care or do field trips this summer as she normally would. “I can’t run an effective program,” she said.

If providers were paid based on enrollment, it would help them weather children’s absences for illness or snowstorms, “things that providers can’t possibly be able to plan for when they’re making their budgets,” Lunan said. It “would help to stabilize the programs.” Instead, “Providers are hemorrhaging income based on these changes,” she said. “It’s killing their bottom line.”

Reversing the decision to pay based on enrollment is just one of the changes included in the legislative proposals Ohio lawmakers have put forward in the name of fighting fraud this year. Some others have since been toned down or removed. initially that would have given the state’s Department of Children and Youth the power to cut off funding or suspend a license for any provider merely suspected of fraud, waste or misuse of dollars without a hearing. That language has since from the bill; now those actions can be taken if “evidence demonstrates” that a provider knowingly engaged in fraud or misuse of funds. But providers remain concerned about lawmakers giving the attorney general more power to prosecute perceived fraud, which in the bill. 

“We don’t want to see childcare providers get penalized because the state made an overpayment to them,” Lunan said. Both overpayments and underpayments are included when states calculate their payment error rates, and those can be due to the state government’s error, not providers acting with ill intent. Her organization is pushing for the state to create a committee made up of childcare providers that could distinguish between clerical errors and actual, intentional fraud. 

The original proposal for , introduced by Republican lawmaker Josh Williams, would have mandated the installation of cameras in all childcare programs that receive government funding to “allow visual inspections in real time,” . It would have given the Department of Children and Youth the ability to view the footage at any time. McClendon pointed out that she has diaper changing stations in her classrooms. “There’s no way to protect my children’s privacy,” she said, calling the idea “a bit extreme.”

While that idea has since been abandoned, lawmakers have adjusted the bill to facial recognition for children who attend programs that receive public funding. Such technology won’t work on young children, particularly infants, given how rapidly their faces are developing and changing, McClendon and Lunan pointed out. McClendon also noted the challenge of keeping kids still long enough to take a photograph. Lunan pointed out that there is already an existing mandate for programs to have an attendance system in place that takes pictures of parents when they sign children in.

An made to that bill the storing of photos of the children. But many parents are still opposed, Lunan said: a against mandating facial recognition has been signed by nearly 900 people. 

Lawmakers are also reducing the time given for allowing a child to be checked in retroactively, if their attendance was originally missed, from 30 days to seven. “That would be a tremendous hardship,” Lunan said, on both providers and the parents who are the ones who have to go into the system and fix the problem.  

The legislation calls for spending up to over two years on data analytics to detect patterns of fraud or abuse. The facial recognition proposal alone would be “expensive for the state and providers, diverting scarce public dollars and provider time away from care itself and toward unnecessary surveillance infrastructure,” said Ali Smith, senior project coordinator at Policy Matters Ohio, . Lunan agreed. “We don’t need funds to come out of childcare,” she said. What Ohio childcare providers need instead, she said, is more funding, not less. “Providers are not defrauding the system. They are barely breaking even — most providers are in the red,” she said. “The conversation really needs to shift from fraud to funding.”

The anti-fraud bills “would just destabilize childcare, or destabilize it further, because it’s already unstable,” Lunan said. 

Our home state of Ohio has put substantial energy into actively promoting credentials through various policy levers. For example, high school students can use state-approved credentials to meet certain graduation requirements, and schools receive credit in the state’s accountability system when students attain them. In the most recent state budget, policymakers renewed a that incentivizes those approved credentials that related to state-identified “high-priority” careers such as advanced manufacturing and construction. With these incentives in place, attainment in Ohio has from 53,000 credentials earned by the class of 2019 to 170,000 by the class of 2024. 

But which of these credentials truly add value for students? 

A new examined the labor-market value that various credentials have for Ohio students. In general, credentials are associated with substantial expected wage increases in the early years after high school (almost $2,000 higher earnings in the first year after graduation). However, we found widely differing wage returns depending on field, with male-dominated careers in the skilled trades linked to larger income benefits. Students attaining manufacturing-related credentials, for instance, typically earn about 35% more than their non-credential-earning peers with similar backgrounds.

On the other hand, we also discovered that many credentials yield little to no economic value for students. For example, we found no significant differences in the annual incomes of students earning a nurse’s aide or culinary certificate six years after high school compared with peers who did not attain a credential. A few credentials, such as a cosmetology certificate, were even associated with reduced earnings after students leave high school.

Our findings lead to some important insights about how states can more effectively leverage industry credentials.

First, policymakers should not view credentials as an isolated indicator of career readiness, but rather as a key element within an integrated career pathway. In addition to finding variable wage returns by field, our study revealed that students who both attain credentials and complete a sequence of career-technical coursework reap larger wage returns than students who attain only a credential or do not participate in any career-focused education. This suggests that states’ accountability systems should count students as career-ready only if they both complete coursework and obtain an aligned credential.

Second, states must be selective about which credentials they approve and, in turn, incentivize. Here in Ohio, the credentials that provide the strongest and most enduring wage gains — lasting into people’s mid-20s — are linked to the transportation, manufacturing and construction industries. By contrast, credentials across a dozen other career fields provide no enduring wage returns. Policymakers should prioritize credentials that yield strong long-term economic payoffs. They should also be wary of approving credentials that lack a clear link to a specific occupation — for instance, a basic job-safety certificate versus a certified welder license — or those that might inadvertently encourage students to pursue low-paying jobs with limited opportunities for advancement. 

Third, states should create robust frameworks for valuing credentials. Our study focused primarily on wages, which ought to play a central role in systems that identify “high-value” credentials and promote their attainment through policies such as targeted funding. Yet pay isn’t the only factor to take into account. How well credentials align with employers’ needs and labor market demands should also be a priority, because while wages and employer demand for a credential often overlap, that is not always the case. For instance, credentials linked to health care or education might pay modest starting wages but could also lead to employment that opens doors to a better-paying job later on. Policymakers should create tiered systems that place more value on credentials that are both high-wage and high-demand, and then provide secondary consideration to those that meet only measures of industry demand.

Ohio illustrates the promise and pitfalls associated with incentivizing credentials through policy initiatives. On the one hand, more students than ever are earning credentials that might give them an edge in the job market. On the other hand, the state has also struggled to pin down the value of credentials and maintain stringent quality control in the face of proliferating attainment rates.

All students should leave high school with the knowledge and skills needed for their next steps. To support this, make sure industry-recognized credentials benefit students and overall economic growth.

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and Department of Education and Workforce Director Stephen Dackin have announced the launch of a statewide Attendance Dashboard in an effort to combat chronic absenteeism in K-12 public schools. 

Over 25% of Ohio students were chronically absent last year, missing nearly one month of school. 

A student is considered chronically absent in Ohio when they miss at least 10% of the minimum number of hours required in the school year, including excused and unexcused absences, according to the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce.

The dashboard announced last week is an that compiles self-reported data from districts and schools across the state, aiming to assist administrators, parents, and taxpayers in identifying trends in attendance patterns down to the grade level.

It will update weekly as more schools report their data. 

The dashboard is organized on a trend line that allows users to see the weekly percentage of statewide absenteeism. It can be viewed from the district down to grade levels of individual schools, with customizable features comparing specific absentee rates.

Dackin said this feature was designed with the intention of allowing districts to learn from each by these comparisons. 

The launch comes after DeWine’s emphasis on improving the lives of children during his address. During his final stretch in office, the dashboard is seemingly another step towards rounding out his agenda. 

“When students are not in school they are not learning, and the consequences are significant,” DeWine said. “Chronic absence isn’t just a school problem, it is a community problem, it is a state problem. It is also a parent problem.”  

Ohio is the second state to have a system that updates so frequently, Dackin said.

While districts and schools are not mandated to share their data, he said the more information that is provided will allow administrators to identify the root causes of chronic absenteeism, as they can widely differ between grade levels.  

“This helps communities understand the interventions needed at a particular grade level, and what kind of supports would be necessary based on the age group of young people,” Dackin said. 

As of last week, 24% of Ohio’s districts and schools’ data is unreported, including Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland Public School Districts, who have some of the highest rates of chronic absenteeism.

“We’re working actually with a lot of those districts,” Dackin said. “We do not have a unified data system in this state, so one of the challenges we have is there are different data systems that have to talk to this system. Many of these 24% districts, we are actively working with them to solve and resolve those technical problems.”

DeWine pointed to East Cleveland City Schools as a prime example of the benefits of attendance tracking, who used its attendance data to proactively reach out to chronically absent students and their families, which reduced its chronic absenteeism by over 10%.

He said the tracking also helped them identify key reasons why students were absent, including transportation barriers, health issues and difficult home situations.  

“We urge every school in Ohio to join the dashboard,” DeWine said. “The more data each school and community have the more innovative and collaborative they can be to solve this huge problem in Ohio.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com.

The science of reading is being taught in classrooms across Ohio, but the state’s education department stresses it will likely take time to track students’ progress.

The Ohio Department of Education and Workforce is particularly interested in tracking the progress of the current kindergarten students.

“This year’s kindergartners will be the first class that all four years going up to third grade, they’re going to get the science of reading,” state education department director Stephen Dackin said to the Capital Journal. “That’s a pretty good barometer of where we will be as a state in terms of our implementation and then increased outcomes in literacy.”

Ohio’s science of reading law took effect in 2023 through the state’s two-year operating budget, which gave $86 million for educator professional development, $64 million for curriculum and instructional materials, and $18 million for literacy coaches.

Ohio school districts were required to teach the science of reading curriculum starting with the 2024-25 school year. The science of reading is based on of research that shows how the human brain learns to read and incorporates phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

“While we are certainly making great progress, this is not easy,” Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine said earlier this month during his state of the state speech. “Retraining seasoned teachers, who were taught the wrong way and now have to learn new methods, is certainly an exercise in perseverance. This shift takes time.”

Ohio’s literacy scores were down from last year, with 61.3% of third graders reading at or above grade level compared to 64.5% from the 2023-24 school year, according to the most recent that were released in September.

“The report card data is lagging data, so it reports on data from the previous school year, and obviously, not all districts have probably been at the point where they’ve implemented the science of reading in their districts last year,” Dackin said.

He said the education department is not surprised by a dip in performance.

“Sometimes you’re asking teachers who’ve been teaching reading for 20 years to suddenly change what they’re doing and implement something that’s new to them,” Dackin said. “We know it takes a while to do this. That doesn’t mean there’s not a sense of urgency in our state, but we also anticipate that folks are going to need some support in helping to implement.”

have passed laws or implemented new policies related to evidence-based instruction since 2013, according to Education Week. the second-worst state for fourth-grade reading in 2013 to being ranked 21st in 2022 after implementing science of reading policy.

College prep programs

A unique facet of Ohio’s science of reading law is the third-party audit of teacher preparation programs.

“Our law is the toughest in the country,” DeWine said during his state of the state speech.

Ohio colleges and universities teacher preparation programs were required to be fully aligned with teaching the science of reading by Jan. 1, 2025, but 10 colleges were found to be not aligned, according to an .

Bowling Green State University, Central State University, Cleveland State University, Defiance College, Ohio Christian University, Ohio Dominican University, Ohio University, Ohio State University, University of Toledo, and Wright State University were not in alignment.

Ohio State University had , the most of any university, according to the audit.

“My concern is how seriously Ohio State is taking this process,” Ohio House Rep. Tom Young, R-Washington Township, said during a recent Ohio House Workforce and Higher Education Committee.

“By the way I look at it, you’re not taking it very seriously at all,” he said. “Things hang in the balance here, and I’m very serious about this, and I’m not going to play games with it.”

Erik Porfeli, professor and interim dean of Ohio State’s College of Education and Human Ecology, said the university is taking this seriously.

“We mobilized quickly and addressed all 17 (issues),” he said.

Binaya Subedi, professor and interim chair of Ohio State’s Department of Teaching and Learning, said there has been professional development with faculty every week this semester.

“We are concerned,” he said. “After the audit report, we have systematically reorganized our curriculum.”

Any college or university that does not become fully aligned by next December will have their approval revoked by Ohio Department of Higher Education Chancellor Mike Duffey.

“We need all universities in compliance or we risk incongruity of literacy outcomes throughout the state for our kids,” Ohio House Rep. Tracy Richardson, R-Marysville, said during a recent Ohio House Workforce and Higher Education Committee.

“Ohio State, you cannot drag on this issue. We will be following up.”

Five colleges and universities were found to be partially in alignment and 33 higher education institutions were found to be in alignment, according to the audit.

“I have confidence that every college will be in full compliance by the end of this year,” DeWine said during his state of the state speech.

Having educator training programs be compliant with the science of reading means school districts won’t have to retrain teachers, Dackin said.

Parents for Reading Justice and OH-KID President Brett Tingley said holding the universities responsible is real accountability.

“Our literacy crisis does not begin in the classroom—it begins in teacher preparation programs,” she said during a recent Ohio House Workforce and Higher Education meeting.

“When a child learns to read, you change the trajectory of that child’s life, and when a state gets reading right, you change the trajectory of the state itself.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com.

Ohio received a bump in funding for child care last week, a small win in a sector that is still facing uncertainty and an affordability crisis.

Analysis by advocacy group Groundwork Ohio shows at more than $9,500 per year for preschool-age care, more than $11,000 per year for toddler care, and more than $12,000 a year for infant care.

The Ohio Department of Children and Youth was awarded $14.7 million in federal grants “to support access to early care and education services,” according to a press release from Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine.

The federal funding comes from the Preschool Development Grant – Birth to Five, distributed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

“This funding will help Ohio better support families and make sure young children have access to quality care and learning opportunities during their most important years,” DeWine said in a statement.

The state said the money will be used to upgrade technology and research, help early childhood education workers with curriculum development, professional learning opportunities, and “business support resources.”

A total of $250 million was distributed through the federal grant program, and Ohio’s director of the Department of Children and Youth, Kara Wente, said the grant would allow the state “to build on the work already happening in communities across the state.”

“By improving coordination and planning, we can make it easier for families to find the services they need and ensure young children get a strong start,” she said in a statement.

The state General Assembly approved funding for child care through its most recent budget, with funding going to the Child Care Choice voucher program and a pilot cost-sharing child care model.

But advocates were disappointed when eligibility for Publicly Funded Child care was left at 145% of the federal poverty level, despite pushes to raise the level to 160% or 200%.

Programs to provide state grant funding for recruitment and child care provider mentorship went down from previous budget drafts, ending up with $2.85 million in funds over the two years of the budget, .

Lynanne Gutierrez, president and CEO of child advocacy group Groundwork Ohio, has said Ohio faces after one-time federal dollars fade away for good in 2028.

State child care advocates have been pushing the federal government to bring current and further funding to the sector.

They have around the country to urge the government to continue funding the Child Care Development Block Grant, along with $10 billion in funding that was frozen in certain states after fraud allegations about Minnesota child care facilities were circulated by a right-wing YouTuber earlier this year.

The funding freeze for Minnesota and other states was blocked temporarily by a federal judge in January, but the lawsuit in which the ruling was made continues.

As funding comes and goes, the cost of child care continues to balloon, and a lack of access and affordability is costing the country billions, according to a new analysis by ReadyNation, a research group partnered with the Institute for Child Success.

The study, released this week, showed insufficient child care for children younger than 5 costs the U.S. economy $172 billion per year in “lost earnings, productivity, and economic activity.”

It showed a $5.3 billion economic impact for Ohio alone.

“Challenges mount over time: with less training and less experience, these parents face diminished career prospects, reducing their earning potential,” the study stated. “And less parent income, along with parental stress, can have harmful short and long-term impacts on children.”

National polling also shows bipartisan support for further child care support and changes to the system.

A poll conducted in the beginning of January on behalf of the national First Five Years Fund showed 80% of voters find the ability to find and afford child care as “either in a state of crisis or a major problem.”

The polling also showed 75% of participants believe child care funding should be increased or at least kept at current levels, with 75% of Republicans, 97% of Democrats, and 85% of independents giving that opinion.

A majority in all political parties polled said funding for child care “is an important and good use of tax dollars.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com.

A panel of economists says that schools in Ohio aren’t producing workers that match employers’ needs.

The state’s labor force has declined by 91,000 between 2000 and 2020, the survey said. During that period, the state’s education system has changed markedly.

Since Republican John Kasich became governor in 2011, Ohio has diverted billions from traditional public schools. Ranked in K-12 education the year before Kasich took office, Ohio schools by 2023.

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Ohio also created such as the , which collapsed in 2018. The state couldn’t verify the politically connected school’s claims of student enrollment, much less whether kids were learning anything.

The state also is now spending in taxpayer money on private schools, while the state’s traditional public schools last year saw their .

In the midst of these radical changes to the Ohio’s education system, it still is not adequately preparing students to join the workforce, economists surveyed by Scioto Analysis said.

Eighteen were asked whether they agreed that “Misalignment between Ohio’s education and workforce training systems and employer skill demands is limiting statewide job growth.” Eleven agreed, three disagreed and four were uncertain or had no opinion.

In the comment section of the survey, David Brasington of the University of Cincinnati said that Ohioans tend not to have gone very far in school. He added that even when they train for certain jobs, their training and the jobs available to them often don’t match.

“Ohio has pretty low educational attainment compared to other states, and even 40% of Ohio workers trained for manufacturing jobs tend not to get manufacturing jobs within a year, consistent with a mismatch of skills and demand for skills,” Brasington wrote.

Educational attainment — or how far people go in school — can be important to employers in several ways. Some need students to go far enough to attain a basic education and possibly vocational training. Others need workers who have been to college.

U.S. News and World Report puts Ohio at in its rankings of educational attainment — well into the bottom half of states.

Bill Lafayette, an economist with Regionomics, said schools and employers need to work closely to address the problem.

“Based on my work with educational institutions, linkages between these institutions and business need to be enhanced,” he wrote. “It has always been important for graduates to leave school with the work-ready skills (communication, responsibility, integrity, leadership, teamwork, etc.) that can spell the difference between success and failure in a career. But now with the pace of technological change, schools need to keep up with the rapidly evolving needs of business, and graduates need to recognize that they must keep their skills current or run the risk of irrelevance.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com.

For some programs, the promise of incoming funding will be enough to restart operations. But many won’t be able to open their doors until they receive their federal dollars, which could take up to two weeks, said Tommy Sheridan, deputy director at the NHSA. 

Sheridan said the Trump administration understands the urgency and is “moving as fast as they possibly can.”

That said, this interruption had an opportunity cost, and it’s led to instability for families and providers, he said, adding that the shutdown caused staff to focus on issues they “should not be worried about,” such as fundraising and contingency planning.

Some providers fear greater delays since the Trump administration shuttered half of the Head Start regional offices earlier this year. 

“They’re going to be working as hard as they can, but they’re going to be doing it with half the capacity,” said Katie Hamm, former deputy assistant secretary for early childhood development under President Joe Biden.

And even once the funding comes through, closed centers will need to go through a series of logistical hurdles, including reaching out to families who may have found alternative child care arrangements and calling back furloughed staff, some of whom have found employment elsewhere. 

“Head Start is not a light switch,” Hamm said. “You can’t just turn it back on.”

This interruption has also further eroded trust between grantees and the federal government that was already shaky, she added.

The Administration for Children and Families did not respond to a request for comment on when programs can anticipate communication from the office or their funding.

Since Nov. 1, approximately 65,000 kids and their families — close to 10% of all of those served by Head Start — have been at risk of losing their seats because their programs had not received their awarded funding during the longest government shutdown in history. The early care and education program delivers a range of resources to low-income families including medical screenings, parenting courses and connections to community resources for job, food and housing assistance. 

At the peak of the Head Start closures, roughly 10,000 kids across 22 programs lost access to services, according to Sheridan. A number of the remaining programs were able to stay open through private donations, loans, alternative funding streams and staff’s willingness to go without pay.

Valerie Williams, who runs a Head Start program with two facilities in Appalachian Ohio, was excited to tell parents that classrooms would be reopening soon. Her centers have been closed since Nov. 3, impacting 177 kids and 45 staff, many of whom already live paycheck to paycheck, she said.

A number of families were doubly impacted, losing access to Head Start’s resources as well as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP, simultaneously. In the days leading up to the closure, Williams and her staff prepared families as best they could, sharing information about resources for food, assistance for utilities and heating and guidance on child care options. 

On Thursday, Williams wrote to parents via an online portal that she hopes to restart the normal school schedule sometime next week. The post was quickly flooded with comments. 

“This is super exciting!!” wrote one parent. “Best news in a long time. Carter has been asking every day. Hope to see u guys very soon.”

“Yayyy,” wrote another. “The kids miss you guys so much!”

Still, Williams knows reopening won’t be seamless. Along with program leaders across the country, she’ll need to call back furloughed staff, place food orders and handle a number of other operational challenges.

And despite the excitement, the transition back may also prove tricky for some kids.

“I do think that it will feel like starting school again for a lot of our classrooms,” Williams said. “They’ve been out for two weeks 
 You’re going to work on separation anxiety issues, you’re going to have to get into that routine again and the structure of a classroom environment. So I think that will be a big issue for a lot of our teachers.” 

As of Friday afternoon, Williams was still awaiting communication from the federal Office of Head Start with information about the anticipated timeline for next steps. 

“As soon as we get that notice of award, [I want to] start our staff and kids back immediately,” she said. “The very next day.”

Now that the shutdown has ended, what’s next for Head Start?

Funding for Head Start is complex. Some 80% comes from federal grants that are released to local providers on a staggered schedule throughout the year. This year, grant recipients with funding deadlines on the first of October and November were left scrambling, as the federal shutdown dragged on.

The government began to resume operations late Wednesday night after President Donald Trump signed a bill, funding through Jan. 30 and allowing programs that didn’t receive their funding on time, including Head Start, to use forthcoming dollars to backpay expenses incurred over the past month and a half.

Here’s what Hamm predicts will happen next: The Office of Head Start will recall all staff to resume, including those who were furloughed during the shutdown. The employees will review grant applications, a process which requires them to flag any language that might be reflective of diversity, equity and inclusion practices. Next, money will be sent along to the remaining regional offices, and eventually dispersed to individual grantees. The NHSA is hopeful that this process will be completed by Thanksgiving for all grantees.

There are two things the federal government can do to help centers open faster, according to Hamm. First, they could waive a typical protocol that leads to a period of seven days between when a member of Congress is notified that their state will be receiving funding and when the funding actually goes out, Hamm explained. 

Officials could also notify grantees, in writing, about how much money they’ll get and when it’s expected to come through, so they can begin planning. 

Unlike SNAP, which received guaranteed funding through the budget year, money for Head Start remains uncertain beyond Jan. 30. While the fear of another shutdown has caused “quite a bit of worry” among the Head Start community, Sheridan said it would likely lead to fewer program disruptions, since it wouldn’t fall at the start of the fiscal year.

To prevent similar chaos moving forward, Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin introduced in the final days of the shutdown that would guarantee uninterrupted service for fiscal year 2026. 

“The 750,000 children and their families who use Head Start shouldn’t pay the price for Washington dysfunction,” Baldwin, the ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee for Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies, wrote in a statement to Âé¶čŸ«Æ·.

Multiple funding threats and deep staffing cuts by the Trump administration over the past year have plunged programs across the country into uncertainty. In the wake of that recent upheaval, a leadership change is also underway. The acting director of the Office of Head Start, Tala Hooban, accepted a new role within the Office of Administration for Children and Families and will be replaced by political appointee Laurie Todd-Smith, according to an email statement from ACF. Todd-Smith currently leads the Office of Early Childhood Development, which oversees the Office of Head Start. 

Sheridan described this move as anticipated and not particularly concerning, though others were less sure. Joel Ryan, the executive director of the Washington State Association of Head Start, noted that Hooban was a longtime civil servant and strong supporter of the Head Start program. Without her, he fears “there’s nobody internally with any kind of power that will push back,” on future threats to the program.

Another worry plaguing providers: current funding for Head Start has remained stagnant since the end of 2024, meaning that through at least Jan. 30, programs will be operating under the same budget amid rising costs across the board.

In previous years, the program’s grant recipients typically got a cost-of-living adjustment, such as the bump ($275 million) for fiscal year 2024. In May, a group of almost 200 members of Congress signed to a House Appropriations subcommittee, requesting an adjustment of 3.2% for 2026. A recent statement from NHSA suggested that instead, the proposed Senate bill for next year includes a jump of just , or $77 million.

“If we don’t see a funding increase in line with inflation, that means that Head Start will be facing a cut of that degree,” said Sheridan. “It’s just kind of a quiet cut, or a silent cut.”

“I think what will end up happening,” said Ryan, “is you’ll end up seeing a massive reduction in the number of kids being served.”

Public school districts have two options. They can sit back and hope the pendulum of support swings back to public education, or they can use increased competition as a driving force for innovation to best serve their students’ specific needs.

In Worthington, Ohio, where I became school superintendent 11 years ago, the district has embraced school choice as an opportunity. Serving students in a diverse, inner suburb of Columbus, hit its in 2025, without boundary or population shifts. Families are choosing neighborhood public schools despite an abundance of alternatives, and the community continues to invest in modernizing district facilities. 

The lessons learned demonstrate that public schools not only continue to matter to families, but they can set benchmarks for excellence in today’s competitive education landscape.

parents lean toward school choice is that they are searching for more rigorous and challenging learning experiences for their children. To remain competitive, districts need to think beyond the traditional classroom and create academic and extracurricular opportunities that fit students’ learning styles, interests and goals.

For instance, the allows Worthington’s second-semester high school seniors to complete their education in real-world settings, from working alongside business leaders to backpacking across Europe.

offers a mastery-based learning environment that emphasizes taking intellectual risks and reframing mistakes as learning opportunities. A key component of the program is Phoenix’s Connections class, a writing course that deepens students’ critical thinking skills across all core subjects. Teachers encourage inquiry by asking open-ended questions and posing thought experiments, helping students develop basic techniques of analysis, organize arguments and evaluate evidence, and learn how to engage one another respectfully in sustained discussions of current ethical and social issues.

Expanding to appeal to every student’s interests is a tall order on a small budget. However, keeping kids busy with positive learning experiences and connected to school and friends prevents them from filling their time with less favorable activities. Through a combination of community funding and participation fees, Worthington has expanded its extracurriculars offerings to include 33 varsity sports, a variety of music programs and 70 clubs. 

Because real learning happens through relationships, the district has also focused on ensuring that all students know they have an identified, trusted adult within the school system who cares for and believes in them. This one-on-one connection is a clear expectation for every member of the school community, whether they are a teacher, coach, nurse, custodian or other staff member. This individualized attention and support shifts the narrative that public schools can’t provide the personalized experience parents want for their children.

As centerpieces of their neighborhoods, Worthington schools host a variety of community activities, including art shows, Fourth of July fireworks displays and civic events, while sports stadiums and running tracks are open for use by the public. By building these connections, Worthington has in turn fostered essential public-private partnerships. Some of the area’s largest employers, including Worthington Industries, Honda of America, Abbott Laboratories and Columbus State Community College, work with the district to provide on-site job training. Students gain critical career skills, while businesses develop a strong workforce built on local talent, ensuring the region remains an economic powerhouse.

Because Worthington’s relationships with local residents don’t end when their children graduate, there is greater community support for essential capital projects. Over the past few years, Worthington has passed multiple levies and launched a three-phase, 15-year master facilities plan to renovate decades-old buildings into modern learning environments that align with diverse student needs. To secure buy-in from the community, the district has maintained complete transparency and engaged families throughout the planning process.

Between 2017 and 2021, Worthington redesigned four middle schools, and in 2022, voters passed a bond issue to rebuild a 1950s-era high school. Through the support of the community, today’s students enjoy bigger and better classrooms, children with special needs or English learners have access to more flexible learning spaces, and the community itself has new multipurpose rooms for public gatherings and events.  

In today’s competitive education market, when families see firsthand how deeply a community cares about the long-term success of a school district and the funds it is willing to invest in their children’s education, they are more likely to make public school not just their first choice, but their only choice.

The national debate around struggling student enrollment assumes public schools are in decline. Worthington’s experience shows there is another path. Public schools can grow, adapt and remain central to the community when they stay rooted in values, relationships and responsiveness. It’s up to forward-focused school and community leaders to rethink K-12 education and help public schools reclaim their status as the best option for families.

But this Monday, she won’t have a classroom to go to.

That’s because the ongoing government shutdown has forced her Highland County, Ohio, program to shutter, impacting 177 kids and 45 staffers. Across the state, at least three providers will close their doors, cutting off services to at least 1,000 young children and employment to 286 Head Start workers.

And Ohio is not alone. In all, 134 programs across 41 states and Puerto Rico serving are at risk of closing Monday morning as federal funds expire this weekend. Since the beginning of October, an additional six Head Start programs serving 6,525 children in Florida, South Carolina and Alabama have been operating without federal funding, drawing on emergency local resources to keep their doors open. 

In total, these approximately 65,000 kids account for close to 10% of all of those served by the early learning and child care program for lower-income families.

News of their Head Start program’s closure has hit Price’s community in the Appalachia foothills particularly hard.

“I had a parent come up and grab me and hug me and she cried and I cried,” she said. “You know, a lot of parents really rely on our program. It’s pretty much invaluable in our county.”

Sarah Allen’s family is among those feeling the pain. Her 3-year-old daughter Hallie attends Head Start while Allen, a former Head Start teacher herself, works on obtaining her state teaching license and substitute teaches at the local school to make extra money. Her husband is a firefighter.

Starting next week, they’ll both have to work fewer hours to stay home with Hallie, creating financial hardship for the family.

“I can’t work if I don’t have a babysitter and prices keep going up for everything — and food costs are crazy,” said Allen, who is also worried about the interruption to her daughter’s education.

Many Head Start families could face a double blow, losing access to the program and food assistance on the same day, with funds for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP, set to run out Saturday as well. An infusion of contingency funding from the White House earlier this month for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, also known as WIC, is expected

About 50 miles south of Highland, right along the Ohio river, sits Scioto County, another Appalachian stretch, parts of it so rural that some communities don’t have stop lights. Come Monday morning, Head Start classrooms across 10 centers in the region — serving 400 early learners and infants — will shut down and all 100 staff members, 60% of whom are former Head Start parents, will be furloughed. 

Communities in , leaving many kids to be raised by grandparents or other family members, who are heavily reliant on Head Start programming, said Sarah Sloan, early childhood director of the county’s Community Action Organization. Other parents are in recovery themselves, she added, and lean on Head Start to provide a safe and stable place for their kids.

Their programming is where families already under stress come to get help, she said. 

Despite this, the reception to the grim news that classrooms would close — from both families and staff — â€has just been so generous,” Sloan said Wednesday, her voice cracking.

“I have not heard one negative word from our parents. They have said things like, ‘We are in this together. We understand. We hate it for your staff. We’re worried.’”

Some states find last-minute funding, others don’t

Âé¶čŸ«Æ· spoke with over a dozen Head Start Association presidents, providers, teachers and parents in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Missouri, Ohio and Washington, the six states with the largest number of seats at risk.

Some states, such as Ohio and Washington, are bracing for imminent closures, but others, such as Missouri and most of Georgia, have been able to access other sources of funding, giving them a runway of a week or two. This means that where a young child lives will determine whether or not they have a staffed classroom in a few days and if their families can access the range of other resources Head Start offers, from health care services to parenting courses.

While each state faces it own challenges, a few universal themes emerged: an assertion that even if local Head Start organizations are able to scrape together enough funding to keep their doors open, it will only be temporary, extending access for a few days or weeks; fear that the borrowed funds to stay operational may not be reimbursed once the federal government reopens; and concern that low-income families will lose access to food assistance at the same time. 

Head Start, which turned 60 this year, provides children at least two meals a day. All of this is setting off alarm bells about the unprecedented nature of the government crisis and the devastating effect it will likely have on the country’s most vulnerable families.

They will begin feeling the blowback from D.C. this weekend, as some parents are forced to choose between caring for their kids and showing up for work.

Funding for Head Start is complex. Some 80% comes from federal grants that are released to local providers on a staggered schedule throughout the year. Grant recipients with funding deadlines on the first of October and November are now scrambling, as the second-longest federal shutdown in history heads into its fourth week.

While there this week, Senate Republicans and Democrats have repeatedly failed to come to an agreement on a funding bill. Democrats are that have allowed millions of people to access health care since the pandemic, while Republicans say they won’t negotiate until Congress passes a bill to reopen the government. 

President Donald Trump has with cuts so far, though interruptions to Head Start funding would impact thousands of families across the political spectrum, with some of the severest programming losses falling on red states.

This has all compounded existing financial strain on local programs, many of which have struggled to hire and retain teachers, according to the National Head Start Association. It also follows multiple funding threats and deep staffing cuts by the Trump administration that have plunged Head Start programs across the country into chaos and uncertainty this year. 

‘These are actual people’

No state has more seats at risk than Florida, with 9,711. While the majority of centers across the state will be able to remain open through the first two weeks of November, at least one program in West Palm Beach serving children of migrant families and seasonal workers will be forced to shutter this weekend, according to Wanda Minick, executive director of the Florida Head Start Association. The closure will impact 386 children and 283 staff across six centers, she said.

Minick wants Congress and the president to understand, “These are not just data points. These are actual people.”

In neighboring Georgia, policymakers were preparing to potentially close centers serving 6,499 children and infants, until a last-minute, bridge loan from The Community Foundation of Greater Atlanta’s Impact Investing Fund came through The $8 million means that three major providers, serving 5,800 kids, will remain open for at least 45 days, though that leaves hundreds of others throughout the state still in a lurch. 

Juanita Yancey, executive officer of the Georgia Head Start Association, expressed her gratitude for the money while emphasizing that it’s only a stopgap measure.

“Time is running out,” she said. “Programs are doing everything possible to keep their doors open, but they cannot run a program on reserves or goodwill. Every day of inaction is another day of uncertainty for families who count on Head Start services.”

“This shutdown is pushing programs to the breaking point when children and families can least afford it,” she added.

The bulk of Head Start seats in Missouri also appear to be safe — at least for now, according to Kasey Lawson, director of the Mid-America Regional Council, which serves 2,350 kids across 17 providers. Though that still leaves about 1,500 seats unaccounted for. 

For Lawson’s 17 providers, the choice to remain open is both temporary and a risk, she said, since the centers don’t have that money “just sitting in the bank,” and they fear they won’t receive backpay once the federal government does reopen.

Lawson said they’ve asked legislators, members of Congress and the federal Office of Head Start, which is under the Department of Health and Human Services, to guarantee reimbursement as they have in the past, yet “nobody’s willing to do that. And so it is the reality of where we sit right now, that it is a true risk that all of our agencies are taking.”

And even though most Head Start families in Missouri will have a place to send their kids Monday morning, many may still face a significant burden as at least 1,100 rely on expiring SNAP benefits.

In North Carolina, where 4,697 seats are at risk, at least one center will be forced to close this Friday, said Terry David, president of the state’s Head Start Association. Classrooms that are based in the local school district should be able to remain open through the end of the calendar year, he said, but that only accounts for about 140 kids.

Across the country, in Washington state, at least one program in the city of Vancouver, which serves at least 175 kids, will close this weekend. Another in the same region, The Margaret Selway Early Learning Center, will remain open through Nov. 7, but each day beyond that is uncertain, according to Nancy Trevena, chief strategy officer at the Educational Opportunities for Children and Families.

Kimberly Gusey’s foster son, Ranger, is a student at Margaret Selway and is especially dependent on Head Start services. The program was able to secure a one-to-one certified nursing assistant for Ranger, who has cerebral palsy, is nonverbal and is fed through a G-tube. 

“It’s amazing,” Gusey said, her voice breaking. “It brings me to tears how much they’ve done for us.”

If the program closes next week, Gusey’s husband will have to quit his job as a mechanic to care for Ranger.

“We’re talking a large amount of money not coming into our home, but we’re willing to do that because we love these children,” she said. “But in so many ways it affects us. Not [just] the pocketbook. The routines for the kids. The routines for us. Everything is affected by this.”

Even with millions spent on new textbooks, and teachers required to take online science of reading training, third grade English Language Arts proficiency fell from 62% in spring of 2023 to 61% earlier this year.

A jump in 2024 to 65% proficiency turned out to be a mirage, as third graders fell right back again last school year.

It’s still unclear whether the scores are cause for alarm or just a as Ohio joins the flood of states shifting to phonics-heavy lessons to help students decode and understand words better. Some supporters of the science of reading believe small gains should happen almost immediately, even if it takes longer for large improvements statewide.

“We haven’t seen much progress yet,” said Chad Aldis of the Fordham Institute, one of the advocates of adopting the science of reading. “This is disappointing.”

Others urge patience, with some districts that adopted the science of reading early, saying they are on the verge of students showing improvements.

In the Elyria school district about 30 miles west of Cleveland, educators are hoping their patience will soon pay off. 

Andrea McKenzie, Elyria literacy specialist acknowledged that scores haven’t improved since the district switched to the science of reading in 2022. But she said this year’s third graders, the first to be using the new curriculum since kindergarten, are on track for an 11 point jump in proficiency rates, according to scores on standardized progress tests.

“This is the moment I have been waiting for,” McKenzie said. “I’ve been waiting for these students to get to third grade to see this through, so I feel like this is the year.”

Though most schools adopted the science of reading right after DeWine started his push early in 2023, Ohio law gave schools until this fall to fully make the switch. Teachers need time to adjust and embrace a new approach. And even Mississippi, whose “miracle” reading gains are the model for Ohio and other states, took a few years before making gains that caught notice.

“Last school year, we had districts who were in very different places in their implementation of science of reading,” said Chris Woolard, chief integration officer of the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce. “We had some of those early adopters that have been doing this for a few years. We had others who are (still in) early stages.”

He stressed that this ongoing school year is the first that all schools must be fully using the science of reading, a “really important” consideration when evaluating results

Melissa Weber-Mayrer, Ohio’s chief of literacy, said this year is “pivotal” since schools now have to be fully using science of reading, but she also cautioned that it could be three to five years before scores grow statewide.

“Looking locally, we will see things start to move,” she said. “But it might be in a grade level, in a school, maybe in one elementary building within a larger district.,” she said.

Elyria, a district of just under 6,000 students, could be one of those pockets. The district’s four elementary schools were named Science of Reading Champions by DeWine last spring for quickly adopting materials and instruction, even as that district’s reading scores are still not rising.

Third grade reading proficiency in that district fell from 45.8% of students in 2023 to 43.8% on state tests this spring.

But the district has been pushing hard to adopt the science of reading, with the school board voting in 2022 to shift to the Core Knowledge Language Arts curriculum and start using it that fall.

The district had 34 teachers start two-year Language Essentials for Teachers of Reading (LETRS) training — a program many consider the gold standard of science of reading — in 2022, with 30 more starting in 2024 and another 22 starting this school year.

The district also hired two literacy specialists in 2022 to help the one already there work with teachers on reading lessons and with students that need extra help.

The change now has kindergarten teacher Lindsay DeCoster giving students focused lessons on letters, their sounds and how to move their tongues and teeth to pronounce them.

“In the past, we have been skipping over this part
 like they don’t need to know how to rhyme, they don’t need to know initial sounds and things like that,” DeCoster said. “If you don’t understand how your mouth needs to look and what your mouth needs to do to make those sounds, then you’re not gonna be able to.”

DeCoster, now in her 17th year as a teacher, said LETRS training improved her teaching immensely.

“I just didn’t know what I didn’t know as far as everything that really goes into teaching a child how to read,” she said. “We’ve now broken it down to the smallest, smallest component.”

With so many states adopting the science of reading in just the last few years, experts were unable to point to many strong studies showing how fast scores change after adopting the science of reading. That’s partly because districts and schools adopt new curricula, add coaches, and train teachers at different speed and intensity, often varying within a single school, as in Elyria.

But Stanford University professor Thomas Dee, who studied how low-performing schools in California improved using that state’s Early Literacy Block Grants, said changes can happen quickly if classroom methods truly change too.

He found that low-performing California students improved by about a third of a year’s worth of learning over two years, after changing the curriculum, training teachers,and adding tutoring and afterschool programs using the grants..

“I think it’s reasonable to expect measurable improvements in student literacy to follow fairly quickly on the heels of evidence-aligned changes in teacher pedagogy,” Dee told Âé¶čŸ«Æ·. “The major concern I have is that state declarations for the Science of Reading may not translate quickly—or indeed ever—into responsive changes in classroom practices.”

Teachers, he said, can fall back into old practices of having students “guess” at words using context or pictures – practices that Ohio banned in its 2023 state reading law – but which can’t be tracked.

Aldis also noted that Ohio is not gaining in another important way that can show progress — whether lower-scoring students are doing better and closing the gap to becoming proficient. Fordham reported last month that the opposite is happening. More third graders are scoring as “limited,” the state’s lowest rating, an equivalent to an F, than before — 20.9% this year compared to 19.1% in 2023.

One factor, Aldis said, could be Ohio dropping its requirement in 2023 that third graders must read well to advance to fourth grade, which motivated students and teachers to show gains on a deadline. 

Casey Taylor, the literacy policy director for ExcelinEd, the education advocacy group formed by former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, worked on reading efforts in the early days of Mississippi’s shift, as well as in North Carolina, which started a similar push in 2021.

She said Mississppi saw some gains in schools that used literacy coaches extensively within two years, but she cautioned, “It still took several years before we really started to see those performance levels shift at a broad, systemic approach.”

Mississippi, the second-worst worst state in reading when its literacy campaign launched in 2013, didn’t really excel for six years, she said.

“We saw some gains in the 2015 NAEP, but it wasn’t until 2019 that the nation really took note, because that was the first time we reached the national average on fourth grade reading,” she said.

North Carolina, she said, has started seeing gains on standardized progress tests teachers give their students, but not on tests like the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) yet.

Though he wants to see faster improvement in Ohio, Fordham’s Aldis agreed with Taylor in one major way – making real gains takes a long-term commitment. 

Ohio, Aldis said, has a history of abandoning improvement projects that don’t show quick results and moving on to something else.

“These reforms are just too important to follow that same path,” Aldis said. “We need to stick with it.”

More Ohio students are being homeschooled now than during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The number of Ohio students being homeschooled was trending upward pre-pandemic, spiked to about 51,500 students during the COVID-19 pandemic and dipped back down slightly.

But homeschooling recently saw another surge with about 53,000 homeschooled students during the 2023-24 school year, according to data from the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce.

The number of homeschooled students in Ohio, according to the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce:

• 2023-24: 53,051 students
• 2022-23: 47,468 students
• 2021-22: 47,491 students
• 2020-21: 51,502 students
• 2019-20: 33,328 students
• 2018-19: 32,887 students
• 2017-18: 30,923 students

There were about 3.1 million homeschooled students nationwide in 2021-22 — quite the jump from 2.5 million in spring 2019, according to the.

“Homeschooling was already on a slightly slower upward trajectory, and had been for a number of years,” said Douglas J. Pietersma, research associate at National Home Education Research Institute. “What COVID did, from our perspective, is just infused it.”

He expects the number of homeschooled students to keep growing.

“It’s not going to put public schools out of business or anything like that, but it’s going to be a slow growth that is certainly going to be measurable over time,” Pietersma said.

Remote learning during the pandemic made parents become more aware of what was being taught in schools, said Melanie Elsey, Christian Home Educators of Ohio’s legislative liaison.

“I don’t think that it was a mass exodus from the public or private schools into homeschooling, but for parents who felt like they could accomplish more with one-on-one attention to learning 
 You can tailor the education to meet the needs of their children,” she said.

Not everyone who switched to homeschooling stayed after the pandemic, Elsey said.

“Some of them put their children back in because it was too much of a commitment,” she said. “So I think it was sort of a time period that parents felt comfortable trying something different to see if they could help their children learn more.”

The modern home education movement sprung out of the 1970s and “skyrocketed” in the 1980s, Pietersma said.

“People were either upset with the quality of education in general,” he said. “Then another group of people, it was more about the content of education.”

Today there are many reasons why a family might opt for homeschooling.

“Obviously, the quality of education is still one of the big issues,” Pietersma said. “Safety issues are a huge thing. People who have had their children in schools where they’ve been bullied or assaulted or had exposure to drugs 
 given the size of school, it may be not impossible to prevent some of those things.”

The reason for homeschooling varies and it is not always because a family is not satisfied with their local school district, Elsey said.

She homeschooled her children, but did not originally think it was for her family. However, she changed her mind after she enjoyed being home with her children through their preschool years.

“We prayed about it and really felt like it was something that was worthwhile,” Elsey said.

Jeannine Ramer has homeschooled her four children — two are now in college and two (ages 17 and 13) are currently being homeschooled.

“Homeschooling has really strengthened our family relationships, my kids are very, very close and supportive of one another, and I think that’s all of the hours spent at home and just really learning together,” said Ramer, who lives in Alliance.

They were not initially planning on homeschooling their children, but Ramer’s sister-in-law homeschooled her children and encouraged them to think about it as their oldest approached preschool age.

They decided to try it for a year or two, but found it worked well for their family.

“We loved it,” Ramer said. “We’ve had the ability to tailor each child’s education to that child.”

A parent does not need to be a licensed teacher in order to homeschool their children, Elsey said.

“It’s amazing how well families do because they have access to resources, really, all over the world, when you can get curriculum from anywhere that meets the needs of your students to learn to pursue their interests,” she said.

Families who decide to homeschool their children enjoy the flexibility, Pietersma said.

“They can tailor the education that they’re providing to their child in so many ways that an institutional school can’t just because of sheer numbers,” he said. “One teacher in a classroom with 30 students can’t take the lesson plan and tailor it to each of the 30 students.”

Ramer’s oldest child was interested in printing and design work as a teenager, so they were able to craft his high school education to those areas. Now he is studying industrial and innovative design in college.

“It just allowed us the ability to foster that,” she said. “There was much more flexibility.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com.

This is largely because the transfer process is inefficient and not designed for non-traditional students. Students who transfer after earning an associate degree often lose significant credits and must retake courses, which is a considerable barrier to earning a baccalaureate, or bachelor’s.

Community colleges could be a big part of the solution by expanding their capacity to offer bachelor’s degrees in fields that are in high demand in their regional labor market, and by doing more to help students transition to four-year colleges.

Today, over 200 community colleges in 24 states offer more than 736 . The focus on business, health care and nursing, education, information technology and other areas that address shortages in these and other fields. The bachelor’s degrees conferred by the community colleges typically cost about half the tuition charged by four-year public colleges. The programs help award four-year degrees to many underserved college students, keeping them close to home, putting them on pathways to good jobs and helping communities thrive.

At MiraCosta College in San Diego, for example, college leaders learned from biotech industry partners such as Pfizer and Abbott Labs that they needed more employees with a bachelor’s degree in biomanufacturing production. After coordinating with four-year college partners, MiraCosta created the first-ever community college biomanufacturing bachelor’s degree program conferred by a two-year college.

The program not only has significant employer buy-in and a 93% completion rate, but it also provides equitable opportunities to students. About two-thirds of MiraCosta’s biomanufacturing graduates are women (62%), two-thirds are non-white (64%) and 20% are the first in their family to attend college. The school is clearly meeting an industry need, employers are engaged, and together they have created a pathway to good-paying jobs in an expensive region of the country. Likewise, graduates of similar baccalaureate programs delivered by community colleges nationwide are 50% people of color and 64% female.  

In northeast Ohio, Lorain County Community College has offered 100 bachelor’s and master’s degrees on its campus for nearly 30 years as part of a voter-approved

University Partnership that includes 13 colleges and universities. The degrees — in everything from biology, human resources, nursing, public safety and respiratory care to computer science and supply chain management — and include the kind of personal attention, career guidance, tutoring, writing instruction and nonacademic assistance with child care, transportation and food that are more common at community colleges than at four-year institutions.

But state officials recognized that more community college baccalaureate degrees were needed to fill talent gaps in emerging fields in the state. Lorain County Community College was given permission to launch an applied bachelor’s degree in microelectronic manufacturing, to prepare workers in fields such as advanced manufacturing, automation, aerospace and biomedical technology.

In the first two years, students spend three days a week working in paid internships and two days in the classroom. They graduate with an associate degree and up to two years of real work experience, then enter the bachelor’s degree program already holding a full-time job, often by the company where they interned. 

The college also launched a bachelor’s degree program to prepare technicians and engineers who are helping companies digitize and automate their operations, integrating robotics, control systems, machine learning and cyber-physical systems into modern factories. More than 100 companies have offered internships, advised on curriculum and committed to hiring graduates. 

But making baccalaureate programs available where they are needed is only one aspect of what community colleges do. Achieving the Dream, the reform network of more than 300 community colleges, includes more than 50 that offer baccalaureate degrees. These colleges are making it easier to transfer to four-year degree programs by creating better advising and support so students can move seamlessly from adult learning programs that provide certificates but not degrees; dual enrollment programs in which high school students also earn college credits from community colleges; and associate degree programs that lead to four-year degrees. 

These community colleges are also working to connect their students and graduates to programs and careers that pay a family-sustaining wage. In focusing on areas from which people from similar demographics have previously been excluded, the schools are sparking upward mobility.

The debate over who and where bachelor’s degrees should be offered is too often driven by institutional priorities and policies set in the past. As jobs increasingly require a bachelor’s degree and employers continue to seek skilled workers, and as too many high school graduates and employees neither master new skills nor earn a living wage, it is time to shift the discussion from what type of institution offers a bachelor’s degree to their programs’ costs, benefits and value to students, employers and communities. 

Community colleges can play a central role in helping graduates achieve a bachelor’s degree. States and all colleges should support these low-cost, high-value degree pathways. 

Whether that ruling — from a Democratic judge in a county-level court — survives appeals to the Republican-dominated Ohio Supreme Court will be the real test. 

If it stands, the ruling would cut off the $700 million Ohio now pays for 140,000 students to attend private, mostly religious schools, through its EdChoice voucher program. Voucher opponents, who say EdChoice takes away money from school districts, hope the money will now go to public instead of private schools. 

EdChoice makes up nearly 90% of Ohio’s voucher programs by giving students and schools nearly $6,200 a year each through eighth grade and $8,400 for high school.

In a late June ruling, Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Jaiza Page found that EdChoice, once a small program limited to only low-income students or those at schools with low test scores, has expanded so much after Ohio opened it up to any student in 2023 that it violates parts of Ohio’s constitution calling for the state to fund “a system of common schools.” 

In the EdChoice case, filed by school districts against the state in 2022, Page agreed that the vouchers, which are used mostly at religious schools that can choose who they accept and what they teach, have created a second, parallel school system that’s selective, not common.

“In expanding the EdChoice program to its current form, the General Assembly has created a system of uncommon private schools by directly providing private schools with over $700 million in funding,” she wrote.

Page, though, recognized that EdChoice has grown so fast that ending it would cause “significant change to school funding in Ohio.” She held off ordering EdChoice to shut down until after appeals, even as she ruled against it.

Yitz Frank, a suburban Cleveland rabbi and president of School Choice Ohio, vowed to appeal Page’s ruling. He praised her, though, for delaying ending the vouchers just a few months before the start of a new school year. 

“You would essentially have well over 100,000 students lose their scholarships,” Frank said. “Tens of thousands of them would have no ability to even figure out how to possibly make those tuition payments. I’m sure there are some more middle class families that might be able to figure it out with great sacrifice, but it would be pretty devastating for the families.”

The ruling, if upheld, is high stakes for Ohio, but will have little impact on vouchers in other states because it centers on language in the state constitution and falls under state courts. 

It’s the latest, however, in a string of state court findings against state aid for private school tuition, including in and , where a bid to change the state constitution to allow state money to pay for private schools also failed.

The case is also significant because Ohio’s voucher program is among the largest in the country. Ohio spends the fourth-most of any state on private school tuition assistance, relative to total state spending on education, , the nonprofit school choice advocacy group.

Florida leads the way, with just over 10% of state spending on education going to private school tuition through vouchers, tax credits or related Education Savings Accounts. Arizona is close behind at 7% and Wisconsin at 5% before Ohio and Indiana follow at around 3.7%.

Voucher opponents, though, hope EdChoice clears appeals and ends soon. They disagreed that cutting off vouchers would be so harmful to families, noting that many sent their children to private schools without vouchers until the Republican majority in the legislature lifted income limits over the last few years.

“Taxpayers are being ripped off,” said Dan Heinz, a school board member of the Cleveland Heights-University Heights school district, the district historically most affected by EdChoice. “Wealthy families that have always used private schools and afforded private schools are now having that tuition subsidized by much poorer families.”

Smaller Ohio voucher programs, including two for students with disabilities and one only for Cleveland residents, are not part of the case. The Cleveland program is well-known as the center of the 2002 U.S. Supreme Court case Zelman v. Simmons-Harris that allowed vouchers to be used for students to attend religious schools.

Page also ruled that Ohio’s requirement for “common schools” means that public schools, the “common” ones, should be fully funded. She agreed with districts that the state legislature has not met that mandate, particularly by under-funding the planned phase-in of the “Fair School Funding” formula it passed in 2021.

“The state provides hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to private schools through EdChoice while at the same time Plaintiffs are unable to educate their students because the General Assembly decided not to fully fund public schools,” Page wrote.

Voucher advocates promise to appeal, saying they are not surprised by this ruling by a Democratic judge in one one the most Democratic-leaning counties in Ohio, even as the state has trended strongly Republican in recent years. 

Advocates including Keith Neely, a lawyer for the Virginia-based Institute for Justice who helped defend EdChoice on behalf of families using the vouchers, said he expects to easily win at the Supreme Court for a few reasons, including that Ohio has no ban on funding additional schools if the state also pays for a “system of common schools.”

“There’s no provision
 that prohibits the general assembly from enacting scholarships, or even providing for this other system of uncommon schools,” he said. “I think plaintiffs are wrong to try and argue that there is a restriction in Ohio’s constitution that prevents the state from providing for educational alternatives like Ed choice.”

Voucher opponents, who say they now have half of Ohio’s 611 school districts, including large ones, as plaintiffs in the case, praised the ruling and hope that public pressure will overcome the political leaning of the state Supreme Court. Six of the seven members, all of whom face election, are Republican.

“Put on the political lens for these people (justices) when they’re looking at 75% of the state’s voters living in districts that have signed up for the lawsuit,” said Heinz. ”That’s not a very promising outlook for their political futures.”

Not likely. Yet in Republican-dominated states, that’s exactly what the future holds. This is arguably the most profound change in American education since the development of universal public education over a century ago.

Over the past five years, 14 states have passed laws creating , often known as Education Savings Accounts — public money families can use to pay private school tuition. All are Republican states: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Louisiana, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming. Two more, , have passed refundable tax credits available to all families.

Every family in those states is eligible, or will be within a few years, for somewhere between per student. Counting programs limited to low-income students, more than half of all K-12 students in the U.S. .

This will accelerate the process of the rich getting richer while the poor fall further behind. And now, Republicans in Congress have quietly slipped worth $5,000 per child into their “one big beautiful bill.”

Equal opportunity has always been a fundamental principle of public education: the idea that every child, no matter how poor, would have access to the same quality school. This has long been more an ideal than a reality, but after decades of legal battles, in poor and affluent districts.

States could preserve equal opportunity in a voucher system if parents were barred from topping up vouchers with their own money. But telling Americans they can’t help fund their child’s private school would never fly. So families will add to the value of their vouchers and buy the best education they can afford — because they love their children. 

Other parents will have no money to add. Their kids will attend public schools or the least expensive private schools. And equal opportunity will fly out the window.

Vouchers will segregate students by income, since private school tuition varies widely. Hence, they will no doubt increase segregation by race as well.

Over time, as more and more people use vouchers, the education market in Republican states will stratify by income far more than it does today. It will come to resemble any other market: for housing, automobiles or anything else. The affluent will buy schools that are the equivalent of BMWs and Mercedes; the merely comfortable will choose Toyotas and Acuras; the scraping-by middle class will buy Fords and Chevrolets; and the majority, lacking spare cash, will settle for the equivalent of used cars — mostly public schools.

Meanwhile, the billions spent on vouchers will be subtracted from public school budgets, and the political constituency for public education will atrophy, leading to further cuts.

It’s obvious why vouchers appeal to people who already send their kids to private school, or would like to. But pro-voucher referenda have never won a majority. They have on state ballots, and three of those defeats occurred last fall, even in red states — in .

Yet, GOP funders donate millions to state legislators to support vouchers. And Republican lawmakers are heeding their wishes.

So far, studies have shown in private schools that accept vouchers. This is just common sense: Expensive private schools are often excellent, but cheap private schools are often worse than neighboring public schools.

Yet only one state, Louisiana, denies schools voucher money if their students perform poorly on state standardized tests. In West Virginia, voucher students who fail state tests lose their eligibility for the program. Most states , not even publishing test scores for schools that receive voucher money.

Private schools have the right to select their students, and some will no doubt discriminate — against gay students, transgender students, Muslim students or all of the above. State voucher laws often do not have comprehensive prohibitions against discrimination, and there are reports of bias in Wisconsin’s program, which is only for low-income students.

Finally, recent research suggests another common-sense reality: Heightened demand fueled by vouchers leads schools to .

None of these outcomes would draw support from a majority of Americans. Yet they are happening, and they will surely deepen the growing divide between rich and poor.

Is there an alternative, other than the status quo of struggling public school systems? Indeed there is. States and school districts could reduce bureaucratic controls, empower educators and increase choice, competition and accountability for performance within the public school system, through the spread of charter schools. Cities that have done so, including , have produced some of the nation’s most rapid improvements in student performance.

Voucher advocates are right, in my opinion, to want more choice, more competition, more diversity of school models and more accountability for performance in the nation’s education system. Traditional districts are operating with a centralized, standardized model that emerged more than a century ago, which makes creating quality public schools an uphill battle, particularly in low-income areas.

I also have no problem with vouchers for low-income students who are now trapped in failing public schools. But for too long, American society has been divided — economically, socially and politically — between those fortunate enough to have earned college degrees and those for whom college was out of reach. Turning the K-12 education system into a marketplace, in which the quality of a child’s school depends upon how much their parents can afford to pay, will only widen the gaps between haves and have-nots. Sadly, 16 Republican states have taken a huge step down that path.