Texas education leaders are considering a major change that would require public school students to study passages from the Bible as part of their English Language Arts curriculum.
The proposal is part of a statewide reading list the Texas Education Agency created under House Bill 1605, a 2023 law that aims to give students a more consistent set of texts across grade levels.
The State Board of Education will take its first vote next week. If the plan moves forward this spring, Texas would become the first state in the country to write specific Bible stories into required reading for multiple grade levels.
Here’s what to know.
🔥 In case you missed it…
Why is Texas adding Bible passages now?
State officials say students often encounter very different texts depending on where they live, and this list is meant to create a shared foundation.
The TEA also says the selections were chosen because of their cultural and literary influence, not to promote a particular faith tradition.
Supporters say a unified list also helps publishers create simpler materials, so districts aren’t piecing together lessons on their own.
The broader goal, they say, is to streamline what schools teach without raising the workload for teachers.
Which Bible passages would Texas students be required to read?
The draft list includes hundreds of literary works for grades K-12. Among them are 11 passages from the Christian Bible that would become required reading if approved.
Some examples include:
Do Not Be Anxious (Matthew 6:25–34) – Grade 6
The Definition of Love (1 Corinthians 13) – Grade 7
The Shepherd’s Psalm (Psalm 23) – Grade 7
Jonah and the Whale (Book of Jonah) – Grade 7
The Eight Beatitudes (Matthew 5:1–12) – Grade 8
David and Goliath (1 Samuel 17) – English I
Lamentations 3 – English I
The Tower of Babel (Genesis 11:1–9) – English II
To Everything There Is a Season (Ecclesiastes 3) – English III
The Book of Job (selected chapters) – English IV
The TEA notes that many classic texts contain biblical references, and students may need to understand the stories behind them to fully grasp larger themes.
Are these readings connected to the Bluebonnet Learning curriculum?
The statewide literary list is separate, but TEA pulled three biblical retellings from Bluebonnet as optional texts for the new canon.
Those retellings are:
• The Golden Rule
• The Parable of the Prodigal Son
• The Road to Damascus
So the statewide list isn’t the same thing as Bluebonnet, but it borrows pieces of it.
How have Texas districts responded to religious content in curriculum?
Fort Worth ISD is one of the clearest examples. In 2025, the district adopted the Bluebonnet Learning reading curriculum, which contains several Christian stories, in its early grade units.
That decision drew weeks of public comment from parents, pastors, and community groups who worried it blurred the separation of church and state.
The curriculum is now in its first year of classroom use for the 2025-26 school year.
Fort Worth’s experience may offer a preview of how communities respond if the statewide list moves ahead with required Bible passages.
When would Bible readings start in Texas schools?
The SBOE will take a preliminary vote next week. If it passes, the board will spend the next few months reviewing public feedback and making revisions before a final vote in April 2026.
Even then, the change would not show up in classrooms right away. Publishers need about two and a half years to update materials, and the state must also adjust standardized tests to match the list.
Because of that timeline, the earliest students would see the new required readings is the 2030-2031 school year, according to the TEA.
Tiffani is a service journalism reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. She is part of a team of local journalists who answer reader questions about life in North Texas. Tiffani mainly writes about Texas laws and health news.
Picture someone sitting at a kitchen table after the kids are finally in bed, laptop open, half-drunk mug of herbal tea nearby. For years, she has had a vague idea for a business–custom curriculum design for small learning pods, for example, or a micro-studio creating bespoke art for local nonprofits. She never moved on it. Too many barriers: no time to figure out incorporation, no budget for a web developer, no clue how to do marketing or bookkeeping, no appetite for the legal and tax homework.
But now she types a prompt into an AI assistant.
Within an evening, she has a draft business plan, a shortlist of ideas for company names with available domains, a first version of a logo, a one-page website, basic contract language, a starter bookkeeping system, filled-out forms and instructions for registering her business, and a rough sense of how many clients she’d need to cover her bills. None of it is perfect. But it’s enough to move from daydream to first customer.
That’s the quiet revolution we’re underestimating.
Most of the public conversation about AI and the labor market is fixated on one (very real) side of the story: which jobs disappear, which tasks get automated, which industries will “lose” the most positions.
That conversation isn’t wrong. But it’s incomplete. The same technology that allows big companies to run with far fewer people also lowers the barriers to entry for people who want to create value on their own.
AI is about to pull the labor market in two directions at once: inward, as firms need fewer employees; and outward, as more individuals gain the tools to act like firms.
The coming wave of layoffs
Inside large organizations, the logic is brutally simple. If a machine can do part of a task, fewer humans can do the same job. If a machine can coordinate multiple tasks, fewer humans are needed to manage them. AI turns out to be remarkably good at exactly the kind of work that employed millions of people: following procedures, coordinating handoffs between departments, and navigating bureaucratic complexity.
Some companies will use AI to squeeze costs out of business-as-usual: automating reporting, drafting, customer support, basic analysis, etc. Others will be challenged by newcomers who never built the bulky structures at all. A firm launched in 2026 might not need a marketing department; it has an AI system that writes, tests, and schedules campaigns. It might not need layers of middle management; coordination and monitoring can be handled by software.
Clayton Christensen wrote about “efficiency innovations“–efforts to improve profitability by letting a company do the same work with fewer resources. AI might be the ultimate efficiency innovation. Whether it’s deployed by incumbents to trim fat or by startups that never had the fat to begin with, the destination is similar: less demand for traditional employment inside firms.
We will still have multinational corporations worth billions of dollars. But they will be increasingly lean on staff compared with their 20th-century predecessors: more revenue per employee, more output per headcount, and fewer career ladders.
The personal back office
At the same time, something more hopeful is happening at the edges of the economy.
For most of history, the jump from “I have an idea” to “I have a business” required access to expertise. Lawyers to set up entities and contracts. Accountants to manage books and taxes. Designers and engineers to build products, websites, and marketing. Consultants or mentors to help you avoid rookie mistakes. You either had those skills yourself, had friends who did, or had enough capital to hire them. Many people simply didn’t.
AI breaks that bottleneck. It turns fragments of expertise into something you can “rent by the prompt.”
You still need judgment. You still need creativity. You still need taste, grit, and some tolerance for risk. But you no longer need a small army. The solo founder at the kitchen table has, for the first time in history, a kind of general-purpose back office: a system that can draft, design, summarize, translate, troubleshoot, and simulate at a level that used to require multiple professionals.
Entrepreneurship won’t suddenly become easy. Most new ventures will still fail. Markets will still be unforgiving. Competition may become even more fierce as barriers to entry fall. But the option to try becomes widely available in a way it simply wasn’t before. The barrier shifts from “I can’t even begin” to “Is the potential upside on this idea worth the risk,” which is a very different kind of problem.
The paradox young people will inherit
Put these forces together, and the picture that emerges is neither techno-utopian nor apocalyptic.
Inside firms, AI will quietly erode demand for routine cognitive work. Meanwhile, outside firms, AI will expand the frontier of what individuals can plausibly do on their own or in small teams. That’s the real tension: fewer stable slots in the big machines; more tools to build something of your own.
Whether this becomes a story of flourishing or precarity depends on lots of things–tax policy, social safety nets, and the speed of change. But one piece of the puzzle is squarely in the domain I work in: how we educate young people for the world they’re walking into.
The school of compliance in an entrepreneurial age
For more than a century, mass schooling has been the farm system for large organizations. It has been remarkably good at what it was implicitly designed to do: teach people to be reliable cogs in bureaucratic machines.
The official curriculum covers math, reading, science, history, etc. The unofficial curriculum teaches something else: how to succeed in a rule-bound institution.
You learn that:
There is always someone above you who sets the assignment.
The path to success is deciphering what that person wants.
The safest strategy is to follow instructions faithfully.
Tasks come with rubrics that specify the criteria for a good performance.
Your job is to hit those criteria as cleanly as possible.
Do that over thirteen years, and those who get good at winning in the game of school also get very good at reading institutions. They sense where the boundaries are, who has authority, and which boxes need to be checked. They become, in a word, employable–especially in environments where advancement comes from mastering the existing playbook rather than writing a new one.
There is nothing inherently wrong with those skills. For much of the 20th century, this was a rational preparation for a world in which the dominant path to a middle-class life ran through large, hierarchical employers.
But it’s almost the opposite of what today’s entrepreneurship requires.
Innovative entrepreneurship is what happens when there’s no rubric, when no one has written the assignment. When the problem itself is fuzzy, you have to decide which part of it is worth solving. It rewards people who notice friction or unmet needs, test rough solutions, and iterate under uncertainty. It punishes those who are good at execution but expect someone else to tell them what to execute. It favors those who are comfortable with ambiguity and relish innovation. It hobbles those who see their purpose as delivering reliability and efficiency on well-worn rails.
The risk we face is that we will send a generation of students into an AI-transformed economy superbly trained in the old game, just as the old game is shrinking. We’ve taught them to follow procedures, coordinate handoffs, and navigate bureaucracy–precisely the skills AI systems excel at. We’ve led them to expect that career success comes from mastering the rungs on tried-and-true institutionalized career pathways. Meanwhile, the jobs along those conventional pathways are dwindling.
A different kind of preparation
If AI really does reduce the number of people big firms need, while making it dramatically easier for individuals to create value directly, then schools have a choice.
They can double down on being pipelines into a narrowing corporate world–ever more focused on test scores, credentials, and compliance with external standards. Or they can take seriously the task of preparing young people to navigate a world in which many of the best opportunities will be ones they help invent.
That doesn’t mean abandoning core knowledge and skills. Young people will still need to know how to read and communicate with each other and with AI. They’ll still need math and science to conceptually understand how the world works. They’ll still need literature and history to engage with the narratives from the past that define the present. But it also means they’ll need repeated, meaningful practice in:
Identifying problems that no adult has pre-packaged.
Spotting unmet Jobs to Be Done where people are cobbling together workarounds.
Finding their comparative advantages rather than competing on narrow measures.
Designing and testing solutions that might fail.
Dealing with ambiguous feedback.
And exercising agency rather than just obedience.
Learning how to wrestle with problems that are complex, not just complicated.
Traditional schooling trains students to compete for scarce slots–top class rankings, starting positions on teams, and admission to selective colleges–on standardized dimensions where everyone is measured the same way. That made sense when the goal was landing one of a limited number of corporate jobs. But entrepreneurship works differently. It rewards people who identify niches that are valuable but unattractive to large companies, and who figure out where they can meaningfully differentiate rather than trying to be marginally better than everyone else at the same thing.
My prediction, then, is this:
In the coming years, AI will allow companies to do more with fewer employees. At the same time, it will quietly lower the barriers to entrepreneurship and creative self-employment in ways we are only beginning to see.
The question for education is whether we will keep treating students primarily as future employees of large systems or help them become future innovators in a landscape where powerful new tools of creation are sitting right in front of them.
For more on what the future looks like for today’s students, visit eSN’s Digital Learning hub.
Thomas Arnett, Clayton Christensen Institute
Thomas Arnett is a senior research fellow for the Clayton Christensen Institute. His work focuses on using the Theory of Disruptive Innovation to study innovative instructional models and their potential to scale student-centered learning in K–12 education. He also studies demand for innovative resources and practices across the K–12 education system using the Jobs to Be Done Theory.
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Imagine students who understand how government works and who see themselves as vital contributors to their communities. That’s what happens when students are given opportunities to play a role in their school, district, and community. In my work as a teacher librarian, I have learned that even the youngest voices can be powerful, and that students embrace civic responsibility and education when history is taught in a way that’s relevant and meaningful.
Now is the moment to build momentum and move our curriculum forward. It’s time to break past classroom walls and unite schools and communities. As our nation’s 250th anniversary approaches, education leaders have a powerful opportunity to teach through action and experience like never before.
Kids want to matter. When we help them see themselves as part of the world instead of watching it pass by, they learn how to act with purpose. By practicing civic engagement, students gain the skills to contribute solutions–and often offer unique viewpoints that drive real change. In 2023, I took my students [CR1] to the National Mall. They were in awe of how history was represented in stone, how symbolism was not always obvious, and they connected with rangers from the National Park Service as well as visitors in D.C. that day.
When students returned from the Mall, they came back with a question that stuck: “Where are the women?” In 2024, we set out to answer two questions together: “Whose monuments are missing?” and “What is HER name?”
Ranger Jen at the National Mall, with whom I worked with before, introduced me to Dr. Linda Booth Sweeney, author of Monument Maker, which inspired my approach. Her book asks, “History shapes us–how will we shape history?” Motivated by this challenge, students researched key women in U.S. history and designed monuments to honor their contributions.
We partnered with the Women’s Suffrage National Monument, and some students even displayed their work at the Belmont-Paul Women’s Equality National Monument. Through this project, questions were asked, lessons were learned, and students discovered the power of purpose and voice. By the end of our community-wide celebration, National Mall Night, they were already asking, “What’s next?”
The experience created moments charged with importance and emotion–moments students wanted to revisit and replicate as they continue shaping history themselves.
Reflecting on this journey, I realized I often looked through a narrow lens, focusing only on what was immediately within my school. But the broader community, both local and online, is full of resources that can strengthen relationships, provide materials, and offer strategies, mentors, and experiences that extend far beyond any initial lesson plan.
Seeking partnerships is not a new idea, but it can be easily overlooked or underestimated. I’ve learned that a “no” often really means “not yet” or “not now,” and that persistence can open doors. Ford’s Theatre introduced me to Ranger Jen, who in turn introduced me to Dr. Sweeney and the Trust for the National Mall. When I needed additional resources, the Trust for the National Mall responded, connecting me with the new National Mall Gateway: a new digital platform inspired by America’s 250th that gives all students, educators and visitors access to explore and connect with history and civics through the National Mall.
When I first shared the Gateway with students, it took their breath away. They could reconnect with the National Mall–a place they were passionate about–with greater detail and depth. I now use the platform to teach about monuments and memorials, to prepare for field trips, and to debrief afterward. The platform brings value for in-person visits to the National Mall, and for virtual field trips in the classroom, where they can almost reach out and touch the marble and stone of the memorials through 360-degree video tours.
Another way to spark students’ interest in civics and history is to weave civic learning into every subject. The first step is simple but powerful: Give teachers across disciplines the means to integrate civic concepts into their lessons. This might mean collaborating with arts educators and school librarians to design mini-lessons, curate primary sources, or create research challenges that connect past and present. It can also take shape through larger, project-based initiatives that link classroom learning to real-world issues. Science classes might explore the policies behind environmental conservation, while math lessons could analyze community demographics or civic data. In language arts, students might study speeches, letters, or poetry to see how language drives change. When every subject and resource become hubs for civic exploration, students begin to see citizenship as something they live, not just study.
Students thrive when their learning has purpose and connection. They remember lessons tied to meaningful experiences and shared celebrations. For instance, one of our trips to the National Mall happened when our fourth graders were preparing for a Veterans Day program with patriotic music. Ranger Jen helped us take it a step further, building on previous partnerships and connections–she arranged for the students to sing at the World War II Memorial. As they performed “America,” Honor Flights unexpectedly arrived. The students were thrilled to sing in the nation’s capital, of course. But the true impact came from their connection with the veterans who had lived the history they were honoring.
As our nation approaches its 250th anniversary, we have an extraordinary opportunity to help students see themselves as part of the story of America’s past, present, and future.
Encourage educator leaders to consider how experiential civics can bring this milestone to life. Invite students to engage in authentic ways, whether through service-learning projects, policy discussions, or community partnerships that turn civic learning into action. Create spaces in your classes for collaboration, reflection, and application, so that students are shaping history, not just studying it. Give students more than a celebration. Give them a sense of purpose and belonging in the ongoing story of our nation.
Melaney Sánchez, Ph.D., Mt. Harmony Elementary
Dr. Melaney Sánchez is a National Board-Certified Teacher and the teacher librarian at Mt. Harmony Elementary, where she fosters a love of reading, inquiry, civics, and lifelong learning. She also teaches at Notre Dame of Maryland University and conducted research on minority student achievement. A Fulbright Scholar and NEA Global Learning Fellow, she brings a global perspective to literacy, learning, and student engagement.
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BATON ROUGE, La. —About two dozen second graders sat on the carpet at the front of Jacquelyn Anthony’s classroom, reviewing how to make tens. “Two needs eight!” the students yelled out together. “Six needs four!”
“The numbers may get a little trickier,” Anthony told them next. “But remember, the numbers we need to make 10 are still there.” The students then turned confidently to bigger calculations: Forty-six needs four ones to make a new number divisible by 10; 128 needs two to make 13 tens.
At the end of the hour, the second graders slung on their backpacks, gathered their Chromebooks and lined up at the door before heading to English and social studies class across the hall. While most schools wait until middle school to transition students from one class to another, kids at Louisiana’s Baton Rouge Center for Visual and Performing Arts do so starting at age 6 or 7. It’s part of a strategy known as departmentalizing, or platooning.
Anthony, rather than teaching all four core subjects, specializes in math. The school’s new facility, built in 2025, was designed with departmentalizing in mind: The classrooms have huge glass windows, so teachers can see their next class preparing to line up in the hallway.
“Teaching today is so different than it was a long time ago, and there are so many demands on them. And the demand to be an expert in your content area is very high,” said Sydney Hebert, magnet site coordinator for the art-focused public school in the East Baton Rouge Parish school district. “We want to make sure that our teachers are experts in what they’re teaching so that they can do a good job of teaching it to the kids.”
As schools contend with a decades-long slump in math scores — exacerbated by the pandemic — some are turning to this classroom strategy even for very young students. In recent years, more elementary schools have opted to departmentalize some grade levels in an attempt to boost academic achievement. The share of fourth and fifth grade classrooms operating on this schedule has doubled since the year 2000, from 15 percent to 30 percent in 2021. Often, that means educators will specialize in one or two subjects at most, such as fourth grade English language arts and social studies, or fifth grade math and science. The theory is that teachers who specialize will be more familiar with the content and better able to teach it.
That may be particularly important for math: Studies have shown that some early elementary school teachers experience anxiety about the subject and question their ability to teach it. Educators also say that the curriculum and standards for math and English in the early grades are changing rapidly in some districts and have become more complicated over time. In a departmentalized setup, it’s also far less likely that math instruction will get shortchanged by an educator who prefers spending time on other subjects.
Jacquelyn Anthony teaches second grade students math at Baton Rouge Center for Visual and Performing Arts on Dec. 9, 2025, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Credit: Annie Flanagan for The Hechinger Report
But while some schools swear by this model, the research on it is mixed.
One prominent 2018 study on the practice in Houston public schools found it had a negative effect on test scores, behavior and attendance. The study doesn’t explain why that was the case, but the researcher said it could be because teachers on this schedule spend less time with individual students.
Another study published in 2024 analyzing Massachusetts schools had different outcomes: Researchers found moderate gains in academic achievement for ELA and a significant boost to science scores for students in departmentalized classes. The results in math, however, showed few gains.
Generally, teachers specialize in the subject they are most comfortable teaching. When a school departmentalizes for the first time, principals typically look at each educator’s test score data over time to determine whether they should specialize in math or reading.
“There are some arguments that, at least if it’s someone who likes the subject, who is passionate about the subject, you have a greater chance of them doing a better job of delivering instruction,” said Latrenda Knighten, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. “But you’ll find mixed reviews.”
Yet there are a few reasons why the strategy is typically reserved for students in older grades, according to school leaders: Spending all day with one teacher increases the bond between the teacher and student, which is important for younger children. In Baton Rouge, Anthony teaches 50 students throughout the day instead of the same 25 students all day.
“Teachers want to get to know their students,” said Dennis Willingham, superintendent of Walker County Schools in Alabama. The district departmentalized some fifth grade classrooms decades ago, but recently added third and fourth grade classes on this schedule. “You tend to see less departmentalization below third grade because of the nurturing element.”
It’s also generally more challenging for young students to quickly change classrooms, even for electives, which means lost instructional time. Smaller elementary schools may also struggle to hire enough teachers to schedule all of them on a departmentalized setup.
But increasingly, schools that are satisfied with this approach for older grade levels are trying it out with their younger grades, too.
After the pandemic, the San Tan Heights Elementary School in Arizona changed its curriculum to one that was more rigorous, and it became harder for the third grade educators to master the standards of all four subject areas, said Henry Saylor-Scheetz, principal at the time.
He proposed that third graders be taught by separate math, English language arts and reading teachers. “I told them, let’s try it for a semester. If it doesn’t work at the end of the year, we’ll go back,” Saylor-Scheetz said.
Ten days into the experiment, teachers told him they never wanted to return to the old schedule. In the subsequent years, the school added more classrooms on this model until, by 2023, all K-8 students were departmentalized. For the last few years, teacher retention at the school was 95 percent, according to Saylor-Scheetz.
Saylor-Scheetz, who last year became principal of a nearby middle school, credited the change for helping the school improve from a C rating on its state report card — a rating it had stagnated at every year since 2018 — to a B rating as of 2022. Since then, more schools in his Arizona school district have shifted to this schedule.
“I’d love to see this become something we do as a nation, but it is a paradigm shift,” Saylor-Scheetz said. “There’s merit in doing it, but there has to be a commitment to it.”
At Baton Rouge Center for Visual and Performing Arts, students in first through third grades have two partner teachers, one for math and science and another for ELA and social studies. The school has been operating on this schedule for third through fifth grade students for more than a decade. Eight years ago, its leaders decided to try it for first and second grade students, too, and were pleased with the results.
On a December morning at the school, young students talked quietly with each other in the hall as they lined up to go from math class to English language arts. All told, the switch took less than five minutes. “We’re at the end of the second nine weeks, so we’ve had a lot of practice,” said GiGi Boudreaux, the assistant principal.
The strategy has not always been successful, though.
During the pandemic, administrators also attempted to departmentalize its kindergarten classes. It didn’t work as they’d hoped: It was a challenge to get the 5-year-olds to quickly change classes and focus on classwork again once they did. Parents also didn’t like it. The school then tried moving teachers from classroom to classroom instead of moving students, but the educators hated it.
“It was too much, so we didn’t do it after that,” said Hebert.
The Baton Rouge school doesn’t have comparison data to show that students perform better in a departmentalized setup, but most educators in the school prefer it, Hebert said. Third grade test scores from 2015 — before the school departmentalized its younger grade levels — showed 73 percent scored “advanced” and “mastery” level on the state ELA test, and 56 percent scored advanced or mastery on the math test. In 2025, 80 percent of third grade students scored advanced or mastery in ELA and 55 percent in math.
“I know that the teachers like it better, and the kids have adapted to it,” Hebert said.
Teachers meet weekly with their partner teachers and grade-level counterparts to discuss their classes and progress on the state standards. Once a quarter, all of the math teachers across the grades meet to talk about strategies and student performance.
At Deer Valley Unified School District in Arizona, departmentalizing some classrooms has helped reduce teacher turnover, said Superintendent Curtis Finch, particularly for early career educators, who can find it challenging to master the content and standards of all four subjects.
“If you’re not confident in your subject, then you don’t have good examples off the top of your head. You can’t control the room, can’t pull the students in,” Finch said.
Jacquelyn Anthony specializes in second grade math and science at the Baton Rouge Center for Visual and Performing Arts, a public elementary school in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Credit: Annie Flanagan for The Hechinger Report
There are drawbacks though, Finch acknowledged. In a self-contained classroom, teachers can more easily integrate their different lessons, so that a math lesson might refer back to a topic covered in reading.
And even though Anthony, the second grade math and science teacher in Baton Rouge, loves teaching math, she also misses the extra time she could spend with each student when she had the same 25 children in her class all day for the entire school year.
“It was a joy for me to be self-contained and to build that little family,” Anthony said. “I think the social emotional needs of students are best met in that type of environment. But being solely a math teacher, I do get to just dig in and focus on the nuance of the content.”
For Anthony’s partner teacher across the hall, Holley McArthur, teaching 50 students ELA and social studies is easier than having to teach 25 students math.
“This is my thing: reading books, comprehending and finding answers, meeting their goals,” said McArthur, who has taught in both kinds of classrooms over three decades in education.
While McArthur’s kids were at recess this mid-December day, the veteran teacher was grading their reading worksheets. A new student had transferred in from out of state midyear, and she was still evaluating his reading skills.
“I think you still get to know the kids, even if you just have them for three hours a day, because I’m not doing the hard math with them.”
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eSchool News is counting down the 10 most-read stories of 2025. Story #5 focuses on a math platform that offers AI coaching for maximum impact.
Math is a fundamental part of K-12 education, but students often face significant challenges in mastering increasingly challenging math concepts.
Many students suffer from math anxiety, which can lead to a lack of confidence and motivation. Gaps in foundational knowledge, especially in early grades and exacerbated by continued pandemic-related learning loss, can make advanced topics more difficult to grasp later on. Some students may feel disengaged if the curriculum does not connect to their interests or learning styles.
Teachers, on the other hand, face challenges in addressing diverse student needs within a single classroom. Differentiated instruction is essential, but time constraints, large class sizes, and varying skill levels make personalized learning difficult.
To overcome these challenges, schools must emphasize early intervention, interactive teaching strategies, and the use of engaging digital tools.
Edia aligns with Illustrative Mathematics’ IM Math, which New York City Public Schools adopted in 2024 as part of its “NYC Solves” initiative–a program aiming to help students develop the problem-solving, critical thinking, and math skills necessary for lifetime success. Because Edia has the same lessons and activities built into its system, learning concepts are reinforced for students.
FDR started using Edia in September of 2024, first as a teacher-facing tool until all data protection measures were in place, and now as an instructional tool for students in the classroom and at home.
The math platform’s AI coaching helps motivate students to persevere through tough-to-learn topics, particularly when they’re completing work at home.
“I was looking for something to have a back-and-forth for students, so that when they need help, they’d be able to ask for it, at any time of the day,” said Salvatore Catalano, assistant principal of math and technology at FDR.
On Edia’s platform, an AI coach reads students’ work and gives them personalized feedback based on their mistakes so they can think about their answers, try again, and master concepts.
Some FDR classes use Edia several days a week for specific math supports, while others use it for homework assignments. As students work through assignments on the platform, they must answer all questions in a given problem set correctly before proceeding.
Jeff Carney, a math teacher at FDR, primarily uses the Edia platform for homework assignments, and said it helps students with academic discovery.
“With the shift toward more constructivist modes of teaching, we can build really strong conceptual knowledge, but students need time to build out procedural fluency,” he said. “That’s hard to do in one class session, and hard to do when students are on their own. Edia supports the constructivist model of discovery, which at times can be slower, but leads to deeper conceptual understanding–it lets us have that class time, and students can build up procedural fluency at home with Edia.”
On Edia, teachers can see every question a student asks the AI coach as they try to complete a problem set.
“It’s a nice interface–I can see if a student made multiple attempts on a problem and finally got the correct answer, but I also can see all the different questions they’re asking,” Carney said. “That gives me a better understanding of what they’re thinking as they try to solve the problem. It’s hugely helpful to see how they’re processing the information piece by piece and where their misconceptions might be.”
As students ask questions, they also build independent research skills as they learn to identify where they struggle and, in turn, ask the AI coach the right questions to target areas where they need to improve.
“We can’t have 30 kids saying, ‘I don’t get it’–there has to be a self-sufficient aspect to this, and I believe students can figure out what they’re trying to do,” Carney said.
“I think having this platform as our main homework tool has allowed students to build up that self-efficacy more, which has been great–that’s been a huge help in enabling the constructivist model and building up those self-efficacy skills students need,” he added.
Because FDR has a large ELL population, the platform’s language translation feature is particularly helpful.
“We set up students with an Illustrative Math-aligned activity on Edia and let them engage with that AI coaching tool,” Carney said. “Kids who have just arrived or who are just learning their first English words can use their home languages, and that’s helpful.”
Edia’s platform also serves as a self-reflection tool of sorts for students.
“If you’re able to keep track of the questions you’re asking, you know for yourself where you need improvement. You only learn when you’re asking the good questions,” Catalano noted.
The results? Sixty-five percent of students using Edia improved their scores on the state’s Regents exam in algebra, with some demonstrating as much as a 40-point increase, Catalano said, noting that while increased scores don’t necessarily mean students earned passing grades, they do demonstrate growth.
“Of the students in a class using it regularly with fidelity, about 80 percent improved,” he said.
Laura Ascione is the Editorial Director at eSchool Media. She is a graduate of the University of Maryland’s prestigious Philip Merrill College of Journalism.
Ohio resident Megan Cutright lost her hospitality job during the pandemic. At her daughter’s urging, she found her way to Lorain County Community College in Ohio and onto a new career path.
Community colleges will soon have a new opportunity to help more students like Megan achieve their career goals. Starting next summer, federal funds will be available through a program known as Workforce Pell, which extends federal aid to career-focused education and training programs that last between eight and 15 weeks.
Members of Congress advocating for Pell Grants to cover shorter programs have consistently highlighted Workforce Pell’s potential, noting that the extension will lead to “good-paying jobs.”
That could happen. But it will only happen if states and colleges thoughtfully consider the supports students need for success.
This is important, because helping students pay for workforce programs is not enough. They also need support and wraparound services, much like the kind Megan was offered at Lorain, where her program followed an evidence-based model known as ASAP that assigns each student a career adviser.
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Megan’s adviser “helped me from day one,” she said, in a story posted on the college’s website. “I told her I was interested in the radiologic technology program but that I had no idea where to start. We just did everything together.”
Megan went on to secure a job as an assistant in the radiology department at her local hospital, where she had interned as a student. She knew what steps she needed to take because her community college supported and advised her, using an evidence-backed practice, illustrating something we have learned from the experience of the community colleges that use the ASAP model: Support is invaluable.
Megan also knew that her path to a full-time position in radiologic technology required her to pass a licensure test — scheduled for four days after graduation.
The students who will enroll in Workforce Pell programs deserve the same careful attention. To ensure that Workforce Pell is effective for students, we should follow the same three critical steps that helped drive the expansion of ASAP and brought it to Megan’s college: (1) experiment to see what works, (2) collect and follow the data and (3) ensure that colleges learn from each other to apply what works.
Before ASAP was developed, the higher education community had some ideas about what might work to help students complete their degrees and get good jobs. When colleges and researchers worked together to test these ideas and gathered reliable data, though, they learned that those strategies only helped students at the margins.
There was no solid evidence about what worked to make big, lasting improvements in college completion until the City University of New York (CUNY) worked with researchers at MDRC to test ASAP and its combination of longer-lasting strategies. They kept a close eye on the data and learned that while some strategies didn’t produce big effects on their own, the combined ASAP approach resulted in significant improvements in student outcomes, nearly doubling the three-year college completion rate.
CUNY and MDRC shared what they learned with higher education leaders and policymakers, inspiring other community colleges to try out the model. Those colleges started seeing results too, and the model kept spreading. Today, ASAP is used in more than 50 colleges in seven states. And it’s paying off — in Ohio, for example, students who received ASAP services ended up earning significantly more than those who did not.
That same experimentation and learning mindset will be needed for Workforce Pell, because while short-term training can lead to good careers, it’s far from guaranteed.
For example, phlebotomy technician programs are popular, but without additional training or credentials they often don’t lead to jobs that pay well. Similarly, students who complete short-term programs in information technology, welding and construction-related skills can continue to acquire stackable credentials that substantially increase their earning potential, although that also doesn’t happen automatically. The complexity of the credentialing marketplace can make it impossible for students and families to assess programs and make good decisions without help.
A big question for Workforce Pell will be how to make sure students understand how to get onto a career path and continue advancing their wider career aspirations. Workforce Pell grants are designed to help students with low incomes overcome financial barriers, but these same students often face other barriers.
That’s why colleges should experiment with supports like career advising to help students identify stepping-stones to a good career, along with placement services to help them navigate the job market. In addition, states must expand their data collection efforts to formally include noncredit programs. Some, including Iowa, Louisiana and Virginia, have already made considerable progress linking their education and workforce systems.
Offering student support services and setting up data systems requires resources, but Workforce Pell will bring new funds to states and colleges that are currently financing job training programs. Philanthropy can also help by providing resources to test out what works best to get students through short-term programs and onto solid career paths.
Sharing what works — and what doesn’t — will be critical to the success of Workforce Pell in the long-term. The same spirit of learning that fueled innovation around the ASAP model should be embedded in Workforce Pell from the start.
Alexander Mayer is director of postsecondary education at MDRC, the nonprofit research association.
This story about Workforce Pell was produced byThe Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.
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Creating consistency between classrooms and ensuring curriculum alignment school-wide can be challenging, even in the smallest of districts. Every educator teaches–and grades–differently based on their experience and preferences, and too often, they’re forced into a solution that no longer respects their autonomy or acknowledges their strengths.
When Superior Public Schools (SPS), a district of 450 students in rural Nebraska, defined standards-referenced curriculum as a priority of our continuous improvement plan, bringing teachers in as partners on the transition was essential to our success. Through their support, strategic relationships with outside partners, and meaningful data and reporting, the pathway from curriculum design to classroom action was a smooth one for teachers, school leaders, and students alike.
Facing the challenge of a new curriculum
For years, teachers in SPS were working autonomously in the classroom. Without a district-wide curriculum in place, they used textbooks to guide their instruction and designed lesson plans around what they valued as important. In addition, grading was performed on a normative curve that compared a student’s performance against the performance of their peers rather than in relation to a mastery of content.
As other educators have discovered, the traditional approach to teaching may be effective for some students, but is inequitable overall when preparing all students for their next step, whether moving on to more complex material or preparing for the grade ahead. Kids were falling through the cracks, and existing opportunity gaps only began to grow.
SPS set out to help our students by instituting standards-referenced instruction at both the elementary and secondary levels, allowing us to better identify each child’s progress toward set learning standards and deliver immediate feedback and intervention services to keep them on the path toward success.
Take it slow and start with collaboration
From day one, school leaders understood the transition to the new curriculum needed to be intentional and collaborative.
Rather than demand immediate buy-in from teachers, administrators and the curriculum team dedicated the time to help them understand the value of a new learning process. Together, we took a deep dive into traditional education practices, identifying which set students up for success and which actually detoured their progress. Recognizing that everyone–teachers included–learns in different ways, administrators also provided educators with a wide range of resources, such as book studies, podcasts, and articles, to help them grow professionally.
In addition, SPS partnered with the Curriculum Leadership Institute (CLI) to align curriculum, instruction, and assessment practices across all content areas, schools, and grade levels. On-site CLI coaches worked directly with teachers to interpret standards and incorporate their unique teaching styles into new instructional strategies, helping to ensure the new curriculum translated seamlessly into daily classroom practice.
To bring standards-referenced curriculum to life with meaningful insights and reporting, SPS integrated the Otus platform into our Student Information System. By collecting and analyzing data in a concise manner, teachers could measure student performance against specific learning targets, determining if content needed to be re-taught to the whole class or if specific students required one-on-one guidance.
With the support of our teachers, SPS was able to launch the new curriculum and assessment writing process district-wide, reaching students in pre-K through 12th grade. However, standards-reference grading was a slower process, starting with one subject area at a time at the elementary level. Teachers who were initially uncomfortable with the new grading system were able to see the benefits firsthand, allowing them to ease into the transition rather than jump in headfirst.
Empowering educators, inspiring students
By uniting curriculum and data, SPS has set a stronger foundation of success for every student. Progress is no longer measured by compliance but by a true mastery of classroom concepts.
Teachers have become intentional with their lesson plans, ensuring that classroom content is directly linked to the curriculum. The framework also gives them actionable insights to better identify the skills students have mastered and the content areas where they need extra support. Teachers can adjust instruction as needed, better communicate with parents on their students’ progress, and connect struggling students to intervention services.
Principals also look at student progress from a building level, identifying commonalities across multiple grades. For instance, if different grade levels struggle with geometry concepts, we can revisit the curriculum to see where improvements should be made. Conversely, we can better determine if SPS needs to increase the rigor in one grade to better prepare students for the next grade level.
While the road toward standards-referenced curriculum had its challenges, the destination was worth the journey for everyone at SPS. By the end of the 2024-2025 school year, 84 percent of K-5 students were at or above the 41st percentile in math, and 79 percent were at or above the 41st percentile in reading based on NWEA MAP results. In addition, teachers now have a complete picture of every student to track individual progress toward academic standards, and students receive the feedback, support, and insights that inspire them to become active participants in their learning.
Tricia Kuhlmann and Jodi Fierstein, Superior Public Schools
Tricia Kuhlmann is the Curriculum Director and Jodi Fierstein is the Elementary Principal and Director of Special Services at Superior Public Schools in Superior, NE.
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Tricia Kuhlmann and Jodi Fierstein, Superior Public Schools
MINNEAPOLIS, MN—Lerner Publishing Group, a leading publisher of K-12 educational materials, is proud to announce the launch of Dr. Gholdy Muhammad’s groundbreaking Genius and Joy curriculum in Summer 2026. This new, all-in-one supplemental curriculum for Grades K–5 is grounded in Dr. Muhammad’s Five Pursuits Framework, a research-based educational model that enhances student engagement and intellectual growth.
Within her research and scholarship in literacy development, English education and writing instruction, and culturally responsive pedagogies, Dr. Muhammad posed the question, “What if the purpose of schools and curriculum was to recognize and elevate the genius and joy of teachers and students?” The result is the Genius and Joy curriculum. This innovative curriculum prioritizes academic rigor by developing literacy skills, building subject area knowledge and centering students’ learning experience on joy. The curriculum is deep in content and thought while also practical and easy for teachers to use.
Dr. Gholdy Muhammad’s Five Pursuits framework of Identity, Skills, Intellect, Criticality, and Joy is a research-based instructional approach that enhances student engagement and achievement by focusing on literacy, identity development, and historical awareness. Its impact is evident in the Lemon Grove School District in California, where implementation of the framework has led to measurable gains: Black and African American students have consistently increased their academic achievement, even surpassing the overall student population in English Language Arts proficiency. Additionally, Multilingual Learners (MLLs) in the district have experienced a tripling in reclassification rates, reflecting the effectiveness of equity-centered, data-informed practices that align with the framework’s core tenets. Schools and districts across forty-three states have implemented the Five Pursuits Framework into their instructional practices, and have been clamoring for an official curriculum.
“I wanted teachers to see curriculum as the stories we teach and tell, as the world around us, and as the legacy that we leave in the lives of our children,” said Dr. Gholdy Muhammad. “It is my hope that this curriculum is a genius and joy experience for youth and teachers alike. We all deserve a comprehensive curricular experience.”
The Genius and Joy Curriculum
Celebrates Joy in Teaching and Learning: The Genius and Joy Curriculum provides easy-to-implement approaches and strategies that include space within the learning experience where students can live out and discover their fullest potential. Joy is a safe and creative space to be free—free to learn, free to dream, and free to be.
Recognizes the Genius Within Every Child: Through powerful stories and dynamic activities, every lesson is designed to spark curiosity, encourage inquiry, and build students’ confidence in their own unique brilliance.
Elevates Learning Through the Five Pursuits: Through innovative pedagogy, students explore more than simple skill building. The five pursuits—identity, skills, intellect, criticality, and joy—of the HILL model are intended to teach the whole student and honor the goals of genius and joy.
“We know that true learning happens when students see themselves in the material, feel their voices are valued, and are encouraged to think critically about the world around them,” said Adam Lerner, Publisher and CEO of Lerner Publishing Group. “We are proud to partner with Dr. Gholdy Muhammad on Genius and Joy to create an environment where students can not only excel academically, but also engage with Lerner’s award-winning books in ways that help them grow as whole individuals.”
Genius and Joy will be available for purchase through Lerner Publishing Group starting Summer 2026. The curriculum will be accompanied by professional development resources to help educators implement the framework effectively, ensuring that the values of joy and academic excellence reach students in classrooms across the country.
Click here to watch Dr. Gholdy Muhammad’s webinar Celebrate the Genius and Joy of Every Student in Your Classroom.
About Dr. Gholdy Muhammad Dr. Gholnecsar (Gholdy) Muhammad is the John Corbally Endowed Professor of Literacy, Language, and Culture at the University of Illinois Chicago. She has previously served as a classroom teacher, literacy specialist, school district administrator, curriculum director, and school board president. She studies Black historical excellence in education, intending to reframe curriculum and instruction today. Dr. Muhammad’s scholarship has appeared in leading academic journals and books. She has also received numerous national awards and is the author of the best-selling books, Cultivating Genius and Unearthing Joy. She also co-authored the book, Black Girls’ Literacies. Her Culturally and Historically Responsive Education Model has been adopted across thousands of U.S. schools and districts across Canada. In 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2025, she was named among the top 1% Edu-Scholar Public Influencers due to her impact on policy and practice. She has led a federal grant with the United States Department of Education to study culturally and historically responsive literacy in STEM classrooms. In the fall of 2026, her first curriculum, entitledGenius and Joy, will be available to schools and educators.
About Lerner Publishing Group™Lerner Publishing Group™ creates high-quality fiction and nonfiction for children and young adults. Founded in 1959, Lerner Publishing Group is one of the nation’s largest independent children’s book publishers with seventeen imprints and divisions: Carolrhoda Books®, Carolrhoda Lab®, Darby Creek™, ediciones Lerner, First Avenue Editions™, Gecko Press™, Graphic Universe™, Kar-Ben Publishing®, Lerner Publications, LernerClassroom™, Lerner Digital™, Millbrook Press™, Soaring Kite Books, Sundance Newbridge, Twenty-First Century Books™, Zest Books™, and Lerner Publisher Services™. For more information, visit www.lernerbooks.com or call 800-328-4929.
eSchool Media staff cover education technology in all its aspects–from legislation and litigation, to best practices, to lessons learned and new products. First published in March of 1998 as a monthly print and digital newspaper, eSchool Media provides the news and information necessary to help K-20 decision-makers successfully use technology and innovation to transform schools and colleges and achieve their educational goals.
Greenville, Wis – December 8, 2025 – School Specialty®, a leading provider of learning environments, supplies and science curriculum to the preK-12 education market, today announced the acquisition of Nasco Education U.S., a trusted name in specialized, curated education solutions for K-12 schools. This strategic acquisition enhances School Specialty’s ability to serve its core customers by enhancing its value proposition to schools across the country.
“We estimate that nearly two-thirds of Nasco Education U.S.’s customers are already School Specialty buyers,” said Ryan Bohr, CEO of School Specialty. “Like School Specialty, Nasco Education U.S. has been an industry fixture of supplying schools for decades. Combining our companies will bring procurement efficiencies to our customers and expand the scope of products available to them.”
School Specialty has more than 60 years of leadership in transforming classrooms into future-ready learning spaces for preK-12 educational institutions, serving five in every six school districts nationwide and curating products from hundreds of trusted brands. Nasco Education U.S. offers a broad selection of specialized products, including hands-on, activity-based resources that support instruction across subjects like science, math, and the arts. Both companies share a deep commitment to providing high-quality, relevant resources that empower teachers and students.
Both organizations will operate independently for the near term. School Specialty expects to integrate the businesses gradually to ensure a seamless experience for the longstanding customers of both organizations.
“Together, we will be able to provide even greater support, innovation, and value to schools nationwide, helping them deliver the best possible learning experiences for their students,” said Ryan Bohr, CEO of School Specialty.
About School Specialty, LLC
With a 60-year legacy, School Specialty is a leading provider of comprehensive learning environment solutions for the pre-K12 education marketplace in the U.S. and Canada. This includes essential classroom supplies, furniture and design services, educational technology, sensory spaces featuring Snoezelen, science curriculum, learning resources, professional development, and more. School Specialty believes every student can flourish in an environment where they are engaged and inspired to learn and grow. In support of this vision to transform more than classrooms, the company applies its unmatched team of education strategists and designs, manufactures, and distributes a broad assortment of name-brand and proprietary products. For more information, go to SchoolSpecialty.com.
About Nasco Education U.S.
Nasco Education U.S. is a leading developer and distributor of instructional materials, offering a wide range of hands-on learning products for the preK-12 education market with 80+ years of experience. Nasco Education U.S. provides schools and educators with the educational materials needed to create impactful classroom experiences that enhance student engagement and academic performance. For more information, go to NascoEducation.com.
eSchool Media staff cover education technology in all its aspects–from legislation and litigation, to best practices, to lessons learned and new products. First published in March of 1998 as a monthly print and digital newspaper, eSchool Media provides the news and information necessary to help K-20 decision-makers successfully use technology and innovation to transform schools and colleges and achieve their educational goals.
By dismantling the Department of Education, the Trump administration claims to be returning control of education to the states.
And while states and local school districts are doing their best to understand the new environments they are working in, they have an opportunity amidst the chaos to focus on what is most essential and prioritize how education dollars are spent.
That means recruiting and retaining more well-prepared teachers with their new budget autonomy. Myriad factors affect student learning, but research shows that theprimary variable within a school’s control is the teacher. Other than parents, teachers are the adults who spend the most time with our children. Good teachers have been shown tosingularly motivate students.
And that’s why, amidst the chaos of our current education politics, there is great opportunity.
Until recently, recruiting, preparing and retaining enough great teachers has not been a priority in policy or funding choices. That has been a mistake, because attracting additional teachers and preparing them to be truly excellent is arguably the single biggest lever policymakers can use to demonstrate their commitment to high-quality public schools.
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Great teachers, especially whole schools full of great teachers, do not just happen. We develop them through quality preparation and meaningful opportunities to practice the profession. When teachers are well-prepared, students thrive. Rigorous teacher preparation translates into stronger instruction, higher K-12 student achievement and a more resilient, equitable education system.
Teachers, like firefighters and police officers, are public servants. We rightly invest public dollars to train firefighters and police officers because their service is essential to the safety and well-being of our communities. Yet teachers — who shape our future through our kids — are too often asked to shoulder the costs of their own preparation.
Funding high-quality teacher preparation should be as nonnegotiable as funding other vital public service professions, especially because we face a teacher shortage — particularly in STEM fields, special education and rural and urban schools.
This is in no small part because many potential teaching candidates cannot afford the necessary education and credentialing.
Our current workforce systems were not built for today’s teaching candidates. They were not designed to support students who are financially vulnerable, part-time or first-generation, or those with caregiving responsibilities.
Yet the majority of tomorrow’s education workforce will likely come from these groups, all of whom have faced systemic barriers in accumulating the generational wealth needed to pursue degrees in higher education.
Some states have responded to this need by developing strong teacher development pathways. For example, California hascommitted hundreds of millions to growing the teacher pipeline through targeted residency programs and preparation initiatives, and its policies have enabled it to recruit and support more future teachers, including greater numbers of educators from historically underrepresented communities.
Pennsylvania hascreated more pathways into the education field with expedited credentialing and apprenticeships for high school students, and is investing millions of dollars in stipends for student teachers.
It has had success bringingmore Black candidates into the teaching profession, which will likely improve student outcomes: Black boys from low-income familieswho have a Black teacher in third through fifth grades are 18 percent more interested in pursuing college and 29 percent less likely to drop out of high school, researchshows. Pennsylvania also passed asenate billHYPERLINK “https://www.senatorhughes.com/big-win-in-harrisburg-creating-the-teacher-diversity-pipeline/”that paved the way for students who complete high school courses on education and teaching to be eligible for career and technical education credits.
At least half a dozen other states also provide various degrees of financial support for would-be teachers, includingstipends, tuition assistance and fee waivers for credentialing.
One example is aone-year teacher residency program model, which recruits and prepares people in historically underserved communities to earn a mster’s degree and teaching credential.
Opening new pathways to teaching by providing financial support has two dramatic effects. First, when teachers stay in education, these earnings compound over time as alumni become mentor teachers and administrators, earning more each year.
Second, these new pathways can also improve student achievement, thanks to policies that support new teachers in rigorous teacher educationprograms.
For example, the Teaching Academy model, which operates in several states, including Pennsylvania, New York and Michigan, attracts, cultivates and supports high school students on the path to becoming educators, giving schools and districts an opportunity to build robust education programs that serve as strong foundations for meaningful and long-term careers in education, and providing aspiring educators a head start to becoming great teachers. Participants in the program are eligible forcollege scholarships, professional coaching and retention bonuses.
California, Pennsylvania and these other states have begun this work. We hope to encourage other state lawmakers to seize the opportunities arising from recent federal changes and use their power to invest in what matters most to student achievement —teachers and teacher preparation pathways.
Sharif El-Mekki is founder & CEO of the Center for Black Educator Development in Pennsylvania. Heather Kirkpatrick is president and CEO Alder Graduate School in California.
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I was the only guy in my education classes at Missouri State University, and until this year I was the only male out of nearly 100 teachers in my school. My approach to teaching is very different, and more often than not was met with a raised brow rather than a listening ear.
I teach kindergarten, and there are so few men in early childhood education that visitors to my classroom tend to treat me like a unicorn. They put me in a box of how I am “supposed” to be as a male in education without knowing the details of my approach to teaching.
As a result, I’d grown skeptical about receiving outside help. When someone new came into my classroom to provide unsolicited “support,” my immediate thought was always, “OK, great, what are they going to cook up? What are they trying to sell me?” I’d previously had former high school administrators come into my classroom to offer support, but they didn’t have experience with the curriculum I used or with kindergarten. The guidance was well-intentioned, but not relevant.
My entire view of getting help and support changed whenAshley Broadnax, a literacy coach from New Orleans, nearly 700 miles away, came into my class in St. James, Missouri, population 3,900. Ashley works for The New Teacher Project, or TNTP, a nonprofit aiming to increase students’ economic and social mobility. Once a month for a full academic year, she came in to help us transition to a “science of reading” approach, as part of a special pilot program, the Rural Schools Early Literacy Collaborative.
I never thought I would love having a literacy coach and their feedback, but I now believe it is something that can work for many teachers. I hope that as Missouri and other states transition to new ways of teaching reading,more coaches will be available for others who could use the support. The state says that over 15,000 teachers may get trained in the science of reading to help build our knowledge of how children learn to read and what type of instruction is most effective.
Ashley had used the curriculum herself and was on hand to provide timely support. This was the first time I received relevant feedback from a former teacher who had firsthand experience with the lessons I was leading.
It completely changed my approach and my students’ learning. Although I come from a family of teachers — my mom, grandma and brother all taught — I had started teaching two weeks out of college, and I wasn’t familiar with the new reading curriculum and didn’t have a lot of self-confidence.
When Ashley came in for the very first visit, I knew working with her was going to be different. Even though she had never been to St. James, she was sensitive to the rural context where I’ve spent all my life. We’re 90 minutes southwest of St. Louis and a little over an hour southeast of Jefferson City, the state capital. In St. James, you may see a person on a horse riding past a Tesla a few times a year. I’ve seen this world of extremes play out in school open houses and in the learning gaps that exist in my kindergarten classroom.
Ashley had researched our community and was open to learning more about our nuances and teaching styles. She was also the first coach I’d met who actually had taught kindergarten, so she knew what worked and what didn’t. As a young teacher with a significant number of students with special needs, I really appreciated this.
Ashley provided me with a pathway to follow the new curriculum while also maintaining my unique approach to teaching. Everything came from a place of ensuring that teachers have what they need to be successful, rather than an “I know better than you do” attitude. She would let me know “I loved how you did this” and she’d ask, “Can you extend it in this way?” or tell me, “This was great, here’s how you can structure it a bit further.”
Not everything she did to help was profound. But her little tips added up. For example, the curriculum we used came with 10 workbooks for each student as well as stacks of literature, and I needed help integrating it into my lessons.
I soon noticed a shift in my ability to teach. I was learning specific ways to help students who were on the cusp of catching on, along with those who weren’t getting it at all.
Throughout the course of the year, we saw how our students were more quickly achieving proficiency in English language arts. In my school, according to the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, the percentage of kindergartners reading on grade level went from 82 percent in the fall to 98 percent in the spring; the percentage of first graders on grade level went from 41 percent to 84 percent.
There were similar gains across the other schools in my county participating in the pilot program; one school had all of its kindergarten and first grade students demonstrate growth on reading assessments. Those students, on average, made gains that were more than double typical annual growth, TNTP found.
I attribute a great deal of this progress to the support from Ashley and her peers. I know I am a better educator and teacher for my students. Her support has made a change for the better in my grade and classroom.
Thomas MacCash is a kindergarten teacher at Lucy Wortham James Elementary in St. James, Missouri.
Since you made it to the bottom of this article, we have a small favor to ask.
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The Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education this week provides a rare opportunity to rethink our current top-down approach to school governance.
We should jump on it. It’s not sexy to talk about governance, but we can’t fix K-12 education until we do so, no matter how we feel about the latest changes.
Since the Department of Education opened in 1980, we’ve doubled per-pupil spending, and now spend about twice as much per student as does the average country in the European Union. Yet despite that funding — and the reforms, reports and technologies introduced over the past 45 years — U.S. students consistently underperform on international benchmarks. And people are opting out: 22 percent of U.S. district students are now chronically absent, while record numbers of families are opting out of those schools, choosing charters, private schools and homeschooling.
Most federal and state reform approaches have been focused on curricular standards and have accomplished little. The many billions spent on the Common Core standards coincided with — or triggered — a 13-year decline in academic performance. The underlying principles of the standards movement — that every student should learn the same things at the same time, that we know what those things are and that they don’t change over time — have made our schools even less compelling while narrowing instruction to what gets tested.
We need to address the real problem: how federal, state and district rules combine to create a dense fog of regulations and directives that often conflict or constrain one another. Educators are losing a rigged game: It’s not that they’re doing the wrong things, it’s that governance makes them unresponsive, bureaucratic, ineffective and paralyzed — can you name an industry that spends less on research and development?
Fixing governance won’t be simple, but it shouldn’t take more than 13 years to do it: three years to design a better system of state governance and 10 more to thoroughly test and debug it.
I would start by bringing together experts from a variety of disciplines, ideally at a new “Center for K-12 Governance” at a university’s school of education or school of public policy, and give them three years to think through a comprehensive set of state laws and regulations to manage schools.
The center would convene experts from inside and outside of education, in small groups focused on topics including labor, funding, data, evaluation, transportation, construction, athletics, counseling, technology, curricula and connections to higher education and the workforce. Its frameworks would address various educational and funding alternatives currently in use, including independent, charter and parochial schools, home schooling and Education Savings Accounts, all of which speak to the role of parents in making choices about their children’s education.
Each group would start with the questions and not the answers, and there are hundreds of really interesting questions to be considered: What are the various goals of our K-12 schools and how do we authentically measure schools against them? What choices do we give parents, and what information might help them make the right decisions for their kids? How do we allow for new approaches to attract, support and pay great teachers and administrators? How does money follow each student? What data do we collect and how do we use it?
After careful consideration, the center would hand its proposed statutes to a governor committed to running a long-term pilot to fully test the model. He or she would create a small alternative department of education, which would oversee a few hundred volunteer schools matched to a control group of similar schools running under the state’s legacy regime; both groups would include schools with a range of demographic and performance profiles. The two systems could run side by side for up to a decade.
Each year, the state would assess the two departments’ performance against metrics like graduation and college-completion rates, teacher retention, income trajectories, civic participation, student and parent satisfaction, and, yes, NAEP scores. Under intense scrutiny by interested parties, both groups would be free to tweak their playbooks and evaluate solutions against a range of real-world outcomes. Once definitive longitudinal data comes in, the state would shutter one department and move the governance of its schools over to the other, perhaps launching a new test with an even better system.
This all may seem like a lot of work, but it’s a patient approach to a root problem. Schools remain the nation’s most local public square; they determine income mobility, civic health and democratic resilience. If we fail to rewire the system now to support them properly, we guarantee their continued decline, to the detriment of students and society. Instead of celebrating students, teachers and principals who succeed despite the odds, we should address why we made those odds so steep.
That’s why we should use this moment to draft and test something audacious, and give the next Supreme Court a happier education case to decide: how to retire a legacy system that finally lost a fair fight.
John Katzman has founded and run three large ed tech companies: The Princeton Review, 2U and Noodle. He has worked closely with many large school districts and has served on the boards of NAPCS and NAIS.
This story about fixing K-12 education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’sweekly newsletter.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
by Tanishia Lavette Williams, The Hechinger Report November 4, 2025
The year I co-taught world history and English language arts with two colleagues, we were tasked with telling the story of the world in 180 days to about 120 ninth graders. We invited students to consider how texts and histories speak to one another: “The Analects” as imperial governance, “Sundiata” as Mali’s political memory, “Julius Caesar” as a window into the unraveling of a republic.
By winter, our students had given us nicknames. Some days, we were a triumvirate. Some days, we were Cerberus, the three-headed hound of Hades. It was a joke, but it held a deeper meaning. Our students were learning to make connections by weaving us into the histories they studied. They were building a worldview, and they saw themselves in it.
Designed to foster critical thinking, this teaching was deeply human. It involved combing through texts for missing voices, adapting lessons to reflect the interests of the students in front of us and trusting that learning, like understanding, unfolds slowly. That labor can’t be optimized for efficiency.
Yet, today, there’s a growing push to teach faster. Thousands of New York teachers are being trained to use AI tools for lesson planning, part of a $23 million initiative backed by OpenAI, Microsoft and Anthropic. The program promises to reduce teacher burnout and streamline planning. At the same time, a new private school in Manhattan is touting an AI-driven model that “speed-teaches” core subjects in just two hours of instruction each day while deliberately avoiding politically controversial issues.
Marketed as innovation, this stripped-down vision of education treats learning as a technical output rather than as a human process in which students ask hard questions and teachers cultivate the critical thinking that fuels curiosity. A recent analysis of AI-generated civics lesson plans found that they consistently lacked multicultural content and prompts for critical thinking. These AI tools are fast, but shallow. They fail to capture the nuance, care and complexity that deep learning demands.
When I was a teacher, I often reviewed lesson plans to help colleagues refine their teaching practices. Later, as a principal in Washington, D.C., and New York City, I came to understand that lesson plans, the documents connecting curriculum and achievement, were among the few steady examples of classroom practice. Despite their importance, lesson plans were rarely evaluated for their effectiveness.
When I wrote my dissertation, after 20 years of working in schools, lesson plan analysis was a core part of my research. Analyzing plans across multiple schools, I found that the activities and tasks included in lesson plans were reliable indicators of the depth of knowledge teachers required and, by extension, the limits of what students were asked to learn.
Reviewing hundreds of plans made clear that most lessons rarely offered more than a single dominant voice — and thus confined both what counted as knowledge and what qualified as achievement. Shifting plans toward deeper, more inclusive student learning required deliberate effort to incorporate primary sources, weave together multiple narratives and design tasks that push students beyond mere recall.
I also found that creating the conditions for such learning takes time. There is no substitute for that. Where this work took hold, students were making meaning, seeing patterns, asking why and finding themselves in the story.
That’s the transformation AI can’t deliver. When curriculum tools are trained on the same data that has long omitted perspectives, they don’t correct bias; they reproduce it. The developers of ChatGPT acknowledge that the model is “skewed toward Western views and performs best in English” and warn educators to review its content carefully for stereotypes and bias. Those same distortions appear at the systems level — a 2025 study in the World Journal of Advanced Research and Reviews found that biased educational algorithms can shape students’ educational paths and create new structural barriers.
Ask an AI tool for a lesson on westward expansion, and you’ll get a tidy narrative about pioneers and Manifest Destiny. Request a unit on the Civil Rights Movement and you may get a few lines on Martin Luther King Jr., but hardly a word about Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer or the grassroots organizers who made the movement possible. Native nations, meanwhile, are reduced to footnotes or omitted altogether.
Curriculum redlining — the systematic exclusion or downplaying of entire histories, perspectives and communities — has already been embedded in educational materials for generations. So what happens when “efficiency” becomes the goal? Whose histories are deemed too complex, too political or too inconvenient to make the cut?
None of this is theoretical. It’s already happening in classrooms across the country. Educators are under pressure to teach more with less: less time, fewer resources, narrower guardrails. AI promises relief but overlooks profound ethical questions.
Students don’t benefit from autogenerated worksheets. They benefit from lessons that challenge them, invite them to wrestle with complexity and help them connect learning to the world around them. That requires deliberate planning and professional judgment from a human who views education as a mechanism to spark inquiry.
Recently, I asked my students at Brandeis University to use AI to generate a list of individuals who embody concepts such as beauty, knowledge and leadership. The results, overwhelmingly white, male and Western, mirrored what is pervasive in textbooks.
My students responded with sharp analysis. One student created color palettes to demonstrate the narrow scope of skin tones generated by AI. Another student developed a “Missing Gender” summary to highlight omissions. It was a clear reminder that students are ready to think critically but require opportunities to do so.
AI can only do what it’s programmed to do, which means it draws from existing, stratified information and lags behind new paradigms. That makes it both backward-looking and vulnerable to reproducing bias.
Teaching with humanity, by contrast, requires judgment, care and cultural knowledge. These are qualities no algorithm can automate. When we surrender lesson planning to AI, we don’t just lose stories; we also lose the opportunity to engage with them. We lose the critical habits of inquiry and connection that teaching is meant to foster.
Tanishia Lavette Williams is the inaugural education stratification postdoctoral fellow at the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy, a Kay fellow at Brandeis University and a visiting scholar at Harvard University.
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Timothy Shanahan, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has spent his career evaluating education research and helping teachers figure out what works best in the classroom. A leader of the National Reading Panel, whose 2000 report helped shape what’s now known as the “science of reading,” Shanahan has long influenced literacy instruction in the United States. He also served on the National Institute for Literacy’s advisory board in both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.
Shanahan is a scholar whom I regularly consult when I come across a reading study, and so I was eager to interview him abouthis new book, “Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives.” (Harvard Education Press, September 2025). In it, Shanahan takes aim at one of the most common teaching practices in American classrooms: matching students with “just-right” books.
Book cover image by Harvard Education Press. Photo courtesy of Timothy Shanahan.
He argues that the approach — where students read different texts depending on their assessed reading level — is holding many children back. Teachers spend too much time testing students and assigning leveled books, he says, instead of helping all students learn how to understand challenging texts.
“American children are being prevented from doing better in reading by a longstanding commitment to a pedagogical theory that insists students are best taught with books they can already read,” Shanahan writes in his book. “Reading is so often taught in small groups — not so teachers can guide efforts to negotiate difficult books, but to ensure the books are easy enough that not much guidance is needed.”
Comprehension, he says, doesn’t grow that way.
The trouble with leveled reading
Grouping students by ability and assigning easier or harder books — a practice known as leveled reading — remains deeply embedded in U.S. schools. A 2018 Thomas B. Fordham Institute survey found that 62 percent of upper elementary teachers and more than half of middle school teachers teach at students’ reading level rather than at grade level.
That may sound sensible, but Shanahan says it’s not helping anyone and is even leading teachers to dispense with reading altogether. “In social studies and science, and these days, even in English classes,” he said in an interview, “teachers either don’t assign any readings or they read the texts to the students.” Struggling readers aren’t being given the chance — or the tools — to tackle complex material on their own.
Instead, Shanahan believes all students should read grade-level texts together, with teachers providing more support for those who need it.
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“What I’m recommending is instructional differentiation,” he said in our interview. “Everyone will have the same instructional goal — we’re all going to learn to read the fourth-grade text. I might teach a whole-class lesson and then let some kids move on to independent work while others get more help. Maybe the ones who didn’t get it, read the text again with my support. By the end, more students will have reached the learning goal — and tomorrow the whole class can take on another text.”
27 different ways
Shanahan’s approach doesn’t mean throwing kids into the deep end without help. His book outlines a toolbox of strategies for tackling difficult texts, such as looking up unfamiliar vocabulary, rereading confusing passages, or breaking down long sentences. “You can tip over into successful reading 27 different ways,” he said, and he hopes future researchers discover many more.
He is skeptical of drilling students on skills like identifying the main idea or making inferences. “We’ve treated test questions as the skill,” he said. “That doesn’t work.”
There is widespread frustration over the deterioration of American reading achievement, especially among middle schoolers. (Thirty-nine percent of eighth graders cannot reach the lowest of three achievement levels, called “basic,” on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.) But there is little agreement among reading advocates on how to fix the problem. Some argue that what children primarily need is more knowledge to grasp unfamiliar ideas in a new reading passage, but Shanahan argues that background knowledge won’t be sufficient or as powerful as explicit comprehension instruction. Other reading experts agree. Nonie Lesaux, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education who specializes in literacy in her own academic work, endorsed Shanahan’s argument in an October 2025 online discussion of the new book.
Shanahan is most persuasive in pointing out that there isn’t strong experimental evidence to show that reading achievement goes up more when students read a text at their individual level. By contrast, a 2024 analysis found that the most effective schools are those that keep instruction at grade level. Still, Shanahan acknowledges that more research is needed to pinpoint which comprehension strategies work best for which students and in which circumstances.
Misunderstanding Vygotsky
Teachers often cite the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development” to justify giving students books that are neither too easy nor too hard. But Shanahan says that’s a misunderstanding of Vygotsky’s work.
Vygotsky believed teachers should guide students to learn challenging things they cannot yet do on their own, he said.
He offers an analogy: a mother teaching her child to tie their shoes. At first, she demonstrates while narrating the steps aloud. Then the child does one step, and she finishes the rest. Over time, the mother gradually releases control and the child ties a bow on his own. “Leveled reading,” Shanahan said, “is like saying, ‘Why don’t we just get Velcro?’ This is about real teaching. ‘Boys and girls, you don’t know how to ride this bike yet, but I’m going to make sure you do by the time we’re done.’ ”
Shanahan’s critique of reading instruction applies mainly from second grade onward, after children learn how to read and are focusing on understanding what they read. In kindergarten and first grade, when children are still learning phonics and how to decode the words on the page, the research evidence against small group instruction with different level texts isn’t as strong, he said.
Learning to read first – decoding – is important. Shanahan says there are rare exceptions to teaching all children at grade level.
“If a fifth grader still can’t read,” Shanahan said, “I wouldn’t make that child read a fifth-grade text.” That child might need separate instruction from a reading specialist.
Advanced readers, meanwhile, can be challenged in other ways, Shanahan suggests, through independent reading time, skipping ahead to higher-grade reading classes, or by exploring complex ideas within grade-level texts.
The role of AI — and parents
Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used to rewrite texts for different difficulty levels. Shanahan is skeptical of that approach. Simpler texts, whether written by humans or generated by AI, don’t teach students to improve their reading ability, he argues.
Still, he’s intrigued by the idea of using AI to help students “climb the stairs” by instantly modifying a single text to a range of reading levels, say, to third-, fifth- and seventh-grade levels, and having students read them in quick succession. Whether that boosts comprehension is still unknown and needs to be studied.
AI might be most helpful to teachers, Shanahan suspects, to help point to a sentence or a passage that tends to confuse students or trip them up. The teacher can then address those common difficulties in class.
Shanahan worries about what happens outside of school: Kids aren’t reading much at all.
He urges parents to let children read whatever they enjoy — regardless if it’s above or below their level — but to set consistent expectations. “Nagging may not be effective,” he said. “But you can be specific: ‘After dinner Thursday, read the first chapter. When you’re done, we’ll talk about it, and then you can play a computer game or go on your phone.’ ”
Too often, he says, parents back down when kids resist. “They are the kids. We are the adults,” Shanahan said. “We’re responsible. Let’s step up and do what’s right for them.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
After decades serving in the Marine Corps and in education, I know firsthand that servant leadership and diplomacy can and should be taught. That’s why I hoped to bring 32 high school seniors from Texas to Washington, D.C., this fall for a week of engagement and learning with top U.S. government and international leaders.
Instead of open doors, we faced a government shutdown and had to cancel our trip.
The shutdown impacts government employees, members of the military and their families who are serving overseas and all Americans who depend on government being open to serve us — in businesses, schools and national parks, and through air travel and the postal service.
Our trip was not going to be a typical rushed tour of monuments, but a highly selective, long-anticipated capstone experience. Our plans included intensive interaction with government leaders at the Naval Academy and the Pentagon, discussions at the State Department and a leadership panel with senators and congressmembers. Our students hoped to explore potential careers and even practice their Spanish and Mandarin skills at the Mexican and Chinese embassies.
The students not only missed out on the opportunity to connect with these leaders and make important connections for college and career, they learned what happens when leadership and diplomacy fail — a harsh reminder that we need to teach these skills, and the principles that support them, in our schools.
Senior members of the military know that the DIME framework — diplomatic, informational, military and economic — should guide and support strategic objectives, particularly on the international stage. My own time in the Corps taught me the essential role of honesty and trust in conversations, negotiations and diplomacy. In civic life, this approach preserves democracy, yet the government shutdown demonstrates what happens when the mission shifts from solving problems to scoring points.
Our elected leaders were tasked with a mission, and the continued shutdown shows a breakdown in key aspects of governance and public service. That’s the real teachable moment of this shutdown. Democracy works when leaders can disagree without disengaging; when they can argue, compromise and keep doors open. If our future leaders can’t practice those skills, shutdowns will become less an exception and more a way of governing.
Students from ILTexas, a charter network serving over 26,000 students across the state, got a lesson in failed diplomacy after the government shutdown forced cancellation of their long-planned trip to the nation’s capital. Credit: Courtesy International Leadership of Texas Charter Schools
With opposing points of view, communication is essential. Bridging language is invaluable. As the adage goes, talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. Speak in his own language, that goes to his heart. That is why, starting in kindergarten, we teach every student in our charter school network English, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese.
Some of our graduates will become teachers, lawyers, doctors and entrepreneurs. Others will pursue careers in public service or navigate our democracy on the international stage. All will enter a world more fractured than the one I stepped into as a Marine.
While our leaders struggle to find common ground, studies show that nationally, only 22 percent of eighth graders are proficient in civics, and fewer than 20 percent of American students study a foreign language. My students are exceptions, preparing to lead in three languages and through servant leadership, a philosophy that turns a position of power into a daily practice of responsibility and care for others.
While my students represent our ILTexas schools, they also know they are carrying something larger: the hopes of their families, communities and even their teenage peers across the country. Some hope to utilize their multilingual skills, motivated by a desire to help the international community. Others want to be a part of the next generation of diplomats and policy thinkers who are ready to face modern challenges head-on.
To help them, we build good habits into the school day. Silent hallways instill respect for others. Language instruction builds empathy and an international perspective. Community service requirements (60 hours per high school student) and projects, as well as dedicated leadership courses and optional participation in our Marine Corps JROTC program give students regular chances to practice purpose over privilege.
Educators should prepare young people for the challenges they will inherit, whether in Washington, in our communities or on the world stage. But schools can’t carry this responsibility alone. Students are watching all of us. It’s our duty to show them a better way.
We owe our young people more than simply a good education. We owe them a society in which they can see these civic lessons modeled by their elected leaders, and a path to put them into practice.
Eddie Conger is the founder and superintendent of International Leadership of Texas, a public charter school network serving more than 26,000 students across the state, and a retired U.S. Marine Corps major.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
KISSIMMEE, Fla. — It’s not a rebrand. But the Moms for Liberty group that introduced itself three years ago as a band of female “joyful warriors” shedding domestic modesty to make raucous public challenges to masks, books and curriculum, is trying to glow up.
The group’s national summit this past weekend at a convention center outside Orlando leaned into family (read: parental rights), faith — and youth. The latter appeared to be a bid to join the cool kids who are the new face of conservatism in America (hint: young, Christian, very male), as well as a recognition of the group’s “diversity,” which includes grandparents, men and kids.
But even as the youth — including 20- and 30-something podcasters and social media influencers, as well as student members of the late Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA — brought a high-energy vibe, stalwart members got a new assignment. Where past Moms for Liberty attendees were urged to run for school board, this year they were encouraged to turn their grievances into legal challenges.
Moms for Liberty CEO and co-founder Tina Descovich acknowledged that while many of them had experienced backlashes as a result of running for school board or publicly challenging books, curricula and policies, they needed to continue the fight. (The more pugnacious co-founder, Tiffany Justice, is now at Heritage Action, an arm of right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation.)
“You have lost family, you have lost friends, you have lost neighbors, you’ve lost jobs, you’ve lost whole careers,” she said. Yet she insisted that it was vital that they “shake off the shackles of fear and stand for truth or we are going to lose Western civilization as a whole.”
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The gathering held up “the free state of Florida” as an example of Republican policies to be emulated, including around school choice and parental rights. The state’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, boasted of having created a state Office of Parental Rights last spring, describing it as “a law firm for parents.”
He trumpeted the state’s lawsuit against Target over the “market risks” of LGBTQ+ pride-themed merchandise and encouraged parents to reach out with potential legal actions. “If you’re identifying one of these wrongs that’s violating your rights and then subjecting our kids to danger and evil, then we want to know about it,” he said. “And we’re going to bring the heat in court to shut it down.”
Tina Descovich, CEO and co-founder of Moms for Liberty, was interviewed on Real America’s Voice, a conservative news and entertainment network that set up a remote studio outside of the Sun Ballroom at the Moms for Liberty national summit. Credit: Laura Pappano for The Hechinger Report
The shifting legal landscape, not just in Florida but nationally, had speakers gushing about the opportunity to file new challenges, particularly in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor in June. It gives parents broad power to object to school materials, including with LGBTQ+ themes, and the right to remove their children from public school on days when such materials are discussed.
“This is where we need to take that big Supreme Court victory and start fleshing it out,” said Matt Sharp, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian law firm. He added that they were “needing warriors, joyful warriors, to file cases to start putting meat on the bones of what that does.”
The directive to file suit was not just around opt-out policies, which were the basis for the Mahmoud case. (Moms for Liberty has opt-out forms and instructions on its website.) Rather, attendees were also urged to file lawsuits in support of school prayer; against school policies that let students use different names and pronouns without parental consent (what Moms for Liberty terms “secret transitions”); and to give parents access to surveys students take at school, including around mental health.
“We need people willing to stand up legally and be, you know, named plaintiffs,” Kimberly S. Hermann, president of the Southeastern Legal Foundation, a conservative policy group, said on a panel featuring two moms who sued their school districts. Winning a lawsuit or even just bringing one in one state, said Hermann, can get other school districts and states to adopt policies, presumably to avoid lawsuits themselves.
“One offensive litigation can have this amazing ripple effect,” she said. She and others made clear that there is staff to provide support. The legal groups will “stand with you,” said Sharp, “whether you’re passing the law or passing the local policy all the way to litigating these cases.”
Even as speakers criticized public schools particularly around LGBTQ+ issues, not as a form of inclusion but as foisting views into classrooms, they relished the chance to infuse their values into schools.
Filing these lawsuits is more than “just fighting for your role as parents,” Sharp told parents in a breakout session. “You’re ultimately fighting for your kids’ ability to be in their schools and make a difference, to be the salt and light in those classrooms with their friends and to take our message of freedom, of faith, of justice and to really spread it all across the schools.”
Overall, this year’s Moms for Liberty event lacked the obvious drama of recent years. The flood of protesters in 2023 in Philadelphia required a large police presence and barricades around the hotel, along with warnings not to wear Moms for Liberty lanyards on the streets.
This year, there were no protests. That was partly because the event was held in a secluded resort convention center that could accommodate 800 (larger than the 500-ish of past hotels). But the group failed to fill the venue or attract much media attention. There was on-location broadcast by Real America’s Voice, a conservative news and entertainment network, from a set outside the Sun Ballroom. (Steve Bannon interviewed Descovich on his show, “The War Room.”)
It also didn’t draw opposition because protesters had a bigger target. Saturday saw “No Kings” rallies across the country, with thousands decrying what they see as President Donald Trump’s authoritarianism. “I forgot it was happening since they’re mostly ignored these days,” state Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith, (D-Orlando) and a senior advisor to LGBTQ+ rights group Equality Florida, said in a text message about the Moms for Liberty event. Liz Mikitarian, founder of the national group, Stop Moms for Liberty, which is based in Florida, said the moms “are still a threat” but not worth organizing a protest against.
It was also a quieter affair than last year’s in Washington, D.C. There, Trump’s appearance fed a party atmosphere with Southern rock, sequined MAGA outfits and a cash bar. (This year, Trump appeared, but only in a prerecorded video message.)
Sequined merchandise for sale at the Moms for Liberty gathering by the company Make America Sparkle Again included tops and jackets that paid tribute to Charlie Kirk, the slain founder of Turning Point USA. Credit: Laura Pappano for The Hechinger Report
The three-day event, of course, aired familiar grievances in familiarly florid language — conservative school choice activist Corey DeAngelis railed against teacher unions over the “far-left radical agenda that they’re trying to push down children’s throats in the classroom.” Other sessions covered the expected — the alleged dangers of LGBTQ+ policies, in sports, restrooms, school curricula and books — but there was also discussion of concerns (shared on left and right) over youth screen use, online predators and artificial intelligence.
The event made room for MAHA, the Make America Healthy Again movement led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of Health and Human Services. Descovich interviewed Dr. Joseph Ladapo, the Florida surgeon general who is working to eliminate all vaccine mandates for the state’s schoolchildren.
But the move by Moms for Liberty to attract young conservatives elevated the energy in the room. It was apparent not only in a tribute to Kirk, the slain founder ofTurning Point USA, which trains young conservatives on high school and college campuses. About 40 Florida TPUSA members took the ballroom stage to accept the “Liberty Sword,” the group’s highest honor, posthumously awarded to Kirk.
It also showed up in a breakout session of mostly conservative social media influencers and podcasters who offered tips on using humor and handling online trolls: Lydia Shaffer (aka the Conservative Barbie 2.0), Alex Stein, Gates Garcia, Kaitlin Bennett, Angela Belcamino (known as “The Bold Lib,” who said she was surprised to have been invited), and Jayme Franklin, who in addition to her podcast is the Gen Z founder of The Conservateur, a conservative lifestyle brand that The New Yorkercalled “Vogue, But for Trumpers.”
They have built huge followings based on their compulsion to provoke. “We need to go back to biblical values of what it means to be a real man and what it means to be a real woman,” urged Franklin. “People want that guidance, and that needs to begin at church. We need to push people back into the pews.”
Their inclusion, like that of conservative commentator Benny Johnson, who moderated a panel, “Fathers: The Defenders of the Family,” appeared to recognize a need to expand the base — and be edgier. Johnson charged out on stage and trumpeted that “God’s first commandment to us was, ‘Go, be fruitful, multiply.’ Go make babies!!!!” He quipped that “right-wing moms, they’re happier, right?” and asked the crowd, “Any trad wife moms out there?”
The phrase is shorthand for a woman who embraces a traditional domestic role, often with an emphasis on fashion and style. Johnson — who credited Kirk for prodding him to find Jesus, get married and become a father (he has four children) — argued that Republicans, especially those in Gen Z, should embrace the traditional nuclear family identity as a winning political move.
“We are the party of parents. We are the party of children,” he said, adding that traditional values were already dominating culture and politics. “We live in a center-right country. And I’m tired of pretending that we don’t,” he said, and showed a map of red and blue votes in the 2024 presidential election. “This is the shift. You live in a red kingdom.”
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at preston@hechingerreport.org.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Social emotional learning — lessons in soft skills like listening to people you disagree with or calming yourself down before a test — has become a flashpoint in the culture wars.
The conservative political group Moms for Liberty opposes SEL, as it is often abbreviated, telling parents that its “goal is to psychologically manipulate students to accept the progressive ideology that supports gender fluidity, sexual preference exploration, and systemic oppression.” Critics say that parents should discuss social and emotional matters at home and that schools should stick to academics. Meanwhile, some advocates on the left say standard SEL classes don’t go far enough and should include such topics as social justice and anti-racism training.
While the political battle rages on, academic researchers are marshalling evidence for what high-quality SEL programs actually deliver for students. The latest study, by researchers at Yale University, summarizes 12 years of evidence, from 2008 to 2020, and it finds that 30 different SEL programs, which put themselves through 40 rigorous evaluations involving almost 34,000 students, tended to produce “moderate” academic benefits.
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The meta-analysis, published online Oct. 8 in the peer-reviewed journal Review of Educational Research, calculated that the grades and test scores of students in SEL classes improved by about 4 percentile points, on average, compared with students who didn’t receive soft-skill instruction. That’s the equivalent of moving from the 50th percentile (in the middle) to the 54th percentile (slightly above average). Reading gains were larger (more than 6 percentile points) than math gains (fewer than 4 percentile points). Longer-duration SEL programs, extending more than four months, produced double the academic gains — more than 8 percentile points.
“Social emotional learning interventions are not designed, most of the time, to explicitly improve academic achievement,” said Christina Cipriano, one of the study’s four authors and an associate professor at Yale Medical School’s Child Study Center. “And yet we demonstrated, through our meta-analytic report, that explicit social emotional learning improved academic achievement and it improved both GPA and test scores.”
Cipriano also directs the Education Collaboratory at Yale, whose mission is to “advance the science of learning and social and emotional development.”
The academic boost from SEL in this 2025 paper is much smaller than the 11 percentile points documented in an earlier 2011 meta-analysis that summarized research through 2007, when SEL had not yet gained widespread popularity in schools. That has since changed. More than 80 percent of principals of K-12 schools said their schools used an SEL curriculum during the 2023-24 school year, according to a survey by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) and the RAND Corporation.
The Yale researchers only studied a small subset of the SEL market, programs that subjected themselves to a rigorous evaluation and included academic outcomes. Three-quarters of the 40 studies were randomized-controlled trials, similar to pharmaceutical trials, where schools or teachers were randomly assigned to teach an SEL curriculum. The remaining studies, in which schools or teachers volunteered to participate, still had control groups of students so that researchers could compare the academic gains of students who did not receive SEL instruction.
The SEL programs in the Yale study taught a wide range of soft skills, from mindfulness and anger management to resolving conflicts and setting goals. It is unclear which soft skills are driving the academic gains. That’s an area for future research.
“Developmentally, when we think about what we know about how kids learn, emotional regulation is really the driver,” said Cipriano. “No matter how good that curriculum or that math program or reading curriculum is, if a child is feeling unsafe or anxious or stressed out or frustrated or embarrassed, they’re not available to receive the instruction, however great that teacher might be.”
Cipriano said that effective programs give students tools to cope with stressful situations. She offered the example of a pop quiz, from the perspective of a student. “You can recognize, I’m feeling nervous, my blood is rushing to my hands or my face, and I can use my strategies of counting to 10, thinking about what I know, and use positive self talk to be able to regulate, to be able to take my test,” she said.
The strongest evidence for SEL is in elementary school, where the majority of evaluations have been conducted (two-thirds of the 40 studies). For young students, SEL lessons tend to be short but frequent, for example, 10 minutes a day. There’s less evidence for middle and high school SEL programs because they haven’t been studied as much. Typically, preteens and teens have less frequent but longer sessions, a half hour or even 90 minutes, weekly or monthly.
Cipriano said that schools don’t need to spend “hours and hours” on social and emotional instruction in order to see academic benefits. A current trend is to incorporate or embed social and emotional learning within academic instruction, as part of math class, for example. But none of the underlying studies in this paper evaluated whether this was a more effective way to deliver SEL. All of the programs in this study were separate stand-alone SEL lessons.
Advice to schools
Schools are inundated by sales pitches from SEL vendors. Estimates of the market size range wildly, but a half dozen market research firms put it above $2 billion annually. Not all SEL programs are necessarily effective or can be expected to produce the academic gains that the Yale team calculated.
Cipriano advises schools not to be taken in by slick marketing. Many of the effective programs have no marketing at all and some are free. Unfortunately, some of these programs have been discontinued or have transformed through ownership changes. But she says school leaders can ask questions about which specific skills the SEL program claims to foster, whether those skills will help the district achieve its goals, such as improving school climate, and whether the program has been externally evaluated.
“Districts invest in things all the time that are flashy and pretty, across content areas, not just SEL,” said Cipriano. “It may never have had an external evaluation, but has a really great social media presence and really great marketing.”
Cipriano has also built a new website, improvingstudentoutcomes.org, to track the latest research on SEL effectiveness and to help schools identify proven programs.
Cipriano says parents should be asking questions too. “Parents should be partners in learning,” said Cipriano. “I have four kids, and I want to know what they’re learning about in school.”
This meta-analysis probably won’t stop the SEL critics who say that these programs force educators to be therapists. Groups like Moms for Liberty, which holds its national summit this week, say teachers should stick to academics. This paper rejects that dichotomy because it suggests that emotions, social interaction and academics are all interlinked.
Before criticizing all SEL programs, educators and parents need to consider the evidence.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
For the first time in more than a decade, confidence in the nation’s colleges and universities is rising. Forty-two percent of Americans now say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education, up from 36 percent last year.
It’s a welcome shift, but it’s certainly not time for institutions to take a victory lap.
For years, persistent concerns about rising tuition, student debt and an uncertain job market have led many to question whether college was still worth the cost. Headlines have routinely spotlighted graduates who are underemployed, overwhelmed or unsure how to translate their degrees into careers.
With the rapid rise of AI reshaping entry-level hiring, those doubts are only going to intensify. Politicians, pundits and anxious parents are already asking: Why aren’t students better prepared for the real world?
But the conversation is broken, and the framing is far too simplistic. The real question isn’t whether college prepares students for careers. It’s how. And the “how” is more complex, personal and misunderstood than most people realize.
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What’s missing from this conversation is a clearer understanding of where career preparation actually happens. It’s not confined to the classroom or the career center. It unfolds in the everyday often overlooked experiences that shape how students learn, lead and build confidence.
While earning a degree is important, it’s not enough. Students need a better map for navigating college. They need to know from day one that half the value of their experience will come from what they do outside the classroom.
To rebuild America’s trust, colleges must point beyond course catalogs and job placement rates. They need to understand how students actually spend their time in college. And they need to understand what those experiences teach them.
Ask someone thriving in their career which part of college most shaped their success, and their answer might surprise you. (I had this experience recently at a dinner with a dozen impressive philanthropic, tech and advocacy leaders.) You might expect them to name a major, a key class or an internship. But they’re more likely to mention running the student newspaper, leading a sorority, conducting undergraduate research, serving in student government or joining the debate team.
Such activities aren’t extracurriculars. They are career-curriculars. They’re the proving grounds where students build real-world skills, grow professional networks and gain confidence to navigate complexity. But most people don’t discuss these experiences until they’re asked about them.
Over time, institutions have created a false divide. The classroom is seen as the domain of learning, and career services is seen as the domain of workforce preparation. But this overlooks an important part of the undergraduate experience: everything in between.
The vast middle of campus life — clubs, competitions, mentorship, leadership roles, part-time jobs and collaborative projects — is where learning becomes doing. It’s where students take risks, test ideas and develop the communication, teamwork and problem-solving skills that employers need.
This oversight has made career services a stand-in for something much bigger. Career services should serve as an essential safety net for students who didn’t or couldn’t fully engage in campus life, but not as the launchpad we often imagine it to be.
We also need to confront a harder truth: Many students enter college assuming success after college is a given. Students are often told that going to college leads to success. They are rarely told, however, what that journey actually requires. They believe knowledge will be poured into them and that jobs will magically appear once the diploma is in hand. And for good reason, we’ve told them as much.
But college isn’t a vending machine. You can’t insert tuition and expect a job to roll out. Instead, it’s a platform, a laboratory and a proving ground. It requires students to extract value through effort, initiative and exploration, especially outside the classroom.
The credential matters, but it’s not the whole story. A degree can open doors, but it won’t define a career. It’s the skills students build, the relationships they form and the challenges they take on along the way to graduation that shape their future.
As more college leaders rightfully focus on the college-to-career transition, colleges must broadcast that while career services plays a helpful role, students themselves are the primary drivers of their future. But to be clear, colleges bear a grave responsibility here. It’s on us to reinforce the idea that learning occurs everywhere on campus, that the most powerful career preparation comes from doing, not just studying. It’s also on us to address college affordability, so that students have the time to participate in campus life, and to ensure that on-campus jobs are meaningful learning experiences.
Higher education can’t afford public confidence to dip again. The value of college isn’t missing. We’re just not looking in the right place.
Bridget Burns is the founding CEO of the University Innovation Alliance (UIA), a nationally recognized consortium of 19 public research universities driving student success innovation for nearly 600,000 students.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Every year, Hispanic Heritage Month offers the United States a chance to honor the profound and varied contributions of Latino communities. We celebrate scientists like Ellen Ochoa, the first Latina woman in space, and activists like Dolores Huerta, who fought tirelessly for workers’ rights. We use this month to recognize the cultural richness that Spanish-speaking families bring to our communities, including everything from vibrant festivals to innovative businesses that strengthen our local economies.
But there’s a paradox at play.
While we spotlight Hispanic heritage in public spaces, many classrooms across the country require Spanish-speaking students to set aside the very heart of their cultural identity: their language.
This contradiction is especially personal for me. I moved from Puerto Rico to the mainland United States as an adult in hopes of building a better future for myself and my family. The transition was far from easy. My accent often became a challenge in ways I never expected, because people judged my intelligence or questioned my education based solely on how I spoke. I could communicate effectively, yet my words were filtered through stereotypes.
Over time, I found deep fulfillment working in a state that recognizes the value of bilingual education. Texas, where I now live, continues to expand biliteracy pathways for students. This commitment honors both home languages and English, opening global opportunities for children while preserving ties to their history, family, and identity.
That commitment to expanding pathways for English Learners (EL) is urgently needed. Texas is home to more than 1.3 million ELs, which is nearly a quarter of all students in the state, the highest share in the nation. Nationwide, there are more than 5 million ELs comprising nearly 11 percent of the U.S. public school students; about 76 percent of ELs are Spanish speakers. Those figures represent millions of children who walk into classrooms every day carrying the gift of another language. If we are serious about celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month, we must be serious about honoring and cultivating that gift.
A true celebration of Hispanic heritage requires more than flags and food. It requires acknowledging that students’ home languages are essential to their academic success, not obstacles to overcome. Research consistently shows that bilingualism is a cognitive asset. Those who are exposed to two languages at an early age outperform their monolingual peers on tests of cognitive function in adolescence and adulthood. Students who maintain and develop their native language while learning English perform better academically, not worse. Yet too often, our educational systems operate as if English is the only language that matters.
One powerful way to shift this mindset is rethinking the materials students encounter every day. High-quality instructional materials should act as both mirrors and windows–mirrors in which students see themselves reflected, and windows through which they explore new perspectives and possibilities. Meeting state academic standards is only part of the equation: Materials must also align with language development standards and reflect the cultural and linguistic diversity of our communities.
So, what should instructional materials look like if we truly want to honor language as culture?
Instructional materials should meet students at varying levels of language proficiency while never lowering expectations for academic rigor.
Effective materials include strategies for vocabulary development, visuals that scaffold comprehension, bilingual glossaries, and structured opportunities for academic discourse.
Literature and history selections should incorporate and reflect Latino voices and perspectives, not as “add-ons” during heritage month, but as integral elements of the curriculum throughout the year.
But materials alone are not enough. The process by which schools and districts choose them matters just as much. Curriculum teams and administrators must center EL experiences in every adoption decision. That means intentionally including the voices of bilingual educators, EL specialists, and, especially, parents and families. Their life experiences offer insights into the most effective ways to support students.
Everyone has a role to play. Teachers should feel empowered to advocate for materials that support bilingual learners; policymakers must ensure funding and policies that prioritize high-quality, linguistically supportive instructional resources; and communities should demand that investments in education align with the linguistic realities of our students.
Because here is the truth: When we honor students’ languages, we are not only affirming their culture; we are investing in their future. A child who is able to read, write, and think in two languages has an advantage that will serve them for life. They will be better prepared to navigate an interconnected world, and they carry with them the ability to bridge communities.
This year, let’s move beyond celebrating what Latino communities have already contributed to America and start investing in what they can become when we truly support and honor them year-round. That begins with valuing language as culture–and making sure our classrooms do the same.
Altagracia “Grace” Delgado, Texas Association for Bilingual Education & Assessment for Good
Altagracia “Grace” Delgado has devoted 30 years to education, serving as a bilingual teacher, literacy coach, and both a school and central office administrator. A passionate advocate for students in special populations, she collaborates with various organizations to ensure they receive the support and resources they need. Grace serves as a Board Member of the Texas Association for Bilingual Education and an Advisory Board Member for Assessment for Good, a project of the Advanced Education Research & Development Fund, as well as the Houston Christian University’s Women in Leadership Program.
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Altagracia “Grace” Delgado, Texas Association for Bilingual Education & Assessment for Good
As a teacher, I heard it all the time: “I’m not a math person.”
I would be in line at the grocery store, wearing a math T-shirt one of my students got for me, and I’d hear it: “Algebra? Who needs it?”
I would ask the person if they’d shopped with a coupon, bought a cheaper store brand, looked at the unit price on toilet paper or if they’d mentally calculated their total before heading to the checkout line.
I’d smile and say — “All of that is algebraic thinking.”
Despite my assurances, the idea that “I am just not into math” was, and still is, pervasive. Sometimes the thought comes from students, often from parents or colleagues, and more often than not it is said with a kind of resignation — as if math were a club you either got into early or missed forever.
That mindset has never been more insidious than it is now, when mathematics knowledge is needed more than ever. Every day we rely on math to interpret data, whether it’s tracking public health trends, forecasting weather, making financial decisions or navigating technology.
The ability to reason quantitatively, spot patterns and make decisions based on evidence has become integral to how we all navigate the world. Yet recent national data shows we’re falling short. Fewer than one in three eighth graders are on grade level in math, according to the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress scores.
Across nearly every industry, from agriculture to aerospace, mathematical reasoning is becoming more essential. Employers across sectors increasingly need people who can interpret data, test ideas and solve unfamiliar problems.
If we want more young people to access these growing opportunities, we need to rapidly expand access to the after-school and summer programs that help them develop the confidence and curiosity to build math skills.
Right now, too many young people are missing out. After-school and summer learning programs are rarely included in state or federal improvement plans, even though research shows that they are proven to reinforce classroom learning and build student confidence.
In addition, educators in these programs could benefit from training and resources to help young people connect more fully with math.
With the right support from funders and policymakers, these challenges can be addressed, and millions more students can build the math skills they’ll need. Every student deserves the chance to build confidence in math, not just those who excel early.
The stakes are far too high to keep throwing the same solutions at the problem. We need to think differently — not just about how we teach math, but how and where young people experience it.
After-school and summer programs give young people a chance to engage with math in low-pressure settings that don’t feel like an extension of school. They aren’t bound by curriculum or high-stakes test prep.
In these programs, educators can naturally bring math into real-life experiences — budgeting for a community project, designing a video game, planning the route for a field trip or understanding the data behind a favorite sport or song.
These programs also create opportunities to engage families in everyday math and to elevate older youth as peer mentors or tutors — making math feel more personal, social and relevant.
Out-of-school experiences mean students aren’t expected to memorize a formula before they can explore an idea. They’re encouraged to ask questions, try things out and see what happens.
And, importantly, they can take time to try, reflect and try again, without fear of being wrong.
When mistakes are treated as part of the mathematical reasoning process, students start to take more risks. They begin trusting themselves to navigate challenges, which builds their confidence.
That shift is especially important for students who have internalized the message that math isn’t for them, and it will carry them much further than an emphasis on better test scores and grades.
At STEM Next, we’re working to foster that shift by supporting after-school and summer programs, training informal educators and strengthening the learning environments where math confidence takes root.
Our recent publication offers a closer look at how after-school and summer programs are helping students experience math differently, and why that shift matters now more than ever.
Expanding access to these programs isn’t just to help kids grow math skills today, it’s a long-term investment in our workforce and our future.
Camsie McAdams is director of the Institute for a STEM Ready America at STEM Next Opportunity Fund.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
