New Nationwide Survey Reveals Middle Schoolers Most Likely to Seek Extra Learning Resources to Close Foundational Skills Gaps and Build Confidence
ORADELL, N.J., April 17, 2025 (Newswire.com)
– More than half of parents (57%) agree that the COVID-19 pandemic had a negative impact on their child’s education and/or academic success, and more than a third (35%) now have their child enrolled in a supplemental learning program, according to a new nationwide survey* of parents of children ages 10-18 conducted by Huntington Learning Center and YouGov. The percentage of students receiving supplemental academic support is particularly high among middle schoolers: 41% among parents of 12-year-olds, 42% of 13-year-olds, and 46% of 14-year-olds.
While parents identified several academic areas where they would expect to see improvement in their children from a supplemental learning program, such as GPA (37%) and specific skills like reading comprehension and writing (37%), the top potential improvement cited was increasing their child’s confidence (45%). Improving study habits (43%) might also lead parents to turn to supplemental programs.
“Not only have children experienced academic setbacks, but their confidence in their abilities has taken a significant hit,” said Anne Huntington Sharma, President and Board Member of Huntington Learning Center. “Families are seeking support beyond the classroom, and this survey confirms that the demand for accessible, personalized academic help is greater than ever.”
These results also reflect a deeper, more concerning trend: Students currently in middle school are seeking help at the highest rates. Today’s 12, 13 and 14 year olds were in the earliest, most foundational years of their education when COVID-19 shutdowns began. In other words, students who were 7-9 years old, typically in first through third grades, five years ago, may be further behind than other age groups. These are the years when critical reading and writing skills are developed, and according to parents surveyed, many students are still struggling to catch up.
To help address these challenges, Huntington Learning Center has expanded its partnerships with school districts and public entities nationwide. In the 2023-24 school year alone, Huntington operated 124 programs funded by state and federal sources across 17 states (with 4 more in progress), serving more than 7,500 students through over 300,000 hours of instruction.
To learn more about how Huntington Learning Center is helping students bridge learning gaps, visit huntingtonhelps.com
About Huntington Learning Center
Huntington Learning Center is the nation’s leading tutoring and test prep provider. We offer customized programs in person, online, and hybrid options. Our certified teachers provide individualized instruction in phonics, reading, writing, study skills, elementary and middle school math, Algebra through Calculus, Chemistry, and other sciences. We prep for the SAT and ACT, as well as state and standardized exams. Huntington’s programs develop the skills, confidence, and motivation to help students succeed and meet the needs of Common Core State Standards. Huntington is accredited by Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools. Founded in 1977, Huntington’s mission is to give every student the best education possible. Learn how Huntington can help at www.HuntingtonHelps.com
*All figures, unless otherwise stated, are from YouGov Plc. The total sample size was 843 adults with children from ages 10 to 18 years. Fieldwork was undertaken between the 3rd and 12th of March 2025. The survey was carried out online. The figures have been weighted and are representative of all US parents with children from ages 10 to 18 years (aged 18+).
While most students say they are eager to learn and say they feel a strong sense of belonging in school, teachers still face challenges that slow improvements in student engagement and learning outcomes, according to a new report from Discovery Education.
Teachers are eager to embrace changes that produce positive outcomes, but major barriers to those outcomes remain, according to The Education Insights Report by Discovery Education.
The report reveals key areas of opportunity for addressing student engagement and captures prevailing attitudes and beliefs from superintendents, teachers, parents, and students.
Three focus areas emerged in the report:
1. All stakeholders must foster student engagement to motivate curiosity, inspire exploration, and activate effective learning. Research shows that students who are engaged are more likely to find learning interesting and empowering. Sixty-eight percent of teachers say that getting students excited about learning is a top challenge for them. What’s more, almost all teachers and students (94 percent) agree that curiosity is key to unlocking learning, but 80 percent of students say there are not enough opportunities to be curious. Students must be appropriately challenged in their learning, and prioritizing curiosity and exploration can fuel student engagement.
2. Career exploration and 21st-century skill development are increasingly critical because teachers, parents, and students feel concerned about students’ preparedness for the future as the workforce evolves. When students see how their current studies connect to potential career paths, they are more likely to be motivated and invested in their education. This integration of curiosity-driven learning and practical exploration of future opportunities guides students toward both academic and career success. Sixty-seven percent of students worry that their education is not evolving to meet future workforce needs. Seventy-four percent of superintendents believe student preparedness for job opportunities has improved compared to five years ago, while only 41 percent of teachers agree. As educators work to engage and motivate students, survey findings suggest they must sharpen their focus in two key areas to better prepare students for the future–career readiness and developing interpersonal skills.
3. Providing more targeted support for teachers and students can increase confidence and improve outcomes. Studies show that teachers who feel supported are more likely to experience job satisfaction and remain in the profession longer, creating a more stable and effective learning environment for students. Research consistently shows that personalized learning approaches–where instruction is tailored to students’ unique strengths, needs, and interests–lead to better academic outcomes, increased engagement, and higher levels of motivation.
“While The Education Insights Report by Discovery Education found that students, parents, teachers, and superintendents have a generally positive outlook about the current state of education, it also found there are hurdles to overcome,” said Brian Shaw, Discovery Education’s CEO. “Educators have concerns about keeping students engaged, and students feel uncertain about their preparedness for the future. Discovery Education’s goal with this research is to spotlight opportunities for improvement so that all stakeholders can collaborate to solve these challenges and create brighter futures for all learners.”
Additional findings include:
Curiosity is important to everyone. There is broad agreement on the importance of curiosity in learning, with more than 90 percent of stakeholders surveyed agreeing that curiosity is central to learning. However, 82 percent of students and 75 percent of teachers believe there are not enough opportunities to be curious in today’s classrooms.
Students want to learn more life skills. Eighty-eight percent of district leaders, teachers, parents, and students rate life skills as very important, but only 57 percent of students believe their schools adequately teach the life skills needed for future success.
Teachers see promise in adaptive learning. Ninety-three percent of teachers believe adaptive learning resources would help students learn more effectively and 75 percent of students say learning at their own pace would increase the likelihood of their engaging with lessons, feeling empowered in school, and more prepared for the future.
Time is of the essence. Ninety-four percent of teachers surveyed reported that they are seeking classroom tools that will give them time back to focus on students.
AI tools from education experts are more trusted. When it comes to Artificial Intelligence, 72 percent of teachers and parents, as well as 85 percent of superintendents surveyed, believe AI-powered customized learning materials are more trustworthy when built by experts in education. In addition, 84 percent of teachers and 90 percent of superintendents believe that as teachers receive more training on how to use AI, it will become a more trusted tool in education.
Survey data was collected by The Harris Poll, an industry-leading research organization, on behalf of Discovery Education in August 2024. It included 1,524 responses from K-12 students, parents of K-12 students, and K-12 teachers and superintendents.
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.
Almost every day at the public elementary school she attended in Montgomery County, Maryland, Stephanie heard comments about her weight. Kids in her fifth grade class called her “fatty” instead of her name, she recalled; others whispered, “Do you want a cupcake?” as she walked by. One classmate spread a rumor that she had diabetes. Stephanie was so incensed by his teasing that she hit him and got suspended, she said.
But nothing the kids did upset her as much as the conduct of her teachers.
For years teachers ignored her in class, even when she was the only one raising her hand, said Stephanie, whose surname is being withheld to protect her privacy. “I was like, ‘Do you not like me or something?” she recalled.
She felt invisible. “They would sit me in the back. I couldn’t see the board,” she said. When Stephanie spoke up once in middle school, a teacher told her, “I can’t put you anywhere else because you’re going to block other students.” She burned with embarrassment when her classmates laughed.
Nearly 20 percent of children in the U.S. — almost 15 million kids — were considered obese as of the 2020 school year, a number that has likely increased since the pandemic (new data is expected next year). The medical conditions associated with obesity, such as asthma, diabetes and sleep apnea, are well known. Children with obesity are also more likely to have depression, anxiety and low self-esteem.
Researchers have suggested different reasons for this “obesity achievement gap,” including biological causes (such as reduced cortical thickness in the brain in children with obesity, which is linked to compromised executive functioning, and higher levels of the hormone cortisol, linked to poorer academic performance). Researchers have also examined indirect causes of poor performance, such as that kids with obesity might miss school more often because of medical appointments or bullying.
But a relatively new area of research has shifted attention to educator bias. Studies have found that teachers often perceive children with obesity as emotional, unmotivated, less competent and non-compliant. That can lead to teachers giving these students fewer opportunities to participate in class, less positive feedback and lower grades.
Weight bias is part of American culture, said Rebecca Puhl,deputy director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health at the University of Connecticut, who has studied childhood obesity and bias. “Teachers are not immune to those attitudes,” she said. While many school districts have tried in the last 20 years to reduce childhood obesity through more nutritious meals and increased exercise, Puhl and other experts say schools also need to train teachers and students to recognize and confront the weight bias they say is hampering the education of an increasing number of children.
Some advocates argue that childhood obesity, which has steadily risen over the last 40 years, should be seen as an “academic risk factor” because of its lasting effects on educational and economic mobility. “There’s certainly been a big push for racial and ethnic diversity, for gender identity diversity, that’s so important,” said Puhl. “But weight is often left off the radar, it’s often not getting addressed.”
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Stephanie, now 18, has struggled with obesity her whole life. Within her family, being overweight never felt like a problem. But school was different.
Beginning in kindergarten, her classmates told her she looked like a Teletubby, she said. Even teachers made comments related to her weight. “If someone brought pastries for a birthday, they would ask, ‘Are you sure you want to eat that? Why don’t you try carrots and hummus?’” Stephanie recalled. Once Stephanie listened as an educator told her mother to put her on a diet. She stopped eating lunch at school after that. “When I was home, I ran to food because it was like the only place I would feel comfortable eating,” she said.
There were a handful of occasions teachers noticed her for something besides her weight. Stephanie smiled as she recalled a time when an English teacher praised an essay she wrote; when she won second place prize in a coding camp; when she was named ‘cadet of the year’ in JROTC during remote school during the pandemic. In elementary school, she received the President’s Award for Educational Achievement, designed to reward students who work hard, often in the face of obstacles to learning.
Stephanie, 18, holds an old photo of her taken in the sixth grade. Credit: Moriah Ratner for The Hechinger Report
It wasn’t enough to make her feel like she had educators on her side. “In school, they want you to confide in teachers, they made us believe that we can go to teachers for anything,” she said. “If you have no friends or if there’s no one to trust — you can always find a teacher who you can feel safe with, you can always trust them. So, I would try, but they always pushed me away.”
One interaction in particular shattered her confidence. Toward the end of seventh grade, Stephanie stayed to ask a question after class. Her teacher asked if she was a new student. “‘How did you not notice I was in your class and the entire year I turned in work?” Stephanie wondered. “That’s when I started to feel like I’m a shadow.” From that point on she stopped caring about getting good grades.
Liliana López, a spokesperson for Montgomery County Public Schools, said that teachers are not “expressly trained on weight bias,” but they “elevate all the identities individuals hold as valuable and we work with staff to identify ways they can create spaces full of affirmation, validation and significance for those identities.” Celeste Fernandez, spokesperson for the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, said her organization does not offer specific training or information on weight bias.
Researchers are increasingly identifying links between poor outcomes for students with obesity and teacher’s attitudes toward kids. In 2015, Erica Kenney, an associate professor of public health nutrition at Harvard University, helped lead a team that analyzed data from a representative sample of children from across the nation. The researchers examined, among other things, whether the kids’ weight gain influenced teachers’ perceptions of their abilities and their standardized test scores.
Gaining weight didn’t change a child’s test scores, the researchers found, but, based on surveys, it was significantly linked to teachers having lower perceptions of students’ ability, for both girls and boys. In other words, kids who gained weight faced a small but significant“academic penalty” from their teachers, Kenney said.
A separate study, involving 130 teachers, found that educators were more likely to give lower grades to essays if they believed a child who was obese had written them. For the study, Kristin Finn, a professor in the school of education at Canisius University, in Buffalo, New York, took four essays written at a sixth grade level and paired them with stock photographs of students who looked similar but some had been digitally altered to appear overweight. The overweight students received moderately lower scores.
As an elementary schooler, Stephanie heard comments about her weight almost every day. Credit: Moriah Ratner for The Hechinger Report
Finn found that the teachers were more likely to view the students with obesity as academically inferior, “messy” and more likely to need tutoring. In surveys, teachers also predicted that students with obesity weren’t good in other subjects such as math and social studies.
“To be able to make a judgment about somebody’s mathematical abilities based on a short essay seemed pretty remarkable,” said Finn. Yet, teachers maintained that they were personally unbiased in their evaluations. “They all think that they’re treating these children fairly,” she said.
Teachers’ perceptions of children’s academic potential matters: Their recommendations can affect not only students’ grades, but also their access to higher level courses, competitive programs, specialized camps and post-secondary opportunities including college.
Girls are at particular risk of being stigmatized for being obese, research has found. In one study, nearly a third of women who were overweight said they had had a teacher who was biased against them because of their weight. Students who face other barriers including poverty are also more likely to be penalized for being overweight, what is called a “double disadvantage.”
Covid, which hit during the spring of Stephanie’s eighth grade year, was a welcome interruption. She loved learning in the privacy of her home and not being “judged for my body,” she said.
When schools reopened in the fall of 10th grade, Stephanie couldn’t bear the thought of returning. She had gained weight during remote learning, some 100 pounds. Citing her asthma and her father’s diabetes, she applied for a waiver that would permit her to attend classes virtually. But “the real reason was because I was ashamed of what I look like,” she said.
She received the waiver and continued her high school studies at home.
After a 2022 diagnosis of Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, which had made her body resistant to insulin, Stephanie decided to undergo bariatric surgery. Following the operation, Stephanie lost more than half her body weight. When she returned to her high school to take exams, people were suddenly nice to her, she said. It frustrated her, she said: “I’m the same person.”
Negative perceptions of people with obesity start early. In one study, children as young as 3 who were shown drawings of people of varying weights perceived the obese people as “mean” more often than “nice.” In another study, when 5- and 6-year-olds were shown images of children of different body sizes, most said they did not want to invite the heavier children to their birthday party.
Experts argue that administrators and teachers must become more sensitive to and knowledgeable about the challenges facing children with obesity. Yolandra Hancock, a pediatrician who specializes in patients with obesity and a former teacher, said she frequently intervenes with educators on behalf of her patients with obesity. One 7-year-old boy was often late to class because he found it difficult to climb the three flights of stairs to get there.
“The assistant principal actually told him if he wasn’t so fat, he would be able to get up the stairs faster,” Hancock said. She explained that the student wasn’t walking slowly because of “laziness” but because obesity can cause a bowing of the leg bones, making it hard to navigate steps. Giving the student more time between classes or arranging for his classes to be on the same floor would have been simple fixes, she said.
In another case, an elementary school student with obesity was getting into trouble for requesting frequent bathroom breaks, a result of his large abdomen putting pressure on his bladder, similar to what happens during pregnancy. “He came close to having an accident,” Hancock said. “His teachers wouldn’t allow him to go to the restroom and would call his mother to complain that he wasn’t focusing.” She wrote to the school requesting that he be allowed to go to the restroom whenever he needed. “If you don’t allow them to do what it is that their body needs,” Hancock said, “you’re creating more barriers to them being able to learn.”
Research has found that teachers can play an important “buffering role” in reducing bullying for children with obesity. In one study, children who believed educators would step in to prevent future bullying did better in school than those who didn’t share this conviction.
But often teachers don’t intervene, said Puhl, the University of Connecticut researcher, because they believe that if students “want the teasing to stop, they need to lose weight.” Yet “body weight is not a simple issue of eating less and exercising more,” she added, but is instead a highly complex condition influenced by genetics, hormones, culture, environment and economics.Bullying and mistreatment don’t motivate people to lose weight, Puhl said, but often contribute to binge eating, reduced physical activity and weight gain.
One way to help, would be for schools to include body weight in their anti-bullying policies, Puhl said. At present, most schools’ anti-bullying policies protect children on the basis of race, ethnicity, gender identity, disability and religious beliefs, “but very few mention body weight.” That lack is really shocking, she added, “because body weight is one of the most prevalent reasons that kids are bullied today.”
This spring, Stephanie went back to school to attend her graduation ceremony and receive her diploma. She still struggles with body image but is determined to put her negative experiences behind her and start fresh in college this fall, she says.
She plans to study psychology. “I want to understand people better, because I didn’t feel heard and there were a lot of things I didn’t speak about,” she said. “I just want to help people.”
This story about childhood obesity awareness was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger 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.
During National College Savings Month, Governor Ron DeSantis announced record refunds to parents through the Florida Prepaid program and encourages all Florida families to take advantage of an affordable prepaid college plan.
In total, Florida has returned nearly $1 billion to Florida families through Prepaid Florida refunds. Florida Prepaid is the largest and longest running prepaid program of its kind, with a 35-year track record of helping over 1.2 million Florida families save for college so they can graduate and enter the workforce without burdensome loan debts.
“Because of our focus on academic achievement and fiscal responsibility, Florida has both the number one ranked higher education system and the lowest tuition in the country,” said Republican Governor Ron DeSantis. “Florida’s flexible college savings options like the Florida Prepaid program allow parents to get a head start on paying for the future, and even get money back when tuition stays low. And because I have ensured tuition has not been raised in Florida since I’ve become Governor, we have another round of refunds available for parents now.”
The Florida Prepaid college saving program allows Florida families to lock in future tuition costs at today’s prices. Because the program factors in what tuition may cost in the future, parents receive a refund if tuition stays lower than what is predicted, often resulting in thousands of dollars back.
“Florida is setting an example for the rest of the nation for ensuring that students can access higher education without taking on high amounts of debt,” said Florida Department of Education Commissioner Manny Diaz, Jr. “I am proud that Florida not only offers options like Florida Prepaid, but we are also returning money to parents because Governor DeSantis has kept tuition low.”
“There is a national narrative that higher education is extremely costly and not worth it. As the number one state for higher education for eight years in a row, Florida universities are a great return on investment. Florida has held tuition and fees flat and continues to prioritize textbook affordability,” said Ray Rodrigues, Chancellor of the State University System of Florida. “National College Savings Month provides an opportunity to highlight the affordability of our public institutions and the benefit Florida’s Prepaid College Savings Programs offer to families.”
Since Governor DeSantis took office, Florida has secured two rollbacks on Florida Prepaid Plan rates, one in 2020 and another earlier this year. These rollbacks have resulted in hundreds of thousands of families paying less, with their prepaid plan rates being reduced by a cumulative amount of $2.6 billion. In fact, more than 40,000 families still need to collect their 2024 refund, with over $130 million in unclaimed refunds.
To find out if you have an unclaimed refund, please login to your Florida Prepaid account.
Young people experiencing family instability and trauma are at increased risk for precarious living situations and interrupted educational experiences. And students who leave school before graduation are considerably more likely to experience homelessness and less likely to enroll in college.
By failing to systematically and preemptively address youth homelessness through our schools, we are increasing the chances of hundreds of thousands of young people becoming and remaining homeless.
We can change this.
Schools are key to intervention. Schools can and should serve as indispensable resources for students who are experiencing unstable housing or outright homelessness. Lamentably, too often, there aren’t enough staff members to carry out existing support programs, much less manage additional programs designed for youth who are at risk for or are already experiencing homelessness.
Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox.
I saw these issues firsthand when I worked as the chief of staff at Chicago Public Schools, but they are prevalent at schools nationwide. For roughly 700,000 youth ages 13 to 17, not having stable or any housing is top of mind, a recent study found.
Here are some suggestions for identifying youth at risk and tackling youth homelessness systemically.
Paying more attention to risk factors will increase the chance that at-risk students will be identified earlier and interventions enacted.
We’ve learned a lot about risk factors at the independent, nonpartisan policy research center I lead. For example, a family’s income is a strong indicator of risk, so school officials and staff should be hypersensitive in districts where families are struggling financially.
Yet appearances alone won’t necessarily indicate which students are struggling. Many schools rely on student self-reporting, which students are less likely to do if they don’t know there are resources available or if they are too ashamed to reveal their status.
Schools should initiate a universal screening at the beginning of the school year to gauge if students are vulnerable to homelessness. All staff should routinely be trained to look for signs of homelessness and risk factors.
Not everyone at a school needs to deeply engage with each student, but they should be aware of signs so they can make referrals to a social worker or the school’s McKinney-Vento liaison if needed.
The federal McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act includes a requirement for schools to provide “comparable” transportation for homeless students to get to and from school. And while every school has a McKinney-Vento liaison who administers programs funded by federal dollars, at many schools that assistance boils down to just providing a bus pass for homeless students, nothing more.
If their school is only able to provide a bus pass, students’ many other needs — like clothing and mental health care — will not be met.
Having more school social workers would also help identify students struggling with housing stability and match them to programs and services that could meet their needs.
Another significant risk factor for homelessness is dropping out of school. A truancy officer’s role is critical when students drop out. Administrators should be asking themselves what it takes to get kids back in school to stay. The goal of that position should not be to identify and punish students but to figure out what resources they need to get them back to school and keep them there.
One way to ensure that interventions are available and applied would be to mirror the work of the Title IV-E Prevention Services Clearinghouse, the place where evidence-based interventions for child welfare are vetted, rated and made eligible for federal reimbursement.
The inclusion of an evidence-based clearinghouse in a federal program is a legislative component that has historically enabled bipartisan buy-in. Since schools are already burdened by tight budgets and overworked staff, adding a clearinghouse for homelessness prevention efforts would allow qualified outside agencies to provide — and be reimbursed for — evidence-based intervention services.
Two other points not to be overlooked are that youth homelessness is experienced disproportionately by Black, Hispanic and LGBTQ youth, and youth homelessness is a leading pathway into adult homelessness. That’s why supporting young people at risk for or experiencing homelessness — through substantial investments and increased services — is a significant way to address racial inequity and break these cycles.
The point of school is to educate and nurture our youth so they can successfully pass on to the next phase of life. If we work together, we can disrupt the brutal cycle of homelessness and give more young people the future they deserve.
Bryan Samuels is executive director of Chapin Hall. He previously served as chief of staff at Chicago Public Schools, director of Illinois DCFS, and commissioner of the Administration on Children, Youth and Families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services during the first Obama administration.
This story about homeless students was produced by The 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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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.
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What you need to know
Hechinger’s executive editor, Nirvi Shah, joins us this week to share what she learned at the recent Moms for Liberty summit and how the organization’s targeted focus on transgender students helped lead to a temporary block to portions of President Joe Biden’s new Title IX regulations in some states.
You found that schools even in the same district are following different Title IX regs. What does this mean for students?
The big takeaway: These are confusing times. Federal court rulings have paused *requiring* schools in some states to follow new Biden administration regulations on sex discrimination. And individual schools in other states are also exempt from being *forced* to adopt those rules, though local school boards, generally, can adopt the regulation. The reality on the ground is, however, that schools within some districts may be following different federal rules about Title IX, which makes for an administrative mess.
Hechinger’s Sarah Butrymowicz created a pair of searchable databases to see which colleges and K-12 schools do not have to follow the Biden administration, but the list can change — 1,700 schools were added during the week of the Moms for Liberty summit — so make note of the time stamp.
After some defeats for Moms for Liberty-backed school board candidates, observers have questioned whether the group’s influence has waned. What’s your assessment of the group’s strategy?
The group is still big on endorsing school board candidates, and school board races are the only elected office for which it makes endorsements, co-founder Tiffany Justice told me and Hechinger writer Laura Pappano in an interview during the summit. (Justice endorsed Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump personally during a one-on-one chat the two had at the M4L summit over Labor Day weekend in D.C.) Justice reiterated in our interview that “All politics is local,” and that the group wants power to be closest to the people and not the federal Education Department. “So how do you solve that? You make sure that you have strong local school boards who answer to their constituents.”
School board races aside, many, including Moms for Liberty, would characterize it as a significant victory — for local schools and like-minded parents — that they got a federal court to agree to preferences of Moms for Liberty member parents on which Title IX regulation should apply at their children’s schools, even if Justice said it was something she never imagined when the group got its start during the pandemic.
What most surprised you about this year’s Moms for Liberty summit?
This was the theme of our story: this laser-like focus on transgender issues at schools. It came up often and was at the center of many speeches and breakout sessions. In the past, the group has had a more expansive message but this year, they seem to have one specific target. “There’s no such thing as a transgender child. Please quote me on that,” Justice told us. “There are children who are experiencing mental distress and they need kindness and compassion and help to feel comfortable in their own bodies, because no child is born in the wrong body. There is no right way to be a boy or a girl.”
My colleague, Ariel Gilreath, reports on the opening of the first traditional school run by the New Orleans school district since Hurricane Katrina devastated the city.
Hechinger Report editor Caroline Preston launched her climate change newsletter (which you can sign up for here) with a look at how some colleges are embedding climate-related instruction into diverse fields.
Despite billions in federal funding during the pandemic, a new study shows that tutoring to help students catch up on learning losses hasn’t yielded great results, reports Hechinger columnist Jill Barshay.
Most states are failing to help parents understand how the pandemic negatively affected students’ academic performance and attendance, according to a new report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education. This may be because some school districts didn’t have quality longitudinal data on absenteeism and other measures before the pandemic and have not made that data public.
Having a teacher of the same race, and attending a school with a higher percentage of students enrolled in dual language immersion English instruction, is associated with better reading scores for English learners, according to a new analysis by the Government Accountability Office. Hechinger Report contributor Kavitha Cardoza wrote recently about a former superintendent’s fraught efforts to make his Alabama district more welcoming for English learners.
In this report, nonprofit group Digital Promise explains how K-12 schools can take a leadership role in ensuring Black, Hispanic, Native American and rural students have equal access to high speed internet, computers and digital literacy training. I wrote about these digital divides in an article about the 2024 National Education Technology Plan.
About 60 percent of people support school vouchers, according to a new poll from news outlet The 19th and SurveyMonkey. Eight-seven percent of respondents want schools to teach about the history of slavery and racism, 60 percent favor instruction on Judeo-Christian values, and 51 percent support instruction on LGBTQ+ people in history and literature.
From the vault
When my colleague Sarah Butrymowicz began reporting on education in 2010, cell phones in the classroom were all the rage. Educators and experts hoped that allowing students access to their own devices in school would revolutionize learning. Now that’s changed, of course: A growing number of districts and states are banning the devices or clamping down on cell phone use (and in some cases even Chromebooks and tablets), arguing that they distract students from learning and pose threats to young people’s mental health.
Cell phone use also frequently leads to behavior problems. Sarah spent months last winter examining thousands of discipline records from a dozen school districts as part of Hechinger’s series on school discipline, Suspended for … what? Cell phones played a role in hundreds of student suspensions. Students were suspended for refusing to give up their phones, recording teachers, blaring music or taking videos, and taking calls in the middle of class. As cell phone bans spread, we’ll be following whether some of these discipline issues subside – or whether there’s an uptick in discipline and suspensions as schools punish kids and send them home for refusing to follow the bans.
Et cetera
Do we need to rethink school policies that put parents on the hook for paying for lost or damaged digital devices? Michael Wear, chief executive officer of the Center for Christianity & Public Life, recently used X to draw attention to this issue: “As someone who grew up in a family that struggled financially, I really think school districts need to think carefully about the ethics and ramifications of mandating kids accept a $1000 electronic device that they didn’t ask for, and then telling parents that if anything happens to the device the family will have to compensate the district for the loss.”
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.
MISSOULA, Mont. — From the outside, the building that was once Cold Springs Elementary School in Missoula, Montana, looks abandoned. Beige paint peels from its cinder-block facade. A blue banner proclaiming “graduation matters” hangs tattered and bleached by the sun. But inside, past a vacant office and around a dimly lit corner, there’s a stack of brand new cots, shoe racks with tiny sandals and the telltale smell of graham crackers.
Five independent child care centers opened here in the spring, the first participants in a unique network called Missoula Child Care Advantage, or MCCA. A sixth center plans to open its doors at Cold Springs in September. When the programs reach full capacity, they’ll serve a combined total of up to 90 kids, infant through pre-school.
Like many communities across the country, Missoula County has a desperate shortage of affordable child care. But Missoulians have found one part of the solution hiding in plain sight: unused public buildings, such as schools closed to accommodate changing enrollments. Cold Springs Elementary was bursting at its nearly 90-year-old seams when it shut its doors in late 2018 and its students moved to a new facility.
Across the country, shuttered schools like Cold Springs Elementary in Missoula, Montana, are being remodeled and repurposed as centers for early child care. Credit: Leah Fabel for The Hechinger Report
Cold Springs Elementary closed in 2018, opening up space for the launch of Missoula Child Care Advantage in 2024. But artifacts from the building’s former life serving older kids remain. Credit: Leah Fabel for The Hechinger Report
The modular classrooms that house the six child care centers were set up in the town of Colstrip, Montana, in the 1960s before being moved to Cold Springs Elementary in the 1980s. They required significant upgrades to meet current child care regulations. Credit: Leah Fabel for The Hechinger Report
As the retrofit projects proceed, new ways of doing the business of child care are emerging, too.
The details of the child care crisis vary by community, but the big picture is the same: Parents are scrambling. More than half of American children under the age of 5 live in a “child care desert,” defined as any census tract where the number of children under 5 is at least triple the number of licensed child care slots. In Montana, the number of slots available meets only 44 percent of total demand, according to the state’s Department of Labor and Industry. For infants, that percentage drops to 32 percent.
Parents Adam Rasmussen and Meredith Repke, who secured one of the initial 42 spots at Cold Springs, are among the lucky ones. For a decade, Missoula offered the couple their ideal lifestyle: mountains within minutes to bike, hike, run, and climb. In late 2022, they welcomed a daughter, Hope. But when it came time for Hope to start in child care a year later, they couldn’t find a single provider with an open slot. At the time, they had been spending a lot of time in Whitefish, a town about 130 miles to the north, due to an illness in the family. When they couldn’t find a child care opening in Missoula, they opted to stay in Whitefish while they continued the search.
MCCA’s opening felt too good to be true, Repke said. Hope enrolled at Montessori Plus International, whose founder saw the Cold Springs location as a way to expand her popular day care to a second site. Repke and Rasmussen moved back to Missoula, into a new house a short bike ride away from the school. “It allowed us to resume our lives,” Repke said.
Related: Our biweekly Early Childhood newsletter highlights innovative solutions to the obstacles facing the youngest students. Subscribe for free.
Inside Cold Springs, each of the six MCCA classrooms has been transformed into a unique day care. Through one door, a nature-themed space with fluorescent ceiling lights covered in fabric replicates staring up into a stand of birch trees; through another is Hope’s Montessori-inspired program where children learn to speak in Mandarin.
There are a few hang-ups with the space, said Sally Henkel, who coordinates MCCA under the auspices of the United Way of Missoula County. Due to licensing guidelines written before the network’s inception, children in different child care programs are required to stay strictly apart. This ensures clear accountability if anything goes wrong, said Henkel, who works closely with the county licensor.
Longtime early childhood educator River Yang enjoys her proximity to colleagues at other child care centers in Cold Springs. “There’s a sense of community here,” she said. Credit: Leah Fabel for The Hechinger Report
For most providers in the area, it’s never an issue because they operate alone. But for the co-located providers at Cold Springs, it makes for a strange dance. And for kids who see other kids but aren’t allowed to interact with them, it’s just confusing. “Outdoor time is awkward,” Henkel said.
Still, the space at Cold Springs is a win. Communities need infrastructure devoted to child care much as they need schools, roads, and bridges. But “there’s no dedicated federal funding source to support that,” said Bevin Parker-Cerkez, who leads early childhood work nationwide for the Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), a community development financial institution. As a result, small-scale child care providers often are on their own when it comes to planning for, maintaining, and upgrading facilities, Parker-Cerkez said. And with barely-there profit margins, upgrades typically aren’t in the budget.
“These are spaces for zero-to-five year olds — they’re getting beat up with wear and tear,” Parker-Cerkez said. “People don’t recognize how much [space] affects the quality of programming. Not just for kids, but for employees, too.”
After a long search for child care, Adam Rasmussen, pictured here with Hope, now lives a quick bike ride away from MCCA. Credit: Leah Fabel for The Hechinger Report
Several years of brainstorming and a quick sprint to secure a state grant led to the opening of Missoula Child Care Advantage, in a school that was closed several years ago. Montana Mama is one of six child care providers to use the space. Credit: Leah Fabel for The Hechinger Report
At Cold Springs, some maintenance costs are built into providers’ $900 per month rent. For small providers who might otherwise operate out of a residence, that’s a steal. The median rent for a two-bedroom house in Missoula is twice that, and housing prices have more than doubled in the past decade.
Missoula County Public Schools’ involvement is a part of what makes MCCA work, said Grace Decker, who spearheaded the network’s formation in her role as the coordinator of Zero to Five Missoula, under the United Way’s umbrella. The district has offered a 5-year lease and cut-rate rent.
But space is only part of the solution to an enormously complex problem. “It’s the pot, but it’s not the soup,” said Decker, who started a new job in March coordinating Montana Advocates for Children, a statewide coalition.
In 2019, Decker began meeting with a group of Missoulians with an interest in the future of child care, including providers, school district officials, and representatives from local businesses and health care. The child care providers painted a bleak picture of their balance sheets. For example, unexpected vacancies — as when a child is pulled out of a center on short notice — can cost them thousands of dollars and threaten their financial survival.
Decker and her collaborators brainstormed ways to alleviate costs. They came up with a plan for a new kind of child care network, open to any licensed provider in Missoula County, in which local businesses could purchase a membership. While the providers would offer child care to all families, employees at member businesses would have waitlist priority. The membership fees paid by the businesses would fund shared access, network-wide, to critical money- and time-saving services like waitlist management, telehealth, and payroll. “That’s where we start to actually stabilize the sector,” Decker said.
Adel Staggs’s struggle to find child care for her daughter, Addie (pictured), led to her opening her own center at Cold Springs as part of Missoula Child Care Advantage. Credit: Leah Fabel for The Hechinger Report
Today, Cold Springs school serves as a pilot site for the network. MCCA used a $414,000 state grant and raised about $200,000 more to reconstruct the classrooms as care centers. Two businesses are signed on as charter members. The hope is that the network’s success at Cold Springs will help to drive its growth countywide.
Henkel, whose position is funded by the city, came on as MCCA’s coordinator in January 2023, several months after she was hired. The hold-up? She couldn’t find child care for her 8-month-old son.
On a recent walk through Cold Springs, Henkel and project architect Adam Jones pointed out the changes made to each room to make them child-care ready. Bathrooms were built, electrical sockets were brought up to code, too-porous countertops were replaced.
Asbestos abatement set the project back $12,000. “That could’ve been a lot worse,” said Jones. And rumors of a long-neglected septic tank onsite turned out to be false. “We thought we’d have to tap into brownfield funding,” Henkel said. “That would’ve set us back at least a year.”
Sally Henkel’s background working at start-ups honed the jack-of-all-trades skill set she needs to run Missoula Child Care Advantage. When providers needed a space to store outdoor supplies, she called on her husband and father-in-law to help her build it. Credit: Leah Fabel for The Hechinger Report
Missoula Child Care Advantage coordinator Sally Henkel spends part of each week at Cold Springs checking in with providers and addressing needs that pop up, like maintenance and licensing concerns. Credit: Leah Fabel for The Hechinger Report
Since MCCA’s opening last March, Henkel has fielded calls from child care advocates from other parts of Montana, as well as from Connecticut, Idaho, West Virginia and Wyoming, all looking to learn more about how the network works. A project based directly on MCCA will launch in the fall in Ravalli County, just south of Missoula.
Missoula is not alone in its approach to expanding child care. Other areas around the country faced with the child care space conundrum have looked at using closed school buildings.
In upstate New York, the 2023 closure of a parochial school led to the creation of the Ticonderoga Community Early Learning Center, set to open in September to 50 children, age 5 and under. In Texas, the United Way of Greater Austin expects to invest more than $18 million over at least two years to transform the shuttered Pease Elementary into a child care center for more than 100 children, ages 6 months to 5 years, as well as community spaces to be used for events like parent classes and continuing education for early childhood educators.
And in Portland, Indiana, 95 miles northeast of Indianapolis, crews are completing renovations on the former Judge Haynes Elementary School, which will reopen in September as the Jay County Early Learning Center, serving 150 kids, ages 6 months to 5 years.
For years, the community has been clamoring for more child care options, said Doug Inman, executive director of the Portland Foundation. Well over half of the county’s young children in need of care are not enrolled in a known program, and only 9 percent of those in need of care are in a program deemed high quality, based on a 2018 survey. Providers named “building renovations” as one of the top barriers keeping them from seeking a higher rating.
Child care provider Katy Slagell plays outdoors with a student at Cold Springs Elementary, home to the second of her two Bumblebee Academy child care centers. Credit: Leah Fabel for The Hechinger Report
The Judge Haynes project faced a setback in 2021 when county leaders opted not to provide funding, citing concerns about concentrating child care slots in the county seat rather than scattering them throughout the region. But the foundation’s board pushed ahead, Inman said. They purchased Judge Haynes from the local school district for $35,000 and brought on a seasoned provider with three other Indiana locations to run the center. They ultimately secured about $4 million, mostly from state and philanthropic grants, but also from community members like a Portland retiree who showed up at the foundation offices to pledge $2,500.
Today, the Jay County Early Learning Center has a new roof, floors, lighting, and bathrooms, a kitchen, a lactation room, and a gym. A toddler-friendly playground will be installed in late August, cleared of “all that equipment that would cause you to get a tetanus shot,” Inman said.
“We knew going into this that we were taking a big bite, but this is a generational project,” he said. “If we can be a model for any small community to see that a community of 20,000 people can do this, we’d love to be a place that others can learn from.”
This story about child care buildings was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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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.
The pandemic disrupted education in previously unimaginable ways. It limited testing and pushed schools toward remote learning and easier assignments, along with softer grading and a more relaxed attitude around attendance.
These accommodations were supposed to be short-term, but most are still with us and are having a negative impact on students. This needs to change.
That’s why, as parents nationwide help their children settle into school this fall, they may want to ask questions about whether their kids are ready to dive into grade-level work — and, if not, find out what is being done to address that.
Four and a half years after the start of the pandemic, it’s time to raise the bar and stop making excuses for sagging achievement. Newly released data show that student growth in 2023-24 lagged behind pre-pandemic achievement levels in nearly every grade. That data follows the big declines in reading and math scores on the most recent Nation’s Report Card and the release of a study showing that high-needs districts have been recovering from the pandemic more slowly than their wealthier counterparts, worsening long-standing achievement gaps.
The pandemic also led to an explosion inchronic absenteeism, and we’ve seen only modest improvements. Arecent study by USC researchers found a lack of concern about the issue among parents. School leaders also aren’t as worried as you’d expect, with only 15 percent saying they were “extremely concerned” about student absences in asurvey released by the National Center for Education Statistics.
Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox.
At the same time, we can see clear evidence of grade inflation in rising GPAs coupled with falling or flat test scores. And while I know that teachers are trying to be supportive, lowering expectations is harmful; recent research shows that students learn more from teachers who have higher grading standards.
However, the need to raise standards doesn’t just rest on the shoulders of teachers. Education leaders and policymakers are also making things too easy. After decades of raising the bar for what’s considered grade-level performance, several states have lowered their “cut scores,” or what it means to be deemed proficient on end-of-year achievement tests.
Many states are alsocutting back on K-12 assessments and graduation requirements, despite the fact that they are critical to holding education systems accountable.
Even students don’t like the go-easy-on-them approach. In anop-ed for the Baltimore Sun, recent high school graduate Benjamin Handelman notes that what is more helpful is for teachers to show enthusiasm for the subjects they teach and offer rigorous and engaging learning opportunities.
That’s important for all students, but especially for those from historically marginalized groups, who areleast likely to get interesting, high-level learning opportunities.
Related: PROOF POINTS: Why are kids still struggling in school four years after the pandemic?
Keeping the bar low is going to make our kids less competitive when they leave school. It shocks me every time I hear people say, “Well, if everyone is behind, then no one is really behind.”
Eventually, young people will compete for jobs that aren’t going to have lower standards. In fact, employers will likely have higher expectations than a decade ago given advances in generative AI, the impact of technological advances on the world of work and a growing demand for employees with strong analytical, problem-solving and interpersonal skills.
Progress over time is central to our lives. When I was growing up, my competitive swimming coach was a former world record holder and Olympian. The time she had needed to be the fastest in the world in the 200-meter butterfly in 1963 was just barely fast enough for her daughter to qualify for the U.S. Olympic trials 30 years later.
We cannot be complacent about the fact thatmath achievement for 13-year-olds has fallen to levels not seen since the 1990s. That’s why I’m glad there are states and systems holding kids to high expectations. We can learn from them.
In Maryland, Superintendent of Schools Carey Wright has pledged to raise rigor, much like she did in Mississippi, which mademajor achievement gains under her stewardship. Her strategy, emulated by others, centers around raising standards and implementing evidence-based instructional strategies, most notably in reading. Mississippi is among three states, along with Illinois and Louisiana, where research shows that students have returned to pre-pandemic achievement levels in reading. Additional strategies adopted by Illinois and Louisiana include tutoring and interventions for struggling learners and professional development for educators.
These states show us that all students can succeed when challenged and supported with high expectations and opportunities to learn. That must be what we strive for to help all kids finally put the pandemic behind them.
Lesley Muldoon is the executive director of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees the Nation’s Report Card. She previously served as chief operating officer of the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers.
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.
It’s officially back-to-school time, where ideas are nurtured, knowledge and curiosity thrive, and life-long friendships are forged. Yet, for many students, school is also a place where the challenges of ADHD are put on full display. For parents and teachers, addressing these challenges requires a multi-faceted approach that combines thorough and adequate testing, open communication, and proactivity.
A holistic approach to student health
The implementation of school-based health centers (SBHCs) is fostering a supportive environment for children with unique needs like ADHD. Traditionally, healthcare and education entities have existed in separate realms. However, the recent global mental health crisis calls for a more interconnected approach. These centers have emerged as hubs for comprehensive primary care and behavioral health services. The rise in SBHCs signals a move in the right direction and acts as a bridge between educators and parents. This strategic partnership creates an environment conducive to learning and growth while nurturing each child’s potential.
“SBHCs provide primary care and behavioral health services for students with Medicaid, no insurance, and occasionally private insurance on school campuses nationwide,” says Ashlea Johnson, LCSW at Summit Mental Health Services and clinical advisor at Qbtech. “The ability to collaborate with educators alongside the family system is an incredible boon for the students.”
The collaborative nature of SBHCs allows clinicians to dive into each student’s specific needs, creating a personalized curriculum extending beyond medical checkups. For example, clinicians at a Colorado-based SBHC incorporate more technology, like objective ADHD testing, to design effective accommodation plans. By harnessing technology-driven testing tools, educators can tailor strategies that enhance school performance and behavior in the classroom with peers.
As the educational landscape continues to evolve and embrace these changes, it also highlights the impact ADHD can have in the classroom. From a parent’s perspective, these challenges can affect their child’s entire school experience, which is why having central healthcare centers equipped with better technology is crucial to student success.
How parents can help
The impact of ADHD on a child’s education is profound. The constant transitions, including moving between classes to varying schedules and new routines, can exacerbate an already stress-ridden child. Parents often find their children struggling to focus in this ever-changing environment and wonder how to lessen the burden.
Parents can play a pivotal role in equipping their children with the right tools to navigate these challenges successfully:
Early planning and communication. Starting conversations early leading up to the first day back can lessen the upcoming anxiety. Discussing teachers, routines, and new friends can prepare your child for what’s ahead.
Role-playing. Engaging in role-playing scenarios can boost your child’s confidence in social settings. Parents can simulate conversations, providing the child with practical tools for making friends, speaking to teachers and more.
A letter to teachers. Collaborating with teachers is crucial. Crafting a letter introducing your child, their accommodation needs, and strengths and weaknesses due to ADHD can familiarize the teacher, helping create a supportive classroom environment.
Familiarization visits. A field trip to the school or classroom before the year starts can ease stressors and make it less intimidating.
Establish routine. Ensure you have established a consistent routine well before the school year starts, from bedtime to breakfast, to provide a sense of stability your child can come home to.
Get a medical opinion. Seek a doctor who is competent in ADHD. While starting with a pediatrician or primary care provider is common, parents should seek a specialist with expertise in ADHD diagnosis and management, including objective testing.
Navigating proper accommodations can also be daunting due to the differing policies across individual schools and districts. For parents seeking to secure services for their child, it’s vital to get an outside medical evaluation that acknowledges ADHD as a medical condition to be used alongside the school evaluation. Choosing a provider who offers comprehensive assessments using subjective and objective measurements and having that data to support the diagnosis can bolster the case for accommodations and provide a clearer picture of the child’s needs.
It’s worth noting each child is unique, and what works for one may not work for the other. Children often possess a deep understanding of their needed accommodations, whether stepping outside the classroom for fresh air or having a quiet place to go for a break when frustrated. Teachers making simple tweaks to their classroom–like seating arrangements, stress balls, or even treadmills–can significantly impact a child’s ability to concentrate and engage.
A glimpse into the future
As we look ahead, the future of SBHCs seems bright, and the need for such places will likely increase as schools recognize the synergy between emotional well-being and academic success. Technology will play a significant role as well. Tools like objective ADHD assessments can boost classroom performance and behavior by being the anchor on which diagnosis and management lie. The data-driven insights can empower educators and clinicians to craft even more tailored plans, ensuring each student receives what they require. This fusion of education and healthcare will continue to redefine student success, reshaping the education landscape for good.
Evelyn Green, M.S.Ed., ADDA and CHADD
Evelyn Green, M.S.Ed., is past president of ADDA (the Attention Deficit Disorder Association) and CHADD (Children and Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder).
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Lawsuits challenging the Biden administration’s Title IX rule on sex discrimination have led to judges blocking its implementation in 26 states. The new rule was also halted in schools and universities attended by children of members of Moms for Liberty, Young America’s Foundation and Female Athletes United, following lawsuits from those groups.
The result is a messy legal landscape with school officials trying to figure out their obligations. Below are lists of K-12 schools and colleges that, because of court injunctions, are continuing to follow the Trump administration’s Title IX rules instead of the newer regulations.
Search below and read our full report about this issue.
Related articles
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.
A middle school teacher is making morning drop-off more fun with unique costumes. Adam Joiner has been working at Thomas Jefferson Middle School for about 15 years. He is the band director for students enrolled in music courses, but he is known school-wide for the costumes he wears while directing morning traffic.Over the years, Joiner has dressed up as Harry Potter, Waldo from “Where’s Waldo?,” Gru from “Despicable Me” and more. When sister station WXII visited Thomas Jefferson Middle School, Joiner’s giant chef hat made him easy to spot among the dozens of cars dropping off students. Along with the hat, Joiner was wearing a small apron and a traffic vest. In one hand, he had an oversized whisk, and in the other, he had a hand-held stop sign. Along with the chef costume, Joiner had a fitting slogan for parents.“I tell them they shouldn’t cook up trouble because that’s my job,” he said. Joiner says the tradition of wearing costumes actually began with wearing funky socks with sandals. Kids noticed and began giving him fun hats to wear. From there, the tradition evolved into full costumes. Joiner says the costumes not only get parents to notice him in traffic, but also give students a fun start to the day. “One of the biggest things in schools is following rules is important, and oftentimes, we’re hard on them at the very beginning. ‘You’ve got to step in line, you’ve got to sit down, you’ve got to stop talking,’” Joiner said. “The first experience is often negative, and I want their first experience to be positive.”He says it also turns traffic from a negative experience into a positive one.“Parents hate it, kids hate it, teachers hate it,” he said. “And this diffuses that.”On a typical morning, Joiner says he wears one of his nearly 150 hats for morning drop-off. He saves the full costumes for Fridays.However, for the first day of school on Monday, Aug. 12, he decided to go all out. He decided to become the villain from “The Little Mermaid,” Ursula, sporting blow-up tentacles and a mask.“I was coming up with ‘Poor, Unfortunate Soul’ lyrics all week, and so I sang them as they came in,” Joiner said. Other staff members in the car line expressed their admiration for Joiner’s dedication to dressing up. Among them is Jefferson’s principal, Jessica Gillespie-Johnson.“It’s amazing. I love being out here in the morning with the music playing and him down there,” she said. “It gives the kids a great way to come into the building. It’s very welcoming.”Joiner says dressing up is also fun for him and helps him develop relationships with students and parents. “It’s not about the pencil and the paper,” Joiner said. “It’s about having a great time learning stuff, and this helps kind of initiate that.”He has no intention of stopping, so students and parents can enjoy his costumes for many mornings to come. “Who knows what will come next!” he said.
A middle school teacher is making morning drop-off more fun with unique costumes.
Adam Joiner has been working at Thomas Jefferson Middle School for about 15 years. He is the band director for students enrolled in music courses, but he is known school-wide for the costumes he wears while directing morning traffic.
Over the years, Joiner has dressed up as Harry Potter, Waldo from “Where’s Waldo?,” Gru from “Despicable Me” and more.
When sister station WXII visited Thomas Jefferson Middle School, Joiner’s giant chef hat made him easy to spot among the dozens of cars dropping off students.
Along with the hat, Joiner was wearing a small apron and a traffic vest. In one hand, he had an oversized whisk, and in the other, he had a hand-held stop sign.
Along with the chef costume, Joiner had a fitting slogan for parents.
“I tell them they shouldn’t cook up trouble because that’s my job,” he said.
Joiner says the tradition of wearing costumes actually began with wearing funky socks with sandals. Kids noticed and began giving him fun hats to wear. From there, the tradition evolved into full costumes.
Joiner says the costumes not only get parents to notice him in traffic, but also give students a fun start to the day.
“One of the biggest things in schools is following rules is important, and oftentimes, we’re hard on them at the very beginning. ‘You’ve got to step in line, you’ve got to sit down, you’ve got to stop talking,’” Joiner said. “The first experience is often negative, and I want their first experience to be positive.”
He says it also turns traffic from a negative experience into a positive one.
“Parents hate it, kids hate it, teachers hate it,” he said. “And this diffuses that.”
On a typical morning, Joiner says he wears one of his nearly 150 hats for morning drop-off. He saves the full costumes for Fridays.
However, for the first day of school on Monday, Aug. 12, he decided to go all out. He decided to become the villain from “The Little Mermaid,” Ursula, sporting blow-up tentacles and a mask.
“I was coming up with ‘Poor, Unfortunate Soul’ lyrics all week, and so I sang them as they came in,” Joiner said.
Other staff members in the car line expressed their admiration for Joiner’s dedication to dressing up. Among them is Jefferson’s principal, Jessica Gillespie-Johnson.
“It’s amazing. I love being out here in the morning with the music playing and him down there,” she said. “It gives the kids a great way to come into the building. It’s very welcoming.”
Joiner says dressing up is also fun for him and helps him develop relationships with students and parents.
“It’s not about the pencil and the paper,” Joiner said. “It’s about having a great time learning stuff, and this helps kind of initiate that.”
He has no intention of stopping, so students and parents can enjoy his costumes for many mornings to come.
A middle school teacher is making morning drop-off more fun with unique costumes. Adam Joiner has been working at Thomas Jefferson Middle School for about 15 years. He is the band director for students enrolled in music courses, but he is known school-wide for the costumes he wears while directing morning traffic.Over the years, Joiner has dressed up as Harry Potter, Waldo from “Where’s Waldo?,” Gru from “Despicable Me” and more. When sister station WXII visited Thomas Jefferson Middle School, Joiner’s giant chef hat made him easy to spot among the dozens of cars dropping off students. Along with the hat, Joiner was wearing a small apron and a traffic vest. In one hand, he had an oversized whisk, and in the other, he had a hand-held stop sign. Along with the chef costume, Joiner had a fitting slogan for parents.“I tell them they shouldn’t cook up trouble because that’s my job,” he said. Joiner says the tradition of wearing costumes actually began with wearing funky socks with sandals. Kids noticed and began giving him fun hats to wear. From there, the tradition evolved into full costumes. Joiner says the costumes not only get parents to notice him in traffic, but also give students a fun start to the day. “One of the biggest things in schools is following rules is important, and oftentimes, we’re hard on them at the very beginning. ‘You’ve got to step in line, you’ve got to sit down, you’ve got to stop talking,’” Joiner said. “The first experience is often negative, and I want their first experience to be positive.”He says it also turns traffic from a negative experience into a positive one.“Parents hate it, kids hate it, teachers hate it,” he said. “And this diffuses that.”On a typical morning, Joiner says he wears one of his nearly 150 hats for morning drop-off. He saves the full costumes for Fridays.However, for the first day of school on Monday, Aug. 12, he decided to go all out. He decided to become the villain from “The Little Mermaid,” Ursula, sporting blow-up tentacles and a mask.“I was coming up with ‘Poor, Unfortunate Soul’ lyrics all week, and so I sang them as they came in,” Joiner said. Other staff members in the car line expressed their admiration for Joiner’s dedication to dressing up. Among them is Jefferson’s principal, Jessica Gillespie-Johnson.“It’s amazing. I love being out here in the morning with the music playing and him down there,” she said. “It gives the kids a great way to come into the building. It’s very welcoming.”Joiner says dressing up is also fun for him and helps him develop relationships with students and parents. “It’s not about the pencil and the paper,” Joiner said. “It’s about having a great time learning stuff, and this helps kind of initiate that.”He has no intention of stopping, so students and parents can enjoy his costumes for many mornings to come. “Who knows what will come next!” he said.
A middle school teacher is making morning drop-off more fun with unique costumes.
Adam Joiner has been working at Thomas Jefferson Middle School for about 15 years. He is the band director for students enrolled in music courses, but he is known school-wide for the costumes he wears while directing morning traffic.
Over the years, Joiner has dressed up as Harry Potter, Waldo from “Where’s Waldo?,” Gru from “Despicable Me” and more.
When sister station WXII visited Thomas Jefferson Middle School, Joiner’s giant chef hat made him easy to spot among the dozens of cars dropping off students.
Along with the hat, Joiner was wearing a small apron and a traffic vest. In one hand, he had an oversized whisk, and in the other, he had a hand-held stop sign.
Along with the chef costume, Joiner had a fitting slogan for parents.
“I tell them they shouldn’t cook up trouble because that’s my job,” he said.
Joiner says the tradition of wearing costumes actually began with wearing funky socks with sandals. Kids noticed and began giving him fun hats to wear. From there, the tradition evolved into full costumes.
Joiner says the costumes not only get parents to notice him in traffic, but also give students a fun start to the day.
“One of the biggest things in schools is following rules is important, and oftentimes, we’re hard on them at the very beginning. ‘You’ve got to step in line, you’ve got to sit down, you’ve got to stop talking,’” Joiner said. “The first experience is often negative, and I want their first experience to be positive.”
He says it also turns traffic from a negative experience into a positive one.
“Parents hate it, kids hate it, teachers hate it,” he said. “And this diffuses that.”
On a typical morning, Joiner says he wears one of his nearly 150 hats for morning drop-off. He saves the full costumes for Fridays.
However, for the first day of school on Monday, Aug. 12, he decided to go all out. He decided to become the villain from “The Little Mermaid,” Ursula, sporting blow-up tentacles and a mask.
“I was coming up with ‘Poor, Unfortunate Soul’ lyrics all week, and so I sang them as they came in,” Joiner said.
Other staff members in the car line expressed their admiration for Joiner’s dedication to dressing up. Among them is Jefferson’s principal, Jessica Gillespie-Johnson.
“It’s amazing. I love being out here in the morning with the music playing and him down there,” she said. “It gives the kids a great way to come into the building. It’s very welcoming.”
Joiner says dressing up is also fun for him and helps him develop relationships with students and parents.
“It’s not about the pencil and the paper,” Joiner said. “It’s about having a great time learning stuff, and this helps kind of initiate that.”
He has no intention of stopping, so students and parents can enjoy his costumes for many mornings to come.
Small things often. If you follow The Gottman Institute, you’ve heard this and hopefully committed it to memory. Although grand gestures are nice, the particles of your day-to-day interactions maintain positive feelings and regard for the ones you love.
The Gottmans taught us that bids are the building blocks of healthy relationships. They are those meaningful daily endeavors when you invite your partner into your world and ask to enter theirs. Bids help you to connect and differentiate your familial relationships from those that you have with strangers at the market and the post office. Bids deepen your relationship.
The absence of bids leads to emotional disengagement, loneliness, and in many cases either break-up or unhappiness. No one typically sets out to turn away from their loved ones’ bids. You certainly don’t want to turn against by rejecting bids outright, but it happens often.
Cell phones, books, laptops, naps, current events, stress… There is always something else to do or something else that captures your attention. But like most things, you have a choice. Do you continue to scroll through social media or watch your favorite reality TV villain? If you do, you are at risk of being crowned as a “bid busters.”
You may miss the important interactions that are occurring right in front of you. Displaying the inattention that leaves your loved ones feeling ignored or rejected when they are vying to be the apple of your eye? That is busting their bid. Repeatedly being ignored or rejected when they try to connect with you by sharing a story, a touch, or a laugh will lead the bidding to stop.
Busting bids puts you on the road to detachment, distance, and even destruction. Ask yourself, are you busting bids? Are you hurting those who you want to love and want to love you?
It takes a great deal of vulnerability to say, “Hey, look at me, I need you.” So, the ask is typically more subtle. A text here, a pout there, a long sigh, all ways of reaching out with a yearning for you to turn toward them.
What do you do in those moments? Here’s a personal example. Raising boys that are 11 and 12 revealed that they can talk for hours about Roblox, Anime, or the latest Marvel movie, none of which interest me in the least. I can honestly think of 1000 things that would capture my attention more. Being a psychologist, of course, I want to talk about their feelings, how they see their future, and their take on the politics of the country. According to me, that’s the good stuff, the stuff that stellar mother-son relationships are made of. But is that me turning towards them, or am I always forcing them to turn towards me?
It’s easy to pay attention to the things that interest you, but you have the opportunity to show more love when you step out of your box. So now I can proudly say that I know more about Legendary Dragon Fruit, One Piece, and the Avengers than I thought possible. I learned that it’s the connection that matters, not so much the subject.
This also applies to my relationship with my husband. He can talk for days about computer hacking, C++, cybersecurity, and app development. Meanwhile, I’m just trying to make sure that I don’t accidentally share my Google Doc folder with the world. Technology is not my interest, but as I turn towards him, he has begun to also be intentional about turning toward me. Because of this, our relationship grows richer every day.
Attention, intention, interest, and curiosity are the antidotes to bid busters. Practicing this will make all the difference in your relationships. If you mind it, it matters. Mind your relationships and watch them bloom.
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The Justice Department sued TikTok on Friday, accusing the company of violating children’s online privacy law and running afoul of a settlement it had reached with another federal agency. The complaint, filed together with the Federal Trade Commission in a California federal court, comes as the U.S. and the prominent social media company are embroiled in yet another legal battle that will determine if – or how – TikTok will continue to operate in the country. Related video above: About 3 in 5 Americans View TikTok as a Threat to National Security, PEW Research Center study findsThe latest lawsuit focuses on allegations that TikTok, a trend-setting platform popular among young users, and its China-based parent company ByteDance violated a federal law that requires kid-oriented apps and websites to get parental consent before collecting personal information of children under 13.TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment. “This action is necessary to prevent the defendants, who are repeat offenders and operate on a massive scale, from collecting and using young children’s private information without any parental consent or control,” Brian M. Boynton, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, said in a statement.The U.S. decided to file the lawsuit following an investigation by the FTC that looked into whether the companies were complying with a previous settlement involving TikTok’s predecessor, Musical.ly.In 2019, the federal government sued Musical.ly, alleging it violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, by failing to notify parents about its collection and use of personal information for kids under 13.That same year, Musical.ly — acquired by ByteDance in 2017 and merged with TikTok — agreed to pay $5.7 million to resolve those allegations. The two companies were also subject to a court order requiring them to comply with COPPA, which the government says hasn’t happened. In the complaint, the Justice Department and the FTC allege TikTok has knowingly allowed children to create accounts and retained their personal information without notifying their parents. This practice extends to accounts created in “Kids Mode,” a version of TikTok for children under 13, Justice said in a press release explaining the lawsuit. The two agencies allege the information collected included activities on the app and other identifiers used to build user profiles. They also accuse TikTok of sharing the data with other companies – such as Meta’s Facebook and an analytics company called AppsFlyer – to persuade “Kids Mode” users to be on the platform more, a practice TikTok called “re-targeting less active users.” The complaint says TikTok also allowed children to create accounts without having to provide their age, or obtain parental approval, by using credentials from third-party services. It classified these as “age unknown” accounts, which the agencies say have grown into millions.After parents discovered some of their children’s accounts and asked for them to be deleted, federal officials said their requests were not honored. In a press release explaining the lawsuit, Justice said the alleged violations have resulted in millions of children under 13 using the regular TikTok app, allowing them to interact with adults and access adult content. In March, a person with the matter had told the AP the FTC’s investigation was also looking into whether TikTok violated a portion of federal law that prohibits “unfair and deceptive” business practices by denying that individuals in China had access to U.S. user data. Those allegations were not included in the complaint, which is seeking civil penalties and injunctive relief.
The Justice Department sued TikTok on Friday, accusing the company of violating children’s online privacy law and running afoul of a settlement it had reached with another federal agency.
The complaint, filed together with the Federal Trade Commission in a California federal court, comes as the U.S. and the prominent social media company are embroiled in yet another legal battle that will determine if – or how – TikTok will continue to operate in the country.
Related video above: About 3 in 5 Americans View TikTok as a Threat to National Security, PEW Research Center study finds
The latest lawsuit focuses on allegations that TikTok, a trend-setting platform popular among young users, and its China-based parent company ByteDance violated a federal law that requires kid-oriented apps and websites to get parental consent before collecting personal information of children under 13.
TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“This action is necessary to prevent the defendants, who are repeat offenders and operate on a massive scale, from collecting and using young children’s private information without any parental consent or control,” Brian M. Boynton, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division, said in a statement.
The U.S. decided to file the lawsuit following an investigation by the FTC that looked into whether the companies were complying with a previous settlement involving TikTok’s predecessor, Musical.ly.
In 2019, the federal government sued Musical.ly, alleging it violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, or COPPA, by failing to notify parents about its collection and use of personal information for kids under 13.
That same year, Musical.ly — acquired by ByteDance in 2017 and merged with TikTok — agreed to pay $5.7 million to resolve those allegations. The two companies were also subject to a court order requiring them to comply with COPPA, which the government says hasn’t happened.
In the complaint, the Justice Department and the FTC allege TikTok has knowingly allowed children to create accounts and retained their personal information without notifying their parents. This practice extends to accounts created in “Kids Mode,” a version of TikTok for children under 13, Justice said in a press release explaining the lawsuit.
The two agencies allege the information collected included activities on the app and other identifiers used to build user profiles. They also accuse TikTok of sharing the data with other companies – such as Meta’s Facebook and an analytics company called AppsFlyer – to persuade “Kids Mode” users to be on the platform more, a practice TikTok called “re-targeting less active users.”
The complaint says TikTok also allowed children to create accounts without having to provide their age, or obtain parental approval, by using credentials from third-party services. It classified these as “age unknown” accounts, which the agencies say have grown into millions.
After parents discovered some of their children’s accounts and asked for them to be deleted, federal officials said their requests were not honored. In a press release explaining the lawsuit, Justice said the alleged violations have resulted in millions of children under 13 using the regular TikTok app, allowing them to interact with adults and access adult content.
In March, a person with the matter had told the AP the FTC’s investigation was also looking into whether TikTok violated a portion of federal law that prohibits “unfair and deceptive” business practices by denying that individuals in China had access to U.S. user data.
Those allegations were not included in the complaint, which is seeking civil penalties and injunctive relief.
While most teachers and students have so much to look forward to as the new school year begins, at times the groans you will hear from the students are almost as loud as the more subtle groans of the teachers. The end of summer is always seen as a tragic end to freedom and fun. Like on Mondays, when the whole long week seems to loom threateningly in front of you, new school years can sometimes fill you with the same sort of dread. The good news is that dread is only based on imagined outcomes.
Your classroom indeed feeds off your energy. You are handed a classroom full of students excited to return but not so enthusiastic to study. You can even use their summer slide to your advantage and bring back the joy of learning. It isn’t as monumental a task as it seems.
Ideas For Easing Students Back to School
1. Reboot your teaching techniques
The new school year presents you with an unbelievable opportunity to start afresh. This means you can spend quality time with yourself, reflecting on the things that went well in the past year and the things you can revise and improve. It’s always a good idea to find out who is in your class and to start personalized learning. Introduce technology into your classroom, use more visual aids, and make your lessons more practical. It’s a good time to create goals that promote student-centric learning.
2. Create a Welcoming Environment
No matter your students’ age, we are all visual creatures. Returning to a drab and grey class can put most people off the idea of learning. Make their return a thing to celebrate. Throw a welcome back party. Open up the windows. Add some color to the room. Create student boards they want to be featured on. There are are a million things you could do depending on how much time and access you have to resources.
Decorate the Classroom: Use vibrant and welcoming decorations. Consider themes that are engaging and inclusive.
Personalize the Space: Allow students to bring something from home to decorate their desks or classroom bulletin boards.
3. Establish Routines Early
Morning Meetings: Start the day with a meeting to set the tone and review the schedule.
Consistent Schedules: Maintain a consistent schedule to help students feel secure and understand expectations.
4. Icebreaker Activities
Get-to-Know-You Games: Activities like “Two Truths and a Lie” or “Find Someone Who” can help students learn about each other.
Team-Building Exercises: Simple team-building activities can foster community and collaboration.
6. Engage in Mindfulness and Meditation
Mindfulness Exercises: Start the day or transition times with short mindfulness exercises to help students focus and reduce anxiety.
7. Incorporate Fun Learning Activities
Interactive Learning: Use games and interactive activities to review material from the previous year.
Creative Projects: Assign creative projects that allow students to express themselves and share their summer experiences.
8. Talk to Parents/Families
Parent Newsletters: Send home newsletters to keep parents informed and involved in the back-to-school process.
Open House Events: Host an open house for parents to see the classroom and meet the teacher.
Provide Emotional Support
Check-Ins: Regularly check in with students to see their feelings and address any concerns.
Counseling Resources: Ensure students are aware of counseling resources available to them.
9. Set Goals and Expectations
Goal Setting: Help students set personal and academic goals for the year.
Classroom Contracts: Create a classroom contract with input from students to establish clear expectations and responsibilities.
10. Rewind & Recap
There is no point in starting your lessons if your students will see stars anyway. Use the first week to ease them back into your classroom processes by exciting them. Time is of the essence, but there is no debating the importance of a good foundation. Remember how you hated Math when the concepts the teacher taught you went over your head? Do you think you would have understood better if you were more comfortable–not just engaged, but at ease in the classroom?
One idea? Create an elaborate hangman game: Divide the class into teams and divide their lessons. Each group will have to think up words for the other groups to guess. Once the word is guessed correctly, the group can explain the term/concept.
11. Use Video Games
Also, consider teaching with video games. You will see that gamification and using new-age media in education can be powerful tools to ease students back into the classroom. You may find students—especially those put off by a traditional classroom—completely at ease when dealing with video games and related technology. One example is this small town in Mexico that is unleashing a new generation of geniuses using the very simple concept of self-study and technology.
Let your students enjoy a couple of hours a week in the computer lab, engaging in online learning games, discovering things about a subject a textbook can’t teach you. After all, kids learn and retain these lessons better when they use them practically – even if they only have access to a virtual lab.
12. Create A Simple Game Show
Host your own game show: I know pop quizzes are a universally hated concept but imagine you play it in the style of your favorite game show – Minute to Win It, Hollywood Squares, Family Feud, and one quiz show I recently discovered on my trip to England – Never Mind the Buzzcocks. If you cannot pick the kind of quiz format you want to follow, you could always divide the class into teams and each group could pick a format and create their own quizzes around foundation topics that are important to know this year. Create fun rounds, each round carrying certain points. Add a buzzer to the mixture and you are all ready to go.
Take a deep breath, brew yourself some nice tea, and sit back. The ideas in your head will become a concrete plan, and going back to school will seem like a cinch this year. Whatever your plans for your class this year, know that you are going to be amazing, and in being that, you’re going to let your class come into its own.
It’s been a busy year for me filling in as co-author of the early education newsletter for Hechinger Report senior reporter Jackie Mader. Jackie returned earlier this month after spending the academic year as a Spencer Education Journalism Fellow at Columbia University (stay tuned for some fantastic stories that she reported during her fellowship year).
Hechinger is a pioneer in prioritizing early childhood coverage in its journalism, with an increasing number of news organizations thankfully starting to establish it a beat in its own right: The Associated Press and the Baltimore Banner are among the outlets adding early childhood beat reporters in recent months. As I wrote in October, it’s my favorite beat, because the inequities are so vast, but so is the potential for positive change.
I will still be reporting and editing for Hechinger in the coming year (including on the early education beat), but I am signing off, for now, by sharing a few of the most personally memorable projects that I’ve worked on since last fall.
Up to 20 percent of the U.S. population has dyslexia, a neurological condition that makes it difficult to decipher and spell written words. Yet only a fraction of affected students get a dyslexia diagnosis or the specialized assistance that can help them learn to read well. One reason so many diagnoses are missed is that scores of schools continue to use IQ tests to assess children for learning disabilities. Because of biases in those tests, and other reasons, a disproportionate number of those diagnosed — and helped — have been white and wealthier.
The critical shortage of therapists who provide essential support for children under age 3 with developmental delays has received little public attention. A half dozen experts shared potential strategies for expanding and diversifying the workforce.
Six ideas to ease the early intervention staffing crisis The critical shortage of therapists and others who provide critical early intervention therapies for children under age 3 with developmental delays has received comparatively little notice from policy makers, the media or the general public. A half dozen experts shared potential strategies for expanding and diversifying the workforce.
Fixing the child care crisis One of my favorite roles is helping manage the eight-newsroom Education Reporting Collaborative, which produces solutions-oriented journalism on many of the most urgent issues of the day. In the spring, six of the partners delved into the impact of the child care crisis on mothers’ ability to stay employed, highlighting a range of solutions at all levels of government, and in the private sphere.
This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
Related articles
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.
The proposals in the 2025 Presidential Transition Project — known as Project 2025 and designed for Donald Trump — would reshape the American education system, early education through college, from start to finish.
Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage and its lobbying arm, Heritage Action, said in an interview with USA TODAY that Project 2025 should be seen “like a menu from the Cheesecake Factory.” No one president could take on all these changes, he said. “It’s a manual for conservative policy thought.”
The fast-changing political landscape makes it difficult to say which of these proposals might be taken up by Trump if he wins reelection. He has claimed to know nothing about it, though many of his allies were involved in drafting it. The exit of President Joe Biden from the presidential race may have an impact on Project 2025 that is still unknown. Finally, many of the broadest proposals in the document, such as changes to Title I and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, would require congressional action, not just an order from the White House.
However, it remains a useful document for outlining the priorities of those who would likely play a part in a new Trump administration. The Hechinger Report created this reference guide that digs into the Project 2025 wishlist for education.
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Early childhood
Child care for military families
Project 2025 calls for expanding child care for military families, who have access to programs that are often upheld as premier examples of high-quality care in America. – Jackie Mader
Head Start and child care
Project 2025 calls for eliminating the Office of Head Start, which would lead to the closure of Head Start child care programs that serve about 833,000 low-income children each year. Most Head Start children are served in center-based programs, which have an outsized role in rural areas and prioritize enrolling a certain percentage of young children with disabilities who often struggle to find child care elsewhere. Head Start also provides a critical funding and resource stream to other private child care programs that meet Head Start standards, including home-based programs. – J. M.
Home-based child care
A conservative administration should also prioritize funding for home-based child care rather than “universal day care” in programs outside the home, Project 2025 says. That funding would include money for parents to stay home with a child or to pay for “familial, in-home” care, proposals that could be appealing to some early childhood advocates who have long called for more resources for informal care and stay-at-home parents. – J. M.
On-site child care
If out-of-home child care is necessary, Congress should offer incentives for on-site child care, Project 2025 says, because it “puts the least stress on the parent-child bond.” Early childhood advocates have been wary of such proposals because they tie child care access to a specific job. It also calls on Congress to clarify within the Fair Labor Standards Act that an employer’s expenses for providing such care are not part of the employee’s pay.– J. M.
K-12 education
Data collection
The National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” should release student performance data based on “family structure” — in addition to existing categories such as race and socioeconomic status — Project 2025 argues. Family structure, the document says, is “one of the most important — if not the most important — factor influencing student educational achievement and attainment.” The document goes on to endorse “natural family structure” of a heterosexual, two-parent household, “because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.” — Sarah Butrymowicz
LGBTQ students
Project 2025 advocates a rollback of regulations that protect people from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. It calls for agencies to “focus their enforcement of sex discrimination laws on the biological binary meaning of ‘sex.’”
The plan also calls on Congress and state lawmakers to require schools to refer to students by the names on their birth certificates and the pronouns associated with their biological sex, unless they have written permission from parents to refer to them otherwise.
The plan also equates transgender issues with child abuse and pornography, and proposes that school libraries with books deemed offensive be punished. — Ariel Gilreath
Privatization
In place of a federal Education Department, the blueprint calls for widespread public education funding that goes directly to families, as part of its overarching goal of “advancing education freedom.”
The document specifically highlights the education savings account program in Arizona, the first state to open school vouchers up to all families. Programs like Arizona’s have few, if any, restrictions on who can access the funding. Project 2025 also calls for education savings accounts for schools under federal jurisdiction, such as those run by the Department of Defense or the Bureau of Indian Education.
In addition, Project 2025 calls on Congress to look into creating a federal scholarship tax credit to “incentivize donors to contribute” to nonprofit groups that grant scholarships for private school tuition or education materials. — Ariel Gilreath and Neal Morton
School meals
The federal school meals program should be scaled back to ensure that only children from low-income families are receiving the benefit, the document says. Policy changes under the Obama administration have made it easier for entire schools or districts to provide free meals to students without families needing to submit individual eligibility paperwork. — Christina A. Samuels
Special education
Project 2025 says that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which provides $14.2 billion in federal money for the education of school-aged children with disabilities, should be mostly converted to “no-strings” block grants to individual states. Lawmakers should also consider making a portion of the federal money payable directly to parents of children with disabilities, it says, so they can use it for tutoring, therapies or other educational materials. This would be similar to education savings accounts in place in Arizona and Florida.
The blueprint also calls for rescinding a policy called “Equity in IDEA.” Under that policy, districts are required to evaluate if schools are disproportionately enrolling Black, Native American and other ethnic minority students in special education. Districts must also track how these students are disciplined, and if they are more likely than other students in special education to be placed in classrooms separate from their general education peers. Current rules, which Project 2025 would eliminate, require that districts that have significant disparities in this area must use 15 percent of their federal funding to address those problems. — C.A.S.
Teaching about race
Project 2025 elevates concerns among members of the political right that educating students about race and racism risks promoting bias against white people. The document discusses the legal concept of critical race theory, and argues that when it is used in teacher training and school activities such as “mandatory affinity groups,” it disrupts “the values that hold communities together such as equality under the law and colorblindness.”
The document calls for legislation requiring schools to adopt proposals “that say no individual should receive punishment or benefits based on the color of their skin,” among other recommendations. It also calls for a federal Parents’ Bill of Rights that would give families a “fair hearing in court” if they believed the federal government had enforced policies undermining their right to raise their children. — Caroline Preston
Title I
This program, funded at a little over $18 billion for fiscal 2024, is the largest federal program for K-12 schools and is designed to help children from low-income families. The conservative blueprint would encourage lawmakers to make the program a block grant to states, with few restrictions on how it can be used — and, over 10 years, to phase it out entirely. Additionally, it says, lawmakers should allow parents in Title I schools to use part of that funding for educational savings accounts that could be spent on private tutoring or other services. — C.A.S.
Higher education
Affirmative action and diversity, equity and inclusion
The document calls for prosecuting “all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers” that maintain affirmative action or DEI policies. That position matches the views expressed by Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, about the use of race in college admissions and beyond. — Liz Willen
Data collection
In higher education, the proposal argues that college graduation and earnings data need a “risk adjustment” that factors in the types of students served by a particular institution. While selective colleges tend to post the highest graduation rates and student earnings, they also tend to enroll the least-“risky” students. A risk adjustment methodology could benefit community colleges, which often have low graduation rates but enroll many nontraditional students who face obstacles to earning a degree. It would also likely benefit for-profit colleges, which similarly tend to accept most applicants. Historically, for-profit schools have received scrutiny under Democratic administrations for poor outcomes and for allegedly misleading students about the value of the education they provide. Republican administrations typically have supported less regulation of for-profit institutions. — S.B.
Parent PLUS loans and Pell grants
The blueprint calls for the elimination of the Parent PLUS loan program, arguing that it is redundant “because there are many privately provided alternatives available.” Originally created for relatively affluent families, the PLUS loan program has become a crucial way for lower- and middle-income families to pay for college. In recent years, it has sparked criticism due to rising default rates and fewer protections than are afforded to otherstudent loan borrowers.
At present, interest rates for private loans are significantly lower than Parent PLUS rates, but they come with fewer protections, and it is more difficult to get approved for a private-bank loan. Project 2025 would also get rid of PLUS loans for graduate students.
If the federal PLUS programs were eliminated, it could stem one portion of the rising tide of families’ education debt, but it would also make the path to paying for college more difficult for some families.
Project 2025 does not call for a change to the Pell grant program, which provides federal funding for students from low-income families to attend college. Some advocates have called for doubling the annual maximum allotment, which is $7,395 for the 2024-25 school year, far below the cost to attend many colleges. — Meredith Kolodner and Olivia Sanchez
Student loan forgiveness
Project 2025 would end the prospect of student loan forgiveness, which has already been largely blocked by federal courts; the Biden administration, in a sort of game of Whac-a-Mole, has proposed still more forgiveness programs that are being fought by Republican state attorneys general and others. Project 2025 would also dramatically restrict what’s known as “borrower defense to repayment,” which forgives loans borrowed to pay for colleges that closed or have been found to use illegal or deceptive marketing. Largely restricting the Education Department to collecting statistics, Project 2025 would shift responsibility for student loans to the Treasury Department. — Jon Marcus
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.
Jackie Mader, Christina A. Samuels, Sarah Butrymowicz, Ariel Gilreath, Neal Morton, Caroline Preston, Liz Willen, Olivia Sanchez, Meredith Kolodner and Jon Marcus
Do you stand over your child’s shoulder when they do their homework? Do you find yourself directing your kids’ every move? “Pick up this, clean up that, sit up straight, finish your homework, study hard, say thank you.” Do you spend a good chunk of your day obsessing about your children’s success, like will they make the sports team or school play, and will they get into the top-notch college you (yes, you!) always dreamed of?
I hate to break it to you, but you may be a helicopter parent—a term which is commonly used but also has a basis in research on specific parenting behaviors and their effects on children.
Most parents want the very best for their children, and so they’ll go to great lengths to be wonderful providers and protectors. The deep love and care that parents have for their children can even push parents to, well, be a bit over-the-top. And helicopter parents are known to be overly protective and involved in their children’s lives.
The term paints a picture of a parent who hovers over their children, always on alert, and who swoops in to rescue them at the first sign of trouble or disappointment. The term was first coined in 1990 by Foster Cline and Jim Fay in their book, Parenting with Love and Logic, and it gained relevance with college admissions staff who noticed how parents of prospective students were inserting themselves in the admissions process.
What is helicopter parenting?
Helicopter parenting can be defined by three types of behaviors that parents exemplify:
Information seeking behavior including knowing your children’s daily schedule and where they are at all times, helping them make decisions, and being informed about grades and other accomplishments
Direct intervention meaning jumping into conflicts with kids’ roommates, friends, romantic partners and even bosses
Autonomy limiting like when parents prevent kids from making their own mistakes and control their lives
We all want to love our children as much as possible and protect them from the dangers in our society. We live in an increasingly competitive world and want to give our kids every advantage possible. But if we over-parent and smother them, it can backfire big time. A collection of research in recent years shows a connection between helicopter parenting and mental health issues like anxiety and depression as children get older and try to make it on their own.
The negative impacts of helicopter parenting
A 2016 study from the National University of Singapore published in the Journal of Personality indicated that children with intrusive parents who had high expectations for academic performance, or who overreacted when they made a mistake, tend to be more self-critical, anxious, or depressed. The researchers termed this as “maladaptive perfectionism,” or a tendency in children of helicopter parents to be afraid of making mistakes and to blame themselves for not being perfect. This happens because the parents are essentially—whether by their words or actions—indicating to their kids that what they do is never good enough.
Another 2016 study evaluated questionnaires about parenting completed by 377 students from a Midwestern university. Students responded to statements about the type of parents they have, how often they communicate with their parents, and how much their parents intrude in their lives. The students also completed a number of tests to discern their decision-making skills, academic performance, and symptoms of anxiety and depression. Results showed that higher overall helicopter parenting scores were associated with stronger symptoms of anxiety and depression.
According to that study, helicopter parenting “was also associated with poorer functioning in emotional functioning, decision making, and academic functioning. Parents’ information-seeking behaviors, when done in absences of other [helicopter parenting] behaviors, were associated with better decision making and academic functioning.”
Link to social anxiety?
The journal Cognitive Therapy and Researchpublished research in 2017 suggesting that helicopter parenting can trigger anxiety in kids who already struggle with some social issues. A group of children and their parents were asked to complete as many puzzles as possible in a 10-minute time period. Parents were allowed to help their children, but not encouraged to do so.
Researchers noted that the parents of children with social issues touched the puzzles more often than the other parents did. Though they were not critical or negative, they stepped in even when their children did not ask for help. Researchers think this indicates that parents of socially anxious children may perceive challenges to be more threatening than the child thinks they are. Over time, this can diminish a child’s ability to succeed on their own and potentially increase anxiety.
So how does all this hovering cause mental health problems in our children?
First of all, helicopter parents are communicating to their children in subtle (or not-so-subtle) ways that they won’t be safe unless mom or dad is there looking out for them. When these children have to go off on their own, they are not prepared to meet daily challenges. This inability to find creative solutions and make decisions on their own can cause a great deal of worry since their protector is no longer around to help them.
Because these children were never taught the skills to function independently, and because they may have been held to unattainable or even “perfectionist” standards, children of helicopter parents can experience anxiety, depression, a lack of confidence, and low self-esteem. Another issue is that if these kids have never experienced failure, they can develop an overwhelming fear of failure and of disappointing others. Finally, if we don’t let our children have the freedom to learn about the world and discover their purpose and what makes them happy, they will struggle to find happiness and live a balanced life—all impacting their mental health.
What we can do to break the helicopter habit
All parents know that parenting is not easy. Having children and raising them presents innumerable challenges and surprises, but also immense joy and connection. Now that we know that overparenting only leads to more problems for our kids, we can make the following adjustments in our parenting approach:
Support your children’s growth and independence by listening to them, and not always pushing your desires on them.
Don’t try to help your children escape consequences for their actions unless you believe those consequences are unfair or life-altering.
Don’t raise your child to expect to be treated differently than other children.
Encourage your children to solve their own problems by asking them to come up with creative solutions.
Teach your children to speak up for themselves in a respectful manner.
Understand and accept your children’s weaknesses and strengths, and help them to use their strengths to achieve their own goals.
Fostering independence
Parents should, of course, do the best they can for their kids. Impulses to involve ourselves in our children’s’ lives often come from a sense of duty, and of unconditional love. We can harness those desires to give the most we can to our kids by resisting helicopter parenting, which can lead to poor outcomes in adulthood.
Instead, try letting your children discover themselves—their weaknesses, strengths, their goals and dreams. You can help them succeed, but you should also let them fail. Teach them how to try again. Learning what failure means, how it feels, and how to bounce back is an important part of becoming independent in our world.
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It’s possible that there is no time in the history of education that our systems of educating have been so out of touch with the communities. Growing populations, shifting communities, and increasingly inwardly-focused schools all play a role.
In light of the access of modern technology, social media, and new learning models that reconfigure the time and place learning happens, it doesn’t have to be that way. Schools can evolve while simultaneously growing closer to the people they serve.
First, for the purpose of this post let’s think of technology and social media as distinct.
Technology has many forms, but in education, it is most visible in terms of computing hardware and software. The hardware is pretty obvious—phones, wearable technology from Apple and Android, iPads, personal computers, Macs, Chromebooks, graphing calculators, and the like.
The software is a bit more inconspicuous because it’s embedded in the hardware. Here we have fundamental PC software like Microsoft Windows or Mac OS; we have productivity suites like Microsoft Office; we have web browsers like Google Chrome or Safari or Firefox; and we have niche programs like reading assessment tools or educational games, which function like what we’d now consider computer-based apps.
There are also less visible forms of technology that make teaching and learning with technology possible, including electricity (you take it for granted until it doesn’t work) WiFi (imagine your classroom looking like it does behind your television—wires everywhere), the cloud (which enables mobile learning, hardware sharing, flipped classrooms, and other advances), and more. Each of these technology tools is critical in their own way, working together to make whatever we’d define as a ‘modern classroom‘ and ‘modern learning‘ work.
But hidden with this list is one bit of seemingly dated software that can be concept-mapped on its own in a million other directions of possibility. No one gets excited by it, but it still makes the internet go: the web browser.
Although itself just a program that translates html code to visual information, the modern web browser has become a vessel that everything else attaches itself to. For schools looking to connect with communities, it also actuates social media channels like Instagram, twitter, facebook, and pinterest, and allows for the blogging or site updates that keep parents informed.
None of this is new, really. The technology has been there for years. Parents have always been ‘informed’—but of what? That’s where there is potential. What we’re communicating as educators, when, and why.
So what can social media ‘do’?
Solicit mentoring relationships
Whether organized by a district, school, teacher, family, or the student themselves, connecting with potential mentors through social media is compelling because it’s A) Public—transparent and safer than ‘social media’ sounds and B) Because it’s public, it can encourage companies to respond when they may not in private.
Connecting students to the artists, architects, engineers, makers, writers, farmers, cooks, and other ‘roles’ for the purpose of mentoring and apprenticeship is one way to begin to repair the disconnect between schools and communities.
This one is closely related to the idea of ‘mentoring’ in the sense that it connects students with people outside of the classroom from their community. But rather than for the purpose of mentoring, it could be less involved—topical but authentic communication between those leading the community, and those living in it, and social media is the perfect way to make it happen.
Share ‘school work’
Ideally authentic products and artifacts produced through new skills and knowledge useful to people and communities.
Want work to leave the classroom? Use social media to publish it with the world. Worried about privacy? Assign students anonymous codes or avatars to publish under. Used closed communities (Facebook Groups, for example) that, while not fully open, are still school-wide. There are ways.
Curate cultural artifacts and ‘local memory’
Today, museums do the work of ‘curating,’ but that’s a crude way to preserve the cultural artifacts that matter. Why can’t schools do this? And why can’t technology be used to streamline and crowdsource it?
How To Connect Schools And Communities Using Technology
In addition to connecting with the world students live and breathe in, new learning models afforded by technology are also useful in reconnecting with families, neighborhoods, and native places students have affection for.
Flipped Classroom
The flipped classroom is one way to exchange where learning happens—or at least what kind of learning happens where. Here, the roles are reversed: Students are exposed to content at home and practice it at school.
Mobile learning
Mobile learning is a brilliant way to immerse students in native places and landscapes. The challenge here is that education isn’t quite ready for it, but if you can figure it out, the possibilities are extraordinary: Deep integration of learning, place, and people.
Place-based education
See above—learning that is based on place and not an indexed set of nationalized curriculum. Authentic, familiar, and personal.
Project-based learning
Project-based learning can incorporate all of the above—flipped classrooms, place-based learning, mobile learning, and so on. The idea is that teaching and learning are anchored through the process of authentic projects constructed over time. These ‘reason’ or ‘need to know’ for these projects will ideally both start and finish in communities.
Experiential learning/Scenario-based learning
Treat the school like a think tank. Explore and address local community issues. Use social media to connect with families and neighborhoods and businesses and organizations, then use problem-based or scenario-based learning to address them.
Conclusion
Technology, so far, hasn’t healed the disconnect between schools and communities, but that could be because we’re selling it short for what it can do—which might start with not seeing its potential fully. Today, popular uses are sharing grades, missing work, test dates, snow days, and basic school announcements. This isn’t nearly good enough.
Whether you’re talking about hardware, software, social media, or something in between, more than anything else, technology connects. As educators, we just need to be intentional about what we’re connecting, and why.
image attribution flickr user usdepartmentofeducation; how to connect schools and communities
According to a new survey, one group in particular is feeling the crunch of rising inflation and home prices, and taking on extra work in response.
Bankrate released its side hustle survey on Wednesday and found that more than one in three U.S. adults make extra money with a side gig, like a weekend job or freelance work.
The survey noted that parents of children ages 18 and under are turning to side hustles more often than those without children or those with older kids.
“Many Americans are still finding that one job isn’t enough,” Bankrate Senior Industry Analyst Ted Rossman stated. “The cost of living has risen sharply in recent years.”
Nearly half (45%) of parents with kids younger than 18 have a side hustle compared to 36% of childless adults and 28% of parents with adult children.
The average monthly side hustle income is $891 per month and the majority of Americans with side hustles (52%) have only been at it for less than two years. They’re likely using the money to pay bills, build their savings, or for discretionary spending.
“My schedule is mayhem,” 41-year-old Jordan Chussler, parent to a 5-year-old daughter and editor of a financial publication, told Marketwatch.
His daughter’s private school bill is $10,600; inflation has brought household expenses up for his family across the board. Chussler works during his lunch break and at night, as a freelancer and at restaurants, to make ends meet.
Chussler and his wife make about $165,000 combined at their main jobs; Chussler takes on extra jobs throughout the year to bring their combined income closer to $200,000 for more financial security.
He puts the extra money from side hustles into a Roth IRA and his daughter’s education fund.
