LOUISVILLE, Ky. — The Kentucky Supreme Court ruled Thursday that a measure establishing public funding for charter schools is unconstitutional, affirming that state funds “are for common schools and for nothing else.”
The 2022 measure was enacted by the state’s Republican-dominated legislature over Democrat Gov. Andy Beshear’s veto. It was struck down the next year by a lower court.
The state’s high court ruled the “Constitution as it stands is clear that it does not permit funneling public education funds outside the common public school system,” Justice Michelle M. Keller wrote in a unanimous opinion.
In 2024, Kentucky voters rejected a ballot measure that would have allowed state lawmakers to allocate public tax dollars to support students attending private or charter schools.
It was another setback for supporters of charter schools, who have attempted for years to gain a foothold in the state. They argue the schools offer another choice for parents looking for the best educational fit for their children. But opponents say such schools would divert needed funds from existing public schools and could pick and choose which students to accept.
Charter schools have been legal in Kentucky since 2017, but none have opened because of the lack of a method to fund them.
Keller, in her opinion, wrote the court was not passing judgment on the efficacy of charter schools.
“We make no predictions about the potential success of charter schools or their ability to improve the education of the Commonwealth’s children, and we leave public policy evaluations to the Commonwealth’s designated policymakers — the General Assembly,” she wrote.
But Keller argued, Kentucky has for more than a century treated education as “a constitutional mandate, challenged again and again…”
“The mandate implicates state education funds are for common schools and for nothing else,” the justice wrote.
Even with a conservative think tank’s blueprint detailing how the second Trump administration should reimagine the federal government’s role in education, few might have predicted what actually materialized this year for America’s schools and colleges.
Or what might be yet to come.
“2025 will go down as a banner year for education: the year we restored merit in higher education, rooted out waste, fraud and abuse, and began in earnest returning education to the states,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon told The Hechinger Report. She listed canceling K-12 grants she called wasteful, investing more in charter schools, ending college admissions that consider race or anything beyond academic achievement and making college more affordable as some of the year’s accomplishments.
“Best of all,” she said, “we’ve begun breaking up the federal education bureaucracy and returning education control to parents and local communities. These are reforms conservatives have championed for decades — and in just 12 months, we’ve made them a reality.”
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McMahon’s characterization of the year is hardly universal. Earlier this month, Senate Democrats, led by independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, called out some of the administration’s actions this year. They labeled federal changes, especially plans to divide the Education Department’s duties across the federal government, dangerous and likely to cause chaos for schools and colleges.
“Already, this administration has cancelled billions of dollars in education programs, illegally withheld nearly $7 billion in formula funds, and proposed to fully eliminate many of the programs included in the latest transfer,” the senators wrote in a letter to Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, chair of the committee that oversees education. “In our minds, that is unacceptable.”
So, what really happened to education this year? It was almost impossible for the average observer to keep track of the array of changes across colleges and universities, K-12 schools, early education and education research — and what it has all meant. This is a look back at how the education world was transformed.
The administration was especially forceful in the higher education arena. It used measures including antidiscrimination law to quickly freeze billions of dollars in higher education research funding, interrupting years-long medical studies and coercing Columbia, Brown, Northwestern and other institutions into handing over multimillion-dollar payments and agreeing to policy changes demanded by the administration.
A more widespread “compact” promising preference for federal funding to universities that agreed to largely ideological principles had almost no takers. But in the face of government threats, universities and colleges scrapped diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programs that provided support based on race and other characteristics, and banned transgender athletes from competing on teams corresponding to genders other than the ones they were assigned at birth.
As the administration unleashed its set of edicts, Republicans in Congress also expanded taxes on college and university endowments. And the One Big Beautiful Bill Act made other big changes to higher education, such as limiting graduate student borrowing and eliminating certain loan forgiveness programs. That includes public service loan forgiveness for graduates who take jobs with organizations the administration designated as having a “substantial illegal purpose” because they help refugees or transgender youth. In response, states, cities, labor unions and nonprofits immediately filed suit, arguing that the rule violated the First Amendment.
The administration has criticized universities, colleges and liberal students for curbing the speech of conservatives by shouting them down or blocking their appearances on campuses. However, it proceeded to revoke the visas of and begin deportation proceedings against international students who joined protests or wrote opinions criticizing Israeli actions in Gaza and U.S. government policy there.
Meanwhile, emboldened legislatures and governors in red states pushed back on what faculty could say in classrooms. College presidents including James Ryan at the University of Virginia and Mark Welsh III at Texas A&M were forced out in the aftermath of controversies over these issues. — Jon Marcus
Since Donald Trump returned to office earlier this year, K-12 schools have lost millions of dollars in sweeping cuts to federal grants, including money that helped schools serve students who are deaf or blind, grants that bolstered the dwindling rural teacher workforce and funding for Wi-Fi hotspots.
Last summer, the Trump administration briefly froze billions of dollars in federal funding for schools on June 30, one day before districts would typically apply to receive it. Although the money was restored in late July, some school leaders said they no longer felt confident they’ll receive all expected federal funds next year.And they are braced for more cuts to federal budgets as the U.S. Department of Education is dismembered.
That process, as well as the end goal of returning the department’s responsibilities to the states, has raised uncertainty about whether federal money will continue to be earmarked for the same purposes. If the state of Illinois is in charge of federal funding for every school in the state, said Todd Dugan, superintendent of a rural Illinois district, will rural schools still get money to boost student achievement or will the state decide there are more pressing needs?
Even as the Trump administration attempts to push more control over education to the states, it has aggressively expanded federal power over school choice and transgender student rights in public schools. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act will create a federal school voucher program, allowing taxpayers to donate up to $1,700 for scholarships that families can use to pay for private school. The program won’t start until 2027, and states can choose whether to participate — setting up potentially divisive fights over new money for education in Democratic-controlled states.
Already, some Democratic-led states have come to the defense of schools in funding and legal fights with the federal government over transgender athletes participating in sports. The U.S. departments of Education and Justice launched a special investigations team to look into complaints of Title IX violations, targeting school districts and states that don’t restrict accommodations or civil rights protections for transgender students. Legal experts expect the U.S. Supreme Court to ultimately decide how Title IX — a federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in education — applies to public schools.
The federal government directly runs just two systems of schools — one for military families and the other for children of tribal nations. In an executive order signed in January, the president directed both systems to offer parents a portion of federal funding allocated to their children to attend private, religious or charter schools.
And as part of the dismantling of the federal Education Department, the Interior Department — which oversees 183 tribal schools across nearly two dozen states — will assume greater control of Indian education programs. In addition to rolling out school choice at its campuses, the department will take over Indian education grants to public schools across the country, Native language programs, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian programs, tribally controlled colleges and universities, and many other institutions. — Ariel Gilreath and Neal Morton
Early education was not at the top of Trump’s agenda when he returned to office. On the campaign trail, when asked if he would support legislation to make child care affordable, he gave an unfocused answer, suggesting tariff revenue could be tapped to bring down costs. Asked a similar question, Vice President JD Vance suggested that care by family members was one potential solution to child care shortages.
However, many of the administration’s actions, including cuts to the government workforce and grants, have affected children who depend on federal support. In April, the administration abruptly closed five of 10 regional offices supporting Head Start, the free, federally funded early childhood program for children from low-income families. Head Start program managers worried they would be caught up in a freeze on grant funding that affected all agencies. Even though administration officials said funds would keep flowing to Head Start, some centers reported having problems drawing down their money. The prolonged government shutdown, which ended Nov. 12 after 43 days, also forced some Head Start programs to temporarily close.
Though the shutdown is over, Head Start advocates are still worried. Many of the administration’s actions have been guided by the Project 2025 policy document created by the conservative Heritage Foundation. Project 2025 calls for eliminating Head Start, which serves about 715,000 children from birth to age 5, for a savings of about $12 billion a year.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act contained some perks for parents, including an increase in the child tax credit from $2,000 to $2,200. The bill also created a new program called Trump accounts: Families can contribute up to $5,000 each year until a child turns 18, at which point the Trump account will turn into an individual retirement account. For children born between Jan. 1, 2025, and Dec. 31, 2028, the government will provide a $1,000 bonus. Billionaires Michael and Susan Dell have also promised to contribute $250 to the account of each child ages 10 and under who lives in a ZIP code with a median household income of $150,000 or less.
That program will launch in summer 2026. — Christina A. Samuels
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As former members of the Denver Public Schools Board of Education, we have long respected the complexity and responsibility of serving on the board. It is a demanding and often thankless role. Yet, the gravity of our district’s challenges and the content of the Denver Post editorial from September 28, 2025, compel us to speak out.
The editorial referenced “some candidates running for the Denver Board of Education who would rather see the district’s world-class lottery system go away,” and accused them of wanting to “keep the best schools in Denver a secret.” Let’s be clear: the three incumbents — Scott Esserman, Xóchitl Gaytán, and Michelle Quattlebaum — have led efforts to dismantle school choice in Denver. They have also collaborated with the Superintendent to only publicize the positive results and limit public access to negative school performance data especially among low income students. The public deserves to see the disaggregated achievement by race, ethnicity, and income.
Despite campaigning on promises of transparency and accountability, the incumbents’ actions have too often produced the opposite. The current board has made critical decisions behind closed doors, minimized authentic community engagement, and failed to deliver measurable improvement for Denver’s students.
This November, Denver voters have the opportunity to elect four new board members who will restore integrity, transparency, and student-centered decision-making. These candidates–Mariana del Hierro (District 2), Caron Blanke (District 3), Timiya Jackson (District 4), and Alex Magaña (At-Large)—represent the best of Denver’s civic and educational leadership. Two are accomplished educators, and two bring executive management experience rooted in community service. Collectively, they are prepared to govern responsibly and help rebuild a system that prioritizes student success above all else.
The data tell a sobering story. While 75% of white students in DPS are proficient in reading, only 30% or fewer Black, Latino, and low-income students meet grade-level expectations–a gap that continues to widen. In mathematics, the disparities are even starker, with up to 80% of students from these groups performing below grade level.
Standardized scores are not the only indicator of educational health, but they are an important one. Denver Public Schools has not returned to pre-pandemic levels of achievement and, alarmingly, has no clear plan to get there. The current leadership has failed to set ambitious goals, measure progress transparently, or hold itself accountable for student outcomes.
It is deeply concerning that a board responsible for $1.5 billion in taxpayer funds, 90,000 students, and 15,000 employees demonstrates so little urgency or accountability. Under this leadership, Denver students have fallen even farther behind academically, socially, and emotionally.
This election offers a turning point. Denver voters can choose leaders who bring urgency, competence, and a clear sense of responsibility to public education. Blanke, del Hierro, Jackson, and Magaña are ready to collaborate with the Superintendent on an aggressive, student-centered plan to raise achievement and restore public confidence. The pandemic presented an opportunity to reimagine a district that works for every child. The current board–and the incumbents seeking reelection—failed that test. Denver cannot afford another generation of lost potential.
This November, we urge voters to support new leadership committed to transparency, accountability, and the belief that every Denver student deserves the opportunity to learn, thrive, and succeed.
Elaine Gantz Berman, Theresa Peña and Mary Seawell are all former elected directors of the Denver Public Schools Board of Education.
KISSIMMEE, Fla. — It’s not a rebrand. But the Moms for Liberty group that introduced itself three years ago as a band of female “joyful warriors” shedding domestic modesty to make raucous public challenges to masks, books and curriculum, is trying to glow up.
The group’s national summit this past weekend at a convention center outside Orlando leaned into family (read: parental rights), faith — and youth. The latter appeared to be a bid to join the cool kids who are the new face of conservatism in America (hint: young, Christian, very male), as well as a recognition of the group’s “diversity,” which includes grandparents, men and kids.
But even as the youth — including 20- and 30-something podcasters and social media influencers, as well as student members of the late Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA — brought a high-energy vibe, stalwart members got a new assignment. Where past Moms for Liberty attendees were urged to run for school board, this year they were encouraged to turn their grievances into legal challenges.
Moms for Liberty CEO and co-founder Tina Descovich acknowledged that while many of them had experienced backlashes as a result of running for school board or publicly challenging books, curricula and policies, they needed to continue the fight. (The more pugnacious co-founder, Tiffany Justice, is now at Heritage Action, an arm of right-wing think tank The Heritage Foundation.)
“You have lost family, you have lost friends, you have lost neighbors, you’ve lost jobs, you’ve lost whole careers,” she said. Yet she insisted that it was vital that they “shake off the shackles of fear and stand for truth or we are going to lose Western civilization as a whole.”
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The gathering held up “the free state of Florida” as an example of Republican policies to be emulated, including around school choice and parental rights. The state’s attorney general, James Uthmeier, boasted of having created a state Office of Parental Rights last spring, describing it as “a law firm for parents.”
He trumpeted the state’s lawsuit against Target over the “market risks” of LGBTQ+ pride-themed merchandise and encouraged parents to reach out with potential legal actions. “If you’re identifying one of these wrongs that’s violating your rights and then subjecting our kids to danger and evil, then we want to know about it,” he said. “And we’re going to bring the heat in court to shut it down.”
Tina Descovich, CEO and co-founder of Moms for Liberty, was interviewed on Real America’s Voice, a conservative news and entertainment network that set up a remote studio outside of the Sun Ballroom at the Moms for Liberty national summit. Credit: Laura Pappano for The Hechinger Report
The shifting legal landscape, not just in Florida but nationally, had speakers gushing about the opportunity to file new challenges, particularly in the wake of the Supreme Court decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor in June. It gives parents broad power to object to school materials, including with LGBTQ+ themes, and the right to remove their children from public school on days when such materials are discussed.
“This is where we need to take that big Supreme Court victory and start fleshing it out,” said Matt Sharp, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian law firm. He added that they were “needing warriors, joyful warriors, to file cases to start putting meat on the bones of what that does.”
The directive to file suit was not just around opt-out policies, which were the basis for the Mahmoud case. (Moms for Liberty has opt-out forms and instructions on its website.) Rather, attendees were also urged to file lawsuits in support of school prayer; against school policies that let students use different names and pronouns without parental consent (what Moms for Liberty terms “secret transitions”); and to give parents access to surveys students take at school, including around mental health.
“We need people willing to stand up legally and be, you know, named plaintiffs,” Kimberly S. Hermann, president of the Southeastern Legal Foundation, a conservative policy group, said on a panel featuring two moms who sued their school districts. Winning a lawsuit or even just bringing one in one state, said Hermann, can get other school districts and states to adopt policies, presumably to avoid lawsuits themselves.
“One offensive litigation can have this amazing ripple effect,” she said. She and others made clear that there is staff to provide support. The legal groups will “stand with you,” said Sharp, “whether you’re passing the law or passing the local policy all the way to litigating these cases.”
Even as speakers criticized public schools particularly around LGBTQ+ issues, not as a form of inclusion but as foisting views into classrooms, they relished the chance to infuse their values into schools.
Filing these lawsuits is more than “just fighting for your role as parents,” Sharp told parents in a breakout session. “You’re ultimately fighting for your kids’ ability to be in their schools and make a difference, to be the salt and light in those classrooms with their friends and to take our message of freedom, of faith, of justice and to really spread it all across the schools.”
Overall, this year’s Moms for Liberty event lacked the obvious drama of recent years. The flood of protesters in 2023 in Philadelphia required a large police presence and barricades around the hotel, along with warnings not to wear Moms for Liberty lanyards on the streets.
This year, there were no protests. That was partly because the event was held in a secluded resort convention center that could accommodate 800 (larger than the 500-ish of past hotels). But the group failed to fill the venue or attract much media attention. There was on-location broadcast by Real America’s Voice, a conservative news and entertainment network, from a set outside the Sun Ballroom. (Steve Bannon interviewed Descovich on his show, “The War Room.”)
It also didn’t draw opposition because protesters had a bigger target. Saturday saw “No Kings” rallies across the country, with thousands decrying what they see as President Donald Trump’s authoritarianism. “I forgot it was happening since they’re mostly ignored these days,” state Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith, (D-Orlando) and a senior advisor to LGBTQ+ rights group Equality Florida, said in a text message about the Moms for Liberty event. Liz Mikitarian, founder of the national group, Stop Moms for Liberty, which is based in Florida, said the moms “are still a threat” but not worth organizing a protest against.
It was also a quieter affair than last year’s in Washington, D.C. There, Trump’s appearance fed a party atmosphere with Southern rock, sequined MAGA outfits and a cash bar. (This year, Trump appeared, but only in a prerecorded video message.)
Sequined merchandise for sale at the Moms for Liberty gathering by the company Make America Sparkle Again included tops and jackets that paid tribute to Charlie Kirk, the slain founder of Turning Point USA. Credit: Laura Pappano for The Hechinger Report
The three-day event, of course, aired familiar grievances in familiarly florid language — conservative school choice activist Corey DeAngelis railed against teacher unions over the “far-left radical agenda that they’re trying to push down children’s throats in the classroom.” Other sessions covered the expected — the alleged dangers of LGBTQ+ policies, in sports, restrooms, school curricula and books — but there was also discussion of concerns (shared on left and right) over youth screen use, online predators and artificial intelligence.
The event made room for MAHA, the Make America Healthy Again movement led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of Health and Human Services. Descovich interviewed Dr. Joseph Ladapo, the Florida surgeon general who is working to eliminate all vaccine mandates for the state’s schoolchildren.
But the move by Moms for Liberty to attract young conservatives elevated the energy in the room. It was apparent not only in a tribute to Kirk, the slain founder ofTurning Point USA, which trains young conservatives on high school and college campuses. About 40 Florida TPUSA members took the ballroom stage to accept the “Liberty Sword,” the group’s highest honor, posthumously awarded to Kirk.
It also showed up in a breakout session of mostly conservative social media influencers and podcasters who offered tips on using humor and handling online trolls: Lydia Shaffer (aka the Conservative Barbie 2.0), Alex Stein, Gates Garcia, Kaitlin Bennett, Angela Belcamino (known as “The Bold Lib,” who said she was surprised to have been invited), and Jayme Franklin, who in addition to her podcast is the Gen Z founder of The Conservateur, a conservative lifestyle brand that The New Yorkercalled “Vogue, But for Trumpers.”
They have built huge followings based on their compulsion to provoke. “We need to go back to biblical values of what it means to be a real man and what it means to be a real woman,” urged Franklin. “People want that guidance, and that needs to begin at church. We need to push people back into the pews.”
Their inclusion, like that of conservative commentator Benny Johnson, who moderated a panel, “Fathers: The Defenders of the Family,” appeared to recognize a need to expand the base — and be edgier. Johnson charged out on stage and trumpeted that “God’s first commandment to us was, ‘Go, be fruitful, multiply.’ Go make babies!!!!” He quipped that “right-wing moms, they’re happier, right?” and asked the crowd, “Any trad wife moms out there?”
The phrase is shorthand for a woman who embraces a traditional domestic role, often with an emphasis on fashion and style. Johnson — who credited Kirk for prodding him to find Jesus, get married and become a father (he has four children) — argued that Republicans, especially those in Gen Z, should embrace the traditional nuclear family identity as a winning political move.
“We are the party of parents. We are the party of children,” he said, adding that traditional values were already dominating culture and politics. “We live in a center-right country. And I’m tired of pretending that we don’t,” he said, and showed a map of red and blue votes in the 2024 presidential election. “This is the shift. You live in a red kingdom.”
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at preston@hechingerreport.org.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Children explore magnifying glasses at the Downtown Children’s Center in St. Louis. (Rebecca Rivas/Missouri Independent.)
Frustration runs deep for Missouri parents like Libby Eversgerd. Her youngest child has been using a scholarship to attend a small, private school after he “began to resist attending school due to mounting pressure and lack of accommodations for his learning differences.”
It’s not easy to find solutions to complex education problems, but once parents find a solution, losing it is a nightmare.
The Missouri National Education Association (MNEA) lawsuit challenging school choice options could devastate thousands of low-income and special needs families across the state. If the union succeeds, children who rely on scholarships for tuition, learning therapies, or specialized instruction will face the very real possibility of losing access to the educational lifelines that have helped them thrive.
This summer, the MNEA chose courtroom power plays over student needs by targeting a $51 million state investment helping economically disadvantaged and special needs children access high-quality education outside their traditional public schools. By suing to block these funds, the union directly threatens over 7,000 new scholarships slated for this school year, nearly tripling the reach of the program and finally ending years-long waits for children who need help now.
If funding is blocked, families face painful choices: pay tuition out of pocket, drastically cut household spending, or send children (often with complex learning or physical challenges) back into environments that have failed them before. For working parents, school choice is the difference between a child in second grade finally reading confidently or a student losing hard won academic progress. The union’s lawsuit ignores those stakes. Maintaining institutional control, in their view, is more important than the needs of Missouri families.
School choice programs prioritize Missouri’s most vulnerable kids. Families use scholarships not just for private school tuition, but for tutoring, transportation, adaptive technology, and therapies. Blocking those options means denying access to tailored learning environments, sometimes after years of waiting for an opportunity that finally arrived this fall.
More than a legal battle about taxpayer funding, the union’s lawsuit is a direct attack on educational freedom for Missouri’s most vulnerable children and the parents who fight daily for a better life. While union lawyers claim they’re defending constitutional principles, the impact falls squarely on the backs of families: children with reading disabilities or physical needs, single mothers scraping together resources, and parents desperate for one more shot at helping their kids succeed outside the standard system.
Recent national data paints a troubling picture for students, especially those already facing challenges. According to the latest release from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), students are struggling at unprecedented levels. The 2024 “Nation’s Report Card” shows that average scores have declined since 2019 for twelfth graders in mathematics and reading, and for eighth graders in science (these scores were already trending downward even before the COVID shutdowns).
Among high school seniors, the percentage scoring below the basic achievement level in both math and reading has reached the highest point since the assessments began, with nearly half of twelfth graders performing below basic in math and one in three below basic in reading.
These results are sobering,as even federal officials admit, with the largest drops hitting lower performing students hardest and widening the gap between the lowest- and highest-achieving students. Participation in hands-on science learning has also decreased, and absenteeism rates among twelfth graders are up sharply, with nearly a third missing three or more days of school in the previous month.
Against this bleak backdrop, school choice programs are more critical than ever for families failed by the standard system. Fewer than one in four twelfth graders are performing at a proficient level in math, and rates of college readiness in both reading and math have dropped since 2019. For the poorest and most vulnerable (those with disabilities, those qualifying for free lunch), school choice may be the only path to academic growth and confidence.
Though the union claims to act in students’ interests, its actions tell the real story.
The union’s lawsuit would devastate families, removing hope and resources from those who need them most. To block these lifelines now would not just cut off opportunity, but actively worsen the crisis revealed in the Nation’s Report Card. Missouri’s policymakers and courts should heed its dire warnings and do everything in their power to support, not sabotage, direct investments in students most at risk of being left behind. As Missourians, we must unite to secure our kids’ future and shield them from the actions of those who would jeopardize it.
On the campaign trail, Donald Trump pledged to get rid of the U.S. Department of Education, expand school choice, roll back new protections for LGBTQ students, and deport millions of undocumented immigrants.
Now that the former Republican president is headed to a second term, the question becomes how likely Trump is to act on his most extreme or implausible proposals and what effects students, teachers, and parents will see in the classroom.
Trump won a decisive victory, picking up nearly every swing state and gaining ground among young voters and voters of color who have been essential members of the Democratic coalition.
Chalkbeat spoke to advocates, experts, and former education department officials about what to expect from the next administration. They widely agreed that President Joe Biden’s Title IX rewrite, which extended new protections for transgender students and is currently tied up in the courts, will be repealed, that civil rights enforcement will look very different, and that future education budgets will be more austere.
But they disagreed on how likely it is that Trump would actually do away with the U.S. Department of Education and how much progress he might make toward federal support for school choice.
A lot will depend on who controls Congress. Votes are still being counted in key races, but Republicans will control the Senate. Control of the House remains unclear and may not be known for days. A trifecta could clear the way for a broader Trump agenda. If Democrats take control of the House, Trump would have to rely more on his executive authority. But even on some key conservative priorities, Republicans are not unanimous, and some may balk at proposals they see as expanding the federal role or disadvantaging their constituents.
Calls to abolish the Department of Education have new momentum
Arguably this has been Trump’s most consistent promise on education policy but also the one that seems most far-fetched to some political observers. Conservatives have talked about getting rid of the department for almost as long as it’s existed, and Trump didn’t make any moves to dismantle it in his first administration.
Fully dismantling the department would require an act of Congress. But Trump could limit its reach in other ways, such as eliminating or moving programs, removing career bureaucrats, and proposing much tighter budgets.
But Jim Blew, who served in Trump’s education department in his first administration and went on to found the Defense of Freedom Institute, said Trump has been adamant that he wants to get rid of the department and that alone gives the idea more “heft.” Blew also believes public support for a federal role in education is changing. Many people don’t think the federal investment in COVID recovery yielded much, he said. At the same time, people see initiatives such as student loan forgiveness and protections for transgender students as examples of federal overreach.
It would take months to take the department apart, Blew said, because every function mandated by Congress would need a new home. But that could be done, he said. Civil rights enforcement could move to the U.S. Department of Justice, for example, and Title I funding for high-poverty schools could become a block grant administered by the U.S. Department of Human Services.
Trump has been clear that his priorities are economic recovery, immigration, and national defense, Blew said, but that doesn’t mean he won’t follow through on education promises.
“It doesn’t need a lot of attention,” Blew said. “It needs political capital. And he can expend that while remaining focused on other priorities.”
Immigration enforcement could ripple through school communities
Trump made demonization of immigrants the centerpiece of his campaign, highlighting at every turn examples of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants or asylum seekers and the impact of immigration on American communities and schools.
Trump has promised to carry out the largest deportation operation in American history. Some experts on immigration policy have said such an effort would be legally and logistically challenging, as well as very expensive. Nonetheless, most observers expect to see an increase in enforcement.
Mike Petrilli, president of the conservative education advocacy organization The Fordham Institute, believes Trump’s education policies won’t make much difference in American classrooms, but his immigration policy may be felt in dramatic ways.
“It’s what he’s campaigned on, it’s what he’s promised to do, and he’d have a pretty free hand to do it,” said Petrilli, who has argued that American schools have a moral obligation as well as a legal one to educate all children who live here.
“The chances that it’s a humanitarian disaster are quite high,” Petrilli said. “Is he going to put people in camps? Will that include families? Are there going to be schools in these camps? I don’t see any reason we should believe they won’t give that a try.”
Even if enforcement is spotty, changes to federal policy have the potential to sow confusion and chaos in local communities, said Janelle Scott, a professor at University of California Berkeley. Some families may keep children home from school out of fear, she said. The messages that local law enforcement and school district officials send to families in this situation could make a difference.
Transgender students could lose new protections as civil rights enforcement changes
When the Biden administration issued new Title IX rules that clarified and strengthened protections for transgender students, Republican states and conservative groups, including Blew’s Defense of Freedom Institute, quickly filed lawsuits that led to the rules being blocked in a majority of states.
Conservatives argued that the new rules eroded protections for cisgender girls because they might have to share bathrooms and locker rooms with transgender classmates and affected the free speech rights of teachers who might be forced to use pronouns and names they disagreed with. They also argued the Biden administration overstepped by defining discrimination on the basis of gender identity as a form of sex discrimination.
Trump is expected to rescind the Biden rules, a move that would still require a lengthy bureaucratic process. But some observers have larger fears for a Trump administration. He has repeatedly accused schools of performing gender surgeries without parental permission — a false and baseless claim — and attacked the idea of gender-affirming care for youth, as well as participation in sports by transgender athletes.
“There have been fantastical claims, but undergirding that is a deep hostility to queer kids as well as allegations that schools are engaging in child abuse if they protect the rights of queer kids,” said Scott, the UC Berkeley professor.
Trump’s first administration also revoked Obama-era guidance on school discipline that aimed to reduce suspensions and expulsions for students of color and emphasized quick resolution of complaints. Some conservative groups have also used civil rights complaints to go after programs that aim to support Black student excellence or mentor teachers of color.
Rick Hess, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said a Trump education department or justice department could make high-profile examples of a few school districts’ diversity initiatives and bring about more widespread change, similar to how the Obama administration targeted districts over school discipline.
School choice gets a modest momentum boost
Expanding taxpayer funding for private schools and home-schooling have topped the conservative education agenda in recent years. A proposed federal tax credit scholarship program backed by Trump’s first education secretary, Betsy DeVos, failed to get any traction. But during Biden’s presidency, Republican-led states have expanded or started private school choice programs, some of which offer money to nearly all interested families.
On Fox News, Trump promised to sign school choice legislation that passed a House committee, and at a barbershop in the Bronx, he talked about the importance of school choice.
Blew expects Trump to push for a tax credit scholarship proposal similar to the one drafted during his first presidency.
Petrilli isn’t convinced that Trump cares that much. “It’s a stretch to say that he’s made it a priority on the campaign trail,” he said. “He has to be reminded to talk about it.”
Petrilli is also not convinced there would be enough support even in a Republican-controlled Congress to send a bill to Trump’s desk. Some rural Republicans, whose constituents have few private school options, are skeptical. So are small government conservatives who don’t want to expand federal programs.
Voters in three states — including two that Trump won by large margins — rejected school choice at the ballot on Tuesday, indicating that even many conservatives have qualms about spending public money on private schools.
But Congress will have to reauthorize Trump’s tax cuts, and a tax credit that allows businesses and individuals to write off donations to private school scholarships could be included there. Observers also expect to see a push to allow families to use money in tax-favored 529 accounts to pay for homeschooling expenses, tutoring, and other educational needs. That money already can be used for private school tuition.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
It feels awful for lots of reasons, of course, but mostly it’s because the country chose political vibes over policy ideas. As a researcher who spends his days trying to find evidence-based ways to make schools better, I’m at something of a loss.
See, whatever you thought about the Harris-Walz ticket’s particular proposals, the Democrats had things to say about education issues that genuinely shape children’s development: affordable early care and learning, access to nutritious school meals, funding for English learners, and more.
President-elect Trump’s education platform was made of much vaguer stuff — mostly culture war vibes. For instance, conservatives are eager to get the government involved in biological screenings to determine if kids have the “correct” genitalia for peeing in a particular bathroom or playing on a particular sports team. Trump talks about schools secretly imposing gender transition surgery on children. Finally, it’s likely that the administration will try to voucherize more public dollars to support families sending their children to private schools.
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But, again, all of this is light on substance. It’s pretty hard to see how bathroom-usage policies will help kids recover from the pandemic’s academic consequences, or get more children ready for kindergarten, or more third graders ready to read on grade level. School voucher programs may give anxious parents public money to pay for private education, but there’s not much evidence that they help students or the public schools they’re leaving behind.
Worse yet, some of conservatives’ K–12 ideas are at war with themselves. The Republican platform calls for federal defunding of schools teaching curricula that conservatives don’t like, but it also pledges — immediately afterward — to “veto efforts to nationalize Civics Education [sic].” So they’re promising not to nationalize how schools teach history, except when they don’t like how certain schools teach history.
Now, there was a detailed conservative plan for federal K–12 education drifting around during the campaign. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 proposes to “eliminate” and “redistribute the various congressionally approved federal education programs across the government.” But Trump claimed to want nothing to do with it.
Maybe he’s telling the truth — perhaps he’s realized that Project 2025 would significantly reduce his ability to enact any sort of affirmative education policy agenda. It would be harder to remake American schools in a Trumpian image without a federal Education Department, after all.
Of course, that’s assuming 1) that Trump has given K–12 enough thought to work through that strategic calculus, and 2) conservatives actually have an affirmative agenda for making schools more effective, something that goes deeper than lines like this from their platform: “Our Great Teachers, who are so important to the future wellbeing of our Country, will be cherished and protected by the Republican Party so that they can do the job of educating our students that they so dearly want to do.”
Perhaps there’s a concrete, substantive plan for reforming Title II of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act lurking in those words, and I just don’t have the right GOP decoder ring?
So look, conservatives: You’ve got to figure something out. The country’s schools can’t afford another four years like the first round of President Trump’s leadership, which left U.S. public schools reeling.
By 2018, the leadership at the Fordham Institute, the country’s most august conservative education policy think tank, was calling for Secretary Betsy DeVos to resign in the hopes that troubles from her first two rocky years could be sorted out by a replacement.
In a January 2021 piece headlined “The Wreckage Betsy DeVos Leaves Behind,” the New York Times editorial board wrote, “The Department of Education lies in ruins at precisely the time when the country most needs it.”
Please forgive me if this reads like I’m being overdramatic. Perhaps it’s my outmoded instincts as a Very Serious Beltway Policy Researcher; I still think about policymaking as an effort to actually solve big public problems.
I’m a hidebound fossil that way. Of course, if you really want to own me, really want to prove experts like me wrong (again), you could shock everyone by setting aside the culture wars and giving substantive education reform a try.
Conor P. Williams is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a founding partner with The Children’s Equity Project, and a father of three children currently enrolled in public schools in Washington, DC. The views here are strictly his own.
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.
As a political scientist with a background in policy analysis, I used to approach questions about policy plans in terms of which had data behind them and which didn’t — along with what such evidence might mean for decision-makers.
However, no question about what a new Donald Trump administration would mean for U.S. education can be answered strictly with a debate about facts and figures.
With the former president and his allies still denying that he lost the 2020 election, with Trump and his running mate embracing unfounded stories about Haitian immigrants eating household pets and with Trump’s obsession with the size of his cheering crowds, any analytical projection about his future agenda is all but impossible. With such an absence of facts or evidence-based policy designs, we must turn to past actions, current rhetoric and the priorities of Trump’s political alliances for a hint of what could come.
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Many Republican proposals have been well-covered, starting with Project 2025 — the policy agenda assembled by the conservative Heritage Foundation for a new Trump term. Although Trump denies that controversial document speaks for his candidacy, more than 140 former members of the first Trump team had a hand in its crafting.
The key education points in the platform Trump does claim as his own — the so-called Agenda47 and the GOP party platform — strike the same notes of emphasis as those in Project 2025. Indeed, the one-page education “chapter” in the 16-page party platform is all but a summary of its much larger Project 2025 counterpart.
What do they emphasize? Culture wars, school vouchers and a peculiar fixation on ending the federal Department of Education.
There’s little action around education in this election cycle, but Harris is likely to boost teacher pay and denounce book bans and privatization
Two of the first three paragraphs of Project 2025’s education plan call for universal school vouchers. In Trump’s official GOP party platform, universal vouchers are the second education agenda item, behind a call to end teacher tenure. Both items follow a general statement about making great schools.
And yet, private school vouchers are not only eating up increasing shares of state budgets, some states are now directly funding new construction for private schools to receive those vouchers. These schools are free to discriminate on admissions and expulsion decisions across a variety of child characteristics.
The education bullet point in the 20-point summary of the Trump platform — the highlights of the highlights — excludes any specific policy statements, simply reading in its entirety:
Cut federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, radical gender ideology, and other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children.
Such a call echoes that of Kevin Roberts, head of the Heritage Foundation, in his Foreword to Project 2025. In that section, after setting a new litmus test for all conservative presidential candidates to support universal vouchers, Roberts insists:
The noxious tenets of “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” should be excised from curricula in every public school in the country. These theories poison our children.
Then there are the statements Trump and his allies make every day, including calls to end the U.S. Department of Education. A similar demand is in the very first paragraph of Project 2025’s education chapter, just ahead of its demands for vouchers.
Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice, who hosted a “fireside chat” with Trump in August, has said on X (formerly Twitter) that Trump is “not kidding” about ending the department, and that she “hope[s] to get to help him accomplish this goal,” perhaps as one last secretary for that agency.
She could have competition. Two weeks before Trump’s appearance for Moms for Liberty, former U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos told reporters that she would consider joining a second Trump administration if it were for the specific task of eliminating the department she led in the first Trump term.
Let’s be clear: The U.S. Department of Education does many things, but what really riles up the Trumpian right is its role as the chief anti-discrimination authority for American schools. And that’s why it’s been singled out by the right for special criticism.
So what does all of this actually mean for kids and families?
What is the common theme of attacks on gender ideology, diversity and racial justice in schools; demands for universal vouchers; and calls to end the federal education agency?
If policy proposals, like budgets, are moral documents, what unifies the possibilities of a new Trump term — whether laid out in Project 2025, the GOP platform, Agenda 47 or campaign speeches on the trail — into some statement of purpose?
I say it’s this: A new Trump presidency would usher in an era of isolation and separatism and a casting out of children who differ from their peers or from what Christian Nationalists believe America should look like beyond what we all share as human beings. As just one example: Voucher schemes, like those prioritized by Trump and his allies, have been used by the right to marginalize LGBTQ+ children and families by denying them access to what the right calls the “education freedom” and “opportunity” represented by such “scholarships.”
What, if not a Trump-inspired politics of humiliation, explains the Trumpian right’s current obsession with the names children use to call themselves or how they describe the racial legacy they carry and experience?
Yet presidents only have partial control over which specific plans they’re able to pass during their time in office. For that reason, considering a new Trump term is as much about the broader political coalition he leads as what Trump and his team could personally do in the education policy arena.
So, from all of this, and regardless of what policies actually pass, we can be sure that a Trump victory would extend the era of culture warring in American education.
For nearly a decade in political life, Donald Trump has told us who he is. When it comes to any education ideas he and his allies might have, my humble suggestion is that we finally listen to what he has said, and consider what he has already done.
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.
Predicting the future is often compared to reading tea leaves. In the case of forecasting what education policies Kamala Harris might pursue as president, though, a more apt analogy might be reading her mind. Frankly it’s anyone’s guess what her education policies would be given how few clues we have.
It wasn’t always this way. Previously, presidential candidates laid out detailed plans for schools. George H. W. Bush wanted to be the education president. Bill Clinton wanted to use stronger schools to build a bridge to the 21st century. George W. Bush wanted to leave no child behind, and move the Republican party in a more compassionate direction. Barack Obama wanted Democrats to break with teacher unions by embracing merit pay.
But in more recent cycles, education has dropped from the list of voters’ top-tier issues, and candidates have become increasingly cagey about their plans.
Donald Trump’s administration was known for its advocacy of school choice, but that wasn’t something he talked much about on the campaign trail in 2015 or 2016; it only came into focus with his selection of Betsy DeVos as secretary of education.
And Joe Biden’s unwillingness to challenge progressive orthodoxy on education would have been hard to predict, given his moderate persona in 2019 and 2020. What turned out to be the best guide to his education policies was his self-identity as the “most union-friendly president in history” — plus the membership of his wife, community college professor Jill Biden, in the National Education Association.
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So here we are with another election in which education issues are barely registering, trying to predict what Harris might do if elected. She has said even less than Trump or Biden, partly because of the truncated nature of her campaign, and partly because of her strategy of leaning into positive vibes and declining to offer policy specifics in the hope that doing so will better her chances of prevailing in November. Official statements — a Harris campaign policy document and the Democratic Party Platform — are thin on details.
Making things even harder is Harris’ well-known willingness to run away from previous positions. She did that in 2019 when the Black Lives Matter movement made it awkward for her to embrace her record in law enforcement — including her tough stance on prosecuting parents of truant children.
Expect a new era of isolation, separatism and a “politics of humiliation” in education
That’s why looking at Harris’ statements from the campaign trail five years ago or her record as a U.S. senator only goes so far.
What we do know is this: She’s sitting vice president. She has positioned herself in the middle of the Democratic Party, not wanting to break with progressives on the left or business-friendly centrists in the middle.
And while her image is not blue-collar like Biden’s, she’s been careful not to put any sunlight between herself and the unions, including teachers unions. One of her first speeches as the presumptive Democratic nominee was to the American Federation of Teachers.
For these reasons, it is likely that a Harris administration would bring significant continuity with Biden’s policies, including on schools.
Picture her appointing a former teacher as secretary of education, proposing healthy increases in school spending and speaking out against privatization, book bans and the like. Call it the Hippocratic Oath approach to Democratic policymaking on education: First, do no harm.
Can those of us involved in K-12 education hope for bolder strokes from a President Harris — including some that might move the needle on reform? Anything is possible.
The most significant play we might anticipate, though, could be on teacher pay. Boosting teacher salaries by $13,500 per year (to close the gap with other professionals) was the centerpiece of her education agenda when she ran for president in 2019.
She has a ready vehicle to pursue it thanks to the looming expiration of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which makes new legislation around tax reform a must-pass item for Congress next year. The most straightforward way for the federal government to put more money into teachers’ pockets isn’t through a complicated grant program to states and districts, but via tax credits that would flow directly to educators.
A major teacher tax credit could quickly get expensive, however, given the size of America’s teaching force (3 to 4 million depending on how you count it). At, say, $10,000 per teacher, that’s $30 to $40 billion a year — in the neighborhood of what we spend on Title I and IDEA combined.
A smarter, more affordable approach would be to target only teachers serving in high-need schools — as the student loan forgiveness programs already do. Studies from Dallas and elsewhere acknowledge that great teachers will move to high-poverty schools — but only if offered significantly higher pay, in the neighborhood of $10,000 more per year.
We also know that when we pay teachers the same regardless of where they teach — the policy of almost every school district in the country — the neediest schools end up with the least-experienced teachers.
A tax credit for teachers in Title 1 schools — which get government funding for having high numbers or high percentages of students from low-income families — could transform the profession overnight, significantly closing the teacher quality gap, school funding gap and, eventually, the achievement gap, too.
Given Democrats’ interest in boosting the “care economy,” perhaps such a tax credit could flow to instructors in high-poverty childcare and pre-K centers, as well. This would fit well with Harris’ promise to move America toward an “opportunity economy,” including by boosting the pay of childcare and preschool teachers.
Still, a big effort on “differential pay” for teachers might be just one wonk’s wish-casting. We’ve had two presidential administrations in a row with little action on K-12 education. It’s quite likely that a Harris administration would be a third.
But here’s hoping for a pleasant surprise after November.
Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. He served in the George W. Bush administration.
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.
Just because Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick didn’t include vouchers on his list of charges that he wants the Legislature to tackle before the coming session, doesn’t mean he has given up on the idea.
What it means, Troy Reynolds, founder of Texans for Public Education says, is that Patrick doesn’t see any reason to change his proposal from the Senate Bill 1 version that went down to defeat in the last regular session and the following special sessions.
And just because House Speaker Dade Phelan has included vouchers on his list of charges to fellow House members, doesn’t mean he’s suddenly embraced Patrick’s vision, Reynolds says. Instead, according toReynolds, Phelan’s call for committee members to analyze and discuss out-of-state voucher programs shows the split remains between the two lawmakers on this issue.
A split that becomes a moot point, of course, if any of Phelan’s challengers for the speaker’s job — all who have supported vouchers in the past — unseat him.
“Patrick made a statement when he released the charges that [school choice] will be a priority. I think you’ll see them regurgitate the legislation and just lay that back out,” Reynolds said. “He doesn’t feel like he needs to study anything anymore. He doesn’t need to learn. That’s what he wants.”
Reynolds described Phelan as the “canary in the coal mine,” with the authority to influence whether or not a system would divert public education funding to reduce private schooling costs and other non-public school education alternatives — such as homeschooling.
Phelan played a part in “defending” against the passage of Governor Greg Abbott and Patrick’s shared priority, alongside most Democrats and a stronghold of more than 20 rural House Republicans.
“I think if he wins as speaker, we have a chance at defeating vouchers again,” Reynolds said. “If you get a speaker who supports public education, he can table things, refuse to bring things to the floor or send them to committee.”
“If one of the other Republicans takes it, you may see them run the table,” he noted. “Abbott’s already shown he’s willing to hold money hostage from children and teachers to get his way, and I fully expect him to do that again.”
Phelan is up for reelection to the speaker’s post against four fellow House Republicans: James Frank (R-Wichita Falls), Tom Oliverson (R-Cypress), Shelby Slawson (R-Stephenville) and David Cook (R-Mansfield).
All four challengers voted in favor of legislation that would’ve created a voucher program in Texas during the most recent special session. Phelan omitted his vote, which is not unusual for him to do as a speaker.
However, according to reports, Phelan indicated he would not have supported Abbott’s universal version instead favoring a more scaled-back approach to implementing such a program.
“Vouchers are not in any way inevitable. There’s still a lot more to go,” Patty Quinzi, director of Public Affairs & Legislative Counsel for the Texas chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, said. “Once people realize what a voucher would do, that the money would come out of the funding for public schools, they are vehemently against it.”
Quinzi said the motivation to get vouchers passed comes from a select few billionaire donors, such as Billionaire GOP mega-donor Jeff Yass. Yass donated roughly $6 million to Abbott in the same month as the final special session the governor called in a last-ditch effort to pass his priority legislation.
Yass has long supported sending public funds to families to help them pay for tuition for private and other alternative schooling.
“Our public schools are passing deficit budgets. We’re now in an uncertified teacher crisis like we’ve never seen before,” Quinzi said. “Make no mistake about it; this by design is to undermine our schools, demonize them, declare them failures, and privatize.”
Quinzi described Texas lawmakers’ efforts to pass such a program as “talking about the wrong things,” particularly when similar plans unfolded unsuccessfully in other states like Arizona, which entered the year with a more than one-billion-dollar budget shortfall.
Quinzi added that reports indicated over 60 percent of those participating in Arizona’s voucher program were already in private schools.
“I think the stakes have never been higher,” Quinzi said. “So, much is on the line right now.”
Despite Quinzi’s concerns about the line of support thinning and Abbott’s recent primary challengers’ victories, she said she was confident that there were enough Republican, rural voters that could block efforts to pass copycat legislation this session.
On the other hand, Reynolds noted that Abbott had already declared he had enough votes from these wins to get vouchers to pass in the Texas House this legislative session.
“If it makes it to the [House] floor, unless the Democrats have a big run, and I’m not seeing that right now,” Reynolds said. “I don’t see a voucher vote getting stopped.”
While advocates staunchly defend the benefits of homeschooling, others are raising questions about lack of data and accountability in some states.
A map published by the Coalition for Responsible Home Education shows an array of different homeschool requirements across the U.S. and a variety of funding practices.
Texas doesn’t require parents to notify a school district that they plan to homeschool their child.
New York, on the other hand, requires notification and intervention procedures when a child isn’t receiving an education meeting state standards.
According to New York statute, homeschool parents in the state must file yearly test assessments, and scores are considered adequate only if they are above the 33rd percentile or reflect one academic year of growth compared to the student’s previous test. When students don’t show progress on annual assessments, the homeschool program is put on probation for two years and parents are required to submit a remediation plan.
West Virginia and Massachusetts fall in between, according to the Coalition for Responsible Home Education map. Both require parents to notify the school district of the intention to homeschool and ask for assessments tracking academic progress. However, both states leave curriculum, instruction methods and other educational decisions up to parents. Neither state takes measures to intervene.
Paying for home school
On the funding front, more states are considering offering Education Savings Accounts and making them available for homeschool families to tap into public funds.
Today, 17 states offer ESAs to parents interested in homeschooling, reported EdChoice, a pro-school choice organization.
West Virginia joined those ranks in 2021. Named the Hope Scholarship, the program diverts roughly $4,000 of taxpayer money per school year from public schools to an educational choice of a parent’s designation.
Among the options is the individualized instructional plan that provides state support to parents who opt for in-home instruction, according to Marion County Schools (West Virginia) Attendance Director Tricia Maxwell.
Jube Dankworth, president of the Texas Home Educators, said homeschool parents in Texas generally oppose Gov. Greg Abbott’s attempts to establish an ESA program for students.
“Personally, I am very much against it,” Dankworth said. “Oklahoma, they did the same thing. Oklahoma was also a free state, and they started doing what they call EPIC up there.
“What happened was all of the (homeschool) tutors and academies and co-ops, they became EPIC-certified and raised their prices, which made it harder for the non-EPIC families to pay for it.”
The Georgia-based EPIC Homeschool Network offers homeschool advising, accreditation services, field trips and other services and support for homeschool families. EPIC stands for empowering, parent-led, individualized, community-driven.
Government involvement
Dankworth is also concerned ESAs would provide the government with an avenue for overreach into homeschooling. Since ESAs pay for educational materials with public money, the government can require parents to adhere to educational guidelines they may not agree with for various reasons, including the parents’ assessment of the needs of the child and religious objections.
Bill Heuer, director of the Massachusetts Home Learning Association, has a similar perspective on homeschool accountability.
He points out that, in Massachusetts, public school superintendents are responsible for every child in their district, whether the child attends a public school, a private school or is homeschooled. If a homeschool student fails to progress academically, responsibility lies with the superintendent who approved the parents’ request to homeschool.
State accountability only needs to go so far, anyway, Heuer argues, since most homeschool families are doing it for the well-being of their children, who often excel best in a home environment.
“You’ve got to do this in good faith,” he said. “If they (the public school) gave you an education plan and they outline what they’re going to do and what the assessment is going to be, it’s sort of like a contract. They (parents) have to do it. We’re not looking to scam the system.”
Massachusetts is nowhere near approving an Education Savings Account plan, Heuer said. According to edchoice.org, Massachusetts does not have a private school choice program, though state lawmakers have considered a tax credit scholarship proposal in the past. The state is firmly set on public money staying in public schools.
Measuring success
Concerns about funding and accountability of homeschooling are compounded by lack of data concerning practices and outcomes.
“Some states, there’s very little oversight and transparency, “ said Erica Frankenberg, who studies education policy at Pennsylvania State University. “They have no idea how many students are being homeschooled.”
However, Heuer said trying to quantify homeschooling is difficult because it comes in various forms, from hybrid models to dual-credit arrangements.
“I don’t know what it accomplishes,” he said of homeschool data efforts.
Frankenberg disagrees, arguing that understanding the churn of students transferring between homeschool and public schools is important.
In West Virginia, Maxwell said some parents transfer students in and out of public school to dodge assessment requirements, making it difficult for the school district to track a child’s progress. Only 37% of homeschool families in the state turn in required assessments.
States that do have homeschool requirements often fail to uphold them, according to Frankenberg.
The Coalition for Responsible Home Education has a collection of testimonials from 28 homeschool students and parents who say they were failed by homeschooling. Some point to lack of state oversight as a persistent problem.
Others have had a much better experience with homeschooling.
The Indiana Association of Home Educators website contains 40 stories from parents and students who praise the flexibility and quality of homeschool education.
These testimonials note, specifically, that homeschooling can make more efficient use of students’ time, lead to faster learning, enable students to take breaks when they need them, generate less stress than traditional school settings, allow more individual attention and enable parents to tailor curriculum to the students’ abilities and needs.
Education vaulted to the forefront of conversations about the presidential race when Democratic nominee Kamala Harris announced Tim Walz as her running mate. Walz, the governor of Minnesota, worked for roughly two decades in public schools, as a geography teacher and football coach. He has championed investments in public education: For example, in March 2023, he signed a bill to make school meals free to all students in public schools.
Harris, a former U.S. senator and attorney general in California, has less experience in education than her running mate. But her record suggests that she would back policies to make child care more affordable, protect immigrant and LGBTQ+ students and promote broader access to higher education through free community college and loan forgiveness. Like Walz, she has defended schools and teachers against Republican charges that they are “indoctrinating” young people; she has also spoken about her own experience of being bused in Berkeley, California, as part of a program to desegregate the city’s schools.
Harris and Walz have been endorsed by both the country’s two largest teachers unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, which tend to support Democratic candidates.
We will update this guide as the candidates reveal more information about their education plans. You can also read about the Republican ticket’s education ideas.
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Early childhood
Child care
Harris has been a vocal supporter of child care legislation during her time in the Biden administration, though the proposals have had a mixed record of success.
During the pandemic, the Biden administration provided $39 billion in child care aid to help keep programs afloat.
The administration lowered the cost of child care for some military families and supported raising pay for federally funded Head Start teachers to create parity with public school teachers.
Earlier this year, Harris announced a new federal rule that would reduce lower child care costs for low-income families that receive child care assistance through a federally funded program. That same rule also requires states to pay child care providers on a more reliable basis.
Walz has also supported child care programs as governor of Minnesota. Earlier this year, he announced a new $6 million child care grant program aimed at expanding child care capacity, which followed a 2023 grant program that cemented pandemic-era support so programs could increase wages for child care workers. — Jackie Mader
Family leave and tax benefits
As soon as she became the presumptive Democratic nominee in July, Harris reaffirmed her support for paid family leave, which also was part of the platform she proposed as a candidate in the 2020 Democratic presidential contest. Harris provided the tie-breaking Senate vote that temporarily increased the child tax credit during the pandemic and has proposed making that tax credit permanent.
In 2021, the Biden administration proposed a universal preschool program as part of a multi-trillion-dollar social spending plan called Build Back Better. The plan ultimately failed to win backing from the Senate.
Harris has played a key role in leading the Biden administration’s AI initiatives, particularly since the launch of ChatGPT. Biden signed an executive order on AI in October 2023, which directed the Education Department to develop within a year resources, policies and guidance on AI and to create an “AI toolkit” for schools.
While Harris hasn’t specifically addressed education technology, in the Biden administration, the Education Department earlier this year released the National Education Technology Plan to serve as a blueprint for schools on how to implement technology in education, how to address inequities in the use and design of ed tech and how to offer ways to bridge the country’s digital divide.
In 2023, the current administration announced several new initiatives to tackle cybersecurity threats in K-12 schools, including a three-year pilot program through the Federal Communications Commission thatwill provide up to $200 million to help school districts that are eligible for FCC’s E-Rate program cover the cost of cybersecurity services and equipment. — Javeria Salman
Immigrant students
Harris has vowed to protect those in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which delays deportation for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. The Biden administration has also used its bully pulpit to remind states and school districts that all children regardless of immigration status have a constitutional right to a free public education. As a senator in 2018, Harris sponsored legislation designed to reunite migrant families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border by the Trump administration, although family separation has continued on a much smaller scale in the Biden administration. In Minnesota, Walz signed legislation that starting next year will provide free public college tuition to undocumented students from low-income families. — Neal Morton
LGBTQ+ students and Title IX
Harris and Walz have both expressed support for LGBTQ+ students and teachers. As a senator, Harris supported the Equality Act in 2019, which would have expanded protections in the Civil Rights Act on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in education, among other areas. In a speech to the American Federation of Teachers, Harris decried the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” laws passed by Florida and other states in recent years. Walz has a long history of supporting LGBTQ+ students in Minnesota, where he was the faculty adviser of Mankato West High School’s first Gay-Straight Alliance club in the 1990s. In 2021, Walz signed an executive order restricting insurance coverage for so-called conversion therapy for minors and directing a state agency to investigate potential “discriminatory practice related to conversion therapy.” Walz signed an executive order in 2023 protecting gender-affirming health care. Earlier this year, he signed a law barring libraries from banning books based on ideology; book bans nationwide have largely targeted LGTBQ+-themed books.
The Biden administration announced significant rule changes to Title IX in 2024 that undid some of the changes the Trump administration made, including removing a mandate for colleges to have live hearings and cross-examinations when investigating sexual assaults on campus. The current administration also expanded protections for students based on sexual orientation and gender identity, which had been temporarily blocked in more than two dozen states and in schools attended by children of members of Moms for Liberty, Young America’s Foundation and Female Athletes United. — Ariel Gilreath
Native students
As vice president, Harris worked in an administration that promised to improve education for Native Americans, including a 10-year plan to revitalize Native languages. The president’s infrastructure bill, passed in 2021, created a $3 billion program to broaden access to high-speed internet on tribal lands — a major barrier for students trying to learn at home during the pandemic. During his time as governor, Walz signed legislation last year to make college tuition-free for Native American students in Minnesota and required K-12 teachers to complete training on Native American history. Walz also required every state agency, including the department of education, to appoint tribal-state liaisons and formally consult with tribal governments.
Walz spent part of his early career teaching in small rural schools, including on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. — N.M.
School choice
Harris, who was endorsed by the nation’s largest public school teachers unions, has voiced support for public schools, but has said little about school vouchers or school choice. Walz does not support private-school vouchers, opposing statewide private-school voucher legislation introduced in 2021 by Republicans in Minnesota. — A.G.
School meals
One of Walz’s signature legislative achievements was supporting a bill that provides free school breakfasts and lunches to public and charter school students in Minnesota, regardless of household income. Walz, who signed the law in 2023, made Minnesota one of only eight states to have a universal school meal policy. The new law is expected to cost about $480 million over the next two years.
The Biden administration also expanded access to free school lunch by making it easier for schools to provide food without collecting eligibility information on every child’s family. — Christina A. Samuels
School prayer
The Biden administration has sought to protect students from feeling pressured into praying in schools. Following the 2022 Supreme Court decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton, the federal Education Department published updated guidance saying that while the Constitution permits school employees to pray during the workday, they may not “compel, coerce, persuade, or encourage students to join in the employee’s prayer or other religious activity.” — Caroline Preston
Special education
As a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, Harris released a “children’s agenda” in 2019 that, among other provisions, called for a large boost in special education spending.
When Congress first passed the federal law that is now called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, it authorized spending to cover up to 40 percent of the “excess costs” of educating students with disabilities compared to their peers. But Congress has never come close to meeting that goal, and today the federal government distributes only about 15 percent of the total cost of educating students with disabilities. The shortfall is “immoral,” Harris told members of the National Education Association at a 2019 candidates forum.
The Biden administration also has proposed large increases in special education spending, but proposals for full funding of special education have not made it through Congress. — C.A.S.
Student mental health, school safety
As California attorney general, Harris created a Bureau of Children’s Justice to address childhood trauma, among other issues. She has spoken out about the mental health toll of trauma, including from poverty, and the need for more resources and “culturally competent” mental health providers. But a 2011 law she pushed for as attorney general allowing parents of chronically absent students to be criminally charged later drew criticism for its toll on families, particularly those who are Black or Hispanic. Harris has said she regrets the law’s “unintended consequences.”
As vice president, Harris leads the new White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which was created after lobbying by survivors of school shootings to support gun safety regulations. She has touted the administration’s efforts to prevent school shootings, including a grant program that has awarded roughly $500 million to schools for “evidence-based solutions,” including anonymous reporting systems for threats and training for school employees on preventing school violence.
In Minnesota, Walz’s 2022 budget called for $210 million in spending to help schools support students experiencing mental health challenges. “As a former classroom teacher, I know that students carry everything that happens outside the classroom into the classroom every day, and this is why it is imperative that our students get the resources they deserve,” he said. — C.P.
Teachers unions, pandemic recovery
The Biden administration has close ties to the nations’ largest teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, the latter of which is the largest labor union of any kind in the country. First lady Jill Biden, who teaches community college courses, is a member of the NEA. Walz, a former teacher, is also an NEA member.
The administration was criticized for discussing with the AFT what kinds of safety measures should accompany the reopening of public schools after the pandemic.
Since 2021, the Biden administration has poured billions into helping public schools recover from the pandemic in various ways: to pay for more staff and tutors and upgrade facilities to improve air conditioning and ventilation, among other things. However, academic performance has yet to rebound, and the recovery has been uneven, with wealthier white students more likely to have made up ground lost during remote classes and Black and Latino students less likely to have done so.
The two unions, which had supported reelecting Biden, quickly threw their support to Harris and Walz. “Educators are fired up and united to get out and elect the Harris-Walz ticket,” NEA President Becky Pringle said after Harris named Walz as her running mate. “We know we can count on a continued and real partnership to expand access to free school meals for students, invest in student mental health, ensure no educator has to carry the weight of crushing student debt and do everything possible to keep our communities and schools safe.” — Nirvi Shah
Teaching about U.S. history and race
Both Harris and Walz have pushed back against Republican-led attacks on K-12 history instruction and efforts to minimize classroom conversations around slavery and race. Shortly after taking office in January 2021, the Biden administration dissolved President Donald Trump’s 1776 commission. In July 2023, Harris criticized a new history standard in Florida that said the experience of being enslaved had given people skills “for their personal benefit.”
As governor, Walz released an education plan calling for more “inclusive” instruction that is “reflective of students of color and Indigenous students.” It also called for anti-bias training for school staff, the establishment of an Equity, Diversity and Inclusion center at the Minnesota Department of Education, and the expansion of efforts to recruit Indigenous teachers and teachers of color. Walz also has advocated for educating students about the Holocaust and other genocides; state bans on teaching about “divisive concepts” in some Republican-led states have chilled such instruction. — C.P.
Title I
Harris’ 2019 “children’s agenda,” from when she was angling to be the Democratic nominee for president, proposed “significantly increasing” Title I, the federal program aimed at educating children from low-income families. The Biden administration also has proposed major increases to Title I spending, but Congress has not enacted those proposals. — C.A.S.
Higher Education
Accreditation
As California attorney general, Harrisurged the federal government in 2016 to revoke federal recognition for the accrediting agency of the for-profit chain Corinthian Colleges, which she hadsuccessfully sued for misleading students and using predatory recruiting practices. The accreditor’s recognition ultimately was removed in 2022.
As vice president, Harris has said little about the accreditation system, which is independently run and federally regulated and acts as a gatekeeper to billions of dollars in federal student aid. But the Biden administration has sought to require accreditors to createminimum standards on student outcomes such as graduation rates and licensure-exam pass rates. —Sarah Butrymowicz
Affirmative action
Harris has long supported affirmative action in college admissions. As California attorney general, she criticized the impact of the state’s 1996 ban at its public colleges. She also filed friend-of-the-court briefs in support of the University of Texas’ race-conscious admissions policy when the Supreme Court heard challenges to it in 2012 and 2015.
Last June, Harris criticized the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action the same day it was handed down, calling the decision a “denial of opportunity.” Walz, referring to the decision, wrote on X, “In Minnesota, we know that diversity in our schools and businesses reflects a strong and diverse state.” — Meredith Kolodner
DEI
Harris has not shied away from supporting DEI initiatives, even as they became a focus of attack for Republicans. “Extremist so-called leaders are trying to erase America’s history and dare suggest that studying and prioritizing diversity, equity, and inclusion is a bad thing. They’re wrong,” she wrote on X.
As governor, Walz has taken steps to increase access to higher education across racial groups, including offering tuition-free enrollment at state colleges for residents who are members of a tribal nation. This spring, Walz signed a budget that increased funding for scholarships for students from underrepresented racial groups to teach in Minnesota schools. — M.K.
For-profit colleges
Harris has long been a critic of for-profit colleges. In 2013, as California state attorney general, she sued Corinthian Colleges, Inc., eventually obtaining a more than $1.1 billion settlement against the defunct company. “For years, Corinthian profited off the backs of poor people — now they have to pay,” she said in a press release. As senator, she signed a letter in the summer of 2020 calling for the exclusion of for-profit colleges from Covid-era emergency funding. — M.K.
Free college
The Biden administration repeatedly has proposed making community college free for students regardless of family income. The administration also proposed making college free for students whose families make less than $125,000 per year if the students attend a historically Black college, tribal college or another minority-serving institution.
In 2023, Walz signed a bill that made two- and four-year public colleges in Minnesota free for students whose families make less than $80,000 per year. The North Star Promise Program works by paying the remaining tuition after scholarships and grants have been applied, so that students don’t have to take out loans to pay for school. — Olivia Sanchez
Free/hate speech
Following nationwide campus protests against the war in Gaza, Biden said, “There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students. There is no place for hate speech or violence of any kind, where it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans.” His Education Department is investigating dozens of complaints about antisemitism and Islamophobia on K-12 and college campuses, a number that has spiraled since the start of the war. — O.S.
Pell grants
The Pell grant individual maximum award has increased by $900 to $7,395 since the beginning of the Biden administration, part of its goal to double the maximum award by 2029. Education experts say that when the Pell grant program began in the 1970s, it covered roughly 75 percent of the average tuition bill but today covers only about one-third. They say doubling the Pell grant would make it easier for low-income students to earn a degree. The administration tried several times to make Pell grants available to undocumented students who are part of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, but has been unsuccessful. — O.S.
Student loan forgiveness
In 2019, while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, Harrisproposed forgiving loans for Pell grant recipients who operated businesses in disadvantaged communities for a minimum of three years. As vice president, she was reportedly instrumental in pushing Biden to announce a sweeping debt cancelation policy.
The policy, which would have eliminated up to $20,000 in debt for borrowers under a certain income level, ultimately was blocked by the Supreme Court. Since then, the Biden administration has used other existing programs, including Public Service Loan Forgiveness, to cancel more than $168 billion in federal student debt.
Harris has regularly championed these moves. In April, for instance, she participated in a round-table discussion on debt relief, touting what the administration had done. “That’s more money in their pocket to pay for things like child care, more money in their pocket to get through the month in terms of rent or a mortgage,” she said of those who had loans forgiven.
But challenges remain. In August, a federal appeals court issued a stay on a Biden plan, known as the SAVE plan, which aimed to allow enrolled borrowers to cut their monthly payments and have their debts forgiven more quickly than they currently can. — S.B.
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.
Sarah Butrymowicz, Ariel Gilreath, Meredith Kolodner, Jackie Mader, Neal Morton, Caroline Preston, Javeria Salman, Christina A. Samuels, Olivia Sanchez and Nirvi Shah
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
SPOKANE, Wash. — Before giving birth to her daughter, Kaleeya Baldwin, 19, had given up on education.
She’d dropped out of school as a seventh grader, after behavior problems had banished her to alternative schools. Growing up in foster homes and later landing in juvenile court had convinced her to disappear from every system that claimed responsibility for her.
“I was just really angry with everything,” said Kaleeya.
But in early 2020, during what would have been her freshman year in high school, Kaleeya discovered she was pregnant. At her first ultrasound appointment, a nurse handed her a stack of pamphlets. One, advertising a new school for pregnant and parenting teens, caught her attention.
“Something switched when Akylah got here,” Kaleeya said, referring to her daughter. “I was a whole different person. Now it’s high school that matters. It’s a legacy — and it’s hope for her.”
Kaleeya Baldwin, 19, holds her daughter,3-and-a-half-year-old Aklyah.
Four years ago, and two months pregnant, Kaleeya enrolled as one of the first students at Lumen High School. The Spokane charter school — its name, which means a unit of light, was selected by young parents who wished someone had shone a light on education for them — today enrolls about five dozen expectant and parenting teens, including fathers. Inside a three-story office building in the city’s downtown business core, Lumen provides full-day child care, baby supplies, mental health counseling and other support as students work toward graduation based on customized education plans.
When the Spokane school district authorized the charter school, it acknowledged that these students had been underserved in traditional high schools and that alternatives were needed. Nationwide, only about half of teen mothers receive a high school degree by the age of 22. Researchers say common school policies like strict attendance rules and dress codes often contribute to young parents deciding to drop out. In April, the U.S. Department of Education issued new regulations to strengthen protections for pregnant and parenting students, though it’s unclear whether the revisions, which also include protections for LGBTQ+ youth, will survive legal challenges.
Lumen High School enrolls about five dozen pregnant and parenting teens, including fathers, at its downtown Spokane campus. Executive assistant Lindsay Ainley works the front desk. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Solutions for these young parents have become even more urgent after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling overturning the constitutional right to an abortion. Lumen is located about 20 miles from the Idaho border, which has one of the country’s strictest abortion bans. Recently, representatives from a network of charter schools in the state toured Lumen to evaluate whether they might bring a similar program to the Boise area. Researchers have also visited the school to study how educators elsewhere might replicate its supportive services, not only for pregnant students, but those facing crises like substance use.
“There are some bright spots. Lumen is one,” said Jeannette Pai-Espinosa, president of the Justice + Joy National Collaborative, which advocates for young women, including teen mothers, referring to support in K-12 schools for pregnant and parenting teens. “By and large it’s just not really a priority on the list of many, many things schools are challenged with and facing now.”
Nationally, teenage birth rates have fallen for the past three decades, reaching an all-time low in 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That same year, the decline in teen births skidded to a halt in Texas, one year after the state’s Republican lawmakers had enacted a six-week abortion ban. Experts fear Texas’ change in direction could foreshadow a national uptick in teen pregnancy now that adolescents face more hurdles to abortion access in red states.
Decades of research have revealed the long-term effects of adolescent pregnancy and childbearing: The CDC reports children of teen mothers tend to have lower performance in school and higher chances of dropping out of high school. They’re more likely to have health problems and give birth as teenagers themselves.
Shauna Edwards witnessed such outcomes as part of her work with pregnant and parenting teens for a religious nonprofit and in high schools along the Idaho-Washington border. She also learned the limits of trying to shoehorn services for those students into a school’s existing budget. At one campus, where Edwards helped as a counselor, she said the principal assigned just one teacher for all subjects and two classroom aides to handle child care for the babies of 60 students.
Principal Melissa Pettey, center right, meets with Lumen High School support staff to discuss current student needs. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Frustrated, she tried to convince the superintendent of another school district to offer a similar teen parent program, but with more funding. He couldn’t justify the costs, Edwards said. Instead, he suggested she open her own school.
“I could serve all of Spokane, ideally, and wouldn’t have the risk of getting shut down by a school district trying to balance its budget,” said Edwards, executive director for Lumen.
Every morning, students from across Spokane County — at 1,800 square miles, it’s a bit larger than Rhode Island — trek to the Lumen campus downtown. Many take public transit, which is free for youth under 18, and end their rides at a regional bus hub across the street from the school. Once their children reach six months, Lumen students can drop them off at an on-site child care and preschool center, operated by a nonprofit partner, before heading upstairs to start their day. Before then, parents can bring their babies to class.
The baby boutique at Lumen High School includes shelves stacked with baby formula, diapers, milk bottles, nasal sprays and other donated supplies.
Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Lumen High School stocks its on-site baby boutique with clothing and personal hygiene products for students and their children. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Funding for small schools in Washington state helps Lumen afford a full teaching staff — one adult each for English, history, math, science and special education. The charter also has a full-time principal, social worker and counselor. Other adults manage student internships or donations to the school’s food bank and “baby boutique,” where students can “shop” for a stroller, formula, diapers and clothes — all free of charge.
It’s common to see an infant cradled in a teacher’s arm, allowing students to focus on their classwork. On a recent afternoon, two couples traded cradling duties with their newborns during a parenting class on lactation.
“Delivering is something that happens to you. Not so with nursing. You have to do it,” said Megan Macy, a guest teacher, who introduced herself as “the official milk lady.”
Megan Macy, a guest teacher and lactation expert, leads a parenting class that students at Lumen High School attend every afternoon. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Kaleeya shared a bit about her daughter Akylah’s delivery: “I was so depleted. I was her chew toy, her crying shoulder, her feeding bag. Once we got home, she wouldn’t latch at all.”
Her friend Keelah, 17, rocked her newborn in a car seat. (The Hechinger Report is identifying the parents who are minors by first name only to protect their privacy.) “It’s hard, and it’s scary,” she said of the first week home with the baby. “She lost a pound between the hospital and pediatrician.”
Lumen contracts with the Shades of Motherhood Network, a Spokane-based nonprofit founded to support Black mothers, to run the parenting classes. The school reserves space for health officials to meet with mothers and babies for routine checkups and government food programs. And founding principal Melissa Pettey has pushed — and paid for — teachers to make home visits with each student.
For each student, Lumen staff develops an individual graduation plan based on earned and missing credits from previous high schools. The school uses an instructional approach, called mastery-based learning, that allows students to earn credits based on competency in academic skills, often applied in projects. The parenting class, for example, counts as a credit for career and technical education, depending on how the contracted teachers evaluate each student.
Parenting classes at Lumen High School include lessons on lactation. The classes count as a career and technical education credit. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
The learn-as-you-go approach also allows Lumen to work around the instability in the lives of their students, who are often coping with children’s illnesses, day care challenges, housing insecurity and other issues.
But the chaos in a young parent’s life can look like inconsistent attendance or even truancy on state accountability reports. Just a tenth of Lumen students attend school regularly, which the state defines as missing no more than two days of class each month.
Next year, the Spokane school district will review Lumen’s operations and performance to decide whether to renew the school’s charter. State data shows less than a fifth of Lumen’s students graduate on time, while a third dropped out. The state doesn’t publicly report testing data from Lumen, due to its size. But Edwards and Pettey said proficiency on state exams isn’t their main goal.
“One student attended 16 elementary schools. Six high schools before junior year,” Pettey said. “Think of the learning missed. How do we get that student to an 11th grade level?”
Payton, a senior, researches historical conflict around gold for her semester-long project with Trevor Bradley, history teacher at Lumen High School. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Added Edwards: “If you can grow them to read baby books to their kids, that’s a success.”
Lumen’s authorizer, Spokane Public Schools, will modify how it evaluates the charter’s performance to take its nontraditional students into account, according to Kristin Whiteaker, who oversees charter schools for the district.
She noted that about a third of Lumen’s incoming high schoolers test at an elementary level; another third test at middle school levels. But during the 2022-23 school year, 52 percent of students posted growth in math while at Lumen, and nearly two-thirds performed better on English language arts exams, according to the school. All of the students who make it to graduation have been accepted into college; 95 percent actually enrolled or started working six months after graduation.
“They’re serving such a unique population,” Whiteaker said. “If you can provide a pathway for students to the next stage of their lives, that’s accomplishing their goals.”
Lumen High School partners with GLOW Children to provide on-site child care for students on the first floor of the charter school’s three-story campus. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Lumen, she added, removes many of the barriers that pregnant and parenting teens face at Spokane’s traditional high schools. Some struggle to complete make-up work after missing weeks or months of classes for parental leave. Most have no access to child care, and regular schools don’t allow babies in the classroom.
Ideally, some experts say, expecting and parenting teens could remain in their original schools and receive these supports. That’s rarely the case, though, and the social stigma alone can keep young parents from finishing their education.
At the national level, a 2010 law that provided funding to help these students expired in 2019. Jessica Harding and Susan Zief, with the research firm Mathematica, studied the effectiveness of those federally-funded programs and found that successful ones work hard to provide flexibility, for excused absences or adding maternity clothes to dress codes. Others get creative, helping students navigate public transportation and modify their work schedules to meet with students after hours.
“Sometimes,” Harding said, “the solutions are not complicated.”
In 2022, when the Supreme Court upended abortion care nationwide, Edwards expected students without reproductive choice in Idaho to attempt to enroll in Lumen. A handful have inquired with the school, said Edwards, but to enroll they would have to move across the state border to Washington where housing costs are significantly higher.
In fact, Lumen recently lost one student whose father found a cheaper home in Idaho. Average rents across Spokane County have risen more than 50 percent over the past five years. And as of March, about half of Lumen students qualified as homeless. One young mother slept outside during winter break while her newborn stayed with a friend. Three students, asked what they would change about Lumen, cited affordable housing or temporary shelter that could help them.
Across Washington, pregnant and parenting teens account for 12 percent of all unaccompanied youth in the homeless system. But the state has a severe shortage of shelter beds available for youth under 18, with even fewer supportive housing options that allow young families to stay together, according to a February 2024 state report. Edwards, meanwhile, has talked with developers to see if they could reserve affordable units for students or loosen rules that prevent minors from signing a lease.
Rene, a senior at Lumen High School, holds his newborn son, RJ, during class. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
“We missed a whole month of class. It was a long month,” said Mena, a 17-year-old junior who convinced her boyfriend, Rene, to enroll before their son’s delivery, in January.
Rene Jr., or RJ, had already lived with the couple in several homes during his first few months. A restraining order with one set of RJ’s grandparents and guardianship battle with the other pushed Mena and Rene to couch-surf with friends.
“School was the only way we could see each other,” Rene said. “I’m surprised, honestly, they can get me to graduation,” he added, while burping RJ. “He’s going to have a future.”
Later, as Mena suctioned RJ’s stuffy nose in another classroom, Rene struggled to stay awake in math. He had forgotten what he’d learned in some earlier lessons on graphing linear equations, and retreated into social media on his phone. Another student badgered him to “put in some effort,” but Rene resisted.
His teacher, Trevor Bradley, intervened. “What’s special about today? Why don’t you want to try?” he said. “You told me you’re tired because the baby’s keeping you up at night.”
After drawing another set of equations on the whiteboard, Bradley asked Rene and the other student for help with finding the values of x and y. Rene barely whispered his answer.
“That’s it! You do remember,” Bradley said, as Rene yawned.
From the start, Lumen’s founders planned to include fathers in the school. Pai-Espinosa, with the National Collaborative, said it’s unusual for K-12 systems to focus on fathers, since mothers often have custodial rights. And at Lumen, the inclusion of “baby daddies” — as students and staff refer to them — sometimes adds teen drama to the mix of emotions and hormones already present at the school.
Lumen High School’s founder and executive director Shauna Edwards, right, meets with social worker Tracie Fowler. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Lumen’s lack of diversity among adults there has also bothered some students, including Kaleeya. Only 40 percent of her peers identify as white, and all of the school’s teachers and administrators are white. Edwards said it has been difficult to recruit a diverse staff. As a temporary solution the school contracted with the Shades of Motherhood Network for parenting classes.
“It’s hard being in a white space with no Black teachers,” Kaleeya said.
Still, she said she liked the school’s emphasis on engaging students in semester-long projects in different subjects and on real-world problems. Last year, confronted with drug-use problems near the downtown campus, students researched and presented options for the city to consider on safe needle disposal in public places. Each student’s individual graduation plan also includes an internship.
Payton, 17, has wanted to be a school counselor since before giving birth to her daughter in late 2022. Her internship at nearby Sacajawea Middle School convinced her to stay on that career path. Another mother, Alana, started an internship this spring with a local credit union and plans to use the marketing experience to help her advocate for children with disabilities in the future.
Kaleeya Baldwin and her daughter, Akylah, walk home after school. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Kaleeya recently turned her internship, with a downtown restaurant, into a part-time job. She planned to save for college, but no longer needs to. Gonzaga University notified her in March of a full-ride scholarship to study there this fall.
“Lumen didn’t change who I was,” Kaleeya said. “I did this for my daughter. I didn’t want to be that low-income family. So I got my ass up, got into this school and I got an education.”
This story about teen parents was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.
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NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Tennessee’s GOP-controlled General Assembly on Thursday adjourned for the year, concluding months of tense political infighting that doomed Republican Gov. Bill Lee’s universal school voucher push. But a bill allowing some teachers to carry firearms in public schools and one adding a nearly $2 billion tax cut and refund for businesses received last-minute approval.
For months, Lee declared enacting universal school vouchers his top priority for the legislative session. At the same time, he warned that lawmakers must pass the major tax cut and refund for businesses to prevent a potential lawsuit as critics alleged the state violated the U.S. Constitution.
The ambitious pitches were made to a legislative body still harboring deep resentments from the past year, where inaction on gun control and safety measures had left deep divides between the Senate and House. Meanwhile, the explosive attention from the expulsions of two young Black Democratic lawmakers resulted in retaliatory restrictions on how long certain House members could speak during legislative debates and limitations on seating inside the public galleries.
“This was a session of good, bad and ugly,” said Democratic Sen. Raumesh Akbari. “Unfortunately some really really bad bills ended up passing.”
While Lee was unable to find consensus on his voucher pitch — an initiative that he vowed to renew next year — he was able to secure a last-minute deal on the eye-popping $1.9 billion tax cut and refund for businesses. The amount is almost 4% of the state’s $52.8 billion budget, which largely does not contain tax breaks for most Tennesseans.
“We accomplished things that will benefit the people of this state,” Lee told reporters after lawmakers adjourned. “And I’m proud of the work of the men and women that have come together and worked together to compromise and figure out the way forward to make life better for the people that live in this state.”
At issue are concerns that the state’s 90-year-old franchise tax violates the U.S. Constitution’s Commerce Clause, which bans states from passing laws that burden interstate commerce. The statute hasn’t been formally challenged, but late last year, a handful of companies sent a letter to lawmakers demanding the Legislature fix the law or risk a legal battle.
“Bottom line, Tennessee pays its bills,” said Republican Sen. Rusty Crowe. “The state of Tennessee wrongly took this money and we’re going to pay these companies back.”
House and Senate leaders disagreed for months over details on how to resolve the legal questions surrounding the franchise tax. On the last day of the session, both sides conceded to offer businesses to apply for retroactive refunds for the past three years in exchange for temporarily disclosing the names of businesses that sought a refund and the ranges of refund amounts — a first in Tennessee history.
Yet the names of the businesses will only be posted by the Department of Revenue publicly for 30 days in June 2025. Companies will have to apply for the refund this year.
“These transparency stipulations are a joke,” said Democratic Sen. Jeff Yarbro, arguing that more could be done to disclose exact amounts even as Republicans countered that the agreed disclosure was unprecedented.
Funding for three years of refunds is expected to cost taxpayers $1.5 billion. It will cost another $400 million annually for the ongoing franchise tax break.
The final week of Tennessee’s nearly four-month long legislative session also saw emotionally-charged debates over the arming of public school teachers and staff, with hundreds of protesters flocking to the Capitol to chant, “Blood on your hands” at the Republicans who passed the bill.
The legislation specifically bars parents and other teachers from knowing who is armed on school grounds.
On Thursday. Lee promised he would sign the bill into law. Once he does, it’ll be the biggest expansion of gun access in the state after last year’s deadly shooting at a private elementary school in Nashville.
“There are folks across the state who disagree on the way forward, but we all agree that we should keep our kids safe,” Lee said, stressing that whether to arm public school staffers will be decided at the local level and not a statewide mandate.
With a Republican supermajority, Democratic members were unable to put up much of a fight against a long list of bills targeting the LGBTQ+ community, ranging from requiring public school employees to out transgender students to their parents and allowing LGBTQ+ foster children to be placed with families that hold anti-LGBTQ+ beliefs.
According to the Human Rights Campaign, Tennessee has enacted more anti-LGBTQ+ laws than any other state since 2015, identifying more than 20 bills that advanced out of the Legislature over the past few months.
Republicans and Gov. Lee also signed off on repealing police traffic stop reforms made in Memphis after the fatal beating of Tyre Nichols by officers in January 2023, despite pleas from Nichols’ parents to give them a chance to find compromise.
Around the same time, lawmakers removed the trustees of Tennessee’s only publicly funded historically Black university after Republicans argued it was needed due to mismanagement identified in audits. Democrats and others have countered that the increased scrutiny largely resulted from the attention over addressing Tennessee State University being chronically underfunded by an estimated $2.1 billion over the last three decades.
As fallout increased around the removals, House lawmakers spiked legislation that would have banned local governments from paying to either study or dispense money for reparations for slavery. A rare rejection of what had been a GOP-backed bill.
On abortion, lawmakers approved criminalizing adults who help minors get abortions without parental consent. That bill is currently awaiting Lee’s expected signature after he had already signed legislation requiring public school students watch a video on fetal development produced by an anti-abortion group.
SAN FRANCISCO — It was two days before the start of the school year, and Lauren Koehler shrugged off her backpack and slid out of a maroon hoodie as she approached the blocky, concrete building that houses the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) Enrollment Center. Koehler, the center’s 38-year-old executive director, usually focuses on strategy, but on this August day, she wanted to help her team — and the students it serves — get through the crush of office visits and calls that comes every year as families scramble at the last-minute for spots in the city’s schools. So when the center’s main phone line rang in her corner office, she answered.
8:04 AM
Four people waiting in the lobby, 12 callers
“Good morning! Thank you for waiting,” Koehler chirped, her Texas accent audible around the edges. “How can I help you?”
On the line, Kelly Rodriguez explained that she wanted to move her 6-year-old from a private school to a public one for first grade, but only if a seat opened up at Sunset Elementary School, near their house on San Francisco’s predominantly white and Asian west side. Koehler told her the boy was fourth on the waitlist and that last year, three children got in.
“We will keep our fingers crossed,” Rodriguez said, sounding both resigned and hopeful.
Stanford professor Thomas Dee predicted this. Not this specific conversation, of course, but ones like it. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, public school enrollment in the United States had been trending downward, thanks to birth-rate declines and more restrictive immigration policies, but the decreases rarely exceeded half a percentage point. But Dee said, between fall 2019 and fall 2021, enrollment declined by 2.5 percent.
At the leading edge of this national trend is San Francisco. Public school enrollment there fell by 7.6 percent between 2019 and 2022, to 48,785 students. That drop left SFUSD at just over half the size it was in the 1960s, when it was one of the largest districts in the nation.
Declining enrollment can set off a downward spiral. For every student who leaves SFUSD, the district eventually receives approximately $14,650 less, using a conservative estimate of state funds for the 2022–23 school year. When considering all state and federal funds that year, the district stood to lose as much as $21,170 a child. Over time, less money translates to fewer adults to teach classes, clean bathrooms, help manage emotions and otherwise make a district’s schools calm and effective. It also means fewer language programs, robotics labs and other enrichment opportunities that parents increasingly perceive as necessary. That, in turn, can lead to fewer families signing up — and even less money.
It’s why Koehler is trying everything she can to retain and recruit students in the face of myriad complications, from racism to game theory, and why educators and policymakers elsewhere ought to care whether she and her staff of 24 succeed.
Answering calls in August, Koehler had a plan — lots of little plans, really. And she hoped they’d move the needle on the district’s enrollment numbers, to be released later in the year.
Lauren Koehler, executive director of San Francisco Unified School District’s Enrollment Center, invites a family from the waiting room to a counseling session in a sunny conference room two days before the start of the 2023-24 school year. Credit: Sonya Abrams for The Hechinger Report.
Koehler arrived at SFUSD in May 2020, which also happens to be when most believe the story of the district’s hemorrhaging of students began. During Covid, the district’s doors remained closed for more than a year. Sent home in March 2020, the youngest children went back part-time in April 2021; forthe vast majority of middle and high school students, schools didn’t reopen for 17 months, until August 2021. In contrast, most private schools in the city ramped up to full-time, in-person instruction for all grades over the fall of 2020.
It was the latest skirmish in a long-standing market competition in San Francisco — and the public schools lost. The district’s pandemic-era enrollment decline was three times larger than the national one.
“My husband and I are both a product of a public school education, and it’s something we really wanted for our children,” said Rodriguez, the first caller. But her son ended up in private school, she explained, because “we didn’t want him sitting in front of a screen.” It was a conversation that has played out repeatedly for Koehler these past few years. But public schools staying remote for longer is not the whole story, not even close.
Remote schooling accounted for about a quarter of the enrollment decline nationally, Stanford’s Dee estimates. The bigger culprit, especially in San Francisco, is population loss. Even before the pandemic, the city had the fewest 5-to-19-year-olds per capita of any US city, about 10 percent of the population, which is roughly half the national average.
Posters on the wall of the Enrollment Center feature photos of smiling students alongside the names of the SFUSD schools and colleges they attended. It’s part of a larger marketing push to improve the district’s reputation and reverse its enrollment declines. Credit: Gail Cornwall for The Hechinger Report
Then, starting around the time Koehler arrived, fewer new kids came than usual and more residents moved to places like Florida and Texas. A recent Censusestimate found 89,000 K-12 students in San Francisco, down from about 93,000 in 2019. That decline represents more than half of SFUSD’s pandemic-era drop.
It’s difficult to pinpoint how many children migrated to private school in response to SFUSD’s doors’ staying closed, since many did, but at the same time, some private school students also moved away. But Dee’s research shows that private schooling increased by about 8 percent nationally. (Homeschooling numbers also grew, although the number of kids involved remains small.)
And these aren’t the only reasons Koehler’s task can seem Sisyphean.
“You guys should be able to find out how many spots are open!” a father sitting outside Koehler’s office said, frustrated after visiting the enrollment center once a week all summer.
Koehler nodded sympathetically and told him his son was sixth on the waitlist for Hoover Middle School and that three times that many got in last year.
Since 2011, families have been able to apply to any of the city’s 72 public elementary schools, submitting a ranked list of choices. The same goes for middle and high school options. When demand exceeds seats, the enrollment center uses “tiebreakers,” mandated by the city’s elected school board, that try to keep siblings together, give students from marginalized communities a leg up, and let preschoolers stay at their school for kindergarten. After that, living near a school often confers priority. A randomized lottery for each school sorts out the rest, which leads to the entire system being referred to locally as “the lottery.”
Sixty percent of applicants got their first choice in the lottery’s “main round” in March 2023. Almost 90 percent were assigned to one of their listed schools. That makes for a lot of happy campers. It also makes for parents like the father with a wait-listed son, holding out for a better option.
Though she responded to him with unwavering calm, Koehler was frustrated too. She knew a seat would be available for his son, but state law prohibited her from letting the boy sit in it until an assigned student told the Enrollment Center they wouldn’t attend or failed to show up in the first week of school.
“I appreciate your patience,” she said, scrawling her cell number on a business card.
Lauren Koehler, executive director of San Francisco Unified School District’s Enrollment Center, counsels a parent hoping to enroll her child in a district school, but only if the charter school she applied to doesn’t extend an offer first. Credit: Sonya Abrams for The Hechinger Report.
To avoid this bind, Koehler and her team have been experimenting with over-assigning kids, the way airlines overbook flights. New, too, is Koehler’s transparency about wait-list standing. In fact, at the beginning of August, every wait-listed family received an e-mail sharing its child’s standing, plus how many kids on the list got in last year. Koehler and her staff hope promising data will encourage parents to hang in there, while a disappointing forecast will open their minds to another school in SFUSD.
Overbooking and transparency represent incremental change. “I annoy some people on my team to no end by being like, ‘Well, I don’t know if we’re ready for this really large step, but let’s take a small step,’” Koehler said. “Let’s put as many irons in the fire as we can.”
Koehler’s next caller said, “The students are not getting their schedules until 24 hours before school starts, which is completely absurd!” Her voice fraying, the mother shared her suspicion that this was true only for kids coming from private middle schools, like her son. Koehler explained that the policy applied to all ninth graders, but still, she said, “I’m sure that’s stressful and annoying.”
Another caller had her heart set on Lincoln High School, down the block from the family’s home. But her son had been assigned to a school lower on the family’s list and an hour-long bus ride away. Koehler suggested several high schools that would have been a short detour on the woman’s way to work south of the city, but the mother began to cry. She had no interest in “Mission High or whatever,” even when Koehler pointed to Mission’s having the highest University of California acceptance rate in SFUSD.
Family and friends are most influential in shaping people’s attitudes about schools, research specific to SFUSD shows. So if they’ve heard bad things, Koehler’s singing a school’s praises often does little to change their minds. Parents also turn toschool-ratings websites, which studies say push families toward schools with relatively few Black and Hispanic students, like Lincoln, which currently scores a 7 on GreatSchools.org’s 1-10 scoring system, while Mission rates a 3.
As the mother on the phone grew increasingly distressed, Koehler responded simply, “I hear you.” And then, “I know this is really hard.”
She learned these lines from her therapist husband. Before they met, Koehler was an AmeriCorps teacher at a preschool serving kids in a high-poverty community. By her own admission, Koehler was “a totally hopeless teacher,” and she couldn’t stop thinking about “all these systems-level issues.” When her pre-K class toured potential kindergartens, she said, “The schools were just so different from each other.” She realized, “Where you are assigning kids — and what their resourcing level is — matters.”
Applications in Chinese, Spanish and English wait for counselors at SFUSD’s Enrollment Center to grab as parents flock to the office two days before the start of the 2023-24 school year. Credit: Sonya Abrams for The Hechinger Report.
After getting a master’s in public policy at Harvard, Koehler took a planning job with Jefferson Parish Public School System in New Orleans and then became a director of strategic projects with the KIPP charter school network in Houston. She moved to the Bay Area in 2018 to work for a different charter network, and that’s when she met the handsome, “uncommonly honest” school counselor. When she joined SFUSD in 2020, her husband struck out into private practice. “I feel like I get training every day,” quipped Koehler of his reassurances at home.
Now, she has her staff role-play parent counseling sessions, practicing skills picked up during trainings on de-escalation, listening so that people feel heard, and other forms of “nonviolent communication.” They try to make families feel understood and give them a sense of autonomy and control.
Often, they succeed. Often, they fail.
9:38 AM
43 people served in the office, 170 calls answered
When phone lines quieted, Koehler began to call parents from the waiting area back to a sunny conference room featuring two massive city maps dotted by district schools.
The first family told her they live in Mission Bay, a rapidly redeveloping area where a new elementary school isn’t scheduled to open until 2025. They were excited about a school one neighborhood over, until they tested the two-bus commute with a preschooler. Then they realized that the city’s recently opened underground transit line goes straight from their home to Gordon J. Lau Elementary. Koehler wasn’t optimistic about there being openings; it’s a popular school.
When the computer revealed one last spot, she squealed à la Margot Robbie’s Barbie, “You are having the luckiest day!”
On August 14, 2023, the Enrollment Center for San Francisco Unified School District welcomed families trying to sort out their children’s school assignments two days before the start of the academic year. Credit: Gail Cornwall for The Hechinger Report
But the next parent, Kristina Kunz, was not as lucky. “My daughter was at Francisco during the stabbing last year,” she told Koehler. The sixth grader didn’t witness the March 2023 event, but when the school was evacuated, she thought she was about to die in a mass shooting. Once home, she refused to go back. Kunz told Koehler the family would have left the district, but they’d already been paying Catholic school tuition for her brother after he’d felt threatened at another middle school a few years earlier. “That was literally the only option,” Kunz said, “and we absolutely can’t afford it this year.”
Koehler read Kunz the list of middle schools with openings, all in the city’s southeast, which has a higher percentage of Black and Hispanic residents than other parts of the city. “Huh uh,” Kunz said, “none of those.” She’d take her chances waiting for a spot to open at Hoover on the west side.
The next parent, a woman who’d recently sent a vitriolic e-mail to the superintendent, said, “There’s no seats open in middle schools.” When Koehler rattled off the schools in the southeast that still had openings, the mother shrugged, as if those didn’t count.
Koehler closed her eyes and quickly inhaled. What she didn’t get into, but was perpetually on her mind, is what she’d read in“Class Action: Desegregation and Diversity in San Francisco Schools,” by Rand Quinn, a political sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania.
San Francisco segregated its schools from its earliest days. In 1870, students with Asian ancestry were officially allowed in any school, but often weren’t welcome in them, leaving most Asian American kids to learn in community-run and missionary schools. In 1875, the district declared schools open to Black students too, but nearly a century later, in 1965, 17 schools were more than 90 percent white and nine were more than 90 percent Black. A large system of parochial schools thrived alongside a handful of nonreligious, exclusively white private schools.
Public school desegregation efforts began in earnest in 1969 with the Equality/Quality plan, which, though modest, involved busing some students from predominantly white neighborhoods. An uproar followed, and the district, which had more than 90,000 students at its 1960s zenith, saw its numbers drop by more than 8,000 students between the spring and fall of 1970 as families fled integration. Over the next dozen years, SFUSD’s rolls decreased by more than 35,000, owing to white flight and also to the last of the baby boomers aging out and drastic public school funding cuts in the wake of a 1978 state proposition that largely froze the property tax base.
A family looking for an elementary school two days before the start of the school year has earmarked a page in San Francisco Unified School District’s Enrollment Guide. Credit: Sonya Abrams for The Hechinger Report.
After 1980, enrollment bounced back a little, but then for years it plateaued at roughly 52,000 students. During the 1965–66 school year, more than 45 percent of the district’s students were white. By 1977, just over 14 percent were. Today, that number is just under 14 percent. All of which is to say, when white families left in droves, they never really came back.
There have been about half a dozen similar initiatives since Equality/Quality — with names like Horseshoe and Educational Redesign — and each time, some west-side parents mounted opposition. Quinn quoted a former superintendent, Arlene Ackerman, who said at the outset of one of those “neighborhood schools” campaigns in the early 2000s: “They’ve said racist things I hadn’t heard since the late ’60s…talking about ‘in that neighborhood, my child might be raped!’”
It’s not just white families who object to their kids being educated alongside a significant number of Black children, said longtime Board of Education Commissioner Mark Sanchez. “You see that in the Latinx population and Asian population as well.”
In nearby Marin County, home to some of the nation’s most affluent suburbs, private schools opened one after the other in the 1970s. At least another 10 independent schools popped up in San Francisco proper, stealing market share from both SFUSD and the city’s parochial sector and pushing overall private school enrollmentabove 30 percent for the first time. Today, approximately 25 percent of San Francisco’s school-aged children attend private school, compared to 8 percent in the state of California and similar shares in many large cities. A November San Francisco Chronicleinvestigation found that at least three independent schools have applied for permits to expand or renovate their campuses in order to make room for more students. At one private school, enrollment is projected to more than double.
When Americans think of segregation academies, they think of the South, said Sanchez, but San Francisco has long had its own. In part because the city didn’t offer quality schooling to children of color. “You’ll see a lot of second-, third-, fourth-generation Latinos that will just only put their kids in Catholic school.”
Lauren Koehler, executive director of San Francisco Unified School District’s Enrollment Center, points out district schools that a family has yet to consider in a counseling session two days before the 2023-24 school year begins. Credit: Sonya Abrams for The Hechinger Report.
These personal decisions have a ripple effect beyond decreasing SFUSD’s budget. Research has shown that advantaged, white families’ turning away from public schools sends a signal to others about their quality. Other studies reveal that when private schools are an option, recent movers to gentrifying neighborhoods are more likely to opt out of public schools. And it is well-established that segregated environments breed people who seek comfort in segregated environments.
“It’s kind of a chicken-and-the-egg thing,” Sanchez said: Private schools are there in part because of racial fear, and racial fear is perpetuated in part because private schools are there.
In 2015, in the southeast part of the city, SFUSD opened Willie Brown Middle School,a state-of-the-art facility that includes a wellness center, a library, a kitchen, a performing arts space, a computer lab, a maker space, biotech lab, a health center, and a rainwater garden, in addition to light-filled classrooms. With small class sizes, bamboo cabinets, few staff vacancies, and furniture outfitted with wheels, it could easily be a private school.
But Willie Brown remained under-enrolled, year after year, even after the school board passed a policy giving its graduates preference for Lowell High School, known as the “crown jewel” of SFUSD. Last year, enrollment jumped when Koehler’s Enrollment Center overbooked the school in the first round, parents decided to give it a shot, and kids ended up happy. About 20 percent of the student body is now white, yet still, spots remained open two days before the start of school this past fall.
To some observers, Willie Brown is just the latest iteration of a failed “if you build it, they will come” narrative in San Francisco. In the second half of the 1970s, the district created new programs and “alternative schools,” akin to other cities’ magnet schools, to attract back families that had fled. Later, Superintendent Ackerman promised a flood of investment in schools in the southeast, including new language programs. There was a small effect on enrollment, Quinn said, but only on the margins.
So when the parent said, “There’s no seats open in middle schools,” Koehler understood that lots of factors influence which schools work for a family and which don’t. But there was also an echo of 1960s anti-integration parent groups.
“I’m sorry,” she replied, “I know this is really stressful.”
1:07 PM
127 served in the office, 390 calls answered
A 17-year-old newcomer to the US entered the Enrollment Center and sat across the conference room table from Koehler. She asked when he’d arrived in San Francisco.
“Domingo.”
“Ayer?” Koehler asked. (Yesterday?)
“No, domingo pasado.” (Last Sunday.)
In New York City and other large cities, an increase in asylum-seeking familieshas been credited with stopping public school enrollment declines. Migrant childrenhave come to San Francisco too, and Koehler’s team has tried to reduce thepaperwork hurdles they and other families face when trying to enroll.
But Koehler would need to meet many more kids like this one to stave off school closures forever.
A family member sitting in the waiting room of SFUSD’s Enrollment Center has filled out an application two days before the start of the 2023-24 school year and waits to speak with an enrollment counselor. Credit: Sonya Abrams for The Hechinger Report.
She’d also need charter school enrollment to stop increasing.
The next parent, also a recent immigrant, stepped into the conference room with a stack of papers issued by the Peruvian government and the conviction that her son needed to be placed in a different grade than the one specified by his age. She made it clear to Koehler that the family would jump at the first appropriate placement offer: SFUSD’s or at Thomas Edison Charter Academy. Koehler scrambled to get the boy assessed and recategorized.
Charter schools were first authorized in San Francisco in the 1990s. Though their share of the education market is smaller here than in places like New Orleans, charter enrollment hassteadily increased, with new schools often inhabiting the buildings of schools SFUSD had to close. Now, approximately 7,000 students attend charter schools rather than district ones.
On August 30, 2023, SFUSD families received an e-mail from the superintendent saying, “We are going to make some tough decisions in the coming months and all the options are on the table.”
Each time a student leaves the district, SFUSD has less money to operate that student’s old school. But the heating bill does not go down. The teacher must be paid the same amount. A class of 21 first graders — or even a class of eight — is no cheaper than a class of 22.
It stands to reason that closing under-enrolled schools and reassigning their students and the funds that go with them to different schools, as many districts across the country arecurrently poised to do, should produce better educational outcomes for all. But it often doesn’t, as experiences in Chicago, Philadelphia and New Orleans illustrate. Sally A. Nuamah, a professor at Northwestern University, has described school closures as “reactive” and urged policymakers to focus instead on the root causes of declining enrollment, like the lack of affordable housing that drives families out of cities.
Koehler can control those things about as readily as she can dig a new train tunnel or decrease school-shooting fear. But she might be able to improve the district’s reputation.
Her team started by modernizing marketing efforts, like going digital with preschool outreach, producing a video about each school, and rebooting the annual Enrollment Fair, a day when principals and PTA presidents sit behind more than 100 folding tables. Parents used to push strollers through the throngs to grab a handout and snippet of conversation; now, schools play videos and offer up QR codes too.
Parents and caregivers, some of whom don’t yet have a school assignment for their child, wait to speak with counselors at SFUSD’s Enrollment Center two days before the 2023-24 school year begins. Credit: Sonya Abrams for The Hechinger Report.
For two years, SFUSD has also worked with digital marketing companies. One “positive impression campaign” included social media posts pushed out by the San Francisco Public Library and the Department of Children, Youth, and Their Families. Images feature photos of smiling students alongside the names of the SFUSD schools and colleges they attended: For example, “Jazmine – Flynn Elementary School – Buena Vista Horace Mann K-8 – O’Connell High School – Stanford University.” In addition to online ads, the district has purchased radio spots and light-pole ads. It’s mailed postcards.
Koehler would like to increase the current outlay of about $10,000 a year, but it’s hard to spend on recruitment when instruction remains underfunded, even if increased enrollment would more than offset the cost. Especially since, at some point, marketing becomes futile. With a finite number of kids in the city, initiatives to increase market share become “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” Dee likes to say. (Private school-board members and admissions directors in San Francisco are also expressing alarm at population declines.)
And in San Francisco, any PR campaign contends with two major sources of bad PR: the press and parents. Koehler understands why journalists report on what’s going wrong in SFUSD: It’s their job. But she sees loads of negative headlines and very few accounts of the many things that are going right. Readers are left with the impression that private schools in the city are objectively better at serving students, which just isn’t true.
Some parents have left SFUSD or refused to enroll their kids because of substantive complaints, like with the district’s decision not to offer Algebra I in eighth grade (starting in 2014). There is also some real scarcity in the process, as in Rodriguez’s case: There simply isn’t enough room on Sunset’s small campus for everyone who wants to be there. And individual families have unresolvable logistical constraints, and in very rare cases, truly legitimate safety concerns. But a lot of it has to do with timing — and fear.
3:23 PM
177 served in the office, 540 calls answered
When David, a father of two, rang the Enrollment Center, it was with the air of a man who just wanted to do the right thing.
After touring SFUSD’s George Peabody Elementary, David and his wife decided the school would be a great fit for their incoming kindergartener. There was something special about it, and they wanted her to learn in a diverse setting.
But they also wanted a backup plan, having heard horror stories of the lottery’s vagaries. “We had two number-one choices,” he said: Peabody and a Jewish private school. They applied to both. In March, their daughter was offered a spot at the private school — and one at a different SFUSD school they liked less. “If we got into Peabody in the first round, we would have gone to Peabody,” said David, who asked that his full name be withheld to protect his privacy. Instead, they signed a contract with the private school. “We put our daughter on the waitlist” for Peabody, he said, “and then kind of forgot about it.”
A family speaks with SFUSD Enrollment Center counselor Raquel Miranda two days before the 2023-24 school year begins. Credit: Sonya Abrams for The Hechinger Report.
When the family got an e-mail offering a spot, on the Saturday before school started, they were excited enough to click “accept,” even though they would have lost their private school deposit. Then they learned that Peabody’s after-school program was full. “There was just no way that we could have made it happen without aftercare,” David said. So he called the Enrollment Center to offer the spot to another family.
Hearing David’s story, Koehler sighed. If she had been able to place his child at Peabody in the first round, aftercare would have been available there, but in August the only programs with openings were located offsite. Because that didn’t work for David’s family, Koehler was left with a seat sitting open at a high-demand school.
Private schools can require open houses, interviews, and a tuition deposit to help screen out all but the most interested families and reveal information about their likelihood of accepting an offer. But SFUSD has tried to do away with hurdles like that, since they disadvantage the already disadvantaged. With no way of gauging intention to enroll, Koehler has to hold seats from March until August for thousands of students who ultimately won’t use them. And she can’t just overbook aggressively, because there are always outliers. This year, one of the city’s biggest middle schools saw every single child who was assigned in March, save one, show up in August. Private schools can more easily absorb extra kids if they overdo it with admissions a little, but Koehler risks a massive fiscal error under the district’s union contract. And overbooking risks leaving other SFUSD schools under-enrolled, something single-campus private schools don’t have to worry about.
It leaves SFUSD an unpredictable mess able to enroll fewer families than it otherwise would. And because the process is a mess, more families apply to multiple systems to hedge their bets and end up holding on to multiple seats, making it all more of a mess.
But change is coming. In 2018, the school board passed a resolution to eventually overhaul SFUSD’s school assignment system. Starting in 2026, citywide elementary school choice will be replaced by choice within zones tied to students’ addresses. The task of sorting out the details has fallen to Koehler’s team, along with a group at Stanford co-led by Irene Lo, a professor in the school of engineering who has been trained to design and optimize “matching” markets like this one.
If Lo could start anywhere, she’d centralize the application process so that families would rank their true preferences: public, private, and charter. One algorithm could then assign the vast majority of seats in a single pass, largely eliminating delays like the one David’s family experienced. But private schools stand to lose ground by agreeing to that, and many public school supporters would argue that this condones and uplifts private and charter schools. So instead of centralization, Lo will start with prediction.
She’ll use AI and other modern modeling tools to anticipate what parents will like. Then there’s “strategy-proofing,” a term from game theory. Essentially, it means trying to set up a system that incentivizes parents to be truthful. Over the decades, families have taken advantage of loopholes allowing students to attend a different school than the one designated by their address. And not just a few families. In the late 1990s, it was more than half. To gain an advantage, they’ve also lied about their student’s ethnicity, “race-neutral diversity factors” such as mother’s education level, and their zip code. Any way each system could be gamed, it was gamed.
Lo said the new six or seven zones will be drawn so each comes close to reflecting the district’s average socioeconomic status. Layered on top of that will be “dynamic reserves” at each school, basically set-asides giving lower-income students first dibs on some seats to make sure diverse zones don’t segregate into schools with wealthier students and others with concentrated poverty. City blocks will be used as a proxy for students’ level of disadvantage.
It all sounds great. It also all sounds familiar. In the early 1970s, Horseshoe featured seven zones and assignment to schools so as to create racial balance. Educational Redesign relied on quotas to make sure no ethnic group exceeded 45 percent. The current lottery uses “microneighborhoods” to capture disadvantage.
What makes Koehler and Lo think the outcome could be different this time?
Lo admitted that they’re trying “another way of putting together the same ingredients.” It’s still guesswork, but with her cutting-edge tools it should be more accurate than the guesswork of the past. And while parents still won’t have complete predictability, they’ll have more than before.
“I understand this is really difficult,” Koehler said to the last parent of the day.
4:47 PM
183 served in the office, 590 calls answered
With the waiting room empty and back offices quiet, Koehler approached each member of her staff: “Go home, because I know this is going to be a really long week.”
It’s likely to be a very long year—and decade—for the enrollment center.
San Francisco was 40 percent white as of the last Census, but only 13.8 percent of its public school enrollment was. Even if Lo works the unprecedented miracle of getting schools to reflect the district’s diversity, there is no hope that they will reflect the city’s without a major change in the way parents have behaved for decades. The data is clear: Without a critical mass of white students in a school, a significant number of parents won’t consider it.
Lauren Koehler, the executive director of SFUSD’s Enrollment Center, listens as a man explains in Spanish that he’d like to enroll a 17-year-old in school despite not being listed on the adolescent’s birth certificate or any other record. The student arrived in the United States as an unaccompanied minor just days before the start of the 2023-24 school year. Credit: Sonya Abrams for The Hechinger Report.
Still, many families are choosing SFUSD, including some of those Koehler talked to in August. Kunz’s daughter got into Hoover off the waiting list. A few months into the school year, her mother said, she is thriving. Her older brother, the one who was pulled out of public middle school, chose SFUSD’s Ruth Asawa School of the Arts over a well-regarded Catholic high school.
Rodriguez, the mother who wanted to send her first grader to Sunset, learned a few days after her call with Koehler that everyone assigned had shown up, and her son wouldn’t be offered a spot. But Koehler’s team had another suggestion near the family’s home: Jefferson Elementary School. Rodriguez almost rejected it in favor of private school, but she’s relieved she didn’t.
“The community’s been very, very welcoming,” she said in October. “His teacher’s wonderful; she has almost 20 years of experience. It has a beautiful garden. The principal is really involved.” A few months later things were still going well: “Jefferson is just fantastic,” she said in December: “We’ve been really, really pleased.”
But Rodriguez said she’s still “recovering” from the enrollment process. “I also worry about the future of it, as we hear potential school closures, budget deficits,” she said. The family is considering selling their house, in favor of a place somewhere else in the Bay Area “where there aren’t so many of the issues that SFUSD is running into.”
In October, David said he and his wife wouldn’t necessarily send their second child to the Jewish private school: “I think we probably will look at Peabody again.” And if that happened, he said, they may even move their oldest over to SFUSD. But by December, his outlook was different. David said his family has been very happy with the private school experience.
Koehler knew about each of these outcomes and thousands more like them, and she hoped they would amount to a turned tide, with enrollment starting to creep up rather than down.
This fall, she and her team learned of SFUSD’s preliminary numbers: Enrollment increased from 48,785 to 49,143. That said, hundreds of those kids are 4-year-olds, sitting in “transitional kindergarten” spots newly added to a statewide specialized pre-K program. In essence, enrollment had flatlined.
Koehler felt nonetheless undaunted. The stable numbers mean “that our outreach is working,” she said. “We are not losing people at the rate that we otherwise might.”
And not all of her plans, her incremental tinkering, have come to fruition yet. “One of my random dreams is that we could do aftercare at the same time as we do enrollment,” she said. She also pointed to SFUSD’s efforts to realign program offerings with what parents want most, spread more success stories, better compensate teachers, and get a bond measure on an upcoming ballot. For the 2025–26 application cycle, her team would like to automatically assign families to multiple waiting lists, “which we hope will make at least the process seem less cumbersome and frightening,” she said. Add in Lo’s changes, Koehler said, and “we’ll draw people back who right now are frustrated by our process.”
“I have a sense that the future will be positive.”
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.
This story was produced by The Dallas Morning News and reprinted with permission.
WASHINGTON — A professional poker player turned TikTok billionaire is helping to bankroll Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s push to oust Republicans who stymied his school choice agenda.
Jeff Yass, the Pennsylvania options trader, has spent more than $209 million in the past decade promoting school choice and pro-voucher candidates.
That includes over $6 million to Abbott in recent months and even more to groups airing attacks in the March 5 primary against the “rural 16,” GOP lawmakers on Abbott’s naughty list for blocking his school choice measure.
Yass’ donations are made possible by a spectacularly successful bet on ByteDance, the Chinese company behind TikTok — the video-sharing app used by hundreds of millions. Abbott banned it from state-owned cell phones a year ago, citing risks to privacy and security that echo concerns aired by governments around the world.
Abbott’s targets in the state legislature see themselves as defenders of limited resources for public schools, not “woke” enemies of opportunity as ads, mailers and robocalls paint them. Some find it exasperating that so much of the onslaught is linked to TikTok.
“It’s very concerning that a guy who made his money in a way that …is very harmful to our young people is using some of that money to double down on his harm to our young people by defunding the public schools,” said state Rep. Gary VanDeaver, R-New Boston, a former schools superintendent who has endured an ad barrage financed in part by Yass.
The Abbott campaign did not respond to repeated email and text requests to square the governor’s views on TikTok with his support from Yass.
“Owned by a Chinese company that employs Chinese Communist Party members, TikTok harvests significant amounts of data from a user’s device, including details about a user’s internet activity,” Abbott said when he banned the app from state-owned devices.
Yass, through a spokesman, declined an interview request but provided a brief statement: “School spending has doubled in real terms over the last 30 years and results have gotten worse, particularly in urban districts. The time for choice and competition is now. I plan to support pro-school choice candidates in any state.”
Yass is a new player in Texas politics, though he has spent big money in Kentucky, New York, North Carolina and Florida. In his home state of Pennsylvania, he’s put $62 million into a group he co-founded called Students First PAC, which backs candidates in both parties that seek alternatives to public schools.
As Abbott has boasted, the $6 million Yass gave him Dec. 18 was the biggest single campaign donation in Texas history. That check, on top of $250,000 Yass gave two months earlier, is fueling Abbott’s quest to replace school choice opponents in the Texas House.
In November, 21 House Republicans broke with Abbott to strip education savings accounts from a $7.6 billion school finance bill. All but five are seeking reelection. Most represent rural districts where alternatives to public schools are rare.
The ESAs would let families use $10,500 a year per child in taxpayer funds for private school tuition.
Abbott has been barnstorming Texas, stumping against incumbents he’d like to replace. He has spent $4.6 million in the last month supporting challengers to 10 of them.
Apart from Abbott, two pro-voucher groups Yass is deeply involved with are also targeting the defectors.
AFC Victory Fund and a Texas offshoot, affiliated with the American Federation for Children, has gotten $4 million from Yass since last fall. He’s given $15 million to School Freedom Fund since 2021, federal records show, plus $62.3 million to its parent organization, the influential anti-tax group Club for Growth.
The rural 16 aren’t defenseless.
San Antonio billionaire Charles Butt, the H-E-B supermarket magnate and 55th on the Bloomberg list, is a longtime booster of public schools. He has put $2.8 million behind the embattled incumbents since July via the Charles Butt Public Education PAC.
VanDeaver has reported raising about $1 million since July, a quarter of it from the Charles Butt PAC.
Teachers groups have put far more modest sums into the races.
Like the targeted incumbents, teachers unions resent the heavy spending from Yass and other out of state billionaires, including Betsy DeVos, who served as education secretary in the Trump administration, and Richard Uihlein, a shipping magnate. That’s on top of big money rolling in from Texas billionaires. Oilman Tim Dunn has given $4.6 million to conservative PACs and pro-voucher candidates. West Texas fracking billionaire Farris Wilks has given $3.3 million.
In September, AFC announced it would spend $10 million nationwide to defeat lawmakers who oppose school choice. Since then, Yass has given $3.5 million.
The School Freedom Fund will spend nearly $4 million on ads targeting 14 Texas Republicans who opposed the ESAs, officials said last week.
“Texas is the front line of the fight for school freedom,” David McIntosh, president of Club for Growth and the School Freedom Fund, said in a statement.
One of the group’s ads airing in East Texas links state Rep. Travis Clardy, a six-term Nacogdoches Republican, to “woke” curriculum and slams him for “[voting] with Democrats against Gov. Abbott’s education freedom bill giving parents the right to choose a better school, free of indoctrination.”
Abbott himself has spent over $400,000 backing Clardy’s opponent, Joanne Shofner.
Clardy mocked the governor as “the $6 million man” in thrall to “damn Yankee billionaires” who don’t care about districts like his.
“These billionaires sitting around in Pennsylvania and California and Michigan and D.C. — nobody thinks that those people are wringing their hands worrying about the poor rural East Texas kids and how are they ever going to get a quality education,” he said.
Another School Freedom Fund ad running in Sherman uses footage of a person in drag reading to small children, and a shot of an all-gender restroom sign. That ad accuses state Rep. Reggie Smith of “keeping kids in woke schools.”
Smith has hit back by depicting vouchers as “a magnet for illegal immigrants,” on grounds that courts require states to provide equal opportunity to children regardless of legal status.
“School choice sounds nice. So does ‘federation for children.’ Don’t be fooled,” the narrator intones in one Smith ad. “They want Reggie Smith gone because he stopped their voucher scheme…. He’ll never allow voucher handouts to illegal immigrants.”
The targeted lawmakers are deeply conservative on gun rights, abortion, immigration, border security and taxes.
“It’s just crazy that I would be accused of being weak on Second Amendment [rights] or weak on the border,” VanDeaver said, “because everything that I have supported, Gov. Abbott supported — other than vouchers.”
State Rep. Hugh Shine, R-Temple, finds it frustrating that Abbott has aligned himself with a TikTok mogul whose role is too hard to explain in the rush to election day. Abbott has put over $400,000 into that district in the last month.
“The outside money is obviously a concern,” Shine said between stops in his Central Texas district. “If people knew that and understood that, they would probably not want to support someone who was getting money for their campaign from that source.”
Shine got $60,000 from the Charles Butt PAC. Rep. Steve Allison, under siege in suburban San Antonio, got $360,000 — against nearly $700,000 his pro-voucher opponent Marc LaHood has gotten from the governor in the last month.
The PAC’s executive director didn’t respond to emails.
In 1987, Yass and some college friends co-founded Susquehanna International Group. It grew into a giant that uses quantitative models to execute rapid-fire trades.
“If you have bought stock or options on an app like Robinhood or E-Trade, there’s a good chance you traded with Susquehanna without knowing it,” the investigative news site ProPublica wrote in 2022, in an examination of Yass’ taxes.
Thanks to a well-timed bet that markets would sour, Susquehanna was one of the few firms that made money in the Black Monday crash on Oct. 19, 1987, that nearly brought down the economy.
The big score came when Susquehanna invested $5 million in 2012 in ByteDance, the Chinese company that later developed TikTok. The Wall Street Journal values Yass’ share at $21 billion.
That’s the bulk of a fortune big enough to rank him the 51st wealthiest person in the world.
A co-founder of Susquehanna now sits on the ByteDance board, a concession the company made as its U.S. presence grew and suspicion with it.
Critics say the TikTok app promotes hate speech and misinformation while giving China a dangerous way to track Americans and subtly influence them. In late 2022 Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, called China’s capacity to conduct “information campaigns” and collect foreign data via TikTok “extraordinary.”
TikTok disputes such allegations, insisting U.S. users’ data is off limits to the company’s Chinese owners.
India has banned the app. Texas and more than 30 other states have banned it from government devices, as have a number of western countries.
The University of Texas and Texas A&M block TikTok from their wifi networks.
A self-described Libertarian, Yass backed the Libertarian presidential nominee in 2016. He also backed Andrew Yang for New York mayor after Yang fell short in the 2020 Democratic presidential race; Yang promoted government-funded debit cards that families could use to pay for private education.
Yass has said little publicly to explain his ardor for school choice.
In rare public comments, he has bashed public school teachers as overpaid and accused their unions, which are a core Democratic constituency, of keeping children in failing schools to protect jobs. In Philadelphia’s mayoral race, he spent $1.1 million to help torpedo the teachers’ union choice in the Democratic primary.
An adviser pointed to comments from 2022, when Yass explained his support for “educational freedom” to a Wall Street Journal columnist:
New York City spends $35,000 per child per school year. Over 12 years, that’s $1.2 million for three kids. If a mom could choose how to spend that, Yass argued, she’d probably put them in charter or religious schools, with funds to spare.
“She’s not poor anymore. She’d get a much better education for her kids,” Yass said. “But that self-serving teachers union comes in and grabs that $1.2 million out of her hands.”
Monty Exter, government relations director at the Texas Association of Professional Educators, said he’s less concerned about Yass’ link to TikTok than “his desire to dismantle public education.”
As for the big money being unleashed on voucher opponents, he said, “It certainly is making the races more difficult.”
This story was produced by The Dallas Morning News and reprinted with permission.
The DMN Education Lab is a community-funded journalism initiative, with support from Bobby and Lottye Lyle, Communities Foundation of Texas, The Dallas Foundation, Dallas Regional Chamber, Deedie Rose, Garrett and Cecilia Boone, The Meadows Foundation, The Murrell Foundation, Solutions Journalism Network, Southern Methodist University, Sydney Smith Hicks and the University of Texas at Dallas. The Dallas Morning News retains full editorial control of the Education Lab’s journalism.
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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.
Amelia Copersito reads during her first grade class at St. Mary Magdalene Catholic School in Apex on Jan. 24.
Ethan Hyman
ehyman@newsobserver.com
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North Carolina School Choice
North Carolina is about to see record expansion in the number of students who get taxpayer-funded vouchers to attend private schools. But it’s not a cause for celebration for public school supporters at a time when they say they don’t get enough help. Here’s ongoing coverage from The News & Observer and The Charlotte Observer.
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North Carolina is about to see record expansion in the number of students who get taxpayer funded vouchers to attend private schools.
For the first time in the state’s history, any family can apply for an Opportunity Scholarship to cover K-12 private school costs, regardless of their income. The initial response has been large, with more than 31,600 completed applications received during the first five days of filing.
The application period runs to March 1.
The new rules could lead to a 60% increase this year in the number of students getting a voucher. And that number will only continue to rise as state lawmakers plan to spend $4.7 billion on vouchers over the next decade.
“Historic expansion of the Opportunity Scholarship Program will lead to historic application numbers this year; I have no doubt,” Mike Long, president of Parents For Educational Freedom in North Carolina, said in a statement.
“Since the program was created, we have only seen OSP enrollment numbers rise, as has demand for the scholarship, because families across our state deserve to have that choice in their child’s education.”
“We could be putting that$1.7 billion into our public schools that provide choice to families,” Mary Ann Wolf, president of the Public School Forum of North Carolina, said in an interview. “Instead that money is being redistributed and put into private schools that don’t have accountability.”
Kids collectively throw water balloons at the Superintendent for Catholic Schools for the Diocese of Charlotte, Dr. Gregory Monroe, during recess at summer camp at St. Matthew Catholic School on July 22, 2022 in Charlotte. Melissa Melvin-Rodriguez mrodriguez@charlotteobserver.com
Most voucher students attend religious schools
State lawmakers created the Opportunity Scholarship Program in 2013, originally promoting it as a way to help low-income families escape failing public schools. Income limits have steadily been raised to allow middle-income families to get vouchers.
Most voucher students are attending religious schools. Sixteen Protestant Christian schools and one Islamic school received more than $1 million in voucher funding last school year.
Citing federal privacy laws, the North Carolina State Education Assistance Authority is no longer listing online how many students are receiving Opportunity Scholarships at each school. The agency now only lists online the dollar amount paid to each school.
“Private schools don’t have to accept all students and can set their own admissions polices on who they want to accept,” Wolf said. “They can discriminate in terms of what families attend based on religion and other factors. That’s a significant difference where our public dollars are going.”
School voucher supporters celebrate National School Choice Week during a rally on Halifax Mall in front of the Legislative Building in Raleigh on Jan. 24. North Carolina could see a 60% increase this year in the number of students receiving a private school voucher now that income limits for families have been removed. Travis Long tlong@newsobserver.com
‘Priceless’ education for some families
Unlike many Protestant schools, Catholic schools don’t require students to be members of their faith. But Catholic families do pay a lower tuition rate.
The Roman Catholic Diocese of Raleigh has 1,261 Opportunity Scholarship students among the 9,563 students in its schools.
An Opportunity Scholarship allowed Christina and Joe Copersito to afford the $7,722 tuition at St. Mary Magdalene Catholic School in Apex. They say their daughter Amelia, a first-grade student, is thriving there.
“As someone who attended both public and private schools throughout my lifetime, I can definitely tell the difference knowing that our child is getting a Catholic education,” Christina Copersito said in an interview. “That is beyond priceless, and that should be available to everyone, every religion, every ethnicity on this Earth without having their financial status being the decider.”’
Amelia Copersito works in her first grade class at St. Mary Magdalene Catholic School in Apex on Jan. 24. Ethan Hyman ehyman@newsobserver.com
It’s why Mary Jawabreh hopes to get an Opportunity Scholarship to send her two children this fall to St. Mary Magdalene. Jawabreh said her husband is unemployed so they can’t afford the tuition based only on her salary as a charter school assistant principal.
“It would be life-changing for our kids,” Jawabreh said in an interview. “They’d have smaller class sizes. They’d have their friends from parish athletics and from church activities.”
Anyone can seek a voucher now
The rules on getting a voucher are getting a major overhaul for the 2024-25 school year.
Instead of an income limit like in the past, a family’s income will now only determine whether families will get a scholarship of between $3,360 and $7,468 per child.
The state will also no longer require any voucher students to have previously attended a public school.
“We may see a larger number of older students coming in and, as the income guidelines change as well, really opening up to what … would otherwise have prevented our middle class families from having the Opportunity Scholarship,” Peggy Lane, the principal of St. Mary Magdalene, said in an interview.
Parents for Educational Freedom in North Carolina, which is being paid by the state to promote the voucher program to parents, estimates 15,000 to 20,000 additional families could receive an Opportunity Scholarship this year.
“Schools that are participating are encouraging more current families to apply for the funds,” Stephanie Keaney, executive director of the North Carolina Association of Independent Schools, said in an interview. “We don’t know how many of those 15,000 new students are currently enrolled in private schools and how many will be transitioning to private schools.”
School voucher supporters celebrate National School Choice Week during a rally on Halifax Mall in front of the Legislative Building in Raleigh on Jan. 24. North Carolina could see a 60% increase this year in the number of students receiving a private school voucher now that income limits for families have been removed. Travis Long tlong@newsobserver.com
But in Arizona, that state’s department of education reported that more than half of the voucher recipients hadn’t attended a public school before.
Voucher critics expect families who are already attending private schools to be mainly getting the new vouchers in North Carolina. It’s led to the cry that millionaires can now get a voucher from the state.
“We were sold a bill of goods that this would help the poorest families, but that’s not how the reality is bearing out,” Todd Warren, state campaign strategist for Down Home North Carolina, said in an interview. “This is a savings account for wealthy private school families.”
But Robert Enlow, president of the group EdChoice, said North Carolina could be closer to the experience of New Hampshire, where he said only 29% of applicants after school choice expansion were existing private school families.
Even if a wealthy family receives a private school voucher, Enlow said that shouldn’t matter since the parents are already paying taxes to support public schools.
“Are we funding wealthy families who are already attending private schools?” Enlow said in an interview. “My response is we should fund families to do what’s right for their families regardless of their income status.”
Private schools raise tuition
Private schools across the state are raising tuition and sending information to families about applying for Opportunity Scholarships. How much of the tuition increase is due to inflation or to take advantage of additional voucher funding is unclear.
“Across the general economy, the increases in expenses such as utilities and supports for our students does affect our tuition,” Anna Bragg, the director of marking and enrollment management for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Raleigh schools, said in an interview.
“Additionally, we look forward to ensuring equitable salaries for our teachers, and the additional funding provided by the Opportunity Scholarship expansion will be able to assist those schools with meeting those needs.”
The tuition rate increases for some schools across the state is more than 10%, which is well above the rate of inflation.
For instance, LifeSpring Academy in Clayton is raising its tuition for the 2024-25 school year to $6,504 — an increase ranging from 17% for high school students to 29% for elementary school students. The school received $577,918 in voucher funding last school year and $634,143 so far this school year.
LifeSpring did not return a call from The News & Observer requesting comment on the tuition increase.
Thales Academy is raising its kindergarten tuition by 14% to $6,500 at several of its schools. Thales is also citing the Opportunity Scholarship becoming available for all students for why it’s eliminating tuition discounts.
“Thales Academy offers one of the lowest tuition rates for high-quality K–12 education in North Carolina,” Kelly Ellis, a Thales spokesperson, said in a statement. “Tuition increases vary and are due to inflation, to support teacher salaries and operational costs that have risen over the past few years.”
‘History changing’ before our eyes
Voucher supporters celebrated the program expansion during National School Choice Week in January. Rep. Donnie Loftis, a Gaston County Republican who sponsored legislation to expand the program, told attendees at a rally in Raleigh that “it’s amazing to watch history changing right before your eyes.”
“The House has worked very hard in making sure we had funding lined up,” Loftis told the crowd on Halifax Mall in front of the Legislative Building. “Now we need your help to make sure more parents know there’s opportunities out there.”
Loftis was joined by speakers such as Senate leader Phil Berger, who thanked parents for sending their children to a private school supported by the Opportunity Scholarship Program.
“We know that education is not a one-size-fits-all proposition,” Berger said. “It would be a disservice to parents if we did not provide them the educational freedom to choose a school that best fits their child’s education needs.”
Students from Fayetteville’s School of Hope perform during a rally celebrating National School Choice Week on Halifax Mall in front of the Legislative Building in Raleigh on Wednesday, Jan. 24, 2024. North Carolina could see a 60% increase this year in the number of students receiving a private school voucher now that income limits for families have been removed. Travis Long tlong@newsobserver.com
Cooper’s Office of State Budget and Management issued an analysis last year saying expansion of the Opportunity Scholarship program could cost public schools more than $200 million a year from lost enrollment. The analysis found that poor rural school districts could be the most impacted.
The voucher expansion comes at a time when North Carolina ranks near the bottom nationally in areas such as pay for beginning teachers and per-pupil funding. At the same time, GOP lawmakers are appealing a 2022 State Supreme Court decision that the courts can order an increase in funding for public schools.
“When the most wealthy take resources out of public schools to only benefit their children, that leaves the most marginalized students — the poorest students who are disproportionately students of color — trapped in underfunded schools that harm the state,” said Warren of Down Home North Carolina.
But Catherine Truitt, the Republican state superintendent of public instruction, said a “public schools only” focus pits schools against the people they’re meant to serve.
“The more I hear the cries for investing in public schools, the more convinced I am that what the real cry should be is invest in students,” Truitt said at the Jan. 24 school choice rally in Raleigh.
Catherine Truitt, the Republican state superintendent of public instruction, speaks during a rally celebrating National School Choice Week on Halifax Mall in front of the Legislative Building in Raleigh on Jan. 24. North Carolina could see a 60% increase this year in the number of students receiving a private school voucher now that income limits for families have been removed. Travis Long tlong@newsobserver.com
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T. Keung Hui has covered K-12 education for the News & Observer since 1999, helping parents, students, school employees and the community understand the vital role education plays in North Carolina. His primary focus is Wake County, but he also covers statewide education issues.
If you live in Arizona, school choice may be coming to your neighborhood soon. As someone who has had more school choice than I know what to do with, I can tell you what may feel like a shocking surprise: Private schools have the power to choose, not parents.
I live inPhoenix, where the nearby town of Paradise Valley is getting ready to offer the privatization movement’s brand of choice to families. The district has indicated that it will likely vote to close four public schools due to insufficient funds. If this happens, other districts will probably follow: The state’s recent universal voucher expansion has predictably accelerated the diversion of money from public to private schools.
Arizona approved use of school choice vouchers, called Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, or ESAs, in 2011 on the promise that they were strictly for children with special needs who were not being adequately served in the public school system. The amount of funds awarded to qualified students was based on a tiered system, according to type of disability.
Over the years, the state incrementally made more students eligible, until full expansion was finally achieved in 2022. For some students, the amount of voucher money they qualify for is only a few thousand dollars, nowhere near enough to cover tuition at a private school. Often, their parents can’t afford to supplement the balance. However, my son, who is autistic, qualified for enough to cover full tuition.
I took him out of public school in 4th grade. Every school I applied to seemed to have the capability to accommodate his intellectual disability needs but lacked the willingness. Eventually, I found a special education school willing to accept him. It was over an hour from our home, but I hoped for the best. Unfortunately, it ultimately was not a good fit.
I then thought Catholic schools would welcome my son, but none of them did. One Catholic school principal who did admit him quickly rescinded the offer after a teacher objected to having him in her class.
The long list of general, special-ed, Catholic and charter schools that turned my son away indicate how little choice actually exists, despite the marketing of ESA proponents.
There was a two-year period where I gave up and he was home without social opportunities. I was not able to homeschool, so a reading tutor and his iPad became his only access to education.
I then tried to enroll him in private schools for students with disabilities.
These schools were almost always located in former office suites in strip malls with no outdoor access. My son’s current school shares space with a dialysis center in a medical building, while a former school was located in a small second-floor suite in a Target plaza.
Once a private school admits your child, they can rescind admission without cause. Private schools are at leisure to act as virtual dictatorships, and special-ed schools in particular are notorious for keeping parents at a distance.
My son’s current school grew tired of my requests for reasonable communication about his school day or even his general progress and made his continued enrollment subject to my acceptance of their decision not to speak to me at all.
With few other choices, I acquiesced to the school’s ultimatum and am keeping my son there while I search for a better option once again — even as he gets closer to aging out of K-12 education. As of now, he has nowhere else to go. There has never been a moment when I couldn’t accept my son for who he is; why can’t private schools do the same — especially those that market themselves to the special needs demographic?
Education is a human right, and public schools, open to all, are the guardians of this right. What privatizers call choice does not really exist.
As ESAs and private schools siphon off money and public schools start closing down, parents will be horrified to discover that nothing can defeat the closely held advantages of a private system designed to keep them out, and no amount of vouchers will make a difference.
When all the public schools are closed, and you can’t get a private school to accept your child, what will you do?
Vouchers gave my son social opportunities that he wouldn’t have had otherwise, along with tutors to help mitigate private education deficits. But he would rather attend a local school, with kids in his neighborhood, or at least the kind of private school ESA marketing promised him.
I hope that as more families experience the exclusion and powerlessness that we have lived with, they’ll realize that a balance between public and private is necessary and an excess of either at the expense of the other is disastrous.
Every day on our way to my son’s special education school, we drive by an elegant, sprawling private school campus. He waves at the children and pretends they’re his friends. He still asks to go there.
Pam Lang is a writer and graduate student at ASU pursuing master’s degrees in comparative literature and social work, and an advocate for public education and healthcare equality.
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.
ATLANTA – It’s unclear to Tameka how — or even when — her children became unenrolled from Atlanta Public Schools. But it was traumatic when, in Fall 2021, they figured out it had happened.
After more than a year of some form of pandemic online learning, students were all required to come back to school in person. Tameka was deeply afraid of COVID-19 and skeptical the schools could keep her kids safe. One morning, in a test run, she sent two kids to school.
Her oldest daughter, then in seventh grade, and her second youngest, a boy entering first grade, boarded their respective buses. She had yet to register the youngest girl, who was entering kindergarten. And her older son, a boy with Down syndrome, stayed home because she wasn’t sure he could consistently wear masks.
After a few hours, the elementary school called: Come pick up your son, they told her. He was no longer enrolled, they said.
Around lunchtime, the middle school called: Come get your daughter, they told her. She doesn’t have a class schedule.
Tameka’s children — all four of them — have been home ever since.
Thousands of students went missing from American classrooms during the pandemic. For some who have tried to return, a serious problem has presented itself. A corrosive combination of onerous re-enrollment requirements, arcane paperwork and the everyday obstacles of poverty — a nonworking phone, a missing backpack, the loss of a car — is in many cases preventing those children from going back.
“One of the biggest problems that we have is kids that are missing and chronic absenteeism,” says Pamela Herd, a Georgetown University public policy professor. She studies how burdensome paperwork and processes often prevent poor people from accessing health benefits. “I’m really taken aback that a district would set forth a series of policies that make it actually quite difficult to enroll your child.”
In Atlanta, where Tameka lives, parents must present at least eight documents to enroll their children — twice as many as parents in New York City or Los Angeles. One of the documents — a complicated certificate evaluating a child’s dental health, vision, hearing and nutrition — is required by the state. Most of the others are Atlanta’s doing, including students’ Social Security cards and an affidavit declaring residency that has to be notarized.
Tameka’s kids have essentially been out of school since COVID hit in March 2020. They have had a consistent place to live, but nearly everything else in their lives collapsed during the pandemic. Credit: Bianca Vázquez Toness/ Associated Press
The district asks for proof of residency for existing students every year at some schools, and also before beginning sixth and ninth grades, to prevent students from attending schools outside of their neighborhoods or communities. The policy also allows the district to request proof the student still lives in the attendance zone after an extended absence or many tardy arrivals. Without that proof, families say their children have been disenrolled.
“They make it so damned hard,” says Kimberly Dukes, an Atlanta parent who co-founded an organization to help families advocate for their children.
During the pandemic, she and her children became homeless and moved in with her brother. She struggled to convince her children’s school they really lived with him. Soon, she heard from other caregivers having similar problems. Last year, she estimates she helped 20 to 30 families re-enroll their children in Atlanta Public Schools.
The school district pushed back against this characterization of the enrollment process. “When parents inform APS that they are unable to provide updated proof of residence, protocols are in place to support families,” Atlanta communications director Seth Coleman wrote by email. Homeless families are not required to provide documentation, he said.
Tameka’s kids have essentially been out of school since COVID hit in March 2020. She and her kids have had a consistent place to live, but nearly everything else in their lives collapsed during the pandemic. (Tameka is her middle name. The Associated Press is withholding her full name because Tameka, 33, runs the risk of jail time or losing custody of her children since they are not in school.)
Tameka’s longtime partner, who was father to her children, died of a heart attack in May 2020 as COVID gripped the country.
His death left her overwhelmed and penniless. Tameka never graduated from high school and has worked occasionally as a security guard or a housecleaner for hotels. She has never gotten a driver’s license. But her partner worked construction and had a car. “When he was around, we never went without,” she says.
Suddenly, she had four young children to care for by herself, with only government cash assistance to live on.
Schools had closed to prevent the spread of the virus, and the kids were home with her all the time. Remote learning didn’t hold their attention. Their home internet didn’t support the three children being online simultaneously, and there wasn’t enough space in their two-bedroom apartment for the kids to have a quiet place to learn.
Because she had to watch them, she couldn’t work. The job losses put her family even further below the median income for a Black family in Atlanta — $28,105. (The median annual income for a white family in the city limits is $83,722.)
When Tameka’s children didn’t return to school, she also worried about the wrong kind of attention from the state’s child welfare department. According to Tameka, staff visited her in Spring 2021 after receiving calls from the school complaining her children were not attending online classes.
The social workers interviewed the children, inspected their home and looked for signs of neglect and abuse. They said they’d be back to set her up with resources to help her with parenting. For more than two years, she says, “they never came back.”
“He wasn’t in school, and no one cared.”
Candace, mother of a seventh grader with autism
When the kids missed 10 straight days of school that fall, the district removed them from its rolls, citing a state regulation. Tameka now had to re-enroll them.
Suddenly, another tragedy of her partner’s death became painfully obvious. He was carrying all the family’s important documents in his backpack when he suffered his heart attack. The hospital that received him said it passed along the backpack and other possessions to another family member, Tameka says. But it was never found.
The backpack contained the children’s birth certificates and her own, plus Medicaid cards and Social Security cards. Slowly, she has tried to replace the missing documents. First, she got new birth certificates for the children, which required traveling downtown.
After asking for new Medicaid cards for over a year, she finally received them for two of her children. She says she needs them to take her children to the doctor for the health verifications and immunizations required to enroll. It’s possible her family’s cards have been held up by a backlog in Georgia’s Medicaid office since the state agency incorrectly disenrolled thousands of residents.
When she called for a doctor’s appointment in October, the office said the soonest they could see her children was December.
“That’s too late,” she said. “Half the school year will be over by then.”
She also needs to show the school her own identification, Social Security cards, and a new lease, plus the notarized residency affidavit.
Some of the enrollment requirements have exceptions buried deep in school board documents. But Tameka says no one from the district has offered her guidance.
Contact logs provided by the district show social workers from three schools have sent four emails and called the family 19 times since the pandemic closed classrooms in 2020. Most of those calls went to voicemail or didn’t go through because the phone was disconnected. Records show Tameka rarely called back.
The only face-to-face meeting was in October 2021, when Tameka sent her kids on the bus, only to learn they weren’t enrolled. A school social worker summarized the encounter: “Discussed students’ attendance history, the impact it has on the student and barriers. Per mom student lost father in May 2020 and only other barrier is uniforms.”
The social worker said the school would take care of the uniforms. “Mom given enrollment paperwork,” the entry ends.
The school’s logs don’t record any further attempts to contact Tameka.
“Our Student Services Team went above and beyond to help this family and these children,” wrote Coleman, the district spokesperson.
Inconsistent cell phone access isn’t uncommon among low-income Americans. Many have phones, as Tameka’s family does, but when they break or run out of prepaid minutes, communication with them becomes impossible.
So in some cities, even at the height of the pandemic, social workers, teachers and administrators checked on families in person when they were unresponsive or children had gone missing from online learning. In Atlanta, Coleman said, the district avoided in-person contact because of the coronavirus.
Tameka says she’s unaware of any outreach from Atlanta schools. She currently lacks a working phone with a cell plan, and she’s spent long stretches over the last three years without one. An Associated Press reporter has had to visit the family in person to communicate.
The logs provided by Atlanta Public Schools show only one attempt to visit the family in person, in Spring 2021. A staff member went to the family’s home to discuss poor attendance in online classes by the son with Down syndrome. No one was home, and the logs don’t mention further attempts.
The details of what the district has done to track down and re-enroll Tameka’s children, especially her son with Down syndrome, matter. Federal laws require the state and district to identify, locate and evaluate all children with disabilities until they turn 21.
One government agency has been able to reach Tameka. A new social worker from the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services, the same agency that came years earlier, made another visit to her home in October.
The department offered to organize a ride for her and her children to visit the doctor. But without an appointment, Tameka didn’t see the point.
The social worker also shared a helpful tip: Tameka can enroll her children with most of the paperwork, and then she would have 30 days to get the immunizations. But she should act fast, the social worker urged, or the department might have to take action against her for “educational neglect.”
To many observers, Tameka’s troubles stem from Atlanta’s rapid gentrification. The city, known for its Black professional class, also boasts the country’s largest wealth disparity between Black and white families.
“It looks good from the curb, but when you get inside you see that Black and brown people are worse off economically than in West Virginia — and no one wants to talk about it,” says Frank Brown, who heads Communities in Schools of Atlanta, an organization that runs dropout-prevention programs in Atlanta Public Schools.
Atlanta’s school board passed many of its enrollment policies and procedures back in 2008, after years of gentrification and a building boom consolidated upper-income and mostly white residents in the northern half of the city. The schools in those neighborhoods complained of “overcrowding,” while the schools in the majority Black southern half of the city couldn’t fill all of their seats.
The board cracked down on “residency fraud” to prevent parents living in other parts of town from sending their children to schools located in those neighborhoods.
Tameka’s 8-year-old daughter ties her shoe before running out to play in Atlanta on Dec. 5, 2023. Credit: Bianca Vázquez Toness/Associated Press
“This was about balancing the number of students in schools,” says Tiffany Fick, director of school quality and advocacy for Equity in Education, a policy organization in Atlanta. “But it was also about race and class.”
Communities such as St. Louis, the Massachusetts town of Everett and Tupelo, Mississippi, have adopted similar policies, including tip lines to report neighbors who might be sending their children to schools outside of their enrollment zones.
But the Atlanta metro area seems to be a hotbed, despite the policies’ disruption of children’s educations. In January, neighboring Fulton County disenrolled nearly 400 students from one of its high schools after auditing residency documents after Christmas vacation.
The policies were designed to prevent children from attending schools outside of their neighborhood. But according to Dukes and other advocates, the increased bureaucracy has also made it difficult for the poor to attend their assigned schools — especially after the pandemic hit families with even more economic stress.
The Associated Press spoke to five additional Atlanta public school mothers who struggled with the re-enrollment process. Their children were withdrawn from school because their leases had expired or were month to month, or their child lacked vaccinations.
Candace, the mother of a seventh grader with autism, couldn’t get her son a vaccination appointment when schools first allowed students to return in person in Spring 2021. There were too many other families seeking shots at that time, and she didn’t have reliable transportation to go further afield. The boy, then in fourth grade, missed a cumulative five months.
“He wasn’t in school, and no one cared,” said Candace, who asked AP not to use her last name because she worries about losing custody of her child since he missed so much school. She eventually re-enrolled him with the help of Dukes, the parent advocate.
“One of the biggest problems that we have is kids that are missing and chronic absenteeism. I’m really taken aback that a district would set forth a series of policies that make it actually quite difficult to enroll your child.”
Pamela Herd, a Georgetown University public policy professor
Many parents who have struggled with the enrollment policies have had difficulty persuading schools to accept their proof of residency. Adding an extra burden to those who don’t own their homes, Atlanta’s policy allows principals to ask for additional evidence from renters.
Shawndrea Gay was told by her children’s school, which is located in an upper-income neighborhood, that her month-to-month lease was insufficient. Twice, investigators came to her studio apartment to verify that the family lived there. “They looked in the fridge to make sure there was food,” she says. “It was no joke.”
Then, in Summer 2022, the school unenrolled her children because their lease had expired. With Dukes’ help, Gay was able to get them back in school before classes started.
Tameka hasn’t reached out for help getting her kids back in school. She doesn’t feel comfortable asking and doesn’t trust the school system, especially after they called the child welfare department. “I don’t like people knowing my business,” she says. “I’m a private person.”
On a typical school day, Tameka’s four children — now 14, 12, 9 and 8 — sleep late and stay inside watching television or playing video games. Only the youngest — the girl who’s never been to school — has much interest in the outside world, Tameka says.
The girl often plays kickball or runs outside with other kids in their low-income subdivision. But during the week, she has to wait for them to come home from school at around 3 p.m.
The little girl should be in second grade, learning to master chapter books, spell, and add and subtract numbers up to 100. She has had to settle for “playing school” with her three older siblings. She practices her letters and writes her name. She runs through pre-kindergarten counting exercises on a phone.
But even at 8, she understands that it’s not the real thing.
“I want to go to school,” she says, “and see what it’s like.”
This story was produced by the Associated Press and reprinted with permission. The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content.
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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.
