When my oldest child was a 2-year-old, we relocated to a new state and I found myself back at square one with my search for child care. In my new city, I now had a very good problem: There was an abundance of programs with availability, and I had a choice of where to enroll my son. As I toured a half-dozen of them, however, I worried that even as an early childhood reporter, I wasn’t asking the right questions or paying attention to the right thing.
A few months later, our early childhood team at Hechinger launched a project digging into the elements of a high-quality preschool. That article and the corresponding video became a quick and easy guide as I looked at options for my second child. It’s what I sent to friends who asked me for advice while navigating their own searches.
While I love telling stories from the field, my colleagues and I are also passionate about providing helpful tools and guides for teachers and caregivers. Here are a few of my favorite early ed “cheat sheets” from our decade of reporting on early childhood.
1. The five elements of a good preschool: What should you look for when you step inside a preschool classroom? What clues can you find on the walls or bookshelves? What questions should you ask teachers and school administrators? This video and article break it down. While classrooms and programs will vary by setting, many of these elements, like the way teachers talk to children and an emphasis on play, apply everywhere.
2. Cracking down on unsafe sleep products: As an anxious new parent, nothing scared me more than hearing about infant deaths due to unsafe sleep products. Still, when desperate and exhausted, I tried several items that I heard would help my babies sleep, including some that the American Academy of Pediatrics later discouraged in updated safe sleep guidelines in 2022. While reporting this article, I was stunned by the lack of evidence and oversight of products that many parents like myself believe are tested before they are available to buy.
3. How to boost math skills by talking about math with your kids: Most parents know how important it is to read to children. But did you know that there are easy ways caregivers can develop math skills? Earlier this year, my colleague Jill Barshay looked at a wave of research from the past dozen years on simple things adults can do to lay an early foundation in math.
4. How to answer tough questions about race and racism with your children: Research shows racial stereotypes start early, and that’s why it’s important to talk to young children about different races and read books and offer toys that have diverse characters. Many parents feel ill equipped for these conversations, however. In 2020, I asked three experts how they would respond to real questions from young kids about race and racism so adults feel better prepared for the questions that children inevitably ask.
5. How parents can support their kids with play: With all the challenges of being a parent, it can be hard to hear there’s yet another thing we should be doing. But this 2023 conversation with researcher Charlotte Anne Wright helped me reframe the way I think about play and my role in it with my own children. While it’s important to give children opportunities for free play, Wright’s research shows “guided play,” or play with a learning goal in mind and light support from a parent, can have benefits for children, too. It’s not as heavy of a lift as it sounds, and Wright provides simple ways parents can engage in playful learning with their children on bus rides and trips to the laundromat.
This story about preschoolers was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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PLEASANTVILLE, N.Y. — As she approached her senior year in high school, the thought of moving on to college was “scary and intimidating” to Milianys Santiago — especially since she would be the first in her family to earn a degree.
Once she began working on her applications this fall, however, she was surprised. “It hasn’t been as stressful as I thought it would be,” she said.
It’s not that Santiago’s anxiety was misplaced: The college admissions process has been so notoriously anxiety inducing that students and their parents plan for it for years and — if social media is any indication — seem to consider an acceptance as among the greatest moments of their lives.
It’s that getting into college is in fact becoming easier, with admissions offices trying to lure more applicants from a declining pool of 18-year-olds. They’re creating one-click applications, waiving application fees, offering admission to high school seniors who haven’t even applied and recruiting students after the traditional May 1 cutoff.
The most dramatic change is in the odds of being admitted. Elite universities such as Harvard and CalTech take as few as 1 applicant in 33, but they are the exception. Colleges overall now accept about 6 in 10 students who apply, federal data show. That’s up from about 5 out of 10 a decade ago, the American Enterprise Institute calculates.
“The reality is, the overwhelming majority of universities are struggling to put butts in seats. And they need to do everything that they can to make it easier for students and their families,” said Kevin Krebs, founder of the college admission consulting firm HelloCollege.
This has never been as true as now, when the number of high school graduates entering higher education is about to begin a projected 15-year drop, starting with the class now being recruited. That’s on top of a 13 percent decline over the last 15 years.
Santiago, who lives in Hamilton, New Jersey, was waiting for a tour to start at Pace University as a video on repeat showed exuberant students and drone footage of the leafy, 200-acre grounds about 30 miles north of New York City, where the university also has a campus.
High school senior Milianys Santiago and her mother, Mindy Santiago, visit Pace University in Pleasantville, New York. The university offers $1,000 a year in additional financial aid to applicants who visit, if they enroll. Credit: Emmanuel Guillén Lozano for The Hechinger Report
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Pace was one of 130 New York state colleges and universities that during October waived their application fees of from $50 to $90 per student, per school. That’s just one of the ways it’s trying to make admissions easier.
“That was a little eye-opening, when we received that letter,” Sueane Goodreau of Ithaca, New York, said about the free application offer as she waited for a tour of Pace’s campus with her high school senior son, Will. Compared to when her older daughter applied to college just three years ago, said Goodreau, “it does feel a little more receptive.”
There was an even bigger incentive offered by Pace: Prospects such as Santiago and Goodreau who visit are promised an additional $1,000 a year of financial aid if they enroll. Applicants who come to visit a campus are twice as likely to enroll as those who don’t, research has found.
Sueane Goodreau and her high school senior son, Will Goodreau, came from Ithaca, New York, to tour the Pleasantville campus of Pace University. They were surprised when Pace and about 130 other New York universities and colleges dropped their application fee for the month of October, Sueane Goodreau says. Credit: Emmanuel Guillén Lozano for The Hechinger Report
The students’ names awaited them on a welcome sign at the reception desk in the office where tours depart. “You Belong Here,” pronounced another placard, on an easel in the waiting area. There was a QR code they could scan if they wanted to chat one-on-one with an admissions officer — who, in earlier times at many schools, were often unapproachable.
“I feel like I’m already a student here,” Santiago quipped.
The reason the university encourages that feeling? It’s simple, said Andre Cordon, dean of admission, in the distinctive pink Choate House at the center of the campus: “We want more students to apply. We don’t want to put up hurdles.”
So many hurdles previously stood along the route to college admission, it’s become a part of popular culture. “Everyone thinks we’re sadists — that we like saying no,” noted Tina Fey in her role as a Princeton admissions officer in the 2013 movie “Admission.”
Perceptions such as those are hard to change. Not only do young Americans aged 18 to 29 believe it isn’t any easier to get into college than it was for people in their parents’ generation, 45 percent of them think it’s harder, a Pew Research Center survey found. More than three-quarters say the admissions process is complex, and more than half that it’s more stressful than anything else they’ve done during their time in elementary, middle or high school, according to a separate survey, by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, or NACAC.
“People have that notion that all campuses are in the same category as MIT, Harvard, Stanford” with their impossibly low acceptance rates, said Cordon. (Pace took 76 percent of its applicants last year, university statistics show.) And “teenagers are still teenagers. There’s anxiety no matter what. They overthink things, and they overthink the admissions process.”
There’s also still a lot of genuine emotion in the process, he said. For many parents, “It’s a pride thing. It’s a status thing. It’s showing off. Or from the student’s side, it’s, ‘I want to make my parents proud.’ ”
In the new world of university admissions, however, that no longer necessarily even requires filling out an application.
Andre Cordon, dean of admission at Pace University, in front of the Choate House, an administrative building at the center of the university’s Pleasantville, New York, campus. Credit: Emmanuel Guillén Lozano for The Hechinger Report
“Congratulations! You’ve been admitted,” a new California State University website tells prospective students, before they enter a single piece of information about themselves.
Several systems now allow students to apply to several public universities and colleges with a single application, avoiding the time-consuming process of completing different forms, writing essays, collecting letters of recommendation or paying fees.
Through Illinois’s new One Click College Admit, for instance, high school students can have their transcripts provided instantly to 10 of the state’s 12 four-year public universities and all of its community colleges and get back a guaranteed offer of admission to at least one, depending on their grades.
“Especially first-generation students, they don’t have that knowledge of how to apply to college,” said José Garcia, spokesman for the Illinois Board of Higher Education. “That’s among the people we’re trying to reach — those who might be intimidated by the name of an institution or not feel confident in their academic abilities or their grades.”
Several of these programs have been advocated for public institutions by governors and legislatures worried about a continued supply of college-educated workers in their states as the proportion of high school graduates going on to get degrees declines.
A student walks across the Pleasantville campus of Pace University in Pleasantville, New York. Credit: Emmanuel Guillén Lozano for The Hechinger Report
“Basically we need to have a bigger pipeline,” said David Troutman, deputy commissioner for academic affairs at the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. “We have to do everything we can to open that door to all students, not just a few. So we have to make sure we’re making the process as painless as we can.”
Now private colleges are jumping aboard the direct-admission bandwagon. More than 210 have arranged through the Common App — an online application used by about 1,100 institutions nationwide — to extend offers of direct admission for the coming academic year to students who filed the Common App but have not applied. That’s almost twice as many as signed on last year, when Common App says 119 institutions in 35 states made more than 733,000 unsolicited offers.
It’s still early to definitively know the effect of this on whether students ultimately enroll. In Idaho, which in 2015 became the first state to try direct admission, enrollment of first-time undergraduates at participating public universities rose 11 percent.
Direct admission by itself does not resolve the other reasons students forgo college, however, said James Murphy, director of postsecondary policy at the nonprofit Education Reform Now, which advocates for more access to and diversity in higher education.
“It’s the furthest thing from a panacea,” Murphy said. “How do we know? Because colleges embraced it so quickly. Any reform taken up so quickly by colleges is likely to have more benefit to colleges than to students.”
While direct admission might help colleges get closer to enrollment targets, for example, he said, “it works best when it’s paired with financial aid and other resources that actually make it easier” to pay.
Waiving application fees has driven increases in applications, some research has shown. During the month that fees were waived last fall in New York state, a quarter of a million students applied to the public State University of New York, up 41 percent from the same period the year before, according to the state’s Higher Education Services Corporation, or HESC.
Choate House, a historic building at Pace University in Pleasantville, New York, that houses administrative offices. Credit: Emmanuel Guillén Lozano for The Hechinger Report
While college applications may not seem expensive, at around $50 each, many students “aren’t just paying one application fee. They can be paying multiple fees,” which add up, said Angela Liotta, HESC’s director of communication.
Universities and colleges are trying other ways to ease the process. More than 2,000 continue to make submitting the results of SAT and ACT scores optional, for instance, something many started doing during the pandemic. More have extended their deadlines or recruited after the traditional May 1 cutoff, when incoming classes were previously considered locked in.
Students are noticing. One way is through the massive amount of marketing materials they’re getting, begging them to apply. The median high school student gets more than 100 letters and emails from colleges and universities each month, a survey by the education technology company CollegeVine found — an old-style approach that CollegeVine found turns out for this generation to be generally ineffective.
Will Goodreau, who was visiting Pace, for instance, got “so many emails and texts,” he said, laughing. “I must have given somebody my number for something.”
All of these things appear to be slowly changing students’ perception of admission. In that NACAC survey, fewer of those who had already gone through the process — while they still found it challenging — considered it as challenging as students who hadn’t started yet.
There could be more changes ahead. A lawsuit was filed in August against 32 colleges and universities that practice so-called early decision, under which students who apply before the usual admission period are more likely to get in, but are obligated to enroll. The practice, which the lawsuit seeks to end, helps colleges fill their classes, but prevents students from shopping around for better offers of financial aid.
Whatever happens, students and their parents should know that “they’re actually the ones in control of this process,” said Krebs, of HelloCollege. “The reality is that at a lot of schools, if you have the grades, you’re going to get in.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
The teaching profession is one of the most female-dominated in the United States. Among elementary school teachers, 89 percent are women, and in kindergarten, that number is almost 97 percent.
Many sociologists, writers and parents have questioned whether this imbalance hinders young boys at the start of their education. Are female teachers less understanding of boys’ need to horse around? Or would male role models inspire boys to learn their letters and times tables? Some advocates point to research that lays out why boys ought to do better with male teachers.
But a new national analysis finds no evidence that boys perform or behave better with male teachers in elementary school. This challenges a widespread belief that boys thrive more when taught by men, and it raises questions about efforts, such as one in New York City, to spend extra to recruit them.
“I was surprised,” said Paul Morgan, a professor at the University at Albany and a co-author of the study. “I’ve raised two boys, and my assumption would be that having male teachers is beneficial because boys tend to be more rambunctious, more active, a little less easy to direct in academic tasks.”
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“We’re not saying gender matching doesn’t work,” Morgan added. “We’re saying we’re not observing it in K through fifth grade.”
Middle and high school students might see more benefits. Earlier research is mixed and inconclusive. A 2007 analysis by Stanford professor Thomas Dee found academic benefits for eighth-grade boys and girls when taught by teachers of their same gender.And studies where researchers observe and interview a small number of students often show how students feel more supported by same-gender teachers. Yet many quantitative studies, like this newest one, have failed to detect measurable benefits for boys. At least 10 since 2014 have found zero or minimal effects. Benefits for girls are more consistent.
Morgan and Hu analyzed a U.S. Education Department dataset that followed a nationally representative group of 8,000 students from kindergarten in 2010 through fifth grade in 2017. Half were boys and half were girls.
More than two-thirds — 68 percent — of the 4,000 boys never had a male teacher in those years while 32 percent had at least one. (The study focused only on main classroom teachers, not extras like gym or music.)
Among the 1,300 boys who had both male and female teachers, the researchers compared each boy’s performance and behavior across those years. For instance, if Jacob had female teachers in kindergarten, first, second and fifth grades, but male teachers in third and fourth, his average scores and behavior were compared between the teachers of different genders.
The researchers found no differences in reading, math or science achievement — or in behavioral and social measures. Teachers rated students on traits like impulsiveness, cooperation, anxiety, empathy and self-control. The children also took annual executive function tests. The results did not vary by the teacher’s gender.
Most studies on male teachers focus on older students. The authors noted one other elementary-level study, in Florida, that also found no academic benefit for boys. This new research confirms that finding and adds that there seems to be no behavioral or social benefits either.
For students at these young ages, 11 and under, the researchers also didn’t find academic benefits for girls with female teachers. But there were two non-academic ones: Girls taught by women showed stronger interpersonal skills (getting along, helping others, caring about feelings) and a greater eagerness to learn (represented by skills such as keeping organized and following rules).
When the researchers combined race and gender, the results grew more complex. Black girls taught by women scored higher on an executive function test but lower in science. Asian boys taught by men scored higher on executive function but had lower ratings on interpersonal skills. Black boys showed no measurable differences when taught by male teachers. (Previous research has sometimes found benefits for Black students taught by Black teachers and sometimes hasn’t.)**
Even if data show no academic or behavioral benefits for students, there may still be compelling reasons to diversify the teaching workforce, just as in other professions. But we shouldn’t expect these efforts to move the needle on student outcomes.
“If you had scarce resources and were trying to place your bets,” Morgan said, “then based on this study, maybe elementary school isn’t where you should focus your recruitment efforts” to hire more men.
To paraphrase Boyz II Men, it’s so hard to say goodbye — to the idea that young boys need male teachers.
*Clarification: The article has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal but has undergone some peer review.
**Correction: An earlier version incorrectly characterized how researchers analyzed what happened to students of different races. The researchers focused only on the gender of the teachers, but drilled down to see how students of different races responded to teachers of different genders.
Since you made it to the bottom of this article, we have a small favor to ask.
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by Sarah Carr, The Hechinger Report November 13, 2025
In New Orleans, a few hundred dollars could once help a family buy a “gifted” designation for their preschooler.
As an education reporter for the city’s Times-Picayune newspaper several years ago, I discovered that there was a two-tiered system for determining whether 3-year-olds met that mark, which, in New Orleans, entitled them to gifted-only prekindergarten programs at a few of the city’s most highly sought-after public schools.
Families could sit on a lengthy waitlist and have their children tested at the district central office for free. Or they could pay the money for the private test. In 2008, the year that I wrote about the issue, only a few of the more than 100 children tested at the central office were deemed gifted; but dozens of privately tested kiddos — nearly all of them tested by the same psychologist for $300 — met the benchmark.
Since working on that story, I’ve been interested in the use of intelligence testing for high-stakes decisions about educational access and opportunity — and the ways that money, insider knowledge and privilege can manipulate that process.
But I knew less about what the research shows about a broader question: Should gifted-only programming for the youngest students exist at all and, if so, what form should it take? When New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani announced in October that he would end long-standing gifted programming for kindergartners (while preserving it for the older grades), I reached out to some leading researchers in search of answers to those questions. Read the story.
More on gifted education
Hechinger reporter Jill Barshay, who covers education research, has written several stories about different facets of gifted education, which she captured in a column earlier this month.
In 2020, The Hechinger Report and NBC News produced a three-part series on the ways that gifted education has maintained segregation in American schools and efforts to diversify gifted classes.
More early childhood news
Federal immigration agents pulled an infant teacher out of her classroom at a Chicago child care, pinning her arms behind her — and traumatizing the families who witnessed the incident, report Molly DeVore and Mack Liederman for Block Club Chicago.
Growing numbers of child care workers are running for elected office, hoping to work directly on behalf of change and more support for a sector that desperately needs it, writes Rebecca Gale for The 74.
Colorado voters approved two sales tax levies to support child care providers and families with young children, reports Ann Schimke with Chalkbeat Colorado.
Research quick take
Contrary to perception, there’s little evidence that an increased academic focus in the early elementary years disadvantages boys, write researchers in a new working paper published by Brown University’s Annenberg Institute. The researchers, Megan Kuhfeld and Margaret Burchinal, examined growth in reading and math test scores for a sample of 12 million students at 22,000 schools between 2016 and 2025. They found that boys are surpassing girls in math by the end of elementary school, and that girls maintain an advantage in reading through fifth grade.
This story about gifted testing was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/how-young-is-too-young-for-gifted-testing/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>
This story was produced in partnership with Teen Vogue and reprinted with permission.
Christopher Cade wants to be president someday. His inspiration largely comes from family members, who have been involved in local politics and activism since long before he was born. But policies from the Trump administration and the Ohio Legislature are complicating his college experience — and his plans to become a politician.
Cade is a student at Ohio State University double-majoring in public policy analysis and political science with a focus on American political theory. He recalls his maternal grandmother, Maude Hill — who had a large hand in raising him — talking to him about her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. She also worked at Columbus, Ohio-based affordable housing development nonprofit, Homeport, and has gone to Capitol Hill to speak with the state delegation multiple times. His dad is the senior vice president of the housing choice voucher program at the Columbus Metropolitan Housing Authority, and his older brother has a degree in political science and is interested in social justice advocacy work, Cade said. Last fall, his first on campus, Cade began applying to opportunities to bolster his resume for a future career in politics.
The now 19-year-old secured an internship with the U.S. Department of Transportation and a work-study job on campus in the university’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion. But the federal opportunity was scrapped when the Trump administration imposed a hiring freeze and budget cuts. His campus job ended when the university announced it would “sunset” the diversity office in response to federal and state anti-diversity, equity and inclusion orders and actions, according to Cade.
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The work-study position was with the university’s Bell National Resource Center on the African American Male, which was founded to support Black men to stay in college. It’s a cause he was excited about.
“I would help order food or speak with students or do interviews,” said Cade. “I developed a good 20 different programs for the next year.”
In February, when the university announced it was closing the office, “I was like, ‘Well, so six months of work just for no reason,’” he said.
OSU President Ted Carter released a statement on Feb. 27 saying the closure of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion was a response to both state and federal actions regarding DEI in public education. The move eliminated 17 staff positions, not including student roles, the university said. Programming and services provided by the Office of Student Life’s Center for Belonging and Social Change were also scrapped.
The change came before the Trump administration’s initial deadline for complying with a memo that threatened to cut funding for public colleges and universities, as well as K-12 schools, that offer DEI programs and initiatives. In March, the administration announced that OSU was one of roughly 50 universities under federal investigation for allegedly discriminating against white and Asian students in graduate admissions. Additionally, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed legislation in March banning DEI programs in the state’s public colleges and universities. The legislation went into effect in June.
Before the DEI office closed, Cade said, “I felt so heard and seen.” He’d attended a private, predominantly white, Catholic high school, he said. “It was not a place that supported me culturally and helped me understand more about who I am and my Blackness,” he recalled. At the university, though, “the programming we had throughout the year [was] about how to change the narrative on who a Black man is and what it means when you go out here and interact with people.
“And then for them to close down all these programs, that essentially told me that I wasn’t cared about.”
After the February announcement, students pushed back, organizing protests and a sit-in at the student union. But eventually, those efforts quieted.
Cade says students felt like there was a “cloud of darkness” hanging over them. But he also thought of his Office of Diversity and Inclusion coworkers, some of whom had spent decades working there, helping students. In particular he thought of his former colleague Chila Thomas, who celebrated her fifth anniversary last year as the executive director of the Young Scholars Program. That program, which helps low-income aspiring first-generation college students get to and through college, was one of several of the office’s programs that will continue. The day after Carter’s announcement, she and others in the office spent time giving students space to talk through their feelings, despite the uncertainties surrounding their own employment, Cade said.
Since the university crackdown on DEI, Cade said he’s experienced more discomfort on campus, even outright racism. He says he was approached by a white person who said, “I’m so glad they’re getting rid of DEI” and spit on his shoe and used a racial slur.
“I don’t know how that could ever be acceptable to anyone, but that was [when] a flip switched in my head,” Cade said. “I couldn’t sit down and be sad and silent. I had to stand up and make change.”
In March, he traveled with other students to Washington, D.C., as part of the Undergraduate Student Government’s Governmental Relations Committee. They met with Ohio Rep. Troy Balderson and an aide, along with staffers from the offices of fellow Ohio lawmakers Sen. Bernie Moreno and Rep. Joyce Beatty, to discuss college affordability, DEI policies and the federal hiring freeze. Cade says he described how he was affected by the U.S. Department of Transportation canceling his internship.
In Carter’s announcement, he stated that all student employees would be “offered alternative jobs at the university,” but Cade said during a meeting with Office of Diversity and Inclusion student employees, an OSU dean clarified that they would have to apply for new opportunities. With the policy changes meaning there were fewer work-study roles and more students in need of jobs, Cade saw the market as increasingly competitive, and he began to job hunt elsewhere. This summer he secured work with the Ohio Department of Transportation as a communications and policy intern. In October he began an intake assistant role in the Office of Civil Rights Compliance at the university. (Ohio State Director of Media and PR Chris Booker told Teen Vogue that the school could not comment on the experiences of individual students but that “all student employees and graduate associates impacted by these program changes were offered the opportunity to pursue transitioning into alternative positions at the university, as well as support in navigating that change.”)
Although he was drawn to OSU for the John Glenn College of Public Affairs’ master’s program, Cade says he might have reconsidered schools had he known that the university would bend to lawmakers’ anti-DEI efforts. While he’s concerned about how education-related legislation and policies may continue to affect his college experience, he worries most about some of his peers. College is already so hard to navigate for so many young people, said Cade. “And this is just another thing that says, ‘Oh yeah, this isn’t for me.’”
This story was published in partnership with Teen Vogue.
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.
Dodgers fans filled the streets of downtown Los Angeles early Monday morning, to celebrate the Dodgers becoming baseball’s first back-to-back World Series champion in 25 years.
The celebratory parade is commenced at 11 a.m., with the Dodgers traveling on top of double-decker buses through downtown with a final stop at Dodger Stadium.
The 2025 Dodgers team has been a bright spot for many Angelenos during an otherwise tumultuous year for the region, after historic firestorms devastated thousands of homes in January and then widespread immigration sweeps over the summer by the Trump administration.
(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)
Manager Dave Roberts holds the Commissioner’s Trophy during the Dodgers World Championship Parade and Celebration Monday.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
Fans fill the streets of downtown Los Angeles following the Dodgers World Championship Parade and Celebration.
(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)
Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Shohei Ohtani during the Dodgers World Championship Parade and Celebration.
(Kayla Bartkowsk/Los Angeles Times)
Ramon Ontivros, left, and Michelle Ruiz, both from Redlands, join fans lining the streets of downtown Los Angeles.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
Fans fill the streets of downtown Los Angeles following the Dodgers World Championship Parade and Celebration.
(Kayla Bartkowsk/Los Angeles Times)
From left, Mike Soto, Luis Espino, and Francisco Espino, join fans lining the streets of downtown Los Angeles.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
Mia Nava, 9, waves a flag. “She’s skipping school today and her teachers know her passion.” Said her mom, Jennie Nava.
(Carlin Stiehl/For The Times)
Alex Portugal holds onto a championship belt at Dodger Stadium. Claudia Villar Lee, poses with a model of the World Series trophy around her neck.
(Kayla Bartkowsk/Los Angeles Times)
Young fans line the streets of downtown Los Angeles for the Dodgers World Championship Parade and Celebration.
Kayla Bartkowski, Allen J. Schaben, Carlin Stiehl, Eric Thayer
by Sarah Carr, The Hechinger Report October 31, 2025
When I was a kindergartner in the 1980s, the “gifted” programming for my class could be found inside of a chest.
I don’t know what toys and learning materials lived there, since I wasn’t one of the handful of presumably more academically advanced kiddos that my kindergarten teacher invited to open the chest. My distinct impression at the time was that my teacher didn’t think I was worthy of the enrichment because I frequently spilled my chocolate milk at lunch and I had also once forgotten to hang a sheet of paper on the class easel — instead painting an elaborate and detailed picture on the stand itself. The withering look on my teacher’s face after seeing the easel assured me that, gifted, I was not.
The memory, and the enduring mystery of that chest, resurfaced recently when New York City mayoral front-runner Zohran Mamdani announced that if elected on Nov. 4, he would support ending kindergarten entry to the city’s public school gifted program. While many pundits and parents debated the political fallout of the proposal — the city’s segregated gifted program has for decades been credited with keeping many white and wealthier families in the public school system — I wondered what exactly it means to be a gifted kindergartner. In New York City, the determination is made several months before kindergarten starts, but how good is a screening mechanism for 4-year-olds at predicting academic prowess years down the road?
New York is not unique for opting to send kids as young as preschool down an accelerated path, no repeat display of giftedness required. It’s common practice at many private schools to try to measure young children’s academic abilities for admissions purposes. Other communities, including Houston and Miami, start gifted or accelerated programs in public schools as early as kindergarten, according to the National Center for Research on Gifted Education. When I reported on schools in New Orleans 15 years ago, they even had a few gifted prekindergarten programs at highly sought after public schools, which enrolled 4-year-olds whose seemingly stunning intellectual abilities were determined at age 3. It’s more common, however, for gifted programs in the public schools to start between grades 2 and 4, according to the center’s surveys.
There is an assumption embedded in the persistence of gifted programs for the littles that it’s possible to assess a child’s potential, sometimes before they even start school. New York City has followed a long and winding road in its search for the best way to do this. And after more than five decades, the city’s experience offers a case study in how elusive — and, at times, distracting — that quest remains.
Three main strategies are used to assign young children to gifted programs, according to the center. The most common path is cognitive testing, which attempts to rate a child’s intelligence in relation to their peer group. Then there is achievement testing, which is supposed to measure how much and how fast a child is learning in school. And the third strategy is teacher evaluations. Some districts use the three measures in combination with each other.
For nearly four decades, New York prioritized the first strategy, deploying an ever-evolving array of cognitive and IQ tests on its would-be gifted 4-year-olds — tests that families often signed up for in search of competitive advantage as much as anything else.
Several years ago, a Brooklyn parent named Christine checked out an open house for a citywide gifted elementary school, knowing her child was likely just shy of the test score needed to get in. (Christine did not want her last name used to protect her daughter’s privacy.)
The school required her to show paperwork at the door confirming that her daughter had a relatively high score; and when Christine flashed the proof, the PTA member at the door congratulated her. That and the lack of diversity gave the school an exclusive vibe, Christine recalled.
“The resources were incredible,” she said. “The library was huge, there was a room full of blocks. It definitely made me envious, because I knew she was not getting in.” Yet years later, she feels “icky” about even visiting.
Eishika Ahmed’s parents had opportunities of all kinds in mind when they had her tested for gifted kindergarten nearly two decades ago. Ahmed, now 23, remembers an administrator in a small white room with fluorescent lights asking her which boat in a series of cartoonish pictures was “wide.” The then 4-year-old had no idea.
“She didn’t look very pleased with my answer,” Ahmed recalled. She did not get into the kindergarten program.
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Equity and reliability have been long-running concerns for districts relying on cognitive tests.
In New York, public school parents in some districts were once able to pay private psychologists to evaluate their children — a permissiveness that led to “a series of alleged abuses,” wrote Norm Fruchter, a now-deceased activist, educator and school board leader in a 2019 article called “The Spoils of Whiteness: New York City’s Gifted and Talented Programs.”
In New Orleans, there was a similar disparity between the private and public testing of 3-year-olds when I lived and reported on schools there. Families could sit on a waitlist, sometimes for months, to take their children through the free process at the district central office. In 2008, the year I wrote about the issue, only five of the 153 3-year-olds tested by the district met the gifted benchmark. But families could also pay a few hundred dollars and go to a private tester who, over the same time period, identified at least 64 children as gifted. “I don’t know if everybody is paying,” one parent told me at the time, “but it defeats the purpose of a public school if you have to pay $300 to get them in.”
Even after New York City districts outlawed private testers, concerns persisted about parents paying for pricey and extensive test prep to teach them common words and concepts featured on the tests. Moreover, some researchers have worried about racial and cultural bias in cognitive tests more generally. Critics, Fruchter wrote, had long considered them at least partly to assess knowledge of the “reigning cultural milieu in which test-makers and applicants alike were immersed.”
Across the country, these concerns have led some schools and districts, including New York City, to shift to “nonverbal tests,” which try to assess innate capacity more than experience and exposure.
But those tests haven’t made cognitive testing more equitable, said Betsy McCoach, a professor of psychometrics and quantitative psychology at Fordham University and co-principal investigator at the National Center for Research on Gifted Education.
“There is no way to take prior experience out of a test,” she said. “I wish we could.” Children who’ve had more exposure to tests, problem-solving and patterns are still going to have an advantage on a nonverbal test, McCoach added.
And no test can overcome the fact that for very young children, scores can change significantly from year to year, or even week to week. In 2024, researchers analyzed more than 200 studies on the stability of cognitive abilities at different ages. They found that for 4-year-olds, cognitive test scores are not very predictive of long-term scores — or even, necessarily, short-term ones.
There’s not enough stability “to say that if we assess someone at age 4, 5, 6 or 7 that a child would or wouldn’t be well-served by being in a gifted program” for multiple years, said Moritz Breit, the lead author of the study and a post-doctoral researcher in the psychology department at the University of Trier in Germany.
Scores don’t start to become very consistent until later in elementary school, with stability peaking in late adolescence.
But for 4-year-olds? “Stability is too low for high-stakes decisions,” he said.
Eishika Ahmed is just one example of how early testing may not predict future achievement. Even though she did not enroll in the kindergarten gifted program, by third grade she was selected for an accelerated program at her school called “top class.”
Years later, still struck by the inequity of the whole process, she wrote a 2023 essay for the think tank The Century Foundation about it. “The elementary school a child attends shouldn’t have such significant influence over the trajectory of their entire life,” she wrote. “But for students in New York City public schools, there is a real pipeline effect that extends from kindergarten to college. Students who do not enter the pipeline by attending G&T programs at an early age might not have the opportunity to try again.”
Partly because of the concerns about cognitive tests, New York City dropped intelligence testing entirely in 2021 and shifted to declaring kindergartners gifted based on prekindergarten teacher recommendations. A recent article in Chalkbeat noted that after ending the testing for the youngest, diversity in the kindergarten gifted program increased: In 2023-24, 30 percent of the children were Black and Latino, compared to just 12 percent in 2020, Chalkbeat reported. Teachers in the programs also describe enrolling a broader range of students, including more neurodivergent ones.
The big problem, according to several experts, is that when hundreds of individual prekindergarten teachers evaluate 4-year-olds for giftedness, any consistency in defining it can get lost, even if the teachers are guided on what to look for.
“The word is drained of meaning because teachers are not thinking about the same thing,” said Sam Meisels, the founding executive director of the Buffett Early Childhood Institute at the University of Nebraska.
Breit said that research has found that teacher evaluations and grades for young children are less stable and predictive than the (already unstable) cognitive testing.
“People are very bad at looking at another person and inferring a lot about what’s going on under the hood,” he said. “When you say, ‘Cognitive abilities are not stable, let’s switch to something else,’ the problem is that there is nothing else to switch to when the goal is stability. Young children are changing a lot.”
No one denies that access to gifted programming has been transformative for countless children. McCoach, the Fordham professor, points out that there should be something more challenging for the children who arrive at kindergarten already reading and doing arithmetic, who can be bored moving at the regular pace.
In an ideal world, experts say, there would be universal screening for giftedness (which some districts, but not New York, have embraced), using multiple measures in a thoughtful way, and there would be frequent entry — and exit — points for the programs. In the early elementary years, that would look less like separate gifted programming and a lot more like meeting every kid where they are.
“The question shouldn’t really be: Are you the ‘Big G’?” said McCoach. “That sounds so permanent and stable. The question should be: Who are the kids who need something more than what we are providing in the curriculum?”
But in the real world, individualized instruction has frequently proved elusive with underresourced schools, large class sizes and teachers who are tasked with catching up the students who are furthest behind. That persistent struggle has provided advocates of gifted education in the early elementary years with what’s perhaps their most powerful argument in sustaining such programs — but it reminds me of that old adage about treating the symptom rather than the disease.
At some point a year or two after kindergarten, I did get the chance to be among the chosen when I was selected for a pull-out program known as BEEP. I have no recollection of how we were picked, how often we met or what we did, apart from a performance the BEEP kids held of St. George and the Dragon. I played St. George and I remember uttering one line, declaring my intent to fight the dragon or die. I also remember vividly how much being in BEEP boosted my confidence in my potential — probably its greatest gift.
Forty years later, the research is clear that every kid deserves the chance — and not just one — to slay a dragon. “You want to give every child the best opportunity to learn as possible,” said Meisels. But when it comes to separate gifted programming for select early elementary school students, “Is there something out there that says their selection is valid? We don’t have that.”
“It seems,” he added, “to be a case of people just fooling themselves with the language.”
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Thirty states now limit or ban cellphone use in classrooms, and teachers are noticing children paying attention to their lessons again. But it’s not clear whether this policy — unpopular with students and a headache for teachers to enforce — makes an academic difference.
If student achievement goes up after a cellphone ban, it’s tough to know if the ban was the reason. Some other change in math or reading instruction might have caused the improvement. Or maybe the state assessment became easier to pass. Imagine if politicians required all students to wear striped shirts and test scores rose. Few would really think that stripes made kids smarter.
Two researchers from the University of Rochester and RAND, a nonprofit research organization, figured out a clever way to tackle this question by taking advantage of cellphone activity data in one large school district in Florida, which in 2023 became the first state to institute school cellphone restrictions. The researchers compared schools that had high cellphone activity before the ban with those that had low cellphone usage to see if the ban made a bigger difference for schools that had high usage.
Indeed, it did.
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Student test scores rose a bit more in high cellphone usage schools two years after the ban compared with schools that had lower cellphone usage to start. Students were also attending school more regularly.
The policy also came with a troubling side effect. The cellphone bans led to a significant increase in student suspensions in the first year, especially among Black students. But disciplinary actions declined during the second year.
“Cellphone bans are not a silver bullet,” said David Figlio, an economist at the University of Rochester and one of the study’s co-authors. “But they seem to be helping kids. They’re attending school more, and they’re performing a bit better on tests.”
Figlio said he was “worried” about the short-term 16 percent increase in suspensions for Black students. What’s unclear from this data analysis is whether Black students were more likely to violate the new cellphone rules, or whether teachers were more likely to single out Black students for punishment. It’s also unclear from these administrative behavior records if students were first given warnings or lighter punishments before they were suspended.
The data suggest that students adjusted to the new rules. A year later, student suspensions, including those of Black students, fell back to what they had been before the cellphone ban.
“What we observe is a rocky start,” Figlio added. “There was a lot of discipline.”
The study, “The Impact of Cellphone Bans in Schools on Student Outcomes: Evidence from Florida,” is a draft working paper and has not been peer-reviewed. It was slated to be circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research on Oct. 20 and the authors shared a draft with me in advance. Figlio and his co-author Umut Özek at RAND believe it is the first study to show a causal connection between cellphone bans and learning rather than just a correlation.
The academic gains from the cellphone ban were small, less than a percentile point, on average. That’s the equivalent of moving from the 50th percentile on math and reading tests (in the middle) to the 51st percentile (still close to the middle), and this small gain did not emerge until the second year for most students. The academic benefits were strongest for middle schoolers, white students, Hispanic students and male students. The academic gains for Black students and female students were not statistically significant.
I was surprised to learn that there is data on student cellphone use in school. The authors of this study used information from Advan Research Corp., which collects and analyzes data from mobile phones around the world for business purposes, such as figuring out how many people visit a particular retail store. The researchers were able to obtain this data for schools in one Florida school district and estimate how many students were on their cellphones before and after the ban went into effect between the hours of 9 a.m. and 1 p.m.
The data showed that more than 60 percent of middle schoolers, on average, were on their phones at least once during the school day before the 2023 ban in this particular Florida district, which was not named but described as one of the 10 largest districts in the country. (Five of the nation’s 10 largest school districts are in Florida.) After the ban, that fell in half to 30 percent of middle schoolers in the first year and down to 25 percent in the second year.
Elementary school students were less likely to be on cellphones to start with and their in-school usage fell from about 25 percent of students before the ban to 15 percent after the ban. More than 45 percent of high schoolers were on their phones before the ban and that fell to about 10 percent afterwards.
Average daily smartphone visits in schools, by year and grade level
Average daily smartphone visits during regular school days (relative to teacher workdays without students) between 9am and 1pm (per 100 enrolled students) in the two months before and then after the 2023 ban took effect in one large urban Florida school district. Source: Figlio and Özek, October 2025 draft paper, figure 2C, p. 23.
Florida did not enact a complete cellphone ban in 2023, but imposed severe restrictions. Those restrictions were tightened in 2025 and that additional tightening was not studied in this paper.
Anti-cellphone policies have become increasingly popular since the pandemic, largely based on our collective adult gut hunches that kids are not learning well when they are consumed by TikTok and SnapChat.
This is perhaps a rare case in public policy, Figlio said, where the “data back up the hunches.”
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Two months after Education Secretary Linda McMahon was confirmed, she and a small team from the department met with leadership from the National Center for Learning Disabilities, an advocacy group that works on behalf of millions of students with dyslexia and other disorders.
Jacqueline Rodriguez, NCLD’s chief executive officer, recalled pressing McMahon on a question raised during her confirmation hearing: Was the Trump administration planning to move control and oversight of special education law from the Education Department to Health and Human Services?
Rodriguez was alarmed at the prospect of uprooting the 50-year-old Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA), which spells out the responsibility of schools to provide a “free, appropriate public education” to students with disabilities. Eliminating the Education Department entirely is a primary objective of Project 2025, the conservative blueprint that has guided much of the administration’s education policy. After the department is gone, Project 2025 said oversight of special education should move to HHS, which manages some programs that help adults with disabilities.
But the sprawling department that oversees public health has no expertise in the complex education law, Rodriguez told McMahon.
“Someone might be able to push the button to disseminate funding, but they wouldn’t be able to answer a question from a parent or a school district,” she said in an interview later.
For her part, McMahon had wavered during her confirmation hearing on the subject. “I’m not sure that it’s not better served in HHS, but I don’t know,” she told Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., who shared concerns from parents worried about who would enforce the law’s provisions.
But nine days into a government shutdown that has furloughed most federal government workers, the Trump administration announced that it was planning a drastic “reduction in force” that would lay off more than 450 people, including almost everyone who works in the Office of Special Education Programs. Rodriguez believes the layoffs are a way that the administration plans to force the special education law to be managed by some other federal office.
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The Education Department press office did not respond to a question about the administration’s plans for special education oversight. Instead, the press office pointed to a social media post from McMahon on Oct. 15. The fact that schools are “operating as normal” during the government shutdown, McMahon wrote on X, “confirms what the President has said: the federal Department of Education is unnecessary.”’
Yet in that May meeting, Rodriguez said she was told that HHS might not be the right place for IDEA, she recalled. While the new department leadership made no promises, they assured her that any move of the law’s oversight would have to be done with congressional approval, Rodriguez said she was told.
The move to gut the office overseeing special education law was shocking to families and those who work with students with disabilities. About 7.5 million children ages 3 to 21 are served under IDEA, and the office had already lost staffers after the Trump administration dismissed nearly half the Education Department’s staff in March, bringing the agency’s total workforce to around 2,200 people.
For Rodriguez, whose organization supports students with learning disabilities such as dyslexia, McMahon’s private assurances was the administration “just outright lying to the public about their intentions.”
“The audacity of this administration to communicate in her confirmation, in her recent testimony to Congress and to a disability rights leader to her face, ‘Don’t worry, we will support kids with disabilities,’” Rodriguez said. “And then to not just turn a 180-degree on that, but to decimate the ability to enforce the law that supports our kids.”
She added: “It could not just be contradictory. It feels like a bait and switch.”
Five days after the firings were announced, a U.S. district judge temporarily blocked the administration’s actions, setting up a legal showdown that is likely to end up before the Supreme Court. The high court has sided with the president on most of his efforts to drastically reshape the federal workforce. And President Donald Trump said at a Tuesday press briefing that more cuts to “Democrat programs” are coming.
“They’re never going to come back in many cases,” he added.
In her post on X, McMahon also said that “no education funding is impacted by the RIF, including funding for special education,” referring to the layoffs.
But special education is more than just money, said Danielle Kovach, a special education teacher in Hopatcong, N.J. Kovach is also a former president of the Council for Exceptional Children, a national organization for special educators.
“I equate it to, what would happen if we dismantled a control tower at a busy airport?” Kovach said. “It doesn’t fly the plane. It doesn’t tell people where to go. But it ensures that everyone flies smoothly.”
Katy Neas, a deputy assistant secretary in the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services during the Biden administration, said that most people involved in the education system want to do right by children.
“You can’t do right if you don’t know what the answer is,” said Neas, who is now the chief executive officer of The Arc of the United States, which advocates for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. “You can’t get there if you don’t know how to get your questions answered.”
Families also rely on IDEA’s mandate that each child with a disability receives a free, appropriate public education — and the protections that they can receive if a school or district does not live up to that requirement.
Maribel Gardea, a parent in San Antonio, said she fought with her son’s school district for years over accommodations for his disability. Her son Voozeki, 14, has cerebral palsy and is nonverbal. He uses an eye-gaze device that allows him to communicate when he looks at different symbols on a portable screen. The district resisted getting the device for him to use at school until, Gardea said, she reminded them of IDEA’s requirements.
Gardea, the co-founder of MindShiftED, an organization that helps parents become better advocates for their children with disabilities, said the upheaval at the Education Department has her wondering what kind of advice she can give families now.
For example, an upcoming group session will teach parents how to file official grievances to the federal government if they have disputes with their child’s school or district about services. Now, she has to add in an explanation of what the deep federal cuts will mean for parents.
Voozeki Gardea, who attends school in the San Antonio area, uses an eye-gaze communication device with the assistance of school paraprofessional Vanessa Martinez. The device verbalizes words and phrases when Voozeki looks at different symbols. Credit: Courtesy Maribel Gardea
“I have to tell you how to do a grievance,” she said she plans to tell parents. “But I have to tell you no one will answer.”
Maybe grassroots organizations may find themselves trying to track parent complaints on their own, she said, but the prospect is exhausting. “It’s a really gross feeling to know that no one has my back.”
In addition to the office that oversees special education law, the Rehabilitation Services Administration, which is also housed at the Department of Education and supports employment and training of people with disabilities, was told most of its staff would be fired.
“Regardless of which office you’re worried about, this is all very intentional,” said Julie Christensen, the executive director of the Association of People Supporting Employment First, which advocates for the full inclusion of people with disabilities in the workforce. “There’s no one who can officially answer questions. It feels like that was kind of the intent, to just create a lot of confusion and chaos.”
Those staffers “are the voice within the federal government to make sure policies and funding are aligned to help people with disabilities get into work,” Christensen said. Firing them, she added, is counterintuitive to everything the administration says it cares about.
For now, advocates say they are bracing for a battle similar to those fought decades ago that led to the enactment of civil rights law protecting children and adults with disabilities. Before the law was passed, there was no federal guarantee that a student with a disability would be allowed to attend public school.
“We need to put together our collective voices. It was our collective voices that got us here,” Kovach said.
And, Rodriguez said, parents of children in special education need to be prepared to be their own watchdogs. “You have to become the compliance monitor.”
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.
MEAD, Wash. — A few weeks after President Donald Trump took office, the conservative school board leaders in this town near the Idaho border made a bet.
They would pit one Washington against the other and see what happened.
For years, Democrats in control of the state had required every school district to have policies on the books that protect transgender students from bullying and prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender identity. The Mead school board unanimously approved a policy in 2019 to comply with the state guidelines, with little comment. Board members at the time asked only about potential cost and whether the student dress code also needed to change.
In 2023, lingering frustration with Covid restrictions and a growing backlash to transgender rights helped propel conservatives onto the town’s school board, a dynamic similar to one that had played out in communities across the country. Then, last year, the state education department checked how many school district policies actually complied with Washington’s nondiscrimination laws. State officials found Mead’s needed updating on a few counts, such as staff training and when to use a student’s preferred pronouns.
The board had 30 days to correct its policy, according to a Feb. 21 notice from the state. Trump by then had already signed a pair of executive orders proclaiming there are only two genders and banning transgender athletes from women’s sports.
Taking their cue from a clear shift in White House policy, the Mead school board pleaded in a March 11 letter for help from the U.S. secretaries for education and justice.
“We find ourselves caught between conflicting directives that threaten not only our federal funding but also the rights and values of the families we serve,” the board wrote. “Refusal to comply could prompt state retaliation in the form of withheld state funding, further threatening our ability to serve students in need.”
It didn’t take long for the board’s gamble to pay off.
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The Mead school board’s letter — sent alongside complaints from several other Washington school districts — arrived just as the U.S. departments of Education and Justice prepared to launch a special investigations team to look into complaints of Title IX violations in colleges and schools.
Title IX, a federal civil rights law from 1972, prohibits sex-based discrimination in education, and some on the right argue that allowing transgender girls to compete in school sports improperly disadvantages and discriminates against cisgender females. (Research to suggest transgender athletes have an advantage in sports is limited and inconclusive.) The joint team would fast-track resolutions and include civil rights attorneys from both departments.
Their first target: the Office for Superintendent of Public Instruction, which oversees education for Washington state.
“OSPI has threatened to withhold funding to school districts that refuse to comply with the OSPI policies that violate Title IX and its implementing regulations,” the U.S. Department of Education said in an April 30 letter announcing the investigation. The letter cited complaints from Mead and a half dozen other districts.
The Hechinger Report, through open records requests, obtained thousands of pages of emails from the accounts of the Mead school board, its superintendent and other Washington school boards involved in the Title IX investigation. Their emails and interviews with conservative activists, elected officials, parents and educators across the state reveal a significant victory for school boards like Mead, which quietly strategized with a statewide network of parents and state Republican officials waiting for a shift in federal power before challenging Washington’s protections for transgender students.
The federal probe also underscores the second Trump administration’s intent to leverage federal authority to undermine progressive policies in blue states, even as experts expect the courts to ultimately determine the legality of the administration’s interpretation of Title IX. Already, the administration has launched similar probes into education agencies in California and Maine.
In Mead, the federal involvement into local school policy alarmed some residents.
“It is irresponsible and dangerous,” said Alaura Miller, a recent graduate of the Mead School District, which serves a former railway town turned bedroom community of Spokane. She came out as transgender in her late teens. Now she’s in college with plans to become a mental health counselor for LGBTQ+ youth in eastern Washington.
“The school board’s emboldening the worst in people,” Miller said. “It’s not teaching community.”
Alaura Miller, a graduate of the Mead school district, has advocated for its school board to support LGBTQ+ youth in her hometown. She plans to work as a mental health counselor in eastern Washington state. Credit: Margaret Albaugh for The Hechinger Report
The escalation of this conflict to Washington, D.C., follows years of simmering tension between local conservatives and the overwhelming number of progressives who run the Evergreen State.
In 2007, it was the first state to adopt rules that allowed transgender students to participate in school sports and competitions that aligned with their gender identity. Lawmakers three years later explicitly included students in nondiscrimination laws, which count gender identity as a protected class. And in 2012, the state issued formal guidelines that protected locker and restroom access for transgender students.
Conservatives grumbled along the way. But they focused political attention elsewhere, including some early victories to block mandatory sex education in every grade and every school. Voters eventually established that mandate in a 2020 ballot measure.
The true firestorm arrived in 2023, with passage of a bill that would allow housing shelters to notify state authorities, not parents, when runaway youth seek refuge and gender-affirming care.
“That’s what started it all. That put parents’ rights on everyone’s radar, as under attack,” said David Spring, executive director of the Washington Parents Network, a statewide coalition that formed during the pandemic to protest school closures and mask mandates.
By then, allies of Trump started to pay attention to Washington state.
The America First Legal Foundation, started by longtime Trump adviser Stephen Miller, represented a group of parents who sued in 2023 to fight the new protections for transgender youth in crisis. Courts dismissed their lawsuit, but Spring’s coalition — and $16 million in political contributions — built momentum behind a 2024 ballot measure to create a “parents’ bill of rights.” The initiative, among other provisions, required schools to inform parents in advance of any medical services offered to their children. Proponents of the measure argue Democrats gutted it with a pair of student safety bills passed earlier this year.
A parents’ rights-focused slate of candidates, meanwhile, secured a 4-1 conservative majority in 2023 on the school board in Mead, where student enrollment hovers just above 10,000 students. About 2 in 5 students qualify as low income and nearly 4 in 5 identify as white.
The new board wasted little time before setting a clear agenda. “Voters made it clear tonight that they want a strong school board that represents parents,” Board President Michael Cannon, who won reelection, told local media at the time.
The Trump administration launched an investigation into Washington state after the Mead school board and several other communities asked for federal intervention. Credit: Margaret Albaugh for The Hechinger Report
In February 2024, the board adopted a resolution opposing a state policy that would require curriculum inclusive of “the histories, contributions, and perspectives of historically marginalized groups,” including LGBTQ+ people, saying it subverted local control over education. The board also joined with its counterparts from two dozen other districts in a campaign to prohibit transgender athletes from playing on female sports teams.
The effort failed, but some residents took notice of a change in their community. One mother with students in Mead schools wrote to the board in December, sharing a statement from the Washington State LGBTQ Commission that condemned the board’s campaign.
“It sends a very clear message to our children that Mead does NOT support and include all students,” her email reads. Writing from her work email account, she identified herself as a state employee active with the LGBTQ+ resources group for public workers.
Alan Nolan, one of the new conservatives on the board, responded by notifying the mother’s employer that she may have broken laws against using government resources for personal matters.
“Are you aware of her activities?” Nolan wrote to her supervisors. Nolan declined interview requests for this story, instead referring The Hechinger Report to the board’s previous statements on the Title IX investigation.
Alan Nolan, one of the newer conservative members of the Mead school board, speaks during a Sept. 8 board meeting. In 2023, voters elected a parents rights-focused slate of candidates to secure a 4-1 conservative majority on the board. Credit: Margaret Albaugh for The Hechinger Report
Cannon, the board president, defended Nolan’s decision to contact the parent’s employer: “He was saying, ‘Quit trying to push us around by using your state title.’”
Cannon also disputed whether the board’s actions made any students or families feel unwelcome at Mead schools.
“That certainly is not the intention at all,” he said. “We want to make every student feel like they belong as much as any other student.”
By then, Trump had reclaimed the White House — after his campaign and Republicans spent $215 million on anti-transgender advertising, according to tracking firm AdImpact. In the presidential election, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris commanded a nearly 20 percentage point lead in the overall Washington vote; in Spokane County, a slim majority of voters supported Trump.
Adrien Leavitt, staff attorney with the ACLU of Washington, said the GOP’s focus on transgender issues in the campaign trickled into local politics in places like Mead.
“When vitriol toward trans people became a nationwide talking point for the right to win the presidency, that invigorated a lot of people to invoke the same harmful rhetoric in their local communities,” Leavitt said. “We think of Washington as a liberal state. Nonetheless, it’s a very diverse state.”
OSPI, in its statewide civil rights review, required 59 out of 295 school districts in Washington to make corrections to their nondiscrimination policy, and 52 of them did so, according to agency data. Another 93 districts received notices to correct their gender-inclusive schools policy, but only 55 districts had as of earlier this year.
After the November election, Spring’s statewide network of parents worked with school boards to prepare for a shift in “the other Washington.” Nearly two dozen boards started a campaign to reverse the state’s policy on transgender athletes, and a growing clash over student pronouns in one district accelerated their efforts. The network’s members met weekly on Zoom, and Spring in early February filed a federal complaint over Title IX before boards like Mead — roughly 30 in total, Spring estimated — soon followed.
“That’s a tenth of school districts doing this kind of revolt. School boards just want to run their schools,” he said.
Michael Cannon, president of the Mead school board, was first elected in 2019. The school board was one of many that challenged Washington state’s Covid protocols. Credit: Margaret Albaugh for The Hechinger Report
In Mead, after the board learned it had 30 days to correct its transgender policy, Nolan shared details of the state’s findings with county and state GOP leaders and the Silent Majority Foundation, a conservative legal nonprofit in eastern Washington. In response to a mother with students in nearby Central Valley schools who asked the board for advice on how to join the fight, Nolan painted an ominous picture of the stakes: “OSPI and the legislature intend to threaten all districts to adopt policies well in excess of what state law requires or face loss of funding.”
Mead schools collect nearly $9 million in federal funding, or about 5 percent of its total budget; another 80 percent comes from the state. State code grants OSPI the authority to order the termination of funding to districts that violate nondiscrimination laws, but the agency has never withheld funding for noncompliance, according to spokeswoman Katy Payne. Still, the Mead school board cited the risk of losing funding — both state and federal — in its plea for help to the federal Education Department.
“It shouldn’t be a choice of which funding to lose,” Cannon told The Hechinger Report. “We just don’t want to risk any funding. That just can’t be on the table for us.”
Superintendent Travis Hanson, who declined several interview requests, said in an email that “culture-war conflicts” — specifically, the political shifts that lead to dramatic changes in local, state and federal education policy — have placed district leaders in an impossible position.
“The increasingly acrimonious debates on these issues are generally split along partisan lines and represent a complex situation for district leaders: navigating socio-political conflict we did not create but are nonetheless responsible for managing,” wrote Hanson, who joined the district in July 2023, just months before the election of the new slate of board members.
Superintendent Travis Hanson listens during a Sept. 8 meeting of the Mead school board. He took over as superintendent in July 2023. Credit: Margaret Albaugh for The Hechinger Report
In late March, the board took another step that further increased tensions: It proposed changes to the transgender policy — but not to comply with the state. Rather, the board would require students to get permission before using their preferred locker room or restroom and would not allow transgender students to room on overnight trips based on their preferred gender. School staff, under the changes, would not need a student’s permission before telling their parents about their gender identity.
A transgender student at Mead High School wrote to the board urging members considering the issue to be sensitive to students “who may rely on school to be their one safe space.”
Nolan replied first by stating his appreciation for the student’s willingness to engage in a civil discussion, but then he issued a vague warning to the teenager.
“I don’t know the source of your gender confusion nor will I pretend I can provide a solution to resolve it,” Nolan told the student. “Fooling yourself to believe you can become that sex is a dangerous lie and those who have bought into it often pay a heavy price.”
The student’s mother responded within hours.
She balked at Nolan’s allusion to a “heavy price” and called him presumptuous and patronizing for commenting on her child’s gender identity.
“We deliberately chose to live within the Mead school district upon recommendation from other family members — a decision I am increasingly questioning,” the mother wrote. “You can’t just wish away kids who are different, and deliberately isolating or driving away families like mine will come with its own heavy price.”
Nolan shared the emails with Cannon, and later sent the mother an apology.
“While we may hold different views on the matter, my response should have been more thoughtful in its tone as it is understandably a topic of significant personal importance,” he wrote.
Other residents praised the board, casting it as their ally in a fight against encroaching state mandates.
One couple with a young daughter wrote: “They have exceeded government outreach for far too long and it is time to take back local control, as the system was designed.”
In the interview with Hechinger, Cannon agreed. And he argued conservatives in Washington state have only acted on the defense.
“The irony is that we’re responding to what they’re doing,” he said of Democrats. “They’ve used the Legislature to force school districts to adhere to their political ideology. None of this originated with these conservative school boards that they like to vilify.”
Trump has continued to wield federal authority over states on Title IX and other issues, even while he has pledged to return control of education to individual states and communities and signed an executive order in March to do so. Later that month, newly confirmed Education Secretary Linda McMahon previewed the investigations to come.
In a Dear Colleague letter to superintendents, McMahon raised concerns about the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), a law that protects the personal records of students, and the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (PPRA), which gives parents the right to review instructional materials. The letter argued that some states and districts had turned “the concept of privacy on its head” and used the laws to prevent parents from knowing if their child started transitioning at school.
The investigation into Washington state hinges on allowing transgender students to compete in female sports but also potential violations of those student privacy laws. Elizabeth Laird, director of equity in civic technology at the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology, described the administration’s legal reasoning as going beyond what Congress intended.
“This investigation looks like the latest instance of the Trump administration weaponizing its ability to withhold federal funds to enforce its ideological agenda,” Laird said.
In an email, an Education Department spokesperson said only that the investigation into Washington state was ongoing. The Justice Department declined to comment.
Chris Reykdal, the Washington state schools chief, described the federal government’s use of the privacy provisions as an attempt to mandate discrimination.
“My office will enforce our current laws as we are required to do until Congress changes the law and/or federal courts invalidate Washington state’s laws,” Reykdal said in a statement. “Unless, and until that happens, we will be following Washington state’s laws, not a president’s political leanings expressed through unlawful orders.”
Some states and districts have already faced consequences from similar investigations. In Maine, the U.S. Department of Agriculture — in a related Title IX investigation — froze federal money meant to feed children in schools, daycares and after-school programs. The state sued, and won a court-approved settlement to stop the freezing of funds. The Trump administration has initiated similar investigations and funding fights in California and in 10 school districts, in Colorado, Kansas and Virginia.
Spring, with the statewide parents network in Washington, did not exactly celebrate the federal intervention in so many school districts. He’s a conservative who prefers local control, especially of education, but said state laws and rights can’t supersede federal law at the schoolhouse.
“We right now have a state ordering school districts around, to break federal law,” Spring said.
Ultimately, courts are likely to continue weighing in on whether these federal actions can be enforced. Conflicting rulings in the federal judiciary, however, make it difficult to predict the outcome.
Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which includes Washington state, barred Idaho from enforcing a ban — the first in the nation — on transgender athletes participating in girls’ and women’s sports teams. The 4th Circuit, also last year, ruled that a similar ban in West Virginia violated Title IX.
Then, this year, the Supreme Court dealt a significant blow to the transgender rights movement, deciding in a 6-3 split that states can prohibit gender-affirming medical care for minors. A Trump-appointed judge in Tennessee also scrapped a set of Title IX rules that former President Joe Biden’s administration proposed to strengthen protections for LGBTQ+ students. And on its upcoming docket, the Supreme Court will hear two cases on whether bans on transgender women in sports violate the Constitution.
“Trump and the alt-right folks want to suggest that civil rights are a zero-sum game,” said Hunter Iannucci, counsel with the National Women’s Law Center, a nonprofit legal group. “They’re trying to position this so Title IX operates only for those students, or only these students can have rights, and that’s just not accurate.”
Back in Mead, the school board in April paused consideration of its contested updates to the transgender policy. Board members continued to hear from both angry and approving members of the public until deciding, in May, to indefinitely postpone any formal action until the federal departments finish their Title IX investigation. The board meetings and especially portions for public comment have been largely quiet since then.
But Miller, the recent Mead graduate, still attends the meetings to speak on behalf of transgender students who remain in the district.
“There are people in the community willing to stand up,” she said. “Even though we’re scared of violence and discrimination, we still have a voice. We still exist.”
Contact staff writer Neal Morton at 212-678-8247, on Signal at nealmorton.99, or via email at morton@hechingerreport.org.
This story about Title IX was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Summer usually provides a respite for Connor Pavlicko from his duties as student body president at Slippery Rock University. But this summer, he was bombarded by classmates demanding to know why their tuition was suddenly going up.
What made these students particularly angry was that the 3.6 percent increase followed a span since 2018 in which tuition at public universities in Pennsylvania, including Slippery Rock, had been frozen in place, said Pavlicko, a junior political science and government major from Ohio.
“This is happening everywhere,” he said he found after “endlessly doomscrolling” social media.
Pavlicko’s right. Students nationwide are facing increases in tuition this fall of as high as 10 percent, along with new fees and rising costs for dorms and dining. And as in Pennsylvania, it’s an abrupt change from a period during which something happened that most Americans probably didn’t notice: Tuition had actually been falling, when adjusted for inflation, after decades of outpacing the cost of almost everything else.
That’s among the conclusions of The Hechinger Report’s update of its Tuition Tracker tool, which shows what students pay to go to individual colleges and universities based on their families’ incomes.
The average net amount that students paid for college, after discounts and financial aid, went up only about a third as much as what Americans shelled out for all the other things they bought, once inflation is accounted for, the Tuition Tracker shows. The finding covers the five years ending in 2023, the most recent period for which federal figures are available.
In real dollars, and as economists track it, this means the price went down — among other reasons, because colleges were trying to boost sagging enrollments.
The bad news, for students and institutions alike, is that now the price is starting to go up again, as higher education contends with financial and political challenges.
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“We had this period where it looked like things were improving,” said Judith Scott-Clayton, a professor of economics and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. (The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College.)
“I’m concerned, and I think a lot of policymakers are concerned, that we’re at a turning point where we’re going to descend back to a time when it’s more difficult” for students and their families to pay for college, Scott-Clayton said.
Even before this new round of price increases, fewer than half of Americans thought the returns on a four-year college education were worth the cost, a survey last year by the Pew Research Center found.
Now, at the same time many universities and colleges are raising their tuition, they’re cutting programs and laying off staff to close budget deficits. This means many students will be paying more and getting less.
The longer-term steady increase in the cost of higher education is already a major reason the proportion of high school students going on to get degrees has been steadily falling, said Andrew Gillen, a research fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute who studies college financing.
A growing number of undergraduates — more than 4 in 10, according to a survey by the student loan provider Sallie Mae — considered alternatives to college such as trade schools or apprenticeships. Among those who do pursue degrees, affordability is tied with geography as the top deciding factors in which colleges they choose.
Considering the growing skepticism that college is “the magic ticket to the American dream,” said Gillen, raising tuition, for many higher education institutions, “definitely has the potential to be penny-wise and pound-foolish.”
But universities and colleges are confronting unprecedented problems on the funding side.
For one thing, the struggle to contain their prices has made it hard for them to cover their own costs. Institutions’ revenue from tuition fell in five of the last six years, according to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, or SHEEO — last year alone, by more than at any time in the 4 1/2 decades that the figure has been tracked.
State appropriations, which are the other main source of income for public universities and colleges, have gone up for five straight years, nationwide. But the rate of increase has begun to slow, SHEEO reports.
This year, a growing number of states are facing budget deficits. And the $100 billion a year in Medicaid cuts approved by Republicans in Congress means that, beginning next year, states will have to take on some of those costs. Historically, public universities have been among the first to see their appropriations reduced in response to competing demands for state funding.
There’s other tough financial news. More than 600 universities and colleges have had federal grants cut off or frozen, according to the left-leaning Center for American Progress. Those budget hits equate to between $3 per student in West Virginia and $1,752 per student in South Dakota, the center calculates.
Most, though not all, of those reductions have affected research and not teaching. But “these institutions are very complex and they’re interconnected, so cuts that are happening in one area don’t just affect that one area. They affect the whole financial picture of the institution,” Scott-Clayton said.
The effects of the federal funding hits have not been limited to elite private, nonprofit colleges, even though those have gotten much of the attention. More than twice as much was cut from federal grants to public universities, or $2.1 billion, as from private institutions, which have lost or stand to lose about $1.2 billion.
Two other important sources of revenue have also been imperiled by the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress.
A crackdown on international students is projected to reduce international enrollment by as much as 40 percent, according to NAFSA, the association representing administrators who oversee international education. And a cap passed by Congress on federal loans for graduate students could reduce enrollment in those programs or force institutions to reduce the prices for them — a good development for students, but another potential financial blow for colleges.
Some wealthy institutions will now have to pay taxes on their endowments, too, stripping them of a collective $1.7 billion next year, under yet another congressional decree.
Expenses are also up, thanks to inflation and the resulting demands for higher salaries from universities’ and colleges’ large labor forces.
At the moment, colleges and universities are enjoying their largest number of customers in years, to whom they can pass along these costs. Enrollment has largely rebounded from pandemic lows, and the number of high school graduates in the spring reached a peak of nearly 4 million. Souped-up demand like that typically allows a seller to charge higher prices.
“It’s kind of a return to normal. The pandemic was so disruptive. What we’ve seen is that there’s been a slight uptick in demand for higher education,” said Dustin Weeden, associate vice president at SHEEO.
In the case of universities, however, that demand will be short-lived. The number of high school graduates is projected to decline beginning next year, noted Jeff Denning, associate professor of public affairs and education at the University of Texas at Austin.
“In terms of supply and demand, there’s more demand right now than there’s going to be for a long time,” Denning said.
All of these things are contributing to this fall’s tuition hikes — though some institutions are straining to avoid calling them that — and budget cuts.
In what it describes as “an inflationary tuition increase,” for example, the University of Nebraska system is raising tuition by 5 percent while also trimming nearly $28 million from the budget of the flagship Lincoln campus alone. Michigan State University is raising tuition by 4.5 percent — it calls this a “tuition adjustment” — while reducing spending by 9 percent over two years.
Facing a $164 million budget deficit, the California State University system — the largest four-year university system in the country — is raising tuition by 6 percent for the second year in a row. It has also cut 1,200 employees and 1,430 course sections on seven of its 23 campuses, a spokeswoman, Amy Bentley-Smith, confirmed, including in courses students are required to take to graduate. That’s about 7 percent of all course sections on those campuses.
Revealing the true cost of college
These kinds of price increases coinciding with cuts in classes and services “certainly could explain some of the public opinion surveys that show people’s frustration with the sector,” Scott-Clayton said.
“Nobody wants to see tuition going up,” she said, “but you also want to know that when you get there, there will still be quality instructors to teach the courses, and there will be places to get help.”
Tuition at the University of Maryland will rise by 4 percent, and mandatory fees by 4.5 percent, after the state — facing its own budget deficit — cut the university’s appropriation. Despite the higher price, the university system’s chancellor told legislators that student advising, career counseling and mental health workers were being cut and the provost said that faculty positions will be left unfilled, making it harder for students to get into classes they need to graduate on time.
In New Hampshire, tuition is going up at the public universities by 2.5 percent while spending is being cut by 18 percent and employees are laid off. Chancellor Catherine Provencher conceded to legislators that steeper cost and fewer services mean “our enrollment is going to fall off.” The Community College System of New Hampshire will also increase tuition by 7 percent after 12 years of leaving it almost flat.
The University of Minnesota system is raising tuition by 4 percent, to 6.5 percent, depending on the campus, and 7.5 percent for out-of-state students — the most in more than a decade — while also cutting its budget by 7 percent. The system’s governing board said that even though the state was giving it the same amount it got last year, inflation had reduced its buying power.
After having benefited over the last few years from lower tuition at public universities competing for their business, out-of-state students are bearing the brunt of increases in several states.
In Kansas, five of the six public universities will raise tuition by 2.5 percent to 4 percent, depending on the campus. Tuition will be up by 3 percent this fall at the University of Oklahoma, and by as much as 8 percent at other public universities and colleges in Oklahoma, which cite rising health insurance premiums and the need for long-delayed maintenance.
After five years of almost no increases, the South Dakota Board of Regents is raising tuition at that state’s public universities by 2.9 percent. The Universities of Wisconsin system plans a 4 percent to 5 percent tuition hike, depending on the campus, though Republican state legislators there are trying to limit the increase to no more than the inflation rate; it’s the third straight tuition increase after a 10-year tuition freeze, and comes despite promises of an additional $256 million in state funding over the next two years. And the University of Tennessee system is raising tuition by up to 3 percent, depending on the campus.
Many private universities and colleges are making similar moves. Tuition at Duke University tuition this fall is up by nearly 6 percent, to more than $92,000 a year, for instance. That decision came even before the university found itself a target of Trump administration funding cuts and investigations, announced that 600 employees had accepted buyouts and offered retirement incentives to 250 faculty. Still more layoffs were planned.
At Slippery Rock and other Pennsylvania public universities, that 3.6 percent tuition increase equates to about $300 a year, for in-state students for a new total of $11,000 a year in tuition and fees, and from $418 to $556 a year for students from out of state, to $15,000 a year. That does not include room and board.
A difference like this might not sound huge, said Pavlicko, the student body president, but “things may have already been tight for some students.”
He’s encouraging people to learn why their tuition is increasing.
“Despite the consistent student belief that the university president has a big red button and a price adjustor like at a gas station, that is not true.”
He’s also steering fellow students to the financial aid office and to money-saving services such as a food pantry and free bus transportation to off-campus apartments.
“Let’s not let people suffer alone,” Pavlicko said.
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.
LOS ANGELES — Oscar Mateo dreamed of being an artist, but after he got leukemia when he was 20, his life plans abruptly changed. The compassionate nursing care he received while hospitalized touched him so much that he decided he wanted to provide the same for others.
That impulse led him to the registered nursing program at Mt. San Antonio College in the Los Angeles County suburb of Walnut. But getting there wasn’t easy, as he had to battle competition for limited seats in one of the highest-demand fields in higher education, a career offering purpose, plentiful jobs and potentially six-figure paychecks.
Mateo was rejected three times by Mt. SAC before winning admission. To burnish his resume and win a coveted seat, he earned certification as a nursing assistant and got work experience.
“It’s so competitive and stressful,” Mateo, now 30, said. “It definitely takes a toll on yourself.”
Mateo represents a paradox bedeviling the U.S. nursing landscape. There is enormous demand for nurses, as retirement or burnout push many from the field. Despite tens of thousands of students fighting to get into nursing programs, schools can’t accommodate that demand, for two major reasons: They can’t find enough faculty to teach classes and there is a dearth of the required hands-on training opportunities in hospitals and health care facilities.
The mismatch has hit California particularly hard, triggering a state audit, legislative proposals and funding initiatives. Some nursing schools want to allow greater use of training technology to widen access — such as high-tech mannequins that simulate heart attacks and other medical conditions. Others warn against that path. In the process, tensions between public and private nursing schools have flared as they battle for resources to expand their programs.
Mt. San Antonio College, in Los Angeles County. More than half of California’s nursing school programs reported their requests for clinical placements in hospitals were denied in 2022-23. Mt. SAC lost placements at several sites, including two spots that were withdrawn right before classes started. Credit: James Bernal for The Hechinger Report
“The demand is so high but there just aren’t enough seats,” said Paul Creason, Long Beach City College dean of business, education and health sciences. “It’s critical to supply the workforce to meet the need, but there are too many obstacles and this will have ramifications for the cost and quality of health care.”
In California, only about a third of 57,987 applications by qualified applicants to nursing school were accepted in 2022-23, the most recent data available, according to the state Board of Registered Nursing. Nationwide, nursing schools turned away nearly 66,000 qualified applications for bachelor’s and graduate nursing programs in 2023, the American Association of Colleges of Nursing reported.
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California’s projected shortfall of working nurses is one of the largest in the nation, estimated to grow from 40,790 this year to 61,490 in 2035, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Shortages are projected for both registered nurses, who provide the more advanced health care skills typically acquired in a two- to four-year training program, and licensed vocational nurses, who offer more basic care after certification that usually takes one year to complete.
The most contested resource in nursing education is the hands-on clinical training required.
“You have to have these spots or your program is dead in the water,” Creason said.
California law requires students to complete at least 500 hours of direct patient care under the supervision of nursing staff at a hospital or other health care facility to graduate and qualify to take the national licensing exam. Without that, students can’t finish their degrees and schools can’t increase enrollment.
So the competition for clinical placements is fierce. Requests are soaring just as some hospitals are scaling back on training because their staff nurses are too overloaded to take on more students. More than half of the state’s nursing school programs reported their requests for clinical placements were denied in 2022-23, according to the state nursing board, and 57.2 percent of the state’s 152 registered nursing programs cited a lack of clinical placements as the top obstacle to adding more seats.
Mt. SAC, for instance, lost placements at several sites — one of them fell from 10 to six. This past semester, a hospital withdrew two spots just weeks before classes started, forcing the school to scramble for a replacement. San Antonio Regional Hospital stepped in, opening a night shift for students.
Andrew Santana instructs students on how to do an APGAR assessment on a simulated newborn baby at Mt. San Antonio College campus. Credit: James Bernal for The Hechinger Report
Public campuses argue that their students should have priority for these clinical slots. Private nursing schools — both nonprofit and for-profit — disagree, urging a level playing field.
Reports that some colleges pay for the sought-after slots have riled many campuses, and in the 2022-23 state survey, nine unnamed colleges reported they had provided “financial support” to secure a clinical placement. A 2023 state law now bans such “pay to play” schemes — but college officials say it is difficult to enforce and unclear as to what it covers. Are donations to a hospital’s foundation, for instance, prohibited? What about tuition assistance to nurses who agree to serve as instructors for that college’s students?
With resources tight, state legislators and nursing organizations have begun rallying to better support public nursing programs.
Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature approved $60 million for a five-year grant program to expand community college nursing programs, including partnerships with four-year campuses for bachelor’s degrees. Beginning this year, another state law mandates health facilities to “work in good faith” with California community colleges and California State University campuses to meet their clinical placement needs.
Private institutions criticize those efforts as unfair. Samuel Merritt University, a private nonprofit in Oakland, petitioned the state board to add 72 seats to the nursing program at its Sacramento campus, but Cal State Sacramento, Sacramento City College and Sierra College told the board they opposed the request because they were losing clinical sites and worried about nurse burnout from training students. The state board approved the 72-seat increase, in August, after the university found clinical placements outside the immediate Sacramento area.
“What we find to be the most frustrating is the state schools, the four-year institutions and the two-year institutions, they’re kind of banding together to prevent any growth by the private schools,” said Steven Rush, dean of Samuel Merritt’s college of nursing.
Creason, of Long Beach City College, argues that community colleges should get priority for state funding and clinical placements because they deliver quality nursing education at a significantly lower cost than private programs, and typically to students who reflect the state’s cultural and linguistic diversity.
California nurses’ organizations agree, saying that community colleges and CSU campuses in particular offer a pipeline to nursing jobs for lower-income, first-generation students of color and that these graduates provide culturally sensitive care.
Creason said the total cost for an LBCC two-year associate degree in nursing – the college’s most popular major along with business – is about $5,000. Under a newly established partnership with Cal State Long Beach to jointly prepare students for a four-year bachelor’s degree in nursing, the total cost would be about $43,000, he said.
But the more affordable public nursing programs are also far more difficult to get into. Long Beach’s admission rate is about 3.3 percent, with room for 80 students among 2,400 applicants each year, although the partnership with Cal State Long Beach will allow it to grow to 120 seats in about two years, Creason said.
That ease of entry is why Oscar Mateo was close to enrolling at West Coast before finally winning admission to Mt. SAC on his fourth try. He said he would have needed to take out a loan of more than $100,000 to afford West Coast but was so driven to become a nurse he would have been willing to make that investment. He was ecstatic when he got his financial aid letter and saw that state grants and fee waivers would cover the entire cost of his nursing program aside from books.
“I was so happy. I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “Once I was in Mt. SAC, it was a no-brainer to go to a community college. The low cost made it so enticing and the respect the school has from the hospitals are big reasons for attending this program over others.”
Student Diva Bailey using a virtual reality headset to do a psych evaluation of a simulated patient at Mt. San Antonio College campus. The technology, which is used in many states, allows nursing students to practice diagnosing and treating medical conditions in a low-stakes environment. Credit: James Bernal for The Hechinger Report
For Ray Ayranian, the heftier tuition and fees at American Career College, a private, for-profit institution, are worth it. Ayranian, who was inspired to pursue nursing after seeing the care given his sister when she underwent neurosurgery, started out at Pasadena City College. But he said he wasn’t a great student and thought the private-school route would be easier — and faster. He and his parents took out a loan for about $30,000 to pay for the 12-month licensed vocational nurse program, he said, and he plans to pay off the debt by working extra shifts once he earns his degree and gets a job.
“I just wanted to do something fast because I’m a pretty hands-on person,” he said.
Representatives for ACC and West Coast declined to comment.
One potential solution to ease the crunch is state financial incentives to hospitals and other medical facilities to provide more clinical placement slots. Virginia offers tax-free grants to nurses and other health professionals who mentor nursing students, while Georgia, Maryland,Colorado, South Carolina and Alabama are among states that offer tax credits or other financial incentives. Federal legislation to give a $2,000 tax credit to nurses who provide at least 200 hours of clinical training is pending.
Another idea is expanding the use of technology. At Mt. SAC, for instance, classrooms have high-tech mannequins that can be programmed to blink, shriek and simulate a variety of medical conditions, including heart attacks, bleeding, respiratory failure — even giving birth. Virtual and augmented reality programs offer interactive 3D environments with animation or actors simulating patients. The technology, which is used in many states, allows nursing students to practice diagnosing and treating medical conditions in a low-stakes environment.
Given the shortage of clinical placements, some nursing educators argue that accredited programs with high student licensing exam pass rates should be allowed to balance simulation training with hands-on training, rather than meet the state’s minimum 500-hour requirement.
Michelle Mahon of the National Nurses United union says better working conditions for nurses would draw back more of those who got burned out and left the field. That, she said, would help ease the pressure to create more nursing school seats.
At Mt. SAC this summer, a group of students doing simulation training was directed to examine a mannequin that was simulating a 72-year-old woman who had undergone gall bladder surgery and returned home. The mannequin, nicknamed Apollo and made of silicon, synthetic plastic polymer and other materials, sported hard legs but a soft, rubbery feel to most of the rest of the body.
The clinical instructor, Maria Stefanidis from nearby San Antonio Regional Hospital, assumed the voice of “Mrs. Smith,” complaining of nausea and sharp pain in her abdominal area.
Paul Song, playing the role of a home health nurse, checked the mannequin’s blood pressure, heart rate, temperature and respiration – all computer programmed. Stefanidis reminded him to assess the incision area for redness and warmth, a potential sign of infection, and guided him on the proper way to check for abdominal sounds. He told Stefanidis he suspected a blockage in the intestines and possible infection because of the elevated vital signs.
“Good assessment,” Stefanidis said. “So what are we going to do about that?”
“The best course of action would be to call the doctor and let him know,” Song said.
Andrew Santana (left) instructing students in performing a simulated delivery of a baby at Mt. San Antonio College campus. Credit: James Bernal for The Hechinger Report
Andrew Santana, Mt. SAC’s Simulation Lab specialist and instructor, said the campus plans to expand its technology offerings with a new health careers building and advancements such as mannequins programmed with artificial intelligence that are able to spontaneously converse with students.
Eileen Fry-Bowers, dean of nursing at the private nonprofit University of San Francisco, is among those who believe that accredited programs with high student licensing exam pass rates should have more flexibility in balancing simulation and hands-on training. No evidence supports the state’s requirement of 500 hours of direct patient care as a threshold for positive patient outcomes, she said.
“This idea that direct care is the be-all and end-all of clinical education is not supported by research,” she said.
Others say technology can never replace the human-to-human connection. Nicole Ong, a Mt. SAC nursing student who worked as a certified nursing assistant before starting her RN program, said experience with real people is crucial for learning how to bond with patients in their most vulnerable moments.
“You have to get trust from a patient and you can’t get that from a mannequin,” Ong said.
Contact editor Lawrie Mifflin at (212) 678-4078 or mifflin@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.
Remiah Ward’s shift at the SmartStyle salon inside Walmart was almost over, and she’d barely made $30 in tips from the haircuts she’d done that day. It wasn’t unusual — a year after her graduation from beauty school, tips plus minimum wage weren’t enough to cover her rent.
She scarcely had time to eat and sleep before she had to drive back to the same Walmart in central Florida to stock shelves on the night shift. That job paid $14 an hour, but it meant she sometimes spent 18 hours a day in the same building. She worked six days a week but still struggled to catch up on bills and sleep.
The admissions officer at the American Institute of Beauty, where she enrolled straight out of high school, had sold her on a different dream. She would easily earn enough to pay back the $10,000 she borrowed to attend, she said she was told. Ward had no way of knowing that stylists from her school earn $20,200 a year, on average, four years after graduating. Seven years later, her debt, plus interest, is still unpaid.
In July, Republicans in Congress pushed through policies aimed at ensuring that what happened to Ward wouldn’t happen to other Americans on the government’s dime; colleges whose graduates don’t earn at least as much as someone with a high school diploma will now risk losing access to federal student loans. But one group managed to slip through the cracks — thousands of schools like the American Institute of Beauty were exempt.
Remiah Ward worked two jobs while trying to make it as a hair stylist but never made enough to pay her all her bills and has had to put her dream career on hold. Credit: Courtesy Remiah Ward
Certificate schools succeeded in getting a carve-out. The industry breathed a collective sigh of relief, and with good reason. At least 1,280 certificate-granting programs, which enrolled more than 220,000 students, would have been at risk of losing federal student loan funding if they had been included in the bill, according to a Hechinger Report analysis of federal data. [See table.] About 80% of those are for-profit programs, and 45 percent are cosmetology schools.
“There is this very strange donut hole in accountability where workforce programs are held accountable, two-year degree programs are held accountable, but everything in between gets off without any accountability,” said Preston Cooper, a senior fellow at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute.
The schools spared are known as certificate programs and, with their promise of an affordable and relatively quick path to economic security, are the fastest growing part of higher education. They usually take about a year to complete and train people to be hair-stylists, welders, medical assistants and cooks, among other jobs.
As with traditional colleges, there are big differences in quality among certificate programs. Some hair stylists can make a middle-class living if they work in a busy salon. But for people who have to pay back hefty student loans, the low wages for stylists in the early years can be an insurmountable obstacle.
Ward found herself facing that dilemma. When she could no longer sustain the lack of sleep from her double shifts at Walmart, she pressed pause on her styling career and took a job with Amazon, loading and unloading planes. She wasn’t ready to give up her dream career, though, so in addition to her 10-hour days moving boxes, she took part-time gigs at local hair salons. She didn’t have family to help pay rent, not to mention loan payments, so she couldn’t afford to work fulltime at a salon, which is essential to build up a regular clientele — and bigger tips. Without that, she couldn’t get much beyond minimum wage.
A representative from the American Institute of Beauty denied that Ward was told she would easily repay her loan.
“No admissions representative, not at AIB or elsewhere, would ever make such a statement,” Denise Herman, general counsel and assistant vice president of AIB, said in an email.
The high cost of many for-profit cosmetology schools — tuition can be upward of $20,000, usually for a one-year program — can leave former students mired in debt. In May, the government released data showing 850 colleges where at least a third of borrowers haven’t made a loan payment for 90 days or more, putting them on track to default. About 42 percent of those were for-profit cosmetology and barbering schools (including AIB).
Brittany Mcnew says she loves working as a stylist but that her income takes a hit when traffic is slow in her salon in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Credit: Meredith Kolodner/The Hechinger Report
Herman blamed the Biden administration policy that after the pandemic let borrowers forgo payments without any penalty.
“Debtors became ‘comfortable’ not making payments,” said Herman. “AIB provides the graduate with the information graduates need to make their payments. What that graduate decides to pay, or not pay, is not influenced by AIB.”
Under the “big beautiful bill” passed in July, two- and four-year colleges must ensure that, after four years, graduates on average make at least as much as someone in their state who has only a high school diploma. The colleges must inform students if they fail that test, and if it happens for two out of three years, the college will be ineligible to receive federal loan funds.
Some for-profit certificate schools lobbied hard for an exemption. The American Association of Career Schools, which represents proprietary cosmetology schools, spent $120,000 lobbying the Education Department and Congress, including on the “big beautiful bill,” in the first six months of this year. At the group’s major lobbying event in April, Sen. Bill Cassidy, chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, was the keynote speaker.
Cassidy declined to answer questions about why certificate programs were excluded, but a fact sheet from his committee noted that they are already covered by something else, the gainful employment rule, which is also being challenged by the for-profit cosmetology industry.
That federal gainful employment regulation, updated in 2023, requires in essence that graduates from career-oriented schools earn enough to be able to pay back their loans and earn more than a high school graduate. It also requires that consumers, like Ward, be given more information about how graduates from all colleges fare in the workplace.
The rule posed an existential threat to a huge swath of cosmetology schools.
In 2023, the American Association of Career Schools sued to block the gainful employment rule.
“AACS supports fair and reasonable accountability measures,” Cecil Kidd, the AACS’s executive director, said in an email. “However, we strongly object to arbitrary or discriminatory policies such as the US Department of Education’s Gainful Employment rule, which unfairly targets career schools while exempting many public and private non-profit institutions that fail to meet comparable outcomes.”
He pointed to public comments in which AACS has argued that the rule imposes an unfair burden on cosmetology schools since stylists are predominantly women, who are more likely to have “personal commitments” that affect their earnings, and who rely on tips that are often pocketed as unreported income.
Cameron Vandenboom is a successful hair stylist but says the high cost of her private beauty school wasn’t worth thousands of dollars in student debt: “I absolutely should have gone to community college.” Credit: Courtesy Shanna Kaye Photo
In a twist that surprised advocates on both sides, the Education Department in May asked the court to effectively dismiss AACS’ lawsuit.
If the court rules in favor of the cosmetology schools, certificate programs will be free of all accountability requirements on their graduates’ earning levels, because they got the carveout in July.
Even if the court rules against cosmetology schools, advocates are pessimistic that the Trump administration will implement the gainful rules. The first Trump administration got rid of the original rules back in 2019 and Nicholas Kent, now the U.S. undersecretary of education, was previously the chief policy officer for Career Education Colleges and Universities, or CECU, the trade group that represents for-profit colleges, including certificate programs. He is a well-known critic of the rule.
“I would be very surprised, if the unlikely scenario plays out that the Biden rule is upheld, that this Department of Education would just say, OK, the court has spoken,” said Jason Altmire, CECU’s executive director. “We are not opposed to accountability for certificate programs, so long as it’s fair to everybody and we have a voice in how you’re measuring programs.”
Altmire said CECU didn’t lobby for certificate programs to be carved out of Congress’ bill, but did argue against the earnings formula that Congress landed on. Altmire said it doesn’t take into account part-time work and the gender gap in wages.
One objection from AACS, raised by CECU as well, is that the earnings measured don’t include tips, which are crucial to hair stylists’ income. Analyzed without including tips, 576 of 724 cosmetology schools in the Hechinger Report analysis would fail Congress’ earnings test. But even if tips were included and raised stylists’ income by 20 percent, 526 cosmetology schools would still fail.
Earlier this year, Remiah Ward made the difficult decision to leave Florida and move to Kentucky, where the cost of living was more forgiving. She’s working from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. at an aluminum factory for $19.50 an hour.
One day, she might go back to styling after her debt is paid off. Like many former beauty school students, she wishes she’d had more information when she decided to enroll.
“They really sugar-coated it. I was 18 years old, and I needed a trade that I was already pretty good at,” said Ward, who is now 26. “Everybody thinks they’re going to make a high return, and it’s just not the reality.”
Marina Villeneuve contributed data analysis to this story.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
For many Americans, the specter of missing children evokes forlorn images on milk cartons or Amber alerts on cell phones. But a new report from the Brookings Institution suggests that the pandemic may have created a new generation of lost kids — this time, from classrooms.
Lost but not found
The number of students who are not in school exploded in 2020 after the Covid outbreak, and many still aren’t back. The missing kids are not in private schools or being homeschooled. Many children are simply not enrolled anywhere, according to the Brookings’ analysis of federal data. Some are older teens, nearly at the end of their high school years, but many are younger. And no one knows whether these kids are getting an education.
During the 2021–22 school year, roughly 2 million additional students, ages 5 through 17, disappeared from both public and private school rolls, a 450 percent increase from 2019-20 in missing kids, according to the report. I would have guessed that families had relocated during the pandemic, temporarily or permanently, and administrative records were in too much disarray to track down everyone. But even by 2023–24, a normal school year, the share of children unaccounted for (not in public or private school) still totaled 2.1 million or almost 4 percent of the nation’s 54 million kids, ages 5 to 17, nearly five times the number before the pandemic.
To calculate the number of missing children, the Brookings researchers subtracted school enrollment figures from U.S. population data.It’s possible that there’s some statistical discrepancy between data from the U.S. Census Department and the National Center for Education Statistics that will be sorted out in the future. But it’s also possible that these missing children are not learning to read and do math, and that doesn’t portend well for the nation’s future. Analysis of state data by Stanford University professor Thomas Dee in 2023 first revealed the pandemic increase in missing children, and was publicized by the Associated Press. This Brookings report confirms that it is an enduring mystery.
Percentage of school-aged children who are not enrolled in traditional public schools, 2016-17 to 2023-24
Source: Brookings, “Declining public school enrollment,” August 2025
Private school enrollment flat
Before the pandemic, the share of students in traditional public schools held steady, hovering near 85 percent between 2016 and 2020. After the pandemic, traditional public school enrollment plummeted to below 80 percent and hasn’t rebounded.
The mysterious missing children account for a big chunk of the decline. But families also switched to charter and virtual schools. Charter school enrollment rose from 5 percent of students in 2016-17 to 6 percent in 2023-24. The number of children attending virtual schools almost doubled from 0.7 percent before the pandemic in 2019-20 to 1.2 percent in 2020-21 and has remained elevated.
Surprisingly, private school enrollment has stayed steady at almost 9 percent of school-age children between 2016-17 and 2023-24, according to this Brookings estimate.
I had expected private school enrollment to skyrocket, as families soured on public school disruptions during the pandemic, and as 11 states, including Arizona and Florida, launched their own educational savings account or new voucher programs to help pay the tuition. But another analysis, released this month by researchers at Tulane University, echoed the Brookings numbers. It found that private school enrollments had increased by only 3 to 4 percent between 2021 and 2024, compared to states without vouchers. A new federal tax credit to fund private school scholarships is still more than a year away from going into effect on Jan. 1, 2027, and perhaps a greater shift into private education is still ahead.
Defections from traditional public schools are largest in Black and high-poverty districts
I would have guessed that wealthier families who can afford private school tuition would be more likely to seek alternatives. But high-poverty districts had the largest share of students outside the traditional public-school sector. In addition to private school,they were enrolled in charters, virtual schools, specialized schools for students with disabilities or other alternative schools, or were homeschooling.
More than 1 in 4 students in high-poverty districts aren’t enrolled in a traditional public school, compared with 1 in 6 students in low-poverty school districts. The steepest public school enrollment losses are concentrated in predominantly Black school districts. A third of students in predominantly Black districts are not in traditional public schools, double the share of white and Hispanic students.
Share of student enrollment outside of traditional public schools, by district poverty
Source: Brookings, “Declining public school enrollment,” August 2025
Share of students not enrolled in traditional public schools by race and ethnicity
Source: Brookings, “Declining public school enrollment,” August 2025
These discrepancies matter for the students who remain in traditional public schools. Schools in low-income and Black neighborhoods are now losing the most students, forcing even steeper budget cuts.
The demographic timebomb
Before the pandemic, U.S. schools were already headed for a big contraction. The average American woman is now giving birth to only 1.7 children over her lifetime, well below the 2.1 fertility rate needed to replace the population. Fertility rates are projected to fall further still. The Brookings analysts assume more immigrants will continue to enter the country, despite current immigration restrictions, but not enough to offset the decline in births.
Even if families return to their pre-pandemic enrollment patterns, the population decline would mean 2.2 million fewer public school students by 2050. But if parents keep choosing other kinds of schools at the pace observed since 2020, traditional public schools could lose as many as 8.5 million students, shrinking from 43.06 million in 2023-24 to as few as 34.57 million by mid-century.
Between students gone missing, the choices some Black families and families in high-poverty districts are making and how many kids are being born, the public school landscape is shifting. Buckle up and get ready for mass public school closures.
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.
ASHE COUNTY, N.C. — In the time it took to read an email, the federal money vanished before Superintendent Eisa Cox’s eyes: dollars that supported the Ashe County school district’s after-school program, training for its teachers, salaries for some jobs.
The email from the Department of Education arrived June 30, one day before the money — $1.1 million in total — was set to materialize for the rural western North Carolina district. Instead, the dollars had been frozen pending a review to make sure the money was spent “in accordance with the President’s priorities,” the email said.
In a community still recovering from Hurricane Helene, where more than half of students are considered economically disadvantaged, Cox said there was no way they could replace that federal funding. “It is scary to think about it, you’re getting ready to open school and not have a significant pot of funds,” she said.
School leaders across the country were reeling from the same news. The $1.1 million was one small piece of a nearly $7 billion pot of federal funding for thousands of school districts that the Trump administration froze — money approved by Congress and that schools were scheduled to receive on July 1. For weeks, leaders in Ashe County and around the country scrambled to figure out how they could avoid layoffs and fill financial holes — until the money was freed July 25, after an outcry from legislators and a lawsuit joined by two dozen states.
“I had teachers crying, staff members crying. They thought they were going to lose their jobs a week before school,” said Curtis Finch, superintendent of Deer Valley Unified School District in Phoenix.
About $1.1 million was at stake for the Ashe County school district in western North Carolina this summer when a portion of K-12 schools’ federal funding was frozen. Credit: Ariel Gilreath/The Hechinger Report
Now, as educators welcome students back to classrooms, they can no longer count on federal dollars as they once did. They must learn to plan without a playbook under a president intent on cutting education spending. For many districts, federal money is a small but crucial sliver of their budgets, potentially touching every part of a school’s operations, from teacher salaries to textbooks. Nationally, it accounts for about 14 percent of public school funding; in Ashe County, it’s 17 percent. School administrators are examining their resources now and budgeting for losses to funding that was frozen this summer, for English learners, after-school and other programs.
So far, the Trump administration has not proposed cutting the largest pots of federal money for schools, which go to services for students with disabilities and to schools with large numbers of low-income students. But the current budget proposal from the U.S. House of Representatives would do just that.
At the same time, forthcoming cuts to other federal support for low-income families under the Republican “one big, beautiful bill” — including Medicaid and SNAP — will also hammer schools that have many students living in poverty. And some school districts are also grappling with the elimination of Department of Education grants announced earlier this year, such as those designed to address teacher shortages and disability services. In politically conservative communities like this one, there’s an added tension for schools that rely on federal money to operate: how to sound the alarm while staying out of partisan politics.
For Ashe County, the federal spending freeze collided with the district’s attempt at a fresh start after the devastation of Helene, which demolished roads and homes, damaged school buildings and knocked power and cell service out for weeks. Between the storm and snow days, students here missed 47 days of instruction.
Cox worries this school year might bring more missed days: That first week of school, she found herself counting the number of foggy mornings. An old Appalachian wives’ tale says to put a bean in a jar for every morning of fog in August. The number of beans at the end of the month is how many snow days will come in winter.
“We’ve had 21 so far,” Cox said with a nervous laugh on Aug. 21.
Fragrant evergreen trees blanket Ashe County’s hills, a region that bills itself as America’s Christmas Tree Capital because of the millions of Fraser firs grown for sale at the holidays. Yet this picturesque area still shows scars of Hurricane Helene’s destruction: fallen trees, damaged homes and rocky new paths cut through the mountainsides by mudslides. Nearly a year after the storm, the lone grocery store in one of its small towns is still being rebuilt. A sinkhole that formed during the flooding remains, splitting open the ground behind an elementary school.
Ashe County Schools Superintendent Eisa Cox visits classrooms at Blue Ridge Elementary School during the first week of the school year in Warrensville, N.C. Credit: Ariel Gilreath/The Hechinger Report
As students walked into classrooms for the first time since spring, Julie Taylor — the district’s director of federal programs — was reworking district budget spreadsheets. When federal funds were frozen, and then unfrozen, her plans and calculations from months prior became meaningless.
Federal and state funding stretches far in this district of 2,700 students and six schools, where administrators do a lot with a little. Even before this summer, they worked hard to supplement that funding in any way possible — applying to state and federal grants, like one last year that provided money for a few mobile hot spots for families who don’t have internet access. Such opportunities are also narrowing: The Federal Communications Commission, for example, recently proposed ending its mobile hot spot grant program for school buses and libraries.
“We’re very fiscally responsible because we have to be — we’re small and rural, we don’t have a large tax base,” Taylor said.
When the money was frozen this summer, administrators’ minds went to the educators and kids who would be most affected. Some of it paid for a program through Appalachian State University that connects the district’s three dozen early-career teachers with a mentor, helps them learn how to schedule their school days and manage classroom behavior.
The program is part of the reason the district’s retention rate for early career teachers is 92 percent, Taylor said, noting the teachers have said how much the mentoring meant to them.
Also frozen: free after-school care the district provides for about 250 children throughout the school year — the only after-school option in the community. Without the money, Cox said, schools would have to cancel their after-school care or start charging families, a significant burden in a county with a median household income of about $50,000.
Sixth grade students make self-portraits out of construction paper during the first week of the school year at Blue Ridge Elementary School in Warrensville, N.C., in August. Credit: Ariel Gilreath/The Hechinger Report
The salary for Michelle Pelayo, the district’s migrant education program coordinator for nearly two decades, was also tied up in that pot of funding. Because agriculture is the county’s biggest industry, Pelayo’s work in Ashe County extends far beyond the students at the school. Each year, she works with the families of dozens of migrant students who move to the area for seasonal work on farms, which generally involves tagging and bundling Christmas trees and harvesting pumpkins. Pelayo helps the families enroll their students, connects them with supplies for school and home, and serves as a Spanish translator for parent-teacher meetings — ”whatever they need,” she said.
Kitty Honeycutt, executive director of the Ashe County Chamber of Commerce, doesn’t know how the county’s agriculture industry would survive without the migrant students Pelayo works with. “The need for guest workers is crucial for the agriculture industry — we have to have them,” she said.
A couple of years ago, Pelayo had the idea to drive to Boone, North Carolina, where Appalachian State University’s campus sits, to gather unwanted appliances and supplies from students moving out of their dorm rooms at the end of the year to donate to migrant families. She’s a “find a way or make a way” type of person, Honeycutt said.
Cox is searching for how to keep Pelayo on if Ashe County loses these federal funds next year. She’s talked with county officials to see if they could pay Pelayo’s salary, and begun calculating how much the district would need to charge families to keep the after-school program running. Ideally, she’d know ahead of time and not the night before the district is set to receive the money.
Districts across the country are grappling with similar questions. In Detroit, school leaders are preparing, at a minimum, to lose Title III money to teach English learners. More than 7,200 Detroit students received services funded by Title III in 2023.
In Wyoming, the small, rural Sheridan County School District 3 is trying to budget without Title II, IV and V money — funding for improving teacher quality, updating technology and resources for rural and low-income schools, among other uses, Superintendent Chase Christensen said.
Schools are trying to budget for cuts to other federal programs, too — such as Medicaid and food stamps. In Harrison School District 2, an urban district in Colorado Springs, Colorado, schools rely on Medicaid to provide students with counseling, nursing and other services.
The district projects that it could lose half the $15 million it receives in Medicaid next school year.
“It’s very, very stressful,” said Wendy Birhanzel, superintendent of Harrison School District 2. “For a while, it was every day, you were hearing something different. And you couldn’t even keep up with, ‘What’s the latest information today?’ That’s another thing we told our staff: If you can, just don’t watch the news about education right now.”
There’s another calculation for school leaders to make in conservative counties like Ashe, where 72 percent of the vote last year went for President Donald Trump: objecting to the cuts without angering voters. When North Carolina’s attorney general, a Democrat, joined the lawsuit against the administration over the frozen funds this summer, some school administrators told state officials they couldn’t publicly sign on, fearing local backlash, said Jack Hoke, executive director of the North Carolina School Superintendents’ Association.
Cox sees the effort to slash federal funds as a chance to show her community how Ashe County Schools uses this money. She believes people are misguided in thinking their schools don’t need it, not malicious.
“I know who our congresspeople are — I know they care about this area,” Cox said, even if they do not fully grasp how the money is used. “It’s an opportunity for me to educate them.”
If the Education Department is shuttered — which Trump said he plans to do in order to give more authority over education to states — she wants to be included in state-level discussions for how federal money flows to schools through North Carolina. And, importantly, she wants to know ahead of time what her schools might lose.
As Cox made her rounds to each of the schools that first week back, she glanced down at her phone and looked up with a smile. “We have hot water,” she said while walking in the hall of Blue Ridge Elementary School. It had lost hot water a few weeks earlier, but to Cox, this crisis was minor — one of many first-of-the-year hiccups she has come to expect.
Still, it’s one worry she can put out of her mind as she looks ahead to a year of uncertainties.
Meanwhile, the anxiety about this school year hasn’t reached the students, who were talking among themselves in the high school’s media center, creating collages in the elementary school’s art class and trekking up to Mount Jefferson — a state park that sits directly behind the district’s two high schools — for an annual trip.
They were just excited to be back.
Marina Villeneuve contributed data analysis to this story.
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.
SALEM, Va. — On a hot and humid August morning in this southwestern Virginia town, football training camp is in full swing at Roanoke College. Players cheer as a receiver makes a leaping one-handed catch, and linemen sweat through blocking drills. Practice hums along like a well-oiled machine — yet this is the first day this team has practiced, ever.
In fact, it’s the first day of practice for a Roanoke College varsity football team since 1942, when the college dropped football in the midst of World War II.
Roanoke is one of about a dozen schools that have added football programs in the last two years, with several more set to do so in 2026. They hope that having a team will increase enrollment, especially of men, whose ranks in college have been falling. Yet research consistently finds that while enrollment may spike initially, adding football does not produce long-term enrollment gains, or if it does, it is only for a few years.
Roanoke’s president, Frank Shushok Jr., nonetheless believes that bringing back football – and the various spirit-raising activities that go with it — will attract more students, especially men. The small liberal arts college lost nearly 300 students between 2019 and 2022, and things were likely to get worse; the country’s population of 18-year-olds is about to decline and colleges everywhere are competing for students from a smaller pool.
“Do I think adding sports strategically is helping the college maintain its enrollment base? It absolutely has for us,” said Shushok. “And it has in a time when men in particular aren’t going to college.”
Women outnumber men by about 60 percent to 40 percent at four-year colleges nationwide. Roanoke is a part of this trend. In 2019, the college had 1,125 women students and 817 men.
This fall, Roanoke will have 1,738 students altogether, about half men and half women. But the incoming freshman class is more than 55 percent male.
Sophomore linebacker Ethan Mapstone (26) jogs to the sideline at the end of a drill. Mapstone said he hadn’t planned to play college football until Roanoke head coach Bryan Stinespring recruited him. Credit: Miles MacClure for The Hechinger Report
“The goal was that football would, in a couple of years, bring in at least an additional hundred students to the college,” said Curtis Campbell, Roanoke’s athletic director, as he observed the first day of practice. “We’ve got 97 kids out there on the field. So we’re already at the goal.”
That number was 91 players as the season began, on Sept. 6 — and the Maroons won their first game, 23-7, over Virginia University of Lynchburg, on what Shushok called “a brilliant day full of community spirit and pride.”
“Our students were out in force, side by side with community members spanning the generations,” he said via email. “In a time when we all need more to celebrate and opportunities to gather, it is easy to say our first football game since 1942 was both historic and invigorating.”
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In the NCAA’s Division III, where Roanoke teams compete, athletic scholarships are not permitted. Athletes pay tuition or receive financial aid in the same way as other students, so adding football players will add revenue. For a small college, this can be significant.
Shushok said it’s not just about enrollment, though: He wants a livelier campus with more school spirit. Along with football, he started a marching band and a competitive cheerleading team.
“It plays to something that’s really important to 18- to 22-year-olds right now, which is a sense of belonging and spirit and excitement,” said Shushok, who came to Roanoke after being vice president of student affairs at Virginia Tech. Its Division I football team plays in a 65,000-seat stadium where fans jump up and down in unison to Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” as the players take the field.
The Maroons play in the local high school stadium — it seats 7,157 — and pay the city of Salem $2,850 per game in rent. The college raised $1.3 million from alumni and corporate sponsors to get the team up and running.
Roanoke College players gather on the sidelines during practice. Credit: Miles MacClure for The Hechinger Report
Despite the research showing limited enrollment gains from adding football, colleges keep doing it. About a dozen have added or relaunched football programs in the last two years, including New England College in New Hampshire and the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Several more plan to add football in 2026, including Chicago State University and Azusa Pacific University in California.
Calvin University in Michigan recently added football even though the student body was already half men, half women. The school wanted to broaden its overall appeal, Calvin Provost Noah Toly said, citing “school spirit, tradition, leadership development,” as well as the increased enrollment and “strengthened pipelines with feeder schools.”
“What you see is basically a one-year spike in male enrollment around guys who come to that school to help be part of starting up a team, but then that effect fades out over the next couple of years,” said Welch Suggs, an associate professor there and the lead author of that study. It found early modest enrollment spikes at colleges that added football compared to peers that didn’t and “statistically indistinguishable” differences after the first two years.
”What happens is that you have a substitution effect going on,” Suggs said. “There’s a population of students that really want to go to a football school; the football culture and everything with it really attracts some students. And there are others who really do not care one way or the other. And so I think what happens is that you are simply recruiting from different pools.”
Today, college leaders value any pool that includes men. Most prefer the campus population to be balanced between the sexes, and, considering the low number of male high school graduates going to college at all (39 percent in the last Pew survey), many worry about too few men being prepared for the future workforce.
“ I don’t know that we have done a good job of articulating the value, and of programming to the particular needs that some of our young men are bringing in this moment,” Shushok said. “I think it’s pretty obvious, if you read the literature out there, that a lot of men are feeling undervalued and perhaps unseen in our culture.”
Roanoke College President Frank Shushok Jr. in his office. Shushok said he brought football back to Roanoke to boost enrollment and create a livelier campus. Credit: Miles MacClure for The Hechinger Report
Shushok said that Roanoke’s enrollment-building strategy was not centered on athletics. The college has also forged partnerships with local community colleges, guaranteeing students admission after they complete their associate degree, and has added nine new majors in 2024, including cannabis studies. Shushok pointed out that while freshman enrollment is down slightly this year, the community college program has produced a big increase in transfer students, from 65 in fall of 2024 to 91 this fall.
About 55 percent of Roanoke’s students come from Virginia, but 75 of the football team’s 91 players are Virginians. The head coach, Bryan Stinespring, a 61-year-old Virginia native, knows that recruiting territory, having worked on the coaching staffs at several Virginia universities in his career.
When Stinespring took over as head coach in 2023, hoping to inspire existing students and potential applicants to join his new team, there was no locker room, no shoulder pads or tackling dummies, no uniforms.
“The first set of recruits that came on campus, we ran down to Dick’s, got a football, went to the bookstore, got a sweatshirt,” said Stinespring, referring to a local Dick’s Sporting Goods store. “These kids came on campus and they had to believe in the vision that we had.”
Students bought into that vision; 61 of them joined a club team last fall, which played four exhibition games in preparation for this year. The community bought in, too; 9,200 fans showed up to the first club game, about 2,000 of them perched on a grassy hill overlooking the end zone.
Linebackers Connor Cox (40) and Austin Fisher (20) look on from the sidelines. Credit: Miles MacClure for The Hechinger Report
Before Ethan Mapstone, a sophomore, committed to Roanoke, he was on the verge of giving up football, having sustained several injuries in high school. Then Stinespring called.
“I could hear by the tone of his voice how serious he meant everything he was saying,” said Mapstone, a 6-foot-1-inch linebacker from Virginia Beach. “I was on a visit a week later, committed two weeks later.”
To him, the football leaders at Roanoke seemed to be “a bunch of people on a mission ready to make something happen, and I think that’s what drove me in.”
KJ Bratton, a junior wide receiver and transfer student from the University of Virginia, said he was drawn to Roanoke not because of football but because of the focus on individual attention in small classes. “You definitely get that one-on-one attention with your teacher, that definitely helps you in the long run,” said Bratton.
Jaden Davis, a sophomore wide receiver who was an honor roll student in high school, said, “ The staff, they care about all the students. They’ll pull you aside, they know you personally, they’ll send you emails, invite you to office hours, and they just work with you to do the best you can.”
Not everyone was on board with football returning to the college when the plan was first announced. Some faculty and administrators were concerned football would change the campus culture, said Campbell, the athletic director.
Sophomore wide receiver Jaden Davis poses for a photograph before the first practice of the season. Davis said the individual attention he could get from professors is what attracted him to Roanoke. Credit: Miles MacClure for The Hechinger Report
“There were just stereotypes about football players,” he said. “You know, they’re not smart, they’re troublemakers. They’re gonna do this and they’re gonna do that, be disruptive.”
But the stereotypes turned out to be unwarranted,he said.When the club team started, he said, “I got so many compliments last year from faculty and staff and campus security about how respectful and polite and nice our students were, how they behaved in the classroom, sitting in the front row and just being role models.”
Payton Rigney, a junior who helps out with the football team, concurred. “All the professors like them because they say ‘yes, sir’ and ‘no, ma’am,’” she said.
Like most Division III athletes, the Roanoke players know that they have little chance of making football a professional career. Mapstone said there are other reasons to embrace the sport.
“It’s a great blessing to be able to do what we do,” he said. “There’s many people that I speak to who are older and, and they reminisce about the times that they had to play football, and it’s very limited time.
“And even though there’s not a future for it, I love it. It’s a Thursday, my only problem in the world is that there’s dew on my shoes.”
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.
Writing can be hard, equal parts heavy lifting and drudgery. No wonder so many students are turning to the time-saving allure of ChatGPT, which can crank out entire papers in seconds. It rescues them from procrastination jams and dreaded all-nighters, magically freeing up more time for other pursuits, like, say … doomscrolling.
Of course, no one learns to be a better writer when someone else (or some AI bot) is doing the work for them. The question is whether chatbots can morph into decent writing teachers or coaches that students actually want to consult to improve their writing, and not just use for shortcuts.
Maybe.
Jennifer Meyer, an assistant professor at the University of Vienna in Austria, has been studying how AI bots can be used to improve student writing for several years. In an interview, she explained why she is cautious about the ability of AI to make us better writers andis still testing how to use the new technology effectively.
All in the timing
Meyer says that just because ChatGPT is available 24/7 doesn’t mean students should consult it at the start of the writing process. Instead, Meyer believes that students would generally learn more if they wrote a first draft on their own.
That’s when AI could be most helpful, she thinks. With some prompting, a chatbot could provide immediate writing feedback targeted to each students’ needs. One student might need to practice writing shorter sentences. Another might be struggling with story structure and outlining. AI could theoretically meetan entire classroom’s individual needsfaster than a human teacher.
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In Meyer’s experiments, she inserted AI only after the first draft was done as part of the revision process. In a study published in 2024, she randomly assigned 200 German high school students to receive AI feedback after writing a draft of an essay in English. Their revised essays were stronger than those of 250students who were also told to revise, but didn’t get help from AI.
In surveys, those with AI feedback also said they felt more motivated to rewrite than those who didn’t get feedback. That motivation is critical. Often students aren’t in the mood to rewrite, and without revisions, students can’t become better writers.
Meyer doesn’t consider her experiment proof that AI is a great writing teacher. She didn’t compare it with how student writing improved after human feedback. Her experiment compared only AI feedback with no feedback.
Most importantly, one dose of AI writing feedback wasn’t enough to elevate students’ writing skills. On a second, fresh essay topic, the students who had previously received AI feedback didn’t write any better than the students who hadn’t been helped by AI.
It’s unclear how many rounds of AI feedback it would take to boost a student’s writing skills more permanently, not just help revise the essay at hand.
And Meyer doesn’t know whether a student would want to keep discussing writing with an AI bot over and over again. Maybe students were willing to engage with it in this experiment because it was a novelty, but could soon tire of it. That’s next on Meyer’s research agenda.
A viral MIT study
A much smaller MIT study published earlier this year echoes Meyer’s theory. “Your Brain on ChatGPT” went viral because it seemed to say that using ChatGPT to help write an essay made students’ brains less engaged. Researchers found that students who wrote an essay without any online tools had stronger brain connectivity and activity than students who used AI or consulted Google to search for source materials. (Using Google while writing wasn’t nearly as bad for the brain as AI.)
Although those results made headlines, there was more to the experiment. The students who initially wrote an essay on their own were later given ChatGPT to help improve their essays. That switch to ChatGPT boosted brain activity, in contrast to what the neuroscientists found during the initial writing process.
These studies add to the evidence that delaying AI a bit, after some initial thinking and drafting, could be a sweet spot in learning. That’s something researchers need to test more.
Still, Meyer remains concerned about giving AI tools to very weak writers and to young children who haven’t developed basic writing skills. “This could be a real problem,” said Meyer. “It could be detrimental to use these tools too early.”
Cheating your way to learning?
Meyer doesn’t think it’s always a bad idea for students to ask ChatGPT to do the writing for them.
Just as young artists learn to paint by copying masterpieces in museums, students might learn to write better by copying good writing. (The late great New Yorker editor John Bennet taught Jill to write this way. He called it “copy work” and he encouraged his journalism students to do it every week by copying longhand the words of legendary writers, not AI.)
Meyer suggests that students ask ChatGPT to write a sample essay that meets their teacher’s assignment and grading criteria. The next step is key. If students pretend it’s their own piece and submit it, that’s cheating. They’ve also offloaded cognitive work to technology and haven’t learned anything.
But the AI essay can be an effective teaching tool, in theory, if students study the arguments, organizational structure, sentence construction and vocabulary before writing a new draft in their own words. Ideally, the next assignment should be better if students have learned through that analysis andinternalized the style and techniques of the model essay, Meyer said.
“My hypothesis would be as long as there’s cognitive effort with it, as long as there’s a lot of time on task and like critical thinking about the output, then it should be fine,” said Meyer.
Reconsidering praise
Everyone likes a compliment. But too much praise can drown learning just as too much water can keep flowers from blooming.
ChatGPT has a tendency to pour the praise on thick and often begins with banal flattery, like “Great job!” even when a student’s writing needs a lot of work. In Meyer’s test of whether AI feedback can improve students’ writing, she intentionally told ChatGPT not to start with praise and instead go straight to constructive criticism.
Her parsimonious approach to praise was inspired by a 2023 writing study about what motivates students to revise. The study found that when teachers started off with general praise, students were left with the false impression that their work was already good enough so they didn’t put in the extra effort to rewrite.
In Meyer’s experiment, the praise-free feedback was effective in getting students to revise and improve their essays. But she didn’t set up a direct competition between the two approaches — praise-free vs. praise-full — so we don’t know for sure which is more effective when students are interacting with AI.
Being stingy with praise rubs real teachers the wrong way. After Meyer removed praise from the feedback, teachers told her they wanted to restore it. “They wondered about why the feedback was so negative,” Meyer said. “That’s not how they would do it.”
Meyer and other researchers may one day solve the puzzle of how to turn AI chatbots into great writing coaches. But whether students will have the willpower or desire to forgo an instantly written essay is another matter. As long as ChatGPT continues to allow students to take the easy way out, it’s human nature to do so.
Shirley Liu is a graduate student in education at Northwestern University. Liu reported and wrote this story along with The Hechinger Report’s Jill Barshay.
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.
Video shows a boy walking on the monorail tracks at Hersheypark before being rescued by an adult.Watch the video in the player above.The video, sent to sister station WGAL, shows a panicked crowd trying to direct the child to a nearby roof, where a man is waiting to grab him.The man then hops up on the monorail from the roof of the nearby building, picks up the boy and carries him to safety. The child was reported missing around 5:05 p.m. Saturday after becoming separated from his parents, according to a statement from a spokesperson for Hersheypark. While employees were searching for the boy, he entered a secured area for the monorail and remained there for almost 20 minutes before briefly walking along the track. The monorail was not in operation, and the ride was chained off as the child walked on the tracks, according to the park. The park said a guest quickly noticed the child walking on the tracks and helped the child off the track to safety.
HERSHEY, Pa. —
Video shows a boy walking on the monorail tracks at Hersheypark before being rescued by an adult.
Watch the video in the player above.
The video, sent to sister station WGAL, shows a panicked crowd trying to direct the child to a nearby roof, where a man is waiting to grab him.
The man then hops up on the monorail from the roof of the nearby building, picks up the boy and carries him to safety.
The child was reported missing around 5:05 p.m. Saturday after becoming separated from his parents, according to a statement from a spokesperson for Hersheypark.
While employees were searching for the boy, he entered a secured area for the monorail and remained there for almost 20 minutes before briefly walking along the track.
The monorail was not in operation, and the ride was chained off as the child walked on the tracks, according to the park.
The park said a guest quickly noticed the child walking on the tracks and helped the child off the track to safety.
ELYRIA, Ohio —Nolan Norman had no idea what microelectronic manufacturing entailed when his adviser at Midview High suggested he take the school’s new class on it last year.
Yet once he started fusing metal to circuit boards, he says he was hooked. “When I was little, I thought that wizards made these things,” the 18-year-old joked of the electronics he’s now able to assemble. Despite long “hating” the idea of college, he was motivated to enroll in the microelectronic manufacturing bachelor’s degree program at nearby Lorain County Community College this fall. He’s spent the summer working in a job in the field that gives him both college credit and pays $18 an hour. Said Norman: “Now I’m seeing the path to get to be one of these wizards.”
Norman’s path wasn’t accidental: Two years ago, Lorain County Community College partnered with Midview High to create the course, one of several ways the college is trying to recruit and train more young people for jobs in manufacturing.
Nationally, more than 400,000 manufacturing jobs are going unfilled, many of them in advanced manufacturing, which requires the sort of high-tech skills and postsecondary credentials that Norman is working toward. President Donald Trump is leveraging tariffs in part, he has said, to grow manufacturing jobs in the United States, including those that involve machinery or robotics and training after high school.
Nolan Norman, 18, an incoming freshman at Lorain County Community College, observes a circuit board under a microscope on Aug. 6 in Elyria, Ohio. Credit: Dustin Franz for The Hechinger Report
Yet as it is, colleges have struggled to add and revise their training based on employer input and prepare students for tomorrow’s jobs, not just today’s. In the area surrounding Lorain County Community College, officials estimate that they’d have to teach four times the number of students to meet today’s unfilled manufacturing jobs.
Gogebic Community College, in rural Michigan, suspended its 22-year-old manufacturing technology program this spring because of low enrollment. “We could not get people into it,” registrar Karen Ball said, speaking in her personal capacity and not on behalf of the institution. “The needs in manufacturing are evolving so quickly, that to stay on top of it is too difficult.”
And then there is the history of manufacturing in communities like Norman’s, where so many factories moved to other countries in recent decades. The manufacturing workforce in the Great Lakes region shrunk by 35 percent between 2000 and 2010, a loss of 1.6 million jobs. But nationwide manufacturing has seen some recovery since then, rising from 11.5 million manufacturing jobs in 2010 to 12.9 million today, according to an analysis by the Economic Innovation Group.
“If your family experienced tumultuous layoffs in steel or automotives, they may see manufacturing as a risky pathway rather than a solid pathway,” said Marisa White, vice president for enrollment management and student services at Lorain County Community College. “Individuals are like, ‘I don’t want my kids to go into something like that.’”
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White and other Lorain officials, though, have been slowly making strides in adding more students in recent years — and in trying to keep up with the needs of companies.
Printed circuit boards before components are attached in a lab at Lorain County Community College in Elyria, Ohio. Credit: Dustin Franz for The Hechinger Report
In addition to partnering with Midview High, staff from the college set up tables at food banks and Boys and Girls Clubs where they answer questions about its manufacturing degree and certificate programs, and even partner with a nearby manufacturing nonprofit that uses holograms and a robot dog to get the attention of high school students. That is paying off, officials say. The college now produces 120 graduates each year in advanced manufacturing — a category that includes industrial engineering tech, mechanical engineering tech, welding, automation and microelectronics — compared to 43, a decade ago.
It has also cultivated a large network of local employers and a system to do market research before launching certificate programs. In some cases, it partners with companies that pay for employees to get training at Lorain college. In a classroom on a recent Wednesday, one of those electrician apprentices, Tyler Tector, 25, had rigged a series of plastic tubes to a small air pump. He hoped it would generate enough suction to keep its grip on his lab partner’s smartphone, which dangled precariously in the air (and already had a cracked screen from some previous misadventure).
The assignment was part of a class in practical applications of fluid power. Tector’s employer, Ford Motor Co., was sending him and a small group of other apprentice electricians to take this class once a week, so they could better work with the growing number of robots at the local engine plant.
Nick Wade, an electrical apprentice for Ford Motor Co., works on a circuitry exercise during professor Brian Iselin’s practical applications of fluid power course at Lorain County Community College in Elyria, Ohio. Credit: Dustin Franz for The Hechinger Report
“Robots are the best co-workers,” joked Tector, who added that he’s not worried about bots putting him out of a job because so many humans are needed to fix them. “They do exactly what you tell them to do. They don’t ask questions. They don’t yell and complain.” They are finicky though, he added. If anything in a robot’s area gets bumped out of place even a fraction of an inch, that could throw the machine off and require reprogramming.
So many employers told college officials they need technicians with basic knowledge across a range of trades that the college is starting a new associate degree program in the fall called Multicraft Industrial Maintenance that will include lessons like the one Tector is doing but in a condensed format.
“Because of the high-tech nature of things, employers don’t want students siloed into trades anymore,” said Brian Iselin, an assistant professor in manufacturing who is leading the effort.
Johnny Vanderford, who leads the college’s microelectronic manufacturing degree program, often spends part of his lunch break scouring LinkedIn for the latest job postings by local employers to see what skills they are looking for. His program’s model involves finding every student a paid internship, and students can take classes two days a week or in the evening to have the rest of the time free for paid work in the field.
Professor Brian Iselin teaches a course to employees of Ford’s Cleveland Engine Plant No. 1 at Lorain County Community College in Elyria, Ohio. Credit: Dustin Franz for The Hechinger Report
Vanderford pointed to a PowerPoint slide showing more than 90 manufacturing companies in the area he said the college has worked with: “We basically tailor our curriculum to meet their workforce needs.” In some cases that means wedging into a class syllabus training on some specialized machine that might be used at only a handful of employers.
Rather than simply having advisory committees with a few large companies that meet occasionally, today Lorain and many other colleges follow a model that involves frequent discussions with company leaders, instructors directly participating in those meetings and a greater focus on the skills employers need.
“Those relationships take time,” said Shalin Jyotishi, managing director of the Future of Work and Innovation Economy Initiative at the think tank New America. He says that it is hard for other community colleges to replicate best practices from Lorain because they are labor-intensive to enact.
Employers also have a tendency to change their plans. For instance, when Tesla pledged to build an electrical vehicle plant in Flint, Michigan, the local Mott Community College started an EV program, said Jyotishi. But the plant never came. “The college still has a Tesla sign,” he said.
The numbers no longer add up at Gogebic Community College, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
When the college suspended its program in manufacturing technology in May, it had just three students.
As with many programs at the college, a single employee was charged with administering and teaching. Doing all that plus staying on top of nearby companies’ workforce needs was “unsustainable,” said Ball, the registrar.
The few small manufacturers in the area all say they have different needs, rather than one clear set of skills, she said, noting that “you can’t be a generalist in manufacturing.” Even when the college does identify a needed skill to teach, it takes at least six months to a year to get the program approved by college leaders and the accreditor. By then, companies might need something different.
And the pay offered by small manufacturers is often low, despite an expectation of training beyond a high school diploma, said Ball.
The Richard Desich SMART Center at Lorain County Community College in Elyria, Ohio, houses the microelectronic manufacturing systems program, which teaches students about the manufacture of semiconductors. Credit: Dustin Franz for The Hechinger Report
Nationwide, automation has reduced the earning power for many manufacturing jobs, said Jyotishi of New America. “For a long time manufacturing was the bedrock of the middle class,” said Jyotishi. “That wage premium for manufacturing has actually gone away.”
And there’s a danger that as colleges aim to please employers, they will create programs that are too narrow, argues Davis Jenkins, senior research scholar at Columbia University’s Community College Research Center. (Editor’s note: The Hechinger Report, which produced this story, is an independent unit of Columbia’s Teachers College.) “You don’t want specific skills training — you don’t want to just train students to work in a fab,” he said, referring to a facility where microchips and other electronics are produced. “Whenever schools buy a lot of specific equipment for training, I worry a lot. What students really need are broader skills.”
Even Lorain doesn’t always find the right fit. During the pandemic, the college started what it calls fast-track programs, which typically run 16 weeks, across a range of professional fields (not just manufacturing). But because of mixed success attracting students, officials recently slimmed the list from 60 to 13, said Tracy Green, vice president of strategic and institutional development at Lorain County Community College. And the college recently started winding down a program in industrial safety because of a lack of student interest, even though there are still a large number of job postings by local companies for jobs with those skills, said Iselin.
One provision in Trump’s new “one big, beautiful bill” promises a boost to manufacturing education, however. For the first time, the law will allow low-income students to use federal Pell Grants for short-term certificate programs, in what is known as Workforce Pell. It’s a change many community college leaders have been calling for for years as they have created more short-term programs in response to demand by students and employers who want to quickly gain new skills in fast-changing areas, including manufacturing. But that program won’t be up and running until the 2026-27 academic year.
The promise of a big new employer moving to town can galvanize student interest in manufacturing.
In Ohio, the talk for years has been a $28 billion Intel chip manufacturing plant under construction in Columbus. The facility is expected to bring some 3,000 jobs to the area, and the company has committed $50 million to workforce education in the state, including $2 million to Lorain County Community College, which it used to buy new classroom equipment, support student scholarships, and pay for program development and instructor training.
Chris Dukles, 36, an electrician apprentice for Ford Motor Co., takes notes during a course taught by Brian Iselin at Lorain County Community College. Credit: Dustin Franz for The Hechinger Report
The top graduates in Lorain County Community College’s microelectronic manufacturing program each year typically get internships at Intel’s closest existing plant, which is in Chandler, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix. It’s a motivator to work hard in their classes, some students say.
Lia Douglas, a student in the microelectronic manufacturing program at Lorain, scored one of those slots and headed to Arizona last summer. The experience, though, was sobering.
“My plan really was to make a good impression with my internship, get a job maybe in Arizona even if it was for a year or two, and then try to move back to Ohio when they have an Ohio plant,” she said.
But one day last July, all the employees were unexpectedly summoned to an all-hands call where the company announced a wave of layoffs and reductions in some benefits that had interested Douglas, including a sabbatical program. This year, Intel announced that the opening of the Ohio plant has been delayed until 2030.
“I learned I had a little too much faith in a company and the promises of a company,” she said. “And it reminded me that at the end of the day, the company has to make money.”
She’s still glad she chose Lorain’s program, which has landed her several local internships and opened her eyes to the many small and mid-sized manufacturers in the area.
Lia Douglas is a student in the microelectronic manufacturing program at Lorain County Community College. Credit: Dustin Franz for The Hechinger Report
And she has been hooked on a career in making things ever since she was in middle school and a family friend taught her a bit of welding. Her hero was Adam Savage, co-host of the TV show “MythBusters,” who she even got to meet at a comic book convention in Cleveland.
Douglas complains that students are told in high school that they either have to choose a trade for hands-on work or an academic track to prepare for a career behind a desk that might involve design and project management. She says that as manufacturing changes, there’s plenty of room to do both. In fact, she says, when a group of doctoral students from Kent State University recently visited the college’s clean room, she was amused to see them struggle with some of the tools the students routinely use in the microelectronic manufacturing program.
“It takes as much brainpower to figure out what is the right tool for the right process as getting a Ph.D.,” she said.
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.
