Chalkbeat

Long-awaited FAFSA fix means students from immigrant families can finally finish aid applications

2024-03-18T20:41:17+00:00

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Many students breathed a sigh of relief last week when federal education officials announced critical fixes to the federal application for financial aid that allows parents without Social Security numbers to contribute information to the form.

The change means tens of thousands of U.S. citizen students and others who are eligible for federal financial aid can finally complete their FAFSAs. But it also leaves families and college counselors scrambling to get through the process months after other students. And some families are still encountering problems.

“It can be very discouraging for students and families who feel like they’re doing all the right things and yet are still coming up against barriers,” said Amanda Seider, who oversees the Massachusetts branch of the college access group OneGoal.

Chalkbeat reported in January that a technical glitch had blocked students with undocumented parents from completing their financial aid applications for over two months. That left many educators and college access groups worried that students who already face higher barriers to college would be deterred by the delays — piled on top of an already difficult rollout of the new, supposedly easier FAFSA. Some colleges and scholarships award aid on a first-come, first-served basis, so students who apply later are at a disadvantage.

During that time, students were left to navigate a confusing array of options, including whether they should just sit tight and wait for a fix, or try a partial workaround that could put them at a higher risk of making a mistake on their application or would require them to come back and fill out more paperwork later.

And there are still outstanding issues. As federal officials put the new fix in place, they uncovered two more issues affecting the same group of students that still need to be resolved.

That means parents without Social Security numbers will have to enter their financial information manually, instead of having it pulled directly from the IRS. And in some cases — when a parent enters a name or address that doesn’t exactly match what their child put down, for example — parents are still getting error messages that block them from filling out the form. Federal officials said last week they would work to fix the issue “in the coming days.”

Federal officials estimated that around 2% of financial aid applicants were affected by the original Social Security number glitch, which would equate to hundreds of thousands of students in a typical year.

The issue caught the attention of dozens of Democratic House members, who sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona urging the department to fix the problem quickly. In a press release issued last week, U.S. Rep. Jared Huffman of California said the glitch was a “completely unacceptable error” that had caused “fear, stress, and missed opportunities for many kids across my district and the country.”

“I hope to see the Department take the steps necessary to ensure issues like this never arise again,” Huffman said.

The rollout of the new FAFSA has been riddled with problems and delays. Education department officials have blamed insufficient funding and significant technical challenges in updating old systems. Republicans have accused the administration of being distracted by dealing with student loan forgiveness. Outside observers have said all these factors and more played a role, according to news reports.

FAFSA applications are down 33% compared with this time last year, according to federal data tracked by the National College Attainment Network.

In the meantime, many colleges have pushed back deadlines as they wait for student financial information that will help them assemble aid packages. And families are waiting.

Now, college counselors and advisers say they’re working to make sure students know what to do if they continue to encounter glitches. They’re also trying to keep students’ spirits up and getting them ready to compare their financial aid and acceptance packages when they come in.

“The most important thing we can do is to share information about how to go about entering information manually, how to make sure that as they are completing those steps that it requires a lot of precision,” Seider said. “We really want to make sure that students and families are being proactive, and not experiencing this as their shortcoming, but rather saying ‘Hey, this system has been a little confusing, we need some help with it.’”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Biden education budget proposal includes $8 billion to extend pandemic recovery work like tutoring

2024-03-11T21:56:58+00:00

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With a deadline looming to spend pandemic education dollars, the Biden administration has proposed making another $8 billion available to states and school districts to encourage better attendance and support academic recovery through tutoring and summer school.

The idea is a key component of President Joe Biden’s proposed budget for the U.S. Department of Education for fiscal year 2025, and represents an acknowledgment that schools still have a lot of work to do to recover from pandemic learning disruptions. The proposal comes a few months after the Biden administration called on schools to prioritize spending remaining COVID relief funding in these same areas.

The president’s budget proposal, announced Monday, also calls for modest increases to federal programs supporting high-poverty schools, students learning English as a second language, and students with disabilities. The administration also wants more money to support the Office for Civil Rights, and a $750 increase in the maximum Pell Grant award to help make college more affordable.

The White House budget plan will almost certainly not be adopted as written. It heads to a dysfunctional Congress that has careened between threats of government shutdown and short-term spending resolutions. The Republicans who control the House have been particularly hostile to Biden’s efforts to increase spending in several areas , including the Title I program that supports high-poverty schools.

Overall the budget proposal calls for more than $82 billion in discretionary spending for the education department, a 4% increase from this year.

Officials emphasized that this budget proposal complies with spending caps agreed to in last year’s bipartisan Fiscal Responsibility Act, while still investing in initiatives they hope will improve student success.

“When it comes to education, this budget is about raising the bar,” Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a call with reporters. “There are historic investments promised on top of historic investments delivered.”

Budget offers way to continue tutoring, attendance outreach

American schools received a combined $190 billion in assistance across three pandemic aid packages and have until September to spend any remaining money. Many schools have come to rely on their tutoring programs and want to keep them going after the pandemic aid expires.

But how they’ll fund them has been a big question. Some states have pledged added tutoring funds, but many districts would likely struggle to keep providing intensive help to students without making cuts elsewhere in their budget.

Similarly, the rate at which students are missing lots of school remains well above pre-pandemic levels in many parts of the country. Many schools launched home visit programs or hired staff specifically to work with kids who aren’t attending regularly, but school leaders say it will take additional time and investment to re-engage students and continue to boost attendance rates.

Expanded summer school programs were a popular investment during the pandemic, though they’ve been only moderately successful in helping students catch up. They’ve also been a common place school leaders have scaled back as COVID relief funding has wound down.

The proposed $8 billion in new money isn’t intended to replace pandemic assistance but would supplement current efforts. Officials envision a competitive grant program that would prioritize high-poverty schools, schools in communities especially hard-hit by COVID, and schools identified as needing academic improvement under federal accountability rules.

More money for English learners, civil rights investigations

Biden’s budget proposal calls for a 1.1% increase, or $200 million, to local grants in the Title I program, which provides money to low-income schools. Earlier in his administration, Biden called on Congress to double spending on Title I, but that hasn’t come to fruition. Congressional Republicans have questioned whether schools need more money after the pandemic stimulus, and last year, they sought to significantly cut Title I spending.

Cardona characterized this budget as defending public education from a “slash-and-burn” approach that would endanger the futures of American students.

Similarly, the White House is proposing a 1.4% increase in spending to support K-12 special education services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, as well as additional money for infants, toddlers, and preschool students with disabilities and grants to recruit special education teachers. Advocates have long called for the federal government to increase special education funding. Federal law lays out disabled students’ educational rights but leaves most of the costs to states and school districts.

The budget proposal calls for a roughly 5% increase or $50 million in new spending for Title III, which supports English learners.

Biden’s budget proposal also includes an extra $22 million, a 16% increase, for the Office for Civil Rights, which conducts investigations into allegations of discrimination in schools. Recently, the department announced it is looking into several incidents involving antisemitism or anti-Muslim discrimination at colleges and K-12 schools since the war between Israel and Hamas broke out in October.

The budget also calls for increased funding for preschool, student mental health, and community schools, which provide a wide range of services to support students and their families, as well as programs to encourage diverse candidates to enter the teaching profession.

The budget proposal includes a few cuts as well, including a 9% or $40 million reduction in a program that supports new charter schools and the replication of high-quality charter models.

Budget seeks to mitigate college costs

Biden’s budget blueprint would also increase the maximum Pell Grant award to $8,145, a 10% increase from current levels. Pell grants are available to college students from low-income families, and unlike loans, do not need to be repaid.

Budget analysts have warned of a looming shortfall in the Pell program after Congress expanded eligibility at the same time more students are heading back to college. The most recent continuing resolution to keep the federal government open walks back some of that recent expansion.

Advocates have argued that the maximum Pell award should be closer to $13,000 to keep pace with tuition increases and keep the door open to college for students of modest means.

The budget would increase funding for programs that allow high school students to earn college credit before graduating and for grants that help colleges support first-generation students and increase graduation rates.

The budget also calls for partnerships with states and tribes to make two years of community college free for students going to college for the first time and workers looking to change careers. Free community college was one of several education proposals that Biden ran on in 2020 that hasn’t gotten traction.

And the budget calls for more investment in the Office of Federal Student Aid amid a rocky rollout of a new federal financial aid form.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

A glitch blocks thousands of immigrant families from a new, simpler FAFSA. The fix is TBD.

2024-01-25T22:20:06+00:00

Leer en español.

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Update as of Feb. 21: There are now two workarounds for the Social Security number problem, one a paper form and the other online. Federal officials promise a permanent fix is coming in March.

Like many high school seniors, 18-year-old Jocelyn is trying to get through her college application to-do list.

She’s applied to 10 colleges so far. Northeastern University in Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago are her top picks. She’d like to study veterinary medicine and work with animals like her two cats, Strawberry and Copito.

With the help of her sibling, Jocelyn completed her portion of the federal application for financial aid in around an hour. But now she’s stuck. That’s because her mom doesn’t have a Social Security number, so she hasn’t been able to add her financial information.

The new Free Application for Federal Student Aid that debuted last month was supposed to be easier for students and families to complete. And in many ways it is: It’s shorter, and it pulls tax information directly from the IRS instead of asking families to enter it themselves. The goal is to get more students to apply for aid and attend college.

But the form was released months later than usual, leaving students much less time to complete it and schools scrambling to offer help. On top of that, many families have experienced glitches. One of the biggest issues is that parents who don’t have a Social Security number can’t enter their information right now, and workarounds from prior years are gone. Potentially tens of thousands of U.S. citizen students and others with legal status — who are eligible for federal financial aid regardless of their parents’ immigration status — could be affected.

Federal officials say a fix is on the way, but can’t say when. Education advocates say there needs to be a stronger sense of urgency to resolve the issue, as some colleges award aid on a first-come, first-served basis.

Eighteen-year-old Jocelyn shows the Instagram video she watched to make sure she filled out her portion of the FAFSA correctly.

“We need to be working around the clock,” said Amalia Chamorro, who directs the education policy project for UnidosUS, a civil rights group that advocates to improve educational opportunities for Latino students. “We do worry that this is just another hurdle, another barrier, another way that they’re getting the message that they don’t matter, that they’re not as deserving of pursuing post-secondary education. That’s not the message that we want them to get.”

Jocelyn, whose last name Chalkbeat is withholding so as not to jeopardize her mother’s immigration status, is feeling stressed. But she’s trying to stay optimistic that she’ll be able to check this off her list soon, too.

“I didn’t want to turn in the FAFSA form late, and now I’m going to have to wait,” she said. “I know that my other friends have turned it in already, and I feel like I’m a little behind.”

Why some students are getting stuck on new FAFSA

Jocelyn isn’t the only one of her classmates having trouble.

On a visit in mid-January to Kelvyn Park High School in Chicago, just two of the 15 students in her class that helps students prepare for and apply to college had managed to complete the FAFSA. The high school serves predominantly Latino students from low-income families, many of whom will be the first in their family to attend college.

Some students got tripped up trying to add their parents as “contributors” to the FAFSA, a new step that requires them to sign up for an account and verify their identity. In the past, students could more easily fill out their parent’s portion for them.

That has presented challenges especially for families who are unfamiliar with the financial aid process, who have language barriers, or who worry about sharing personal information with the federal government.

When students are the first in their family to attend college, or there are immigration concerns, “You’re going to have a lot of paranoia, you’re going to have a lot of anxieties around it,” said Josh Kumm, who teaches Jocelyn’s class in partnership with OneGoal, a nonprofit college access organization that works in over 30 high schools in Chicago.

Eighteen-year-old Breann Sanford was one of the lucky ones who got through.

It helped that her mom was familiar with the FAFSA — she filled one out when she took a few college classes — and Sanford’s college and career coach knew just what to do when Sanford accidentally entered her email instead of her mom’s in one instance.

“It was a big help,” she said. “I knew I had a lot of different support options that I could go to if I needed help.”

Breann Sanford, 18, was able to submit her FAFSA successfully by mid-January. In her class at Kelvyn Park High School in Chicago that helps students apply to college, only a few completed the form without challenges.

Others are struggling for other reasons. During the recent visit, 18-year-old Ángel Serrano said he was still trying to tell his mom that he’s applying to college and needs her help with the financial aid form. His window to do that is on Wednesdays — the only day she’s not exhausted or working, Serrano said.

Another student in the class needs financial information from his mom, but they’re no longer living together or on speaking terms.

“You’ve got all these other things going on,” Kumm said. “It’s not just socioeconomic, it’s also the social-emotional parts of the family dynamics … That’s complicated.”

One-on-one help is key, but some FAFSA issues need federal fix

One-on-one support has been crucial for students to navigate FAFSA hiccups, though school counselors and college coaches have been swamped with requests for help. Sometimes the fix is to sit on hold with the U.S. Department of Education for hours — a step that’s impossible for many working parents.

Elve Mitchell, the senior director of program operations for College Possible in Chicago, a college access organization that works with a half-dozen high schools in the city, said one big thing his organization’s coaches are working on is making sure students and parents know the right questions to ask when they finally do get through to a live person on the department’s helpline.

Another way school staff and coaches are trying to help is by finding other ways students can work on their applications, such as fine-tuning a personal essay or using a federal student aid estimator to do some rough comparisons of college costs.

But for students whose parents do not have Social Security numbers, there isn’t much a school counselor can do right now.

When Jocelyn met with her school’s college and career coach this week, the advice was to sit tight, keep checking the federal government’s website, and wait for “the green light on what to do.”

Schools like Kelvyn Park High School in Chicago have been stepping in to offer students help when they've struggled to complete the new FAFSA form.

In the past, parents without a Social Security number could enter all zeros and sign a paper form.

The education department set up a new process for these parents to verify their identity through a credit agency, but educators say it’s not working consistently. Parents have had to call the federal helpline, open a case, and then share documents that prove their identity.

“For someone who’s undocumented, it’s very scary to give the federal government any documentation,” said Tony Petraitis, a college and career curriculum specialist for Chicago Public Schools, who’s been assembling how-to guides with screenshots to support school counselors. “For one of our most vulnerable populations, it’s a pretty big deal.”

Even if the credit agency produces a correct match, these parents still can’t share additional information on the FAFSA until the federal government comes up with a fix.

Chamorro, of UnidosUS, hopes the added delays and frustrations don’t deter students from applying to college.

“We don’t want them to give up,” she said.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Millions of kids are newly eligible for free school meals — but many will likely miss out

2023-10-11T17:37:22+00:00

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Dylan Beitz’s ears perked up when federal officials announced last month that a new rule would allow more schools to offer free breakfast and lunch to all students.

That rule would cover Jefferson County schools, the district in West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle where Beitz oversees child nutrition. Before the change, the district fell just below the federal cutoff for offering free meals to all 8,400 of its students as part of a national program meant to help high-poverty schools.

Under the new rule, which takes effect later this month, Jefferson County could go from offering free meals in seven schools to all 16. Beitz knew that could save the district time and labor — no more mailing bills for unpaid meal debt — and give families extra money to spend on other expenses.

“I think it’s something that we want to go to,” Beitz said. But first, the district has to see if it can afford to “bite that bullet” if there are out-of-pocket costs: “We’ve really got to look and see what the financial repercussions are.”

Beitz isn’t the only one crunching the numbers. Recent headlines proclaimed the new rule would grant millions of students access to free school meals. And there’s research indicating that universal free meals may provide academic and other advantages for students. Yet federal officials and school nutrition experts say many kids who could benefit will actually miss out.

That’s because without additional funding from Congress that’s probably not on the horizon, districts that want to participate must weigh the costs and benefits of providing more free meals against other priorities.

“Unless they have additional resources, or the state is able to provide additional resources, a lot of the newly eligible schools will find it difficult financially to implement that,” said Crystal FitzSimons, who oversees school nutrition work for the nonprofit Food Research & Action Center, which advocated for the new cutoff.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees school meal programs, said it’s up to districts to opt in and the agency knows not all newly eligible districts will do so.

What is the community eligibility provision?

This federal program allows schools or districts that meet certain criteria to provide free breakfast and lunch to all students, regardless of family income. Elsewhere, schools have to collect paperwork from families to determine if they qualify for free or reduced-priced meals. Other students pay full price.

What is changing?

Under a new rule, individual schools or entire districts can participate in the community eligibility provision if at least 25% of students meet certain criteria. These could include participating in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program — commonly known as SNAP — or Medicaid, lacking stable housing, or living in foster care. Under the previous rule, schools or districts had to enroll at least 40% of students who met those criteria.

The change affects a federal program known as the community eligibility provision that allows schools to provide free meals to all students regardless of family income. It has shot up in popularity in recent years, as schools got used to providing free meals to all kids under a temporary pandemic-era policy, and didn’t want to go back to charging them when that expired.

Under a previous rule for that program, individual schools or entire districts could offer free meals to all kids if at least 40% of students met certain criteria that showed they were from low-income backgrounds. The new rule lowers that to 25% of students. Around 3,000 school districts serving some 5 million students are newly eligible, federal officials said. That represents around 10% of all public school students in the U.S.

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack touted the change as an important step toward fulfilling the Biden administration’s pledge that it would expand access to free school meals to millions more children in the coming years.

In feedback collected by federal officials, some school staff said the lower threshold would help their districts that didn’t qualify under the old cutoff, “but they know students in their communities experience widespread food insecurity.”

Still, many districts that are newly eligible may choose not to participate because they’d rather spend money on things like classroom activities or staff salaries.

Before the rule change, schools and districts that were just above the old 40% threshold often didn’t participate because it was hard to break even under the formula the federal government uses to reimburse schools for the free meals they serve.

Last school year, two-thirds of schools that served 40% to 50% of students who met the low-income criteria used the community eligibility provision, a 50-state survey conducted by FitzSimons’ organization found. The take-up rate rose as more students were identified as being from low-income families.

That financial calculus is unlikely to change anytime soon. In its most recent budget, the Biden administration proposed raising the federal reimbursement for school meals in a way that would help districts that serve lower shares of students from low-income families provide free meals to all. But Congress would have to agree — and Republican leaders have previously opposed additional spending to make meals free for kids who don’t already qualify.

To decide if the free-meals-for-all route makes financial sense, newly eligible districts should look at whether they’d save money by reducing administrative work, and if there would be “any financial improvements because of economies of scale and increases in breakfast and lunch participation,” FitzSimons said.

Eliminating meal debt, and the need to collect it, could also be a reason to opt in, she said.

School officials want more aid from federal government

The community eligibility provision is different from the temporary universal free school meal programs that all schools were permitted to run during the pandemic, and the permanent state-run programs that eight states adopted after Congress failed to pass a national universal meals program.

Those programs generally offer free meals to all public school students in the state regardless of income, and require additional state spending.

Federal officials and school nutrition experts expect many districts in those eight states will take advantage of the rule change because it will cut down on paperwork and allow for more federal funding. More districts in states that help pay for the cost of participating in the federal program, such as New York and Oregon, may opt in, too.

Districts that want to make this change mid-year will have to work with state education officials to seek a waiver from the federal government. Some, like New York, have already opened an application process.

Kate Dorr, who oversees food services for 16 districts in central New York, is planning to apply to bring on the last three schools in her area that do not yet serve free meals to all students.

She knows it will help many families. Last year, meal debt in her districts spiked from zero to $150,000. Dorr had many painful conversations with families who struggled to afford food, but no longer qualified for free meals.

But without the New York state subsidy, providing free meals to all students would be hard to afford, she said. That’s why she wants federal officials and lawmakers to do more to support school nutrition programs like hers.

“I really feel for states that don’t have this kind of supplemental funding,” Dorr said. “This change from 40% to 25% just feels like way too little, when so much more is needed.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

COVID-era laptops made a dent in the digital divide. Now the real work begins.

2024-01-25T22:08:07+00:00

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When pests started attacking plants in the community garden across the street from M. Agnes Jones Elementary School in Atlanta, the students hatched a plan.

They didn’t want to use pesticides in the garden, and they had learned in their science lessons that bats eat insects. They researched how to attract bats to the garden, made paper sketches of bat house designs, then moved to digital design tools. The students could see 3-D versions of their houses, test modifications, and refine their designs — making the entrance narrower so bats would feel safe and adding rafters to create better spaces for brooding.

A new National Education Technology Plan released this week urges educators to use technology to enable this kind of engaged, hands-on learning and urges states and districts to provide the training, planning time, and technical support to make it happen.

First issued by the U.S. Department of Education in 1996 and last updated in 2017, the National Education Technology Plan provides guidance to help school systems use technology to improve learning and close achievement gaps. The latest iteration comes as virtual learning and federal pandemic relief “expedited the proliferation of technologies and connectivity on a scale and speed for which many districts and schools were unprepared.” Innovation actually slowed even as more students got laptops, and too much technology use today is essentially passive, the plan argues.

Surveys suggest more than 90% of secondary students and more than 80% of elementary students have access to a personal laptop or tablet — before the pandemic, fewer than half of students had such access. Schools are awash in digital tools and grappling with the implications of artificial intelligence. Yet a recent survey of more than 41,000 students found the main way students used technology in school was to take online tests and quizzes.

Wide gaps persist between digital haves and have-nots

The plan identifies three types of digital divides. There’s still an access divide — not all students have laptops or reliable internet. There’s also a use divide — some students log into Google Classroom to catch up on assignments while others produce podcasts and design top-notch bat houses. And finally there’s a design divide — only some teachers have the training, support, and planning time to learn how to use new technology in exciting ways.

School systems need to address all three divides to make full use of technological opportunities, the plan said. They also need to balance student privacy with responsible oversight, imbue students with digital literacy, battle the ills of social media, adapt to AI, and make smart decisions about which technology to invest in, according to the report.

Technology has the potential to help students take more control of their learning, make connections they couldn’t make before, and showcase their skills in new ways, the plan says. English learners and students with disabilities, in particular, could benefit from more ways to access material and show what they’ve learned, but if schools don’t plan carefully, these students are also at more risk of being excluded, the plan says.

The plan includes dozens of examples of educators already doing this work, including from rural and high-poverty schools, along with guidelines for decision-making and missteps to avoid.

Districts where internet access is spotty shouldn’t rely on online surveys to reach parents, for example. Consider hosting monthly in-person technology nights instead and send communication in a variety of languages. Special education directors buying screen-reading programs should make sure they also work offline and that they’re compatible with the operating system installed on district laptops.

The plan includes rubrics for assessing whether ed tech programs have evidence to back their claims and suggests regular audits of which programs teachers are actually using. An Associated Press investigation last year found school districts spent tens of millions of pandemic relief dollars on ed tech with little evidence it worked.

David Miyashiro, superintendent of the Cajon Valley Union School District in California, served on the technical working group that helped develop the report. He was an early proponent of embracing technology in education, and he’s led an expansion in Cajon Valley, where two-thirds of students come from low-income households and one-third are learning English.

Students get their first laptops in kindergarten and use them to deliver 30-second TED talks about what they’re afraid of and what they’re excited about, illustrated by generative AI. They’re learning presentation and communication skills while building community and connection with their classmates, Miyashiro said.

Students trade up in third grade, when they go to middle school, and again for high school. An ed tech bond helped pay for devices, IT infrastructure, and a replacement fund.

Miyashiro hopes the new federal plan helps districts incorporate technology thoughtfully. And he said it feels timely, now that many more students have devices.

“A lot of districts bought computers so teachers could Zoom synchronously with their kids,” he said. “Now what are they going to do? This plan helps them course correct.”

But for John Fredericks, an English teacher at West Tallahatchie High School in the Mississippi Delta, digital access has actually gotten worse since 2021. Pandemic relief money meant students had laptops and hotspots for the first time ever — though the connections could be spotty.

“The best thing, when the students had access to the internet and a computer at home, was the ability to differentiate, the ability to challenge the kids who want more work,” Fredericks said. “And for students who have trouble completing work, I could give them more time and grace.”

Now the hotspots are gone, laptops have to stay at school, and when a student is out sick, Fredericks is back to sending home paper packets. Students who take virtual dual-enrollment classes in the school’s computer lab try to get their college coursework done during other classes.

Fredericks said it’s hard to even imagine what learning opportunities his students are missing. He just hopes policymakers don’t forget that pandemic-era laptops are already breaking down and some communities still don’t have internet, at least not at a price families can afford.

“Throwing money at the problem kind of actually worked,” he said. “That’s not always true in government policy or education policy, but if you want to solve the technology divide, keep giving schools money for technology. Let them buy computers and buy hotspots and advocate for high-speed internet in rural areas.”

Blending tech with learning takes time, vision

When Margul Retha Woolfolk started as principal at M. Agnes Jones Elementary in Atlanta, she found a state-of-the-art building where the science lab was “really a storage unit.” The school serves a high-poverty neighborhood, and students spent a lot of time drilling basic skills.

Retha Woolfolk, now an associate superintendent with Atlanta Public Schools, knew her own students had done better when lessons in core skills were coupled with hands-on projects. And she loved science. She started going to conferences, learning everything she could, and seeking out partners at local universities and in the private sector.

Jarvis Blackshear, a paraprofessional with a background in music production, would come to play a critical role providing instructional support in science and technology. He had learned how to teach himself new programs as a music engineer, and he had a knack for bringing students and parents along with him.

Retha Woolfolk wanted to buy the school a programmable robot, but it cost more than $7,000. She could get it for $3,000 if she got it disassembled. Blackshear invited fourth and fifth graders to help him build it. He’d assemble each section ahead of time, sand down sharp edges, then disassemble it and have it waiting for students.

He took the same approach as students designed the bat houses, teaching himself design programs so he could support the students’ learning. When the 3D-printed bat houses weren’t up to snuff, he reached out to a grandparent with carpentry skills to help students make their blueprints reality.

Seven years later, Principal Robert Williams said he’s proud to continue the work. MAJ offers coding alongside art, music, and physical education. Students build electric cars and learn about force and motion, circuitry, teamwork, and the engineering design process along the way. The MAJ Rapid Racers team competes in Greenpower USA regional events, “the NASCAR of elementary school.”

Aleigha Henderson-Rosser, the district’s assistant superintendent for instructional technology, said leadership at the building level makes a big difference, but educators shouldn’t feel like they have to know everything to get started.

“Don’t be scared to take risks, and the kids will guide you,” she said. “Our kids deserve to learn like this.”

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

White House calls for focus on tutoring, summer school, absenteeism as pandemic aid winds down

2024-01-18T00:26:36+00:00

Top White House officials are urging schools to double down on tutoring, extra learning time, and efforts to boost attendance as the spending deadline for pandemic aid nears.

To help, federal officials say states can now seek permission for schools to spend the last and largest pot of COVID relief money on these kinds of efforts over the next two school years. Previously, schools had to spend down their money by January 2025.

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona announced what the Biden administration is calling its Improving Student Achievement Agenda at a White House event Wednesday with governors and state education commissioners. The new push comes at a time when many states have yet to see math and reading scores rebound to pre-pandemic levels and many students are struggling to fill in gaps in their learning.

Federal officials said they had chosen to focus on these strategies because they are proven ways to raise student achievement.

“These three strategies have one central goal: Giving students more time and more support to succeed,” Cardona said. “We must get back to pre-pandemic levels quickly. But also let’s be clear: The bare minimum that we aspire to is to get back to what it was in 2019. 2019 data wasn’t anything to write home about.”

Though the federal government doesn’t have many tools at its disposal to encourage schools to adopt certain attendance or academic strategies, Cardona said the education department would do what it could.

That includes monitoring states to make sure they are spending federal money on evidence-based approaches to improve school performance, a job they have under federal education law. For example, federal officials could look at how states are running their tutoring programs and step in to provide guidance if the model they’re using isn’t as effective as others.

Education officials also plan to prioritize these strategies for competitive grant funding.

Why the White House wants schools to focus on tutoring and chronic absenteeism

As they did throughout the pandemic, federal officials pointed to high-dosage tutoring as a worthy investment for schools. To do that, programs should tutor students one-on-one or in groups of no more than four, for 30 minutes at least three times a week. Sessions should be scheduled during the school day and take place with a trained tutor, White House officials wrote.

Last year, some states and school districts said they had abandoned efforts to tutor kids after school, finding students often missed sessions because they lacked transportation or had schedule conflicts.

The Biden administration lifted up examples of states and districts that have invested heavily in tutoring, including Maryland, which launched a tutoring corps to focus on middle and high school math this past fall, and Washington, D.C, which is tutoring students in math and English language arts.

During the White House event, Christina Grant, D.C.’s state superintendent of education, said a key part of that investment is staffing tutoring managers in the district’s highest-need schools — a finding that’s been echoed by other tutoring programs. Those managers work like an assistant principal who can set up schedules, examine student data, and group students by ability.

“They are the ones saying, ‘No, no, you can’t go to lunch, you have to come sit here,’” Grant said. “We’re making sure that we didn’t just tell teachers and principals: ‘Hey, do this extra thing.”

Absenteeism soared during the pandemic and remains well above 2018-19 levels in most communities. When children miss school, they fall behind academically and are at greater risk of dropping out. When many students in a school frequently miss class, teachers have to decide whether to repeat material for those who missed, boring their classmates, or leave some students behind.

“We simply cannot accept chronic absenteeism as the new normal,” White House Domestic Policy Advisor Neera Tanden said. “Fortunately, we know what works: engaging parents and families as partners in their children’s education.”

She cited the example of Gompers Elementary-Middle School in northwest Detroit. Chalkbeat chronicled the school’s efforts to keep students in school, including pairing students who were starting to miss too many days with adult mentors and working closely with families.

Family and work obligations, mental health challenges, lack of transportation, and many other factors contribute to children missing too much school.

Federal officials urged schools to make specific commitments to reduce absenteeism, such as increasing calls and texts to parents, doing more home visits, and developing early warning systems. Schools should make sure communication is available in multiple languages.

States also should adopt consistent definitions of chronic absenteeism and incorporate it as a measure in their school accountability system if they haven’t done so already, officials said.

Connecticut Education Commissioner Charlene Tucker-Russell described how the state used data to identify students struggling the most — homeless students, English learners, students with disabilities — and target support. The program trained teachers and community members to do outreach and connect families with shelter, transportation, and mental health resources. An evaluation of the program found a 16% increase in attendance after home visits, Tucker-Russell said.

New Mexico Gov. Michelle Luhan Grisholm said she was “embarrassed” about her state’s sky-high rates of chronic absenteeism, including among elementary students. Working with parents is part of the solution, but schools also have to make sure students feel supported and successful so they want to be in school, she said.

“If you aren’t reading at grade level, and you can’t do math at grade level, [school] is not a place you want to be,” she said.

Federal and state officials also emphasized the importance of giving students “more time on task” — both by making sure they are attending school regularly and adding learning time.

That could mean adding time to the school day or year — a strategy many districts have struggled to pull off — or running substantial summer school programs that offer multiple hours of academic instruction per day.

Nearly half of school districts used the largest bucket of COVID relief funds to expand summer school, federal officials said, though already some have made cuts or made plans to do so.

Alabama’s state superintendent, Eric Mackey, said education officials in his state are working with lawmakers and the governor’s office to keep funding summer math and reading camps that have run for the last three years with pandemic aid. The state has provided meals, transportation, and connections to afternoon youth programming to help make it work.

“We’ve built enough momentum that our legislature said: ‘We know we can’t drop this,’” Mackey said. “We have to find a way to continue to fund it and sustain it going forward.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

New federal program puts $12 million toward school integration in a dozen states

2023-10-23T16:13:00+00:00

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School desegregation efforts in a dozen states are getting a $12.5 million infusion from the federal government as part of a new grant program meant to create more diverse schools.

Among the winners are some of the largest districts in the country, including New York City and Chicago, where debates have long raged over how to address the inequities wrought by school segregation. Other winners include a cohort of Maryland districts and the East Baton Rouge Parish in Louisiana, both of which have been home to intense battles over school segregation in recent years.

The grants come as many school communities continue fraught discussions about racial inequities in schools — conversations that ramped up after the murder of George Floyd, but are facing pushback in many states as conservative lawmakers, activists, and some parents fight to end diversity and equity initiatives and curtail teaching about race and racism.

The funding is a small fraction of what the Biden administration initially sought. And there is only so much schools and federal officials can do in the wake of Supreme Court decisions that severely limited desegregation across district lines, and quashed efforts to explicitly take student race into account as part of integration plans.

Still, the grants are the culmination of a years-long effort led by school integration advocates and officials within the Obama and Biden administrations to steer more federal funding to school desegregation. The money is sorely needed, as America’s schools remain highly segregated by race and income but initiatives to fix that often fizzle out.

The result of that isolation, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement on Thursday, is that students of color and students from low-income families disproportionately experience “inadequate resources, lesser access to advanced courses, fewer extracurricular offerings, and other tangible inequities.”

The grants are relatively small: The $12.5 million is being divided among 14 initiatives, ranging from $250,000 to $2.8 million. But integration advocates say start-up money like this is essential because it gives schools funding and political cover to launch complicated planning efforts and community conversations that are necessary for initiatives to stick.

“It’s not going to fully solve it,” said Mohammed Choudhury, the former Maryland schools superintendent who oversaw the state’s application that netted $500,000 for its first year of work. But if the money helps shift some policies, “then it’s a big damn deal.”

Maryland will use its money to work on initiatives in the districts of Anne Arundel, Charles, Frederick, Howard, and Montgomery counties. Howard County, notably, faced parent backlash a few years ago when leaders there tried to deconcentrate the share of students from low-income families who attended certain schools.

Each of the Maryland districts has committed to try at least one of three strategies to create more integrated schools. Those include revamping admissions processes to make selective schools more diverse; ensuring dual language schools are accessible to low-income families whose children are learning English; or finding ways to integrate young children across public and private preschools. Much of the money will be spent on family engagement, Choudhury said.

Expanding access to particular programs may not be as controversial or have as sweeping of an effect as other school desegregation strategies, such as changing school boundaries. But Choudhury, who is now a senior advisor to Maryland’s board of education, expects it won’t be drama-free.

“From opportunity-hoarding type tensions and challenges, to people feeling like they are losing something, to people feeling like they could potentially be pitted against each other — all of those things have to be navigated,” he said. “You’ve still got to win hearts and minds.”

New York City, meanwhile, won $3 million for initiatives in parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn that have previously worked to create more integrated middle schools. In Manhattan, officials will work to create a more diverse group of schools serving some 12,000 students, starting with preschool. In Brooklyn, the money will help put middle school integration plans into place, and fund efforts to recruit elementary school families to attend the area’s middle schools.

Recently, some New York City schools have returned to academically screening incoming middle schoolers — a practice integration advocates say fuels segregation. The current mayor and chancellor have shown less interest in school integration than past administrations.

Chicago Public Schools plans to use its $500,000 to hire staff and host community meetings, a spokesperson said. The work is part of several ongoing planning initiatives related to school quality and student admissions, according to a project description.

Fayette County Public Schools in Kentucky plans to use its funding to improve schools in Lexington’s East End, a historically Black community that’s experiencing some gentrification.

“Our aim is to reconnect our East End students with the cultural identity and heritage of their historical neighborhood,” a project description states. “All the while, changing the reputation and perception of East End schools so that they are a source of pride for residents as well as an attractive school choice for more diverse, affluent parents.”

Other winning districts include:

Anchorage School District in Alaska, which plans to use its funding to create more socioeconomically diverse high school programs by expanding access to career and technical education.
Hamilton County Schools in Tennessee, which plans to use its money for community engagement as it seeks to “reimagine” student transportation and school access.
Oakland Unified in California, which will develop an integration plan focused on improving outcomes for students who attend some of the district’s highest-poverty schools.
Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools in North Carolina, which will analyze enrollment patterns and student assignment policies and potentially change attendance boundaries. The money will help fund sessions for students, families, and staff to provide feedback.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Feds urge schools to protect rights of Jewish, Muslim students following ‘alarming’ rise in incidents

2023-11-08T00:26:26+00:00

Federal officials are urging school leaders to protect Jewish and Muslim students from discrimination following an “alarming rise” in reports of antisemitism, Islamophobia, and other incidents of bias at colleges and K-12 schools over the last month.

The letter, shared with U.S. schools and colleges on Tuesday, comes one month after the militant group Hamas launched a surprise attack against Israel, killing more than 1,400 people. Israel has responded with airstrikes in Gaza that have killed at least 10,000 people and displaced more than a million others.

The news has shaken many school leaders, educators, and students with ties to Israel and the Gaza Strip, and prompted protests on college campuses nationwide.

Since the start of the conflict on Oct. 7, the Education Department has received at least seven discrimination complaints involving antisemitism and two involving Islamophobia, a department spokesperson told Chalkbeat in an email. Most stemmed from incidents at colleges, but at least one incident happened at a K-12 school.

“The rise of reports of hate incidents on our college campuses in the wake of the Israel-Hamas conflict is deeply traumatic for students,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement on Tuesday. “College and university leaders must be unequivocal about condemning hatred and violence and work harder than ever to ensure all students have the freedom to learn in safe and inclusive campus communities.”

Several incidents have been documented in news reports over the last month. At Cornell University, police were called after online posts threatened Jewish students. The University of Pennsylvania alerted the FBI about antisemitic emails that threatened the campus’ umbrella organization serving Jewish students. A hit-and-run that injured a Muslim student at Stanford University is being investigated as a hate crime. In suburban Denver, students of Palestinian descent reported racist bullying at their high school, while in New Jersey a high schooler had her hijab ripped off.

In the letter, the assistant secretary for civil rights, Catherine Lhamon, noted that schools that receive federal funds are legally required to protect Jewish, Israeli, Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian students from discrimination. That could include racial or ethnic slurs, stereotypes based on a student’s religious style of dress, or discrimination related to a student’s accent, ancestry, name, or language.

A few days before the Education Department issued its letter, a coalition of three organizations that advocate for the civil rights of Arab Americans and Palestinian people had asked the department to “take urgent special measures to ensure that Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students, or students perceived as such” were protected from discrimination at school. They cited examples of students who’d been doxxed and the recent murder of a 6-year-old in suburban Chicago in what police have described as an anti-Muslim hate crime.

Incidents of antisemitism and Islamophobia were on the rise even before the war between Israel and Hamas, according to organizations that track such incidents.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil liberties and advocacy organization, noted that the education discrimination complaints it received last year had jumped by a “disturbing” 63% to 177 cases. That included instances of Islamophobic school curriculum and failure to accommodate Muslim students’ religious requests. (Bullying at K-12 schools, such as an incident in which a Delaware middle schooler who was told by her teacher she was too skinny to fast during Ramadan, were tracked in a separate category.)

The Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish civil rights and advocacy organization, documented 494 incidents of antisemitism at non-Jewish, K-12 schools last year, a 49% increase over the prior year. Most were incidents of harassment, such as a student taunting a Jewish classmate with a Holocaust joke, or vandalism, such as a swastika drawn on a school wall.

Meanwhile, when Education Week and ProPublica reviewed nearly 500 incidents of hate in schools between January 2015 and December 2017, the news organizations found that incidents targeting Jewish and Muslim students were among the most common.

Kira Simon, the director of curriculum and training for the Anti-Defamation League’s education program, which offers anti-bias training to schools, said that teachers can help combat the kind of harmful rhetoric that can lead to bullying and harassment at school by taking a few key steps.

If teachers regularly lead discussions about current events in their classrooms, she said, they should stop to think about how those conversations could “impact my students who are Jewish, or how might it impact my students who are Muslim or my students who are Palestinian or Arab?” she said. “And not to assume how it would impact them, but to be thoughtful.”

That could mean putting ground rules in place for having a respectful discussion, letting students opt out of the conversation, or giving them an alternative assignment if they’re having a strong emotional reaction. It can also be a good idea to give students advance notice about these conversations, instead of springing it on them.

And if teachers know they have students in the same class with opposing viewpoints on the conflict, they can focus on making sure students feel safe to share when they feel scared or stressed, and know who at the school they can turn to for support.

And while these conversations and questions may feel urgent, it’s OK for teachers to take the time they need to plan a conversation and do their own research, Simon said. That might mean giving students time to write about how they’re feeling while planning for a discussion down the line.

“Something that adults can do that, I think, will help young people to feel a little bit safer and be able to regulate their emotions better, is to tone down the urgency,” Simon said. “If a question comes up, the teacher doesn’t have to have the answer right in the moment.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Suspensions and bullying plunged as many students learned remotely, national data shows

2023-11-15T21:52:14+00:00

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The number of students who were suspended or arrested at school fell dramatically during the first full school year of the pandemic, new federal data released Wednesday show.

And though disparities in who got suspended or arrested at school persisted along lines of race and disability, in some cases, those gaps narrowed considerably, especially for Black students.

The data for the 2020-21 school year, released by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, echoes earlier reports from some school districts and states. But it’s the first to fully capture what discipline looked like across America’s schools early in the pandemic, when large shares of students were learning remotely.

“Some of these data are not easy to look at,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona told reporters Wednesday. “These data are a reminder that we have a lot of work to do.”

The data come as many schools wrestle with how discipline should look in the wake of a pandemic that left many students with greater social and emotional needs. Some states have considered laws that would give schools broader latitude to suspend students, and some districts have brought back school police following concerns over student behavior and safety.

The report reflects a time when 88% of schools provided a combination of in-person and remote instruction, federal data show, while another 5% offered only remote instruction. The following year, when most students returned to fully in-person learning, many schools reported an uptick in behavioral issues, and some districts suspended a larger-than-usual share of students.

Suspensions and expulsions had been falling for years even before COVID hit, as many schools took steps to curb disciplinary practices that removed students from the classroom. But the declines during the 2020-21 school year were much steeper.

The drops likely reflect a combination of fewer students learning in person and a reticence among educators to remove students from the classroom at a time when many kids craved in-person contact with their teachers and peers. But the data does not capture some of the new or informal disciplinary practices that cropped up during the pandemic, such as removals from a Zoom classroom or requiring a student to learn remotely as a form of punishment.

Around 639,000 K-12 students were suspended from school at least once during the first full year of the pandemic, down from 2.5 million students during the 2017-18 school year, the last period with comparable data.

That represents a staggering 75% decline. (For comparison, suspensions dropped around 11% from the 2013-14 school year to 2017-18 school year.)

Similarly, the number of students who experienced an in-school suspension fell by 70%. The number of students who were referred to law enforcement dropped by 73%. And the number of students who were arrested at school plummeted 84% to around 8,900.

Education department officials cautioned against drawing too many conclusions from an anomalous school year filled with disruptions for both students and the staff who collect this data.

Public school enrollment dropped by 1.7 million students, or 3%, between the 2017-18 and 2020-21 school years. And schools were not required to report whether students who were disciplined were learning in person or remotely. To address that, federal officials are collecting the same data for the 2021-22 school year — the first-ever back-to-back effort.

Still, it’s notable that Black boys and students with disabilities continued to receive a disproportionate share of suspensions from school. Black boys made up 8% of the nation’s K-12 enrollment during the 2020-21 school year, but they received 18% of suspensions from school. Similarly, students with disabilities made up 17% of the nation’s enrollment, but they received 29% of suspensions.

That disparity for Black boys shrank 7 percentage points from the last time this data was collected, but the gap for students with disabilities didn’t budge.

A new disparity, meanwhile, arose regarding white boys. During the 2017-18 school year, white boys were suspended from school at a rate nearly equal to their share of enrollment. But in the first full year of the pandemic, they made up 24% of the nation’s enrollment, and received 36% of suspensions from school — a gap larger than the one for Black boys.

A top education department official said while the cause of that trend is unclear, it represents a notable departure from past data collections that merits investigation.

Black, Hispanic, and Asian students were much more likely to learn remotely during the 2020-21 school year, while white students were more likely to learn in person.

Black students and students with disabilities, meanwhile, continued to be arrested at school at higher rates than their peers, though those disparities did narrow. The gap shrank notably for Black students, who made up 15% of K-12 enrollment, but received 22% of arrests at school.

Three years ago, they made up the same share of enrollment, and experienced 32% of arrests at school.

Still, a top department official said the frequency with which students were arrested at school was deeply concerning.

Reports of bullying and harassment related to a student’s race, sex, or disability also fell notably by 64% — echoing other research that found a drop in online searches related to school bullying during that time. However, Black students were still more than twice as likely as their peers to experience race-based bullying or harassment.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

U.S. math scores dropped, but reading and science results held steady on key international test

2023-12-05T10:00:00+00:00

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It’s a familiar story, with a few interesting plot twists.

That’s how one top federal official described the 2022 test results for American students on a high-profile international exam that allows for comparisons of what 15-year-olds around the world know and can do in math, reading, and science.

The results released Tuesday from the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, showed that math scores dropped significantly last year for 15-year-olds in the U.S. compared with 2018, the last time this test was given. But there was also encouraging news: Reading and science scores held steady over that time. And the nation’s PISA rankings actually rose because other countries’ performance dipped.

“These results are another piece of evidence showing the crisis in mathematics achievement,” said Peggy Carr, the commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the PISA in the U.S. “Only now can we see that it is a global concern.”

The decline in math scores following the pandemic has become a topic of national concern, as scores for fourth and eighth graders dropped significantly on a key national test last year. Students in several states also saw big math declines in COVID’s wake, though there’s been some recent recovery.

Some educators say that’s because math skills build on one another, so students who missed critical lessons earlier in the pandemic may have a hard time filling in those blanks and catching up to their current grade level.

The scores come as officials and educators in several states are weighing the best way to teach students math — and how much classes should focus on real-world uses of math versus more theoretical applications. Others are trying to expand access to higher-level math courses like algebra and calculus. Historically, Black and Latino students have had much less access to these classes than their peers.

“There are a lot of hypotheses about what we need to do differently to move ourselves forward in mathematics,” Carr said. “But clearly we haven’t figured it out.”

Even though American students’ average scores dropped or didn’t change much, the U.S. climbed in the international rankings in all three subjects, as scores declined in other countries that tend to outperform the U.S.

The U.S. improved its rankings even as its students reported that their schools were closed on average for longer periods of time during the pandemic than their peers in other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries.

The relationship between academic performance and the length of school closures was small, Carr said, meaning that the variance in scores was mostly due to other factors. Some OECD countries that reopened for in-person learning more quickly than the U.S. saw steeper drops on the test, she said.

That finding echoes the analysis of a research team released last year that found remote learning was a contributor to score declines, but it wasn’t the primary driver of those academic losses.

Among the 81 international school systems that participated in the PISA last year, the U.S. ranked 26th in math achievement, up from 29th among the same group of school systems in 2018.

Among the 37 members of the OECD that gave the test, most of which are higher-income countries, the U.S. ranked 22nd in math achievement.

Norway, France, Iceland, and Portugal, for example, all scored better than the U.S. in math in 2018, but are now scoring at the same level statistically.

The U.S. ranked sixth in reading and 10th in science among the 81 school systems that gave the PISA last year. In 2018, the U.S. ranked eighth in reading and 11th in science.

The steady reading results among U.S. high schoolers run counter to the significant reading declines observed last year for younger students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP. Academic recovery in reading has also been uneven. Carr said that could indicate that the NAEP has a higher difficulty level than the PISA.

U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona pointed to the results as an indicator of the impact of the federal investments made in schools during the pandemic, much of which was spent on academic recovery initiatives, such as tutoring and mental health support for students.

That spending “kept the United States in the game,” Cardona said. Without it, he said, the U.S. would be “in the same boat” as other countries that didn’t spend as much and saw steeper declines.

The PISA was given to around 4,600 students across the U.S. and some 620,000 students around the world.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Nearly 10 million children won’t get summer food benefits as states opt out of new federal program

2024-01-10T21:02:51+00:00

Across rural North Dakota, many school districts struggle to staff summer meal programs, and families might live 20 miles from the nearest meal site.

So state officials eagerly got on board when they learned the federal government was launching a permanent summer program that gives low-income families $120 for each of their school-aged children. Families can use the money, which comes loaded on a prepaid card, to buy their own food and cook at home.

“In North Dakota, the summer food service program doesn’t meet the needs of a lot of the students,” said Linda Schloer, who directs child nutrition for the state’s Department of Public Instruction. “For a modest effort both financially and personnel-wise, it just makes sense that we would do whatever we can to try to get the program going as soon as possible.”

States had to tell the federal government by Jan. 1 if they planned to run a Summer EBT program in 2024. As of Wednesday, 35 states said they would. Together they are expected to reach more than 20 million school-aged children — a rare example of a pandemic-era assistance program sticking around after the end of the public health emergency.

But another 9.5 million students who would have been eligible will likely go without after their states declined to participate this year. Some states cited cost and administrative burden, while in others governors balked at accepting federal money.

South Dakota, which serves a similar student population as its neighbor to the north, is among those opting out.

“Federal money often comes with strings attached, and more of it is often not a good thing,” Ian Fury, the chief of communications for Republican Gov. Kristi Noem, wrote in an email. He cited low unemployment, the administrative burden of running the program, and South Dakota’s “robust existing food programs.”

That news came as a disappointment to school leaders like Louie Krogman, the superintendent of the White River School District in South Dakota.

The district serves around 400 students, most of whom are Native American and come from low-income families. The district runs a summer meal program in June, but families are on their own until school starts seven weeks later.

“We do have some families that would have definitely benefited from that additional EBT money,” Krogman said.

Timeline and cost keeps some states from offering Summer EBT this year

Summer EBT will work a little differently depending on the state, but generally states will identify which families qualify for the $120 or more in benefits and either mail out EBT cards for the summer, or load the value onto existing benefit cards. Then families can use that money to buy food at their local grocery store.

The newly permanent program will run similarly to the Pandemic Summer EBT program that operated for the previous three summers, as well as a federal pilot program that tested the concept over the last decade. A 2016 review of that program found that offering these summer benefits reduced child food insecurity and helped kids eat more fresh fruits and vegetables.

The extra money is coming at a much-needed time, said Kelsey Boone of the Food Research & Action Center, a nonprofit that advocates for anti-hunger policies, including Summer EBT.

“In the last year, a lot of the boosts to SNAP benefits ended,” Boone said, referring to the temporary pandemic-era increases to the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which ended last spring. Summer EBT “can help offset those cuts,” she said, “especially at a time when food prices are so high.”

In declining to participate, Georgia and Nebraska pointed to their states’ existing summer food programs, while Mississippi said it did not have the funding or staff capacity to run the program. During the pandemic, the federal government covered the full cost of the benefits and running the Summer EBT program, but now states have to split the administrative costs.

Texas said it wasn’t feasible to participate because the final rules and guidance for the program came just days before states had to tell the federal government if they’d be opting in. The state also needs additional funding from the state legislature to run the program, a spokesperson for the state’s health and human services department wrote in an email.

Vermont, too, said the state is working to secure funding and put the necessary IT systems in place. “The goal is to be able to offer this important summer nutrition benefit for eligible children starting in the summer of 2025,” a spokesperson for Vermont’s Department for Children and Families wrote in an email.

Still, in several Republican-led states, the program seemed to get caught in a longstanding political debate over whether the government should provide more publicly funded benefits to families — a debate that’s also raged over whether states should provide free school meals to all students.

Iowa’s Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds, for example, issued a statement saying her state opposed participating in Summer EBT because the program didn’t have tight enough restrictions on what foods families could buy and it would cost the state $2.2 million to run — though Iowa students were in line to receive around $29 million in food benefits and the program follows the same nutrition requirements as SNAP.

“Federal COVID-era cash benefit programs are not sustainable and don’t provide long-term solutions for the issues impacting children and families,” Reynolds said. “An EBT card does nothing to promote nutrition at a time when childhood obesity has become an epidemic.”

In Oklahoma, Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt cited concerns about the program not being “fully vetted.” He also said that it would help relatively few children — though an estimated 403,000 school-aged children would qualify for food benefits in his state.

Three of Oklahoma’s largest Native American tribes are stepping in to run Summer EBT programs on their reservations, an effort that could reach at least 50,000 children.

Florida said it opted out of participating because it already had summer food programs and didn’t want to follow additional federal rules.

“We anticipate that our state’s full approach to serving children will continue to be successful this year without any additional federal programs that inherently always come with some federal strings attached,” Miguel Nevarez, a spokesperson for the Florida Department of Children and Families wrote in an email.

But Sky Beard, the Florida director for No Kid Hungry, an initiative of the nonprofit Share Our Strength that advocated for Summer EBT, sees a big need for the additional summer benefits.

Her organization conducted a poll last year that found around a quarter of parents of school-aged children worried their households wouldn’t have enough to eat.

“There are summer meal sites available throughout the state, but there are real challenges with families accessing those,” she said. Existing programs “just don’t reach all children that participate in school meal programs over the school year.”

Some Republican-led states are embracing the program. Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, for example, issued an enthusiastic statement about her state’s participation in the anti-hunger program.

“We are leveraging every resource at our disposal to fight this crisis, and Summer EBT promises to be an important new tool to give Arkansas children the food and nutrition they need,” she said.

For now, many states are already working to get Summer EBT up and running by the time school lets out in a few months.

In North Dakota, Schloer is focused on making sure the state has up-to-date addresses for eligible students so families can get their EBT cards in the mail.

The state is preparing to send out lots of emails and texts to families, too, to make sure they know about the new program, and whether they might need to fill out some paperwork to get their benefits.

“If we can get a message on that smartphone and from a reliable source, we’re hoping that they will read it,” Schloer said. Schools, too, can play a part by making sure families know: “It’s legitimate, please pay attention!”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Tennessee senators’ report highlights risks of rejecting federal education funding

2024-01-09T21:28:53+00:00

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Senate members of a joint legislative panel that looked into whether Tennessee should reject more than $1 billion in federal education funding released their own report Tuesday, citing disagreements with House colleagues.

The 12-page report said Tennessee could not make new investments toward other needs if it opts out of federal education funding and tries to fill the gap with state revenues.

The report also noted numerous other avenues for Tennessee to pursue to resolve conflicts between federal and state interests, and it brought up uncertainties created by taking the unprecedented step of saying no to U.S. money.

“Many federal requirements could still apply to Tennessee schools even if the state rejected federal K-12 dollars, creating questions that would likely be resolved in court,” the report said.

In essence, the senators’ report laid out why no state has ever taken the step of rejecting federal funding for its students and schools, even though several such as Oklahoma and Utah have considered it.

The U.S. contribution, for which Tennessee citizens pay taxes, makes up about a tenth of the state’s budget for education — about the same as with other states. Most federal money supports low-income students, English language learners, and students with disabilities.

Sen. Jon Lundberg, the Bristol Republican who co-chaired the 10-member panel, called the report “preliminary” as he and four other senators submitted the document to Lt. Gov. Randy McNally and House Speaker Cameron Sexton.

“At this time, the House and Senate have not agreed to mutual recommendations,” they wrote in an accompanying letter.

Rep. Debra Moody, the Covington Republican who co-chaired the panel with Lundberg, did not immediately respond when asked whether the House members would submit their own report or comment on any disagreements.

Rep. Debra Moody and Sen. Jon Lundberg, both Republicans, co-chaired the joint legislative panel that conducted hearings in November.

But Sexton, who floated the idea nearly a year ago for Tennessee to look into the possibilities, said through an aide that a separate House report is coming.

“The House agreed with [the] Senate’s options for consideration. However, the Senate would not agree with the House’s actionable recommendations moving forward,” said a statement from Sexton’s office.

The Crossville Republican, who is a likely candidate for governor in 2026, had complained about testing requirements and other federal strings attached to acceptance of federal dollars, but has yet to provide a list of the other strings he finds objectionable.

Education advocates have suggested that objections from Sexton and the legislature’s GOP supermajority are related to current “culture wars” about curriculum and the rights of transgender students to use school bathrooms or join sports teams consistent with their gender identity, which may not correspond with their sex assigned at birth.

A year ago, Sexton said Tennessee could tap into $3.2 billion in new recurring state revenues, which would more than cover any lost federal funds for education. But those numbers were based on budget information at that time. State revenues have since flattened.

“Tennessee likely has room in the budget to reject and replace recurring federal funding in K-12 education, but at the expense of other potential investments,” the report said.

The senators also noted that the amount of federal money that Tennessee receives totals more than any of the recurring increases for education over the last decade. It’s also larger than the budgets of all but just a few state agencies, such as TennCare, transportation, education, and corrections.

Lundberg released the report just as the General Assembly reconvened its 2024 session, meeting a Jan. 9 deadline set by Sexton and McNally when they appointed the joint panel in September.

RELATED: Key education issues to watch as Tennessee lawmakers return

He told Chalkbeat later Tuesday that he stands by the report and refused to make changes requested by Sexton’s office.

“We determined it was best to release a Senate report that was solid, based on the testimony we heard and the information we were given,” said Lundberg, who declined to detail the points of contention.

Lundberg, who also chairs the Senate Education Committee, praised the work of the joint legislative panel for clearly identifying the state’s funding sources for education and their related mandates.

“Frankly there are fewer federal strings than I anticipated,” he said.

During four days of testimony in November, the panel heard mostly fact-finding presentations from established nonpartisan researchers, school district leaders, and state officials.

On the fifth day, at the request of House members, the group also heard from representatives of two conservative groups who urged the state to pursue forgoing federal funding. None of the Senate members were present for that final testimony. They said scheduling conflicts prevented them from attending.

The legislative panel declined to hear from Tennessee parents or advocacy groups about how federally funded education programs are run or affect their children.

Last week, several legislative leaders told Chalkbeat they did not expect any new legislation this year out of last year’s hearings.

Below, you can read the full Senate report, with the accompanying letter.

This story has been updated from a previous version.

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org

Chicago gets $20 million federal grant to buy 50 electric school buses

2024-01-09T22:05:09+00:00

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Chicago Public Schools is planning to purchase up to 50 electric school buses to operate its own fleet with a $20 million federal grant from the Environmental Protection Agency.

The additional money comes as the district continues to struggle to provide students with transportation. The district has not operated its own bus fleet for more than a decade. It contracts with outside vendors to provide bus service and has been grappling with a driver shortage since the pandemic hit.

CPS announced just before winter break that it would not be adding bus service for general education students, many who attend selective or magnet schools, for the remainder of the year. They cut service to those students at the start of the school year in order to ensure students with disabilities, who are legally entitled to transportation, were being routed and weren’t riding the bus more than an hour.

But the federal grant and new buses will not immediately fix those issues. For one, 50 buses “will not be enough to provide service to the entire district,” a district spokesperson said. The process for buying and deploying the electric buses will start on April 1, 2024 and happen over a three-year period, the spokesperson said.

The Chicago Teachers Union applauded the grant and said the news was a sign of better collaboration between the union, the district, and the mayor, who is a former CTU organizer. The statement issued by the union said the award would “allow CPS to hold private bus vendors accountable for another 140 electric buses that will replace their current diesel-powered fleets.”

About $81 million is being awarded to private bus vendors that serve Illinois and other states, according to the EPA. First Student Inc. – which operates yellow buses in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin – is getting $39.4 million to purchase 100 electric buses; Student Transportation of America Inc is also in line to receive $12.2 million to purchase 32 buses in Illinois and Wisconsin; and Highland CSB 1 is expected to get $29.4 million to purchase 98 buses in Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

A news release from Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson’s office said the goal will be to deploy the new buses in communities “most impacted by poor environmental policies and practices, and historic disinvestment.” Johnson ran on a promise to update school facilities to be more environmentally friendly and energy efficient.

In all, the federal government is doling out more than $1 billion to fund electric buses across 280 school districts.

In Philadelphia, the school district is in line for $8 million to add 20 electric buses to its fleet, doubling the current 20 it operates. Detroit Public Schools is expected to get nearly $6 million to buy 15 electric buses.

The move comes as districts nationwide are looking to shift to clean energy buses. Colorado also announced plans last August to expand electric buses in more than a dozen school districts using state and federal funding. New York state announced in 2022 it wants all new school buses to be zero-emissions by 2027.

The federal Clean School Bus Program also provides rebates to districts that use electric buses. Thirteen school districts in Illinois, most of them downstate, got more than $46 million in those rebates last school year to operate electric buses, according to data from the EPA.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

Después de superar obstáculos, esta universitaria está luchando por la reforma migratoria

2023-03-02T23:03:30+00:00

Read in English.

Chalkbeat Colorado es un noticiero local sin fines de lucro que informa sobre las escuelas públicas en Denver y otros distritos. Suscríbete a nuestro boletín gratis por email en español para recibir lo último en noticias sobre educación.

Edna Chávez sabe lo que es escapar sola de su país como adolescente. Sabe lo que es hacer el arriesgado y solitario viaje hacia el norte, cruzar ilegalmente la frontera y ser retenida como menor no acompañada en albergues y centros de detención.

Pero esta estudiante de 21 años se considera una de las pocas afortunadas, porque más tarde fue adoptada.

Ese apoyo le permitió continuar sus estudios y la encaminó hacia la residencia legal permanente.

Chávez ha conocido a muchos estudiantes con historias similares, pero que no tienen ninguna vía de acceso a la ciudadanía, con educación y oportunidades laborales limitadas, y que han tenido que soportar discriminación. Chávez quiere hacer algo al respecto.

“Tenemos que hacer un cambio radical en nuestra comunidad, no podemos seguir escondiéndonos”, dijo Chávez. “Es momento que alguien haga algo. Ese alguien tiene que ser yo.”

Chávez está planeando una manifestación el 11 de marzo en el Capitolio del estado, y la ha llamado Estudiantes Por Una Reforma Migratoria.

La manifestación fue idea suya, pero ha conseguido el apoyo de grupos de defensa de los inmigrantes que le están ayudando a coordinarla. Si suficientes estudiantes necesitan transporte al Capitolio, ella buscará la manera de proporcionarlo.

También está pidiendo que los estudiantes escriban cartas y firmen una petición pidiéndole al Congreso que renueve las disposiciones de la Ley de Inmigración de 1929. El propósito de esta ley era ofrecer una vía para obtener estatus legal para los inmigrantes que han estado muchos años en el país. Sin embargo, las fechas de entrada al país requeridas no se han actualizado recientemente, por lo que la mayoría de los inmigrantes ya no califican. En actualizaciones anteriores, la ley les otorgo amnistía a algunos inmigrantes durante la administración del presidente Reagan.

Actualizar la ley les daría a muchos más inmigrantes una vía para obtener estatus legal y a muchos más jóvenes un camino para continuar su educación.

“Lo que realmente quiero es que todos los estudiantes lleguen a demostrar que unidos somos mejores”, dijo Chávez. “La unión hace la fuerza”.

Chávez está llena de esperanza porque ya ha superado muchas barreras.

Chávez dice que en su país natal, Guatemala, estaba luchando contra hombres que intentaban obligarla a prostituirse. Se sentía en peligro, y a los 17 años decidió un día huir a Estados Unidos sin decírselo a sus padres.

Temía que su papá, que la maltrataba, no la iba a ayudar. De hecho, todavía su relación con él es tensa en la actualidad.

Después de un largo y peligroso viaje, Chávez estuvo confinada durante meses en centros de detención y luego en un albergue para menores no acompañados. Cuando cumplió 18 años, la sacaron del albergue para jóvenes y la enviaron de nuevo a un centro de detención. Luego, un defensor de inmigrantes encontró una familia que estaba dispuesta a apadrinarla. Después de mudarse con ellos, la adoptaron formalmente.

Cuando Chávez se mudó a Denver a los 18 años, se matriculó en GALS, una escuela chárter en la ciudad.

En Guatemala la habían obligado a abandonar la escuela después de segundo grado. Cuando empezó la escuela en Estados Unidos, no hablaba inglés. Un año después de matricularse en la secundaria, las escuelas cerraron debido a la pandemia. Eso significó que, encime de todo lo demás, también tuvo que aprender tecnología para poder continuar estudiando en línea a fin de obtener su diploma.

Consiguió graduarse la pasada primavera, antes de lo previsto.

“Básicamente no sabía nada,” dijo Chávez. “Tuve un montón de retos, se puede decir así, pero nada me impidió lograr lo que yo me había propuesto lograr.”

Chávez solicitó admisión en varias universidades y fue aceptada en todas menos una. El único rechazo no la desanimó porque, después de visitar el campus de la Colorado State University en Fort Collins, supo que allí quería ir.

“Me sentí que era de ese lugar”, dijo ella.

Empezó la universidad con algunos créditos que había obtenido en la secundaria. Ahora está estudiando matemáticas con especialización en ciencias actuariales.

Para ella, tener éxito significa tener una buena educación y luego poder aportar a su comunidad.

Pero ella no está esperando para aportar. Dice que ha descubierto una pasión por ayudar a los demás. Su mamá en Guatemala le dice que es como si fuera una persona nueva.

Chávez le dice que es cierto, porque así es. Tener tiempo para estudiar, en vez de trabajar todo el día, le ha permitido ver el mundo con otros ojos, dijo ella.

“Me he sentido más segura. Me he sentido más valiosa como mujer. Me he sentido realmente afortunada de estar en un país que me ofrece seguridad”, dijo Chávez.

Y para ella es importante ayudar a los demás a disfrutar al máximo el lugar donde se sienten protegidos.

“Lo estoy haciendo por el amor que le tengo a la comunidad”, dijo Chávez. “Lo hago de todo corazón.”

Yesenia Robles es reportera de Chalkbeat Colorado y cubre asuntos relacionados con los distritos escolares K-12 y la educación multilingüe. Para comunicarte con Yesenia, envíale un mensaje a yrobles@chalkbeat.org.

Tennessee should boost education funding, not reject federal money, school leaders say

2023-11-08T01:01:44+00:00

A state committee studying whether Tennessee should reject federal education dollars heard a unified plea from public school leaders not to do that — and to instead invest the state’s excess revenues in K-12 students, teachers, and schools.

“The needs are so great,” said Toni Williams, interim superintendent of Memphis-Shelby County Schools, Tennessee’s largest district, during remarks Tuesday before the panel.

She described dozens of school buildings that are over a century old, outdated HVAC systems, and the need to mitigate everything from mold to rats. Last year, a library ceiling collapsed at Cummings K-12 Optional School, injuring the school librarian and two other staff members.

Toni Williams, interim superintendent of Memphis-Shelby County Schools, speaks to state lawmakers on Nov. 7, 2023.

“This year has been incredibly difficult,” Williams said of her district’s work to address its ailing infrastructure while also providing teachers and staff with competitive pay and preparing for an end to federal COVID relief funding.

The plea from Williams and three other district leaders ran counter to the panel’s charge to develop a strategy on “how to reject certain federal funding or how to eliminate unwanted restrictions.”

Tennessee receives about $1.8 billion in federal funds for education. The U.S. government generally covers about a tenth of a state’s spending for public schools. No state has ever said no to federal funding for its students.

But leaders of Tennessee’s GOP-controlled legislature say they’re frustrated by the federal oversight that’s attached to receiving the money. Many of them believe the state can afford to forgo federal funding and fill the gap with state money.

The committee, appointed by the speakers of the House and Senate, kicked off hearings into the matter this week and is to report its findings and recommendations to the General Assembly by Jan. 9.

Federal funding cutoff could force tax increases later

On Monday, officials with the state comptroller’s office reported that districts in low-income and rural areas depend the most on federal funding. That money is directed to schools that serve disadvantaged students and programs that target certain needs ranging from rural education and English language learners to technology and charter schools.

On Tuesday, researchers with the Sycamore Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, said “much is unknown” if the state opts to pull out of the federal funding stream.

“There’s no precedent upon which to make projections,” said Mandy Spears, the institute’s deputy director.

Even with lower-than-projected revenues and experts predicting stagnant revenues ahead, Spears told the panel that Tennessee likely has room in its budget to replace federal dollars with state money. However, possible ramifications could include budget cuts or tax increases during a future shortfall or recession; protracted court battles over federal requirements that may still exist for schools even if funding is refused; and Tennesseans having to pay federal income taxes for education support that would go to other states.

Spears said federal requirements tied to federal funding provide an extra layer of accountability that’s important to many students and their families because of Tennessee’s history of racial discrimination, school segregation, and exclusion of students with disabilities from public schools.

“Students and families in these protected classes may worry that such practices could return in the absence of federal oversight,” Spears said.

Later Tuesday, the panel asked school district leaders numerous questions about staffing costs related to federal compliance and whether replacing federal funds with state money would give them more flexibility. They also questioned the superintendents about whether their districts measure how much federally funded food is wasted in school cafeterias.

They don’t.

“We just report the number of meals served every day,” said Williams of Memphis-Shelby County Schools, where food and nutrition is the second largest federally funded program at a cost of $89 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Williams said 60% of the district’s 100,000-plus students are considered economically disadvantaged.

“Some of these students wouldn’t have an opportunity (to eat), if not for our food and nutrition program,” she said.

District leaders say extra funding is needed

Asked for a list of burdensome requirements associated with federal education funding, none of the school leaders spoke up. But they spoke at length about the need for more funding for public schools and their students.

Marlon King noted that Madison-Jackson County Schools, where he is superintendent, is among several districts in West Tennessee making investments to develop the future workforce for Ford Motor Co.’s new electric pickup truck plant in nearby Haywood County.

Hank Clay, chief of staff for Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools, worried that any move toward eliminating federal funding or oversight could tempt districts to shift money that helps their most vulnerable students, especially when school leaders are dealing with other challenges around teacher pay and school facilities.

“If there’s funding on the table to replace these federal dollars, we would welcome that, but ask that it be in addition to — because our students deserve it,” Clay said.

Matt Hixson, who leads schools in Hawkins County, called infrastructure a “huge concern” and noted that his rural district is staring at a $15 million price tag for roof replacement at two high schools. That cost is borne by local taxpayers.

“The only way we have to fund some of those projects is to stand in front of my peers in the county and say we need more tax money,” he said. “I’m a taxpayer too. I’m not a fan of big taxes.”

Earlier this year, the Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations reported that the state needs to invest more than $9 billion in its K-12 education infrastructure over five years, an increase of nearly 9% from an assessment done a year earlier.

Of that amount, about $5.4 billion is needed for renovations and technology improvements, while nearly $3.6 billion is needed to build additions and new schools.

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Tennessee rushes to revamp its A-F letter grades for schools. Educators cry foul.

2023-10-26T10:00:00+00:00

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It was supposed to make things simpler.

A 2016 Tennessee law required the state to assign each public school a letter grade, A to F, based mostly on student test results. The intent was to give parents and communities an easy way to assess the quality of education at each school.

Nothing about it has been simple, though. Since the law took effect, the state hasn’t issued any grades, mostly because of testing glitches and the pandemic.

And now there’s a new complication: As the state prepares to finally issue its first grades in November, the education department and its new leader are revamping the grading formula. The changes likely will mean fewer A’s and generally worse grades than expected for many schools, especially those serving students from lower-income families in rural and urban communities.

The rollout will be a jolt to many Tennessee public school leaders, who have been waiting and planning for these grades for five years, thinking they understood what the criteria would be. And beyond the stigma, the grades could have real consequences: Officials representing schools that get D’s or F’s eventually may face hearings or audits of their spending and academic programming.

“It almost seems like we’re trying to change rules after the game’s already been played,” said Brian Curry, a school board member in Germantown, during an August town hall in Memphis to discuss potential changes with state officials.

Why the letter grades for schools matter

Tennessee’s 2016 school report card law didn’t include consequences for schools that get low grades.

That changed last year, when Tennessee passed a new system for funding K-12 education.

Under the Tennessee Investment in Student Achievement Act, or TISA, school districts or charter authorizers can face hearings before the state Board of Education if their schools get D’s or F’s on the state report card, beginning with the 2024-25 school year.

Ultimately, administrators could have to submit a corrective action plan or undergo a state audit of spending and academic programming at the school in question.

State board member Darrell Cobbins, whose district includes Memphis schools, acknowledges that the increased funding that came with TISA warrants additional accountability. But he wonders about the feasibility of what the law asks of the all-volunteer board. Holding hearings for potentially hundreds of schools will be a “major undertaking,” he said.

The board is working with a consultant, Bellwether Education Partners, to develop a review process that Cobbins hopes will be logical, consistent, and explainable.

At the crux of the state’s late change is a long-running debate over proficiency vs. growth — whether students should be judged based more on whether they meet certain academic standards, or on how much progress they make toward those standards. Where the state lands in that debate is especially important for schools where students face extra challenges even before they walk into a classroom.

But many public school leaders believe there’s a larger political motive behind the sudden drive by Gov. Bill Lee’s administration to change the rules: advancing his school choice agenda.

Under a 2019 voucher law pushed by Lee, Tennessee now provides taxpayer money to help some families send their children to private schools. But the program has fewer than 2,000 students enrolled in the three counties where it operates, significantly below this year’s 5,000-seat cap. Lee wants to expand enrollment and eventually take the option statewide.

“School choice has got to be part of what’s driving all this,” said Mike Winstead, director of Maryville City Schools and a former Tennessee Superintendent of the Year.

“Think about it,” he continued. “If you have an A or B school in your community, that may not motivate parents to want to pull their kids out of public schools to use a voucher.”

Several other district leaders brought up the same concern to state officials at town halls hosted by the department in August and September to get public feedback about revising the grading formula. But state officials flatly deny there’s a connection between the voucher law and changes to the grading formula.

The grading law “was passed to promote transparency, and families should be able to know and to understand how their students’ schools are performing,” a department spokesman said in a statement to Chalkbeat.

Education Commissioner Lizzette Reynolds said the goal of the new formula is to generate grades that signify meaningful differences in school performance in a way that make sense to Tennesseans, whether they reflect proficiency, growth, or other criteria that are ultimately chosen.

“Whether you are a student, parent, teacher, policymaker, or an interested community member, school letter grades will empower all Tennesseans with the information they need to support K-12 public education and our local schools,” she said.

Tennessee initially adopted growth-focused model

State law requires that Tennessee’s model for grading schools take into account student performance and improvement, as demonstrated on annual state tests, and it allows inclusion of other reliable indicators of student achievement. The statute directed the education department to come up with a formula to turn those results into a single letter grade for each school, to be published online on the State Report Card.

When developing the calculation under former Republican Gov. Bill Haslam’s administration, the department stressed achievement and growth in math and English language arts. And it created two pathways for schools to demonstrate achievement.

One way was based on what the state calls “pure achievement,” meaning that a certain percentage of a school’s students demonstrated a required level of proficiency, skill, or knowledge. By this metric, a school that started the school year with a high proficiency rate was likely to receive an A even if it had not improved student learning during the school year.

The other way rewarded schools that met certain goals to move their students toward proficiency from one year to the next. The idea was that all schools, especially those serving low-income students or that have historically performed poorly, should have an opportunity to get an A as long as they make strong progress toward the state’s achievement goals.

So even the achievement part of the grading formula could be fulfilled with strong growth. In this way, Tennessee was an early adopter of a growth-heavy model when developing its accountability system.

“All means all!” became the mantra of then-Education Commissioner Candice McQueen as she worked with education stakeholders for nearly a year to design a system to incentivize improvement for all students — whether they are considered low, average, or high achievers — as well as for all schools, regardless of their demographic makeup.

Tennessee had modest success with that approach, even though the actual letter grades were never issued. Before the pandemic hit in 2020, students were showing incremental growth in math and reading based on some of the nation’s highest proficiency standards.

But state lawmakers have become increasingly impatient with the pace of improvement, especially in reading. About a third of the state’s students meet grade-level standards on the English language arts test, which requires students to demonstrate the ability to read closely.

“School choice has got to be part of what’s driving all this. Think about it. If you have an A or B school in your community, that may not motivate parents to want to pull their kids out of public schools to use a voucher.” — Mike Winstead, Maryville City Schools director

“At the end of the day, I want to know: Can you add, subtract, multiply, and divide, and can you read, regardless of how much you have grown from one year to the other?” said Rep. Mark Cochran, an Englewood Republican, during one legislative hearing about the state’s emphasis on growth.

Meanwhile, the legislature has sought to provide more options for families dissatisfied with the performance of traditional public schools by introducing private school vouchers and allowing charter schools to open statewide.

Now as Tennessee revamps its school grading system, Lee’s administration is poised to shift weight in the equation from growth to pure achievement. Reynolds wants the state to do that by eliminating the growth pathway for demonstrating achievement. Growth would still be a component of the overall grade, as dictated by state law, but a much smaller part.

“I want to be very clear that when we’re talking about academic achievement, we’re talking about academic achievement,” Reynolds, the new education commissioner, said at an Oct. 12 meeting of education stakeholders.

State hears strong calls for retaining growth focus

Reynolds, who was sworn in to her post in July, launched the reevaluation of the grading system about a month later as her first major initiative. She invited Tennesseans to weigh in on how the state should measure a school’s academic success. At the time, state officials said all options were on the table.

At town halls, meetings with stakeholders, and in nearly 300 public comments from Tennesseans, state officials heard a common theme: Keep some kind of growth option as part of the achievement calculation. Measuring student performance with a single letter grade requires nuance, many educators said, and the growth-based model allows that.

“Is having a campus that has only 15% reading proficiency really a B school, if those kids cannot read?” — Lizzette Reynolds, Tennessee education commissioner

A formula that’s weighted too heavily toward pure achievement, they warned, would produce grades that essentially mirror the economic profiles of the schools — with high-income communities getting the A’s and B’s — and families wouldn’t be able to use the grades to differentiate the performance of one high-poverty school from another.

“Given the strong correlation between achievement and poverty, I think it’s really difficult to talk about just achievement in isolation. We really need to balance this with growth,” said Madeline Price, policy director for the State Collaborative on Reforming Education, at an Oct. 5 meeting of the stakeholders group.

“All schools, especially low-income and traditionally low performing schools, should have a very real opportunity to receive an A” if they significantly improve student performance, the leaders of Tennessee’s school superintendent organization wrote in a letter to Reynolds.

Meaghan Turnbow, who coordinates programs for English language learners in fast-growing Rutherford County Schools, south of Nashville, noted pitfalls in a model that emphasizes proficiency over growth.

“We have students come to our district from all over the world with various education levels and English levels,” she wrote in a public comment. “Year to year they grow, but it may be several years before they are considered meeting or exceeding expectations.”

Tennessee Education Commissioner Lizzette Reynolds speaks to a gathering of school superintendents in September. Reynolds has signaled that she wants to narrow the way the state judges student performance.

But soon after asking for public feedback, Tennessee’s new education chief signaled that she wanted to narrow the way the state judges student performance.

During an Aug. 29 town hall in Chattanooga, Reynolds acknowledged that the education department, before scuttling plans to issue grades in the fall of 2022 under former Education Commissioner Penny Schwinn, had run the numbers but didn’t like what it saw. For instance, she said, a school with 80% of its students reading on grade level might have received a B, but so might a school that had only 15% of students reading on grade level, while also demonstrating high growth.

“Is having a campus that has only 15% reading proficiency really a B school, if those kids cannot read?” Reynolds asked.

“We should celebrate growth,” she continued. “We should also celebrate achievement, because at the end of the day, kids can grow. But if they never get on grade level, they don’t have much of a future, particularly when it comes to reading and math.”

How a single school could get conflicting evaluations

The A-F grading system, as required by the state, was billed as a simple, common-sense tool to help parents understand how their child’s school is doing and compare schools.

But changes the department is making could add a new layer of complexity for school communities.

When Tennessee developed its accountability plan in 2017, it opted for a single system to satisfy both the state law and a 2015 federal accountability law called the Every Student Succeeds Act, or ESSA. That way, “we’re not sending different messages to parents and the general public,” said Winstead, the Maryville schools director who served on the state task force that developed the plan.

ESSA doesn’t require A-F grades, but it directs the state to use its own criteria to identify schools that are academically in the bottom 5%, plus other schools showing low performance or significant disparities across groups of students who are Black, Hispanic, economically disadvantaged, or English learners, or have learning disabilities. Such schools become eligible for additional federal funding.

Because of the link between the two laws, the schools that would earn the lowest grades under Tennessee’s current formula are the same ones that would get federal support to help them improve. And educators would work with a common set of goals, priorities, and incentives.

Changes that the Tennessee Department of Education is making could create two separate accountability systems, producing conflicting assessments of how a school is doing.

Under Reynolds, the Tennessee education department appears ready to decouple the state’s A-F system from its federal compliance plan. The change would result in Tennessee having two accountability systems, potentially producing conflicting assessments of how a school is doing.

For example, if the new state formula places less emphasis on certain student groups than the federal system does, a school that has big racial or economic disparities in student performance could still earn high grades from Tennessee based on overall proficiency rates. Meanwhile, a school with low proficiency rates would get a D or an F, even though it may serve certain groups of students better than an A or B school.

Mary Batiwalla, former assistant commissioner of assessment and accountability in Tennessee, says what’s going on here has parallels in Texas, where Reynolds used to be chief deputy commissioner. Officials there changed their grading criteria this year to apply to schools retroactively. However, after some school districts sued that state over the changes, Texas delayed the release of its grades.

Texas lawmakers are also in the midst of a special session on vouchers to debate whether students should be able to use public dollars to attend private schools. Batiwalla worries that officials in both states are hijacking the grading systems for political aims, not to incentivize school communities to improve.

“If you want to do vouchers, do vouchers,” said Batiwalla, an outspoken critic of Reynolds’ efforts. “Don’t take away this policy tool that has the potential to drive improvement from the rest of the public schools.”

Proficiency focus could shortchange some students

Other tweaks are likely when Tennessee releases its new equation in the days or weeks ahead, just before giving schools their first set of grades.

“If you want to do vouchers, do vouchers. Don’t take away this policy tool that has the potential to drive improvement from the rest of the public schools.” — Mary Batiwalla, former assistant commissioner, Tennessee Department of Education

The department has heard calls to include social studies and science scores in the calculation, as well as data related to third-grade reading, participation in tutoring programs, and postsecondary indicators like dual enrollment and career and technical education offerings, just to name a few. There’s also a growing consensus around ditching student absenteeism data, which is a factor in the current equation.

But most educators have their eye on the growth vs. proficiency debate. They worry that greater emphasis on proficiency will motivate schools to focus on improving “bubble kids” — those scoring just under proficiency — instead of working to improve students at all levels of achievement.

“You’re incentivizing bad choices that serve just a few kids instead of all kids,” Winstead said.

Winstead’s suburban school system should be fine. Maryville City Schools, near Knoxville, is one of the state’s highest-achieving districts and stands to benefit if Tennessee’s revamped grading formula puts more weight on proficiency. But Winstead philosophically disagrees with the approach that the state appears to be taking.

“This is going to demoralize a lot of school communities,” he said, “teachers, kids, and parents — folks who have done incredible things to move kids forward.”

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org. Laura Testino covers Memphis-Shelby County Schools. Reach Laura at LTestino@chalkbeat.org.

Tenn. study on rejecting federal education funds has ‘no predetermined outcome,’ leader says

2023-10-05T14:50:17+00:00

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A leader of the group of lawmakers exploring whether Tennessee can feasibly reject nearly $1.9 billion in federal education funding says that the panel’s work will begin in early November, and that its findings — not politics — will guide its recommendations.

“There is no predetermined outcome for this working group, or for what the information we gather is going to show,” Sen. Jon Lundberg, a co-chair of the panel, said Wednesday.

“We want to look at what federal education money we get, where it goes, what we’re required to do to get those funds, and ultimately what’s the return on the investment,” the Bristol Republican told Chalkbeat. “I think this will give us a good overview.”

Lundberg, who also chairs the Senate Education Committee, was responding to criticism from Democrats that Republicans are seeking to undermine public education, cater to charter and private school interests, and advance the political aspirations of House Speaker Cameron Sexton, a Crossville Republican and likely candidate for governor in 2026.

In February, Sexton said Tennessee should consider forgoing U.S. education dollars to free schools from federal rules and regulations, and should make up the difference with state funding. On Sept. 22, he and Lt. Gov. Randy McNally, an Oak Ridge Republican, appointed eight Republicans and two Democrats to the working group to look into the idea and report back by Jan. 9, when the General Assembly convenes a new session.

Most of the federal money the state receives supports low-income students, English language learners, and students with disabilities. Tennessee school districts that are most reliant on U.S. dollars tend to be rural, and have more low-income and disabled students, less capacity for local revenue, and lower test scores in English language arts, according to a recent report from the Sycamore Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.

Sen. Jon Lundberg

On Thursday, Lundberg and co-chair Debra Moody, a Covington Republican who chairs a House education committee, released the panel’s schedule showing five days of meetings in November, with the kickoff meeting on Nov. 6.

If the committee finds ways for the state to feasibly wean itself from federal education money that Tennesseans help generate through their taxes, Lundberg expects legislation to come out of its work. But he acknowledged that state revenue collections have lagged in recent months, potentially making it harder to cut the cord.

“Revenues are a valid concern, but that’s not our charge at this point,” he said. “We just want to do a deep dive on where we stand.”

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Bo Watson warned lawmakers in August that Tennessee likely will need to begin curbing state spending. But on Wednesday, he endorsed the panel’s task.

“I think it’s premature to say whether there will be budget constraints,” said the Hixson Republican. “Evaluating our programs and our funding is always a healthy exercise.”

Even if officials decide the state can afford to pass on federal funds, JC Bowman, executive director of Professional Educators of Tennessee, questions whether it could effectively manage resources designed to support underserved communities and ensure equal access to education.

He cites the Achievement School District as one example of poor oversight for a state-run program intended to serve students attending low-performing schools. The turnaround district took over dozens of neighborhood schools beginning in 2012, mostly in Memphis, and turned many of them over to charter operators. But it has had few successes to show for its decade of work.

Lundberg said that example shouldn’t stop the state from investigating the possibility.

“Do I trust the state more than the federal government? Absolutely,” Lundberg said. “I think that government that operates closest to the people is the best government.”

Gov. Bill Lee has said he’s open to the idea and denounced what he called “excessive overreach” by the federal government. However, he didn’t give specific examples on education when answering questions from reporters last week.

Advocates for historically underserved student populations say federal oversight is needed to ensure that the state and local districts adequately provide for every student and school.

Meanwhile, Senate Democrats pointed out that the federal government provided nearly $30 million last year to public schools in Cumberland County, which Sexton represents. That’s 44% of the East Tennessee district’s budget. Three school districts in Anderson County, where McNally lives, received $31 million in U.S. funds, which covered 32% of their budgets.

You can look up exactly how much federal education funding is on the line for every Tennessee county.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated with information about the panel’s meeting schedule.

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Will bipartisan education reform be revived? Maybe not any time soon.

2023-10-03T23:11:44+00:00

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Former Education Secretary Arne Duncan wants the country to adopt a unifying set of ambitious education goals, but he doubts any politician will lead the way in doing so.

“I would love us to try to agree on some goals,” he said Tuesday afternoon, before noting later, “I don’t have a lot of optimism that it’s going to come at the national level.”

Duncan, who was a member of the Obama administration, spoke at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank at an event titled, “A Way Forward for School Reform.” But Duncan and Frederick Hess, AEI’s director of education policy, suggested that there is no clear way forward.

In the background of this discussion was recent history: A particular brand of bipartisan education reform — which emphasized charter schools and accountability for student test scores — dominated Washington during the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations. Now it’s in the rearview mirror, and there’s no indication it’s coming back.

The forum highlighted how the parties are further apart on education than at any point in recent memory. And the discussion pointed to why no bipartisan collaboration on education appears to be in the offing, despite nascent efforts to create one and unprecedented challenges faced by the country’s schools. In short, the politics have changed and there’s no education agenda that is unifying both parties.

“How do you think about solutions that are going to feel relevant and are capable of building broad support in a different political landscape?” said Hess. “Anybody who says we do that by going back to the playbook that resonated between 1992 and 2012 is, I think, probably misleading themselves.”

The forum was the latest rumbling about the idea of reviving what had been a dominant strain of education policy.

Last month, a small cadre of nonprofit leaders published a manifesto titled “A Generation at Risk: A Call to Action.” (This is a reference to “A Nation at Risk,” the 1983 federal government report that spurred a national bipartisan focus on improving schools.)

The report was the result of covenings of “a group of education advocates from the Left, Right, and Center,” as part of a “building bridges initiative” organized by Democrats for Education Reform and the Fordham Institute, a right-of-center education think tank.

“We all agree that we need a bold vision for change, leadership that works across lines of difference, and decisive action if we are to make good on America’s promises to our children, today and in the future,” the report says.

Duncan, who now runs an organization that seeks to reduce gun violence in Chicago, said he wants agreed-upon national goals focusing on access to prekindergarten, third grade reading, high school graduation, and college completion. He also suggested that he would like to see a renewed cross-party effort to improve schools. “I really miss trying to work in a bipartisan way,” said Duncan.

That seems a bit quixotic at the moment.

Former President Donald Trump appears likely to be the Republican nominee. His campaign has emphasized culture-war issues in education and Trump has said he would try to abolish the U.S. Department of Education.

President Joe Biden has been quiet on K-12 education policy. Policy-wise, his administration has focused on increasing spending for schools, while Congressional Republicans have sought to cut education budgets.

Duncan suggested that a new focus on improving education might come from families, but acknowledged that most parents like their own child’s school — a fact that has persisted even in the wake of the pandemic.

Another challenge for reassembling the old coalition is that it’s not clear what their policy agenda would be. The Generation at Risk report promotes high-level ideas like “set goals aligned to recovery,” “rethink how time and staff are used,” and “evaluate emerging innovations.” It’s not clear how these would be translated into federal policy that would affect schools, though. At the AEI event there was only limited discussion of specific ideas for improving schools.

This contrasts with the heyday of bipartisan school reform when advocates were aligned on a number of concrete policies, like the Common Core standards, increasing the number of charter schools, and test-based accountability for teachers and schools.

Those policies have a mixed — and still-debated — legacy. Research found that No Child Left Behind contributed to improvements in math test scores and graduation rates. But studies on Common Core and teacher evaluations showed little if any benefits. Recent research on charter schools have leaned more positive.

At the moment, though, education policy has been dominated by debates over what gets taught in school, particularly around race and gender. Hess noted that as a historical matter that’s hardly unusual.

“Most of our history has been fighting over what books do you read and about how do you teach our history,” he said. “However we want to define school reform, maybe that’s not how the families and the people who schools are serving are actually thinking about the work of school reform.”

Matt Barnum is interim national editor, overseeing and contributing to Chalkbeat’s coverage of national education issues. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Tennessee legislative panel will look into rejecting federal education funds

2023-09-25T21:13:40+00:00

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When Tennessee House Speaker Cameron Sexton floated the idea in February of the state rejecting U.S. education dollars to free schools from federal rules and regulations, most supporters of public education hoped it was nothing more than political posturing.

But on Monday, Sexton and his counterpart in the Senate, Lt. Gov. Randy McNally, took the significant step of creating a legislative panel to conduct a comprehensive review of Sexton’s pitch.

The panel will look into the feasibility of doing without federal support for K-12 students and report back to legislative finance and education committees by Jan. 9. Currently, Tennessee receives up to $1.8 billion from the federal government for its schools, most of which supports low-income students, English language learners, and students with disabilities.

Federal funds typically make up about a tenth of a state’s K-12 budget.

No state has ever rejected federal funding for its students and schools.

But Sexton has said that by rejecting the federal funds that Tennesseans help generate through their taxes, the state can avoid the federal strings attached to those dollars, and make up the funding difference with state money.

McNally, in a statement Monday, cited the state’s “excellent financial position” while deeming Sexton’s proposal as “worthy subject of examination and study.”

Tennessee has been flush with cash in recent years, but its revenues have begun to flatten.

Last month, when the legislature approved $100 million in one-time funding during a special session on public safety, Sen. Bo Watson, a Hixson Republican who chairs his chamber’s finance committee, warned that Tennessee needs to tighten spending in the future. And last week, state Finance Commissioner Jim Bryson reported that state revenues for August — the first month of Tennessee’s fiscal year — were $39 million less than budget estimates.

Sen. Raumesh Akbari of Memphis, one of two Democrats named to the panel, said the trend should diminish any appetite to forgo federal cash.

“Most of us know how important federal funds are to our state budget, whether for our schools, roads, or health care,” Akbari told Chalkbeat. “My goal on this task force is to support the continued use of federal funding for K-12 education.”

“Besides,” she added, “Tennesseans pay federal taxes. Why should our tax dollars go to support schools in Georgia or California or New York, and not our own schools?”

Many Republicans, though, bristle at the federal oversight tied to receipt of federal education dollars.

Most notable are civil rights protections for students based on race, sex, and disability. Tennessee’s Republican-dominated government has challenged the spirit of those protections by passing laws in recent years to restrict classroom discussions and library books related to race, gender, and bias, as well as to prohibit transgender youth from playing girls sports and restrict which school bathrooms they can use.

“This working group will help provide a clearer picture of how much autonomy Tennessee truly has in educating our students,” Sexton said in a statement Monday.

A spokeswoman for Gov. Bill Lee said he looks forward to reviewing the panel’s findings.

The governor “remains committed to working with the General Assembly to ensure all Tennessee students have access to a high-quality education, while pushing back on federal overreach,” said Elizabeth Johnson, Lee’s press secretary.

The speakers appointed the 10 members to the exploratory panel, five from each chamber:

Sen. John Lundberg, R-Bristol (co-chair)
Rep. Debra Moody, R-Covington (co-chair)
Sen. Raumesh Akbari, D-Memphis
Sen. Joey Hensley, R-Hohenwald
Sen. Bill Powers, R-Clarksville
Sen. Dawn White, R-Murfreesboro
Rep. Ronnie Glynn, D-Clarksville
Rep. Timothy Hill, R-Blountville
Rep. John Ragan, R-Oak Ridge
Rep. William Slater, R-Gallatin

In a Sept. 22 letter creating the joint working group, the speakers outlined four tasks:

Identify the amount of federal funding the state, districts, and schools receive and the laws associated with accepting such funds;
Examine how the state, districts, and schools use or intend to use the funding, and whether there are conditions or requirements for accepting such funds;
Report on the feasibility of the state rejecting federal education funding;
Recommend a strategy on how to reject certain federal funding or how to eliminate unwanted restrictions placed on the state due to receiving the funding.

Last month, the Sycamore Institute reported that Tennessee distributed $1.1 billion in federal funds to school districts across the state — or about 11% of total district revenues — in 2019-20. The nonpartisan think tank also calculated that each of Tennessee’s 142 school districts received between $314 and $2,500 per student in federal funds, accounting for 3% to 20% of each district’s total revenues.

The group’s report said school districts most reliant on federal dollars tend to be more rural, and have more low-income and disabled students, less capacity for local revenue, and lower test scores in English language arts.

Tennessee already ranks in the bottom fourth of states in spending per pupil, and eliminating a key funding source would have serious consequences, said Gini Pupo-Walker, executive director of The Education Trust in Tennessee.

“We would not only redirect Tennesseans’ federal tax dollars to other states in the country, but we would have to dip into our rainy day fund in order to maintain our current level of education funding, limiting our capacity to invest in our students in the future, particularly those most in need,” Pupo-Walker said.

A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Education, which in February called Sexton’s proposal “political posturing,” said students need more — not fewer — resources to support academic recovery following the pandemic, as well as to address a crisis in youth mental health.

“Any elected leader in any state threatening to reject federal public education funds should have to answer to their local educators and parents in their community about the detrimental impact it would have on their community’s education system and their students’ futures,” the spokesperson said.

A statement from the Tennessee Disability Coalition said the group wants to work with the panel “as a resource in conveying the vital importance of federal education funding for students with disabilities.”

“As the past 50 years have shown us, these funds and associated regulations have dramatically improved outcomes for Tennessee students with disabilities and served to protect them from institutionalization, segregation, and marginalization,” the group said.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to include a comment from the U.S. Department of Education.

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Schools face a funding cliff. How bad will the fall be?

2023-09-13T15:13:30+00:00

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It’s an ominous phrase that is top of mind for many school district officials: the “funding cliff.”

This refers to the imminent end of billions of dollars in federal COVID relief money that schools have been relying on during the pandemic. “The feds pushed a lot of money into the K-12 system,” said Lori Taylor, an education finance researcher at Texas A&M University. “Now the districts are being weaned off of that funding — they’re losing that shock absorber, that cushion.”

This has educators and experts nervous: the money might be gone before students have fully recovered academically and could lead to painful layoffs and other budget cuts. Some schools have already begun cutting back on recovery programs including tutoring, summer school, and extra staff, like college advisors.

But what is not yet clear is how steep the fall from the funding cliff will be. That’s because there are many other factors that will shape school budgets, including money from other sources. Plus, schools are making spending choices now that could lead to bigger or smaller cuts later.

What we do know is that high-poverty schools face a bigger cliff, that more federal money won’t be forthcoming, and that school budgets will be shaped both by districts’ own financial decisions and those made by state politicians. How precisely this plays out could affect classrooms and students for years to come.

Here, Chalkbeat offers a guide to the federal school funding cliff and what factors will make or break school budgets after the federal money runs out.

Schools got a lot of federal money, but it’s running out — and no more is coming

Schools have received a large infusion of federal money since the pandemic: roughly $190 billion or close to $4,000 per student.

The money was meant to address the consequences of the pandemic on schools, including learning loss. In practice, local officials had wide discretion over how to spend it. Money from the final pot has to be earmarked by the end of September 2024 (though schools can seek an extension for when that money is actually spent). The latest data shows that schools still have funding left, but are on track to use it all by the deadline.

Some advocates had hoped that even more federal dollars would be on the way. For instance, the Los Angeles teachers union had sought to make federal relief permanent. But this is not going to happen. The recent deal that President Joe Biden struck with Congressional Republicans limits new federal spending on education for the next couple years.

In sum, the infusion of temporary federal money really will be temporary. Once it’s spent, it’s gone.

High-poverty schools got more federal money, so face a steeper cliff

The COVID relief was not spread evenly across schools. Nationally, districts in more affluent areas received just over $1,000 per student, with some getting even less. High-poverty districts, on the other hand, got over $6,000 per student. A handful of very high poverty districts, like Detroit, received massive sums of money. There was also variation from state to state, with schools in the South getting more federal money as a percent of their total budgets.

This means that some schools will face little or no funding cliff while others will face steep cliffs. “Districts serving our neediest kids have further to fall,” noted a recent analysis published by the Brookings Institution.

The scope of cuts will depend on how schools have chosen to spend federal money

“A lot depends on how prudent they were in their use of the federal funds,” said Taylor. “Federal funds should have been interpreted as one-time money.”

It’s clear that a good chunk of the funding was indeed used for one-time expenses: HVAC and other building upgrades, personal-protective equipment for COVID, bonuses for staff.

Detroit, for instance, earmarked over half of its COVID relief for long-deferred facilities upgrades. “One thing that I’ve tried to do as superintendent is be disciplined with finances,” superintendent Nikolai Vitti recently told Chalkbeat. “I always think about recurring revenue with recurring expenditures, and one-time revenue with one-time expenditures.”

On the other hand, at least some districts have used COVID money for ongoing operating costs like paying teachers’ salaries and maintaining buildings. State data show that schools have been adding staff in recent years. As federal aid runs out, layoffs might follow.

There’s also a third, mushier category: supplementary expenses that schools have added to try to make up for learning loss or address other needs. Those might include expanded summer school programming, after-school tutoring time, vendor contracts, temporary new staff. Some have already begun cutting. Detroit eliminated some positions like college transition advisors. Districts in Montgomery County, Maryland, and Reno, Nevada have cut back on tutoring.

As the funding cliff approaches, these recovery add-ons may start to vanish even more rapidly. This programming may be easier to cut because it’s not part of core instruction, but could still be painful to lose, especially when students remain behind academically.

Generous state or local funding could cushion the fall

The biggest chunk of education funding comes from states, and they have been increasing spending on schools of late. One recent analysis found that most states have increased education spending in their budgets this year, often by substantial amounts. Last year, California passed a record state budget, which included a one-time $7.9 billion learning-recovery grant to schools, on top of the one-time federal aid.

If state funding continues to increase, districts could be protected from major cuts even as federal money dwindles.

David Lauck, CFO of Alliance College-Ready, a charter network in Los Angeles, says he’s not expecting immediate cutbacks thanks to funding increases from California. “We do not anticipate any major dropoff in programming,” he said.

More local funding could also help cushion schools. Officials in Kansas City are planning to use higher property tax revenue to keep some of the staff they added with federal aid. “We’ve done the work so we can retain them,” said Jennifer Collier, the superintendent of Kansas City Public Schools. “The cuts were not as deep as we originally thought.”

But states could soon face budget challenges, limiting their ability to help schools

States governments also received a separate $195 billion worth of temporary federal money. This has supported the generous education funding for schools, but it also means states face their own funding cliff. Moreover, many states are projecting that revenue from state taxes will decline next year.

“With more fiscal data coming in, the long-term health of state budgets looks murky,” concluded Lucy Dadayan, principal research associate with the Urban Institute.

That could create a double whammy for schools: federal funds run out and states don’t have the ability to provide an additional buffer. Once again, high poverty schools are more at risk because they tend to be most reliant on state funds. Local funding is also not a guaranteed backstop. The higher-poverty schools that face the greatest fiscal cliff typically have less property wealth to draw from.

The budget situation will likely vary by state. A number of Republican-leaning states have adopted tax cuts and private school choice programs, which could strain state budgets.

But there is some good news for public schools. States have built up substantial “rainy day” funds that could bolster budgets. Plus the broader economy, contrary to some predictions, is looking relatively strong. That’s a more promising indicator for state revenue, since a strong economy tends to mean higher funding from sales and income taxes.

Bruce Baker, a University of Miami professor and school finance researcher, says he suspects the upcoming funding cliff won’t be as bad as what happened after the Great Recession, when schools made deep cuts after federal aid runs out. But he said this will vary from place to place and that schools are to some extent at the mercy of state politicians.

“A lot of these cliffs are going to be a function of state choices,” said Baker.

Matt Barnum is interim national editor, overseeing and contributing to Chalkbeat’s coverage of national education issues. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

A dozen Chicago Public Schools employees ousted over federal PPP loan fraud

2023-09-06T18:05:00+00:00

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A dozen Chicago Public Schools employees have resigned or been fired after the district’s inspector general found they fraudulently obtained federal Paycheck Protection Program loans.

The loans — most of which did not need to be repaid — were available to businesses during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 to help them stay afloat. Federal officials have since said the PPP loan program lacked controls and was “susceptible to fraud.”

All but one of the ousted CPS employees earned six-figure salaries and worked year-round positions.

“We’re talking about people who have full-time, year-round jobs with CPS,” Inspector General Will Fletcher told Chalkbeat Wednesday. “How they were able to have fully fledged side businesses was obviously going to be a question.”

The inspector general’s report does not name the employees. According to the report, one of them was a central office administrator who inflated how much they made on a side business in 2020 in order to get a PPP loan and also did not report that secondary employment to CPS.

Other cases include:

A district regional administrator making $165,000 a year created a fake business in order to get a $20,000 PPP loan. The money was deposited in their personal checking account and spent within two months on “expensive luxury items” and a trip to Las Vegas, bank records obtained by the inspector general showed.
A school administrator with a side business selling clothing admitted to inflating its income in 2019 in order to get two PPP loans totaling $40,000. The clothing business earned “at most $7,500,” but they claimed it earned $100,000.
An administrator making more than $120,000 a year got a $20,000 PPP loan by paying someone to fill out the application and report they made $100,000 as an independent contractor in 2019.

The inspector general’s report cites two additional employees whose dismissal cases are pending. The district said it has filed dismissal charges against them, but both cases are being litigated.

In a statement, a CPS spokesperson said the district is reviewing a recommendation by Fletcher that future employees be required to report any PPP loan they’ve received as part of the onboarding process.

“We take seriously our responsibility to serve students and families with integrity and we will hold accountable individuals who breach CPS policies and the public’s trust,” the spokesperson wrote.

Fletcher said his office opened a broad investigation into PPP fraud in 2022 and started by searching a public database that lists all PPP loan recipients. In all, 780 district employees showed up in the data as having obtained PPP loans, the OIG report said.

“We’re not presuming that all 780 loans were fraudulent,” Fletcher said, noting some CPS employees do have legitimate side jobs outside of school and during the summer. There may also be cases of identity theft. While the investigations are continuing, the report released Wednesday focused on cases involving higher-level employees and those who worked year-round positions.

“We’re looking at employees who have some level of supervisory authority or who are in positions where they have some kind of control over sensitive information, financial information, dealings with the contractors and vendors,” Fletcher said. “People who are in positions of trust in the district.”

Other investigations have also turned up evidence of misused funds related to the pandemic. The inspector general found most bus companies that were given “good faith” payments to keep paying drivers during the switch to virtual learning in March 2020 laid off their workers despite taking the money.

“PPP fraud is just one facet of what has concerned us related to pandemic fraud,” Fletcher said.

Fletcher said his office has the capacity to continue investigating these and other pandemic-related fraud and waste allegations, but noted there is a “lack of information” around much of the COVID relief money distributed by the federal government in the past few years.

Chicago Public Schools has received more than $2.8 billion in COVID recovery money from the federal government under three Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief packages passed by Congress.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

Schools are cutting recovery programs as U.S. aid money dries up. Students are still struggling.

2023-09-06T04:01:00+00:00

This story is a collaboration with the Associated Press. Sign up for Chalkbeat’s free weekly newsletter to get essential education news delivered to your inbox.

DETROIT – Davion Williams wants to go to college. A counselor at his Detroit charter school last year helped him visualize that goal, but he knows he’ll need more help to navigate the application process.

So he was discouraged to learn the high school where he just began his sophomore year had laid off its college transition adviser — a staff member who provided extra help coordinating financial aid applications, transcript requests, campus visits, and more.

The advisers had been hired at 19 schools with federal pandemic relief money. In June, when Detroit’s budget was finalized, their jobs were among nearly 300 that were eliminated.

“Not being able to do it at this school is kind of disappointing,” Williams said in August at a back-to-school event at Mumford High School.

An unprecedented infusion of aid money the U.S. government provided to schools during the pandemic has begun to dwindle. Like Williams’ school, some districts are already winding down programming like expanded summer school and after-school tutoring. Some teachers and support staff brought on to help kids through the crisis are being let go.

The relief money, totaling roughly $190 billion, was meant to help schools address needs arising from COVID-19, including making up for learning loss during the pandemic. But the latest national data shows large swaths of American students remain behind academically compared with where they would have been if not for the pandemic.

Montgomery County schools, the largest district in Maryland, is reducing or eliminating tutoring, summer school, and other programs that were covered by federal pandemic aid. Facing a budget gap, the district opted for those cuts instead of increasing class sizes, said Robert Reilly, associate superintendent of finance. The district will focus instead on providing math and reading support in the classroom, he said.

But among parents, there’s a sense that there remains “a lot of work to be done” to help students catch up, said Laura Mitchell, a vice president of a districtwide parent-teacher council.

Mitchell, whose granddaughter attends high school in the district, said tutoring has been a blessing for struggling students. The district’s cuts will scale back tutoring by more than half this year.

“If we take that away, who’s going to help those who are falling behind?” she said.

Districts have through September 2024 to earmark the last of the money provided by Congress in three COVID relief packages. Some schools have already started pulling back programming to soften the blow, and the next budget year is likely to be even more painful, with the arrival of what some describe as a “funding cliff.”

In a June survey of hundreds of school system leaders by AASA, The School Superintendents Association, half said they would need to decrease staffing of specialists, such as tutors and reading coaches, for the new school year. Half also said they were cutting summer-learning programs.

As the spending deadline looms, the scope of the cuts is not yet clear. The impact in each district will depend on how school officials have planned for the aid’s end and how much money they receive from other sources.

State funding for education across the country has been generous of late. But states may soon face their own budget challenges: They also received temporary federal aid that is running out.

Many school officials are bracing for the budget hit to come. In Shreveport, Louisiana, officials say that next year they might have to cut some of the 50 math teachers they added to double up on math instruction for middle schoolers.

Schools there added the teachers after identifying deep learning gaps in middle school math, and there’s evidence it helped, with a 4-point increase in math scores, officials say. But at a cost of $4 million, the program will be in jeopardy.

“Our money practically is gone,” Superintendent T. Lamar Goree said.

Some researchers have questioned whether the money was sufficient or sustained enough to address the deep declines in learning. But with a recent deal limiting federal spending increases in education, more money from Congress will not be forthcoming.

Meanwhile, some lawmakers and commentators have pointed to anemic academic recovery to suggest schools didn’t spend the COVID relief money wisely in the first place.

Experts note that district officials had wide discretion over how to spend the money, and their decisions have varied widely, from HVAC upgrades to professional development. “Some of the spending was very wise, and some of it looks, in hindsight, to have been somewhat foolish,” said Lori Taylor, an education finance researcher at Texas A&M University.

To date, there is limited research on whether the federal money has helped address learning loss. One recent study of eight districts’ summer school programs found no impact on reading scores but improvements in math. Since only a fraction of students in each district attended, this made only a small contribution to learning recovery, though.

School officials insist the money has made a difference.

“I wonder what the counterfactual would have been if we didn’t have the money,” said Adriana Publico, the project manager for COVID relief funds at Washoe County School District in Reno, Nevada. “Would students have been even worse off? I think so.“

The Washoe system has cut hours for after-school tutoring in half this year and eliminated teacher coaches from many elementary schools. The district just finished a dramatically expanded summer school program, but officials aren’t sure if they’ll be able to afford to continue it next summer.

Some school systems are trying to maintain COVID-era additions. In Kansas City, Missouri, district officials say they’re planning to keep a number of the positions that were added with federal money, including intervention teachers and clinicians who work with students who have experienced trauma. The district will be able to do so, said CFO Erin Thompson, because of higher property tax revenue.

“This might not be as bad as what we thought,” she said. “We’re optimistic at this point.”

In Detroit, which received a windfall of federal COVID money, district officials say they budgeted carefully to avoid steep cuts when the money runs out. This included earmarking more than half of their federal relief — some $700 million — for one-time building renovations to aging campuses across the city.

But ultimately, officials said some reductions were necessary. Expanded summer and after-school programs have been phased out, in addition to the hundreds of staff positions, like the college advisers.

“In an ideal world, I would rather have college transition advisers,” said Superintendent Nikolai Vitti. “But it’s another example of making hard decisions.”

Hannah Dellinger is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering K-12 education. Contact Hannah at hdellinger@chalkbeat.org.

Matt Barnum is interim national editor, overseeing and contributing to Chalkbeat’s coverage of national education issues. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Collin Binkley is an education reporter for the Associated Press.

Barnum reported from New York and Binkley reported from Washington, D.C.

Newark failed to investigate sexual harassment complaints, U.S. Department of Education finds

2023-08-29T15:00:02+00:00

Newark Public Schools repeatedly failed to investigate dozens of complaints of sexual harassment and did not take appropriate action to address substantiated complaints over a six-year span, a federal compliance review found.

The U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights found nine violations of Title IX, a federal law protecting students from discrimination on the basis of sex in schools and colleges, according to a letter sent from the department to Newark Superintendent Roger León on Monday.

The district last week approved a resolution agreement to ensure compliance with Title IX regulations and its response to complaints and reports of sexual harassment and assault in schools.

“OCR determined that the district discriminated against students based on sex by failing to respond to incidents of sexual harassment and assault and that it failed to coordinate its responses through its designated Title IX coordinator, among other Title IX violations,” the federal department said in a press release on Monday.

The review included an analysis of 80 sexual harassment complaints across district elementary and high schools, including Barringer and Weequahic High Schools and Dr. E. Alma Flagg Elementary School, which reported a high number of incidents. The complaints include allegations that employees sexually assaulted, kissed, and touched students, as well as incidents involving sexual assault between students.

OCR also interviewed 27 current and former staff and reviewed the district’s sexual harassment procedures in handling sexual harassment complaints. The new findings are the latest in a series of harassment and diversity issues impacting students and employees in city schools.

In June 2022, a lawsuit filed by a former employee claimed she was harassed and intimidated by district upper management and a lawsuit filed in August 2022 alleged that Science Park High School principal Darleen Gearhart discriminated against an employee, made racist comments, and created a hostile and retaliatory work environment at Sussex Avenue School. Most recently, students at the Newark School of Global Studies reported experiencing racial and religious harassment at the high school last year.

Newark Public Schools did not respond to a request for comment about the review on Monday.

U.S. Department of Education reviews Title IX compliance

As part of the federal office’s review, OCR reviewed 80 complaints and “closely reviewed” schools with a high number of complaints, according to the department’s letter to the district. During the investigation, the office found an additional employee-to-student complaint for the 2016-17 school year and five more during the 2021-22 school year that the district had not investigated.

The review included nine of the district’s 18 high schools and 23 of the district’s 41 elementary schools that received sexual harassment complaints. As part of the review, the department selected Barringer, East Side, West Side, and Weequahic High Schools for “close review” and found that Barringer and East Side High Schools received the most complaints, or roughly 26% each, according to the letter. Weequahic High School received three complaints, two involving students with disabilities, the letter further read.

In addition to selecting schools with a high number of complaints for close review, the office also reviewed incidents of sexual harassment of students by employees at Central High School, Chancellor Elementary School, Horton Elementary School, and Peshine Avenue School.

Specifically, OCR found that the district failed to investigate and “respond appropriately” to reported incidents of sexual harassment of students by employees during school years 2016-17 through 2019-20 and 2021-22, the letter said. It also failed to investigate multiple incidents of alleged sexual harassment among students during the 2018-19 and 2019-20 school years. Instead, the district deferred the investigation of employee-to-student harassment to the state’s Department of Children and Families Institutional Abuse Investigation Unit to determine what measures should be implemented, the letter said.

“The district repeatedly failed to respond to incidents of student-to-student sexual harassment and to address the effects of such harassment on targeted students, did not take sufficient steps to prevent recurrence of harassment, and failed to provide adequate notice of the investigation outcomes to targeted students and their parents,” according to the letter to León.

OCR also reviewed two more high schools that restricted student admission by application: Science Park High School, which reported one incident of student-to-student sexual harassment, and Eagle Academy for Young Men, which reported no incidents, the letter said.

Among elementary schools, the office decided to “closely review” Flagg Elementary “because it received 19% of the complaints at elementary schools alleging student-to-student sexual harassment,” the letter further read.

Among the procedural violations, the federal office found that Newark’s Title IX coordinator did not, and currently does not, oversee the district’s response to sexual harassment complaints among students. The district’s Harassment, Intimidation, and Bullying coordinator, Rashon Dwight, currently oversees student sexual harassment complaints. Parents and employees were also unaware of the coordinator’s role, the letter to León read.

Newark also failed to implement and comply with a grievance procedure that complied with new amendments to Title IX regulations. OCR also found concerns with the district’s recordkeeping system to track incidents of sexual harassment across schools.

Under the agreement with the department approved on Thursday, Newark agreed to resolve the violations.

The resolution agreement says Newark Public Schools will:

Ensure the Title IX coordinator oversees all of the district’s efforts to comply with the federal sex discrimination law and district investigations of sexual harassment involving its students and employees.
Develop a program to assess the effectiveness of the district’s Title IX anti-discrimination efforts.
Revise federal anti-discrimination policies and procedures to comply with Title IX regulations.
Train staff and students on how to identify sex discrimination and the reporting procedures.
Maintain records of sexual harassment reports.
Review incidents of employee-to-student and student-to-student sexual harassment from school years 2017-2018 through 2021-2022 to determine if further action is needed to provide a resolution for each.
Provide a notice of nondiscrimination that complies with federal sex discrimination laws.
Conduct an annual school climate survey for district employees and students to evaluate the climate at each district school as it relates to sexual harassment and identify the next steps for OCR to review and approve.

Jessie Gomez is a reporter for Chalkbeat Newark, covering public education in the city. Contact Jessie at jgomez@chalkbeat.org.

Schools can host frank discussions of racism, but likely can’t create race-limited groups, feds say

2023-08-25T15:48:40+00:00

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Schools can facilitate frank discussions about race and racism, but likely cannot create groups that exclude people because of their race — even if done with the stated purpose of combating racism — according to new federal guidance.

The document, which the U.S. Department of Education issued Thursday, comes at a time when schools across the country are wrestling with how to manage various issues related to race — from how to help students write college admissions essays to how to facilitate discussions about race and racism in class.

The guidance, which was praised by a coalition of civil rights groups, is the Biden administration’s latest attempt to provide clarity on what is and isn’t allowed. It suggests that common practices employed by schools — curriculum that explores race, efforts to support specific groups experiencing racism — are permitted. But it also indicates that race-exclusive groups, an approach that has been employed in some schools, would trigger a civil rights investigation.

Written as a letter to school officials from the department’s Office for Civil Rights, the guidance does not hold the force of law. But it does suggest how the current administration would approach legal questions, and such guidance is often closely watched by school officials.

“This resource aims to assist our nation’s schools to fulfill Congress’ longstanding promise that no student experience discrimination based on race,” said Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Catherine Lhamon in a statement.

The guidance explains what would and wouldn’t trigger a civil rights investigation under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination based on race and national origin. The letter runs through a number of hypothetical examples to illustrate the department’s approach.

For instance, the document explains that a “program that requires all students to read a book about race discrimination and racial justice” would be perfectly fine. So would a requirement that all students take a Mexican American history course, the guidance says. That’s because neither instance singles out students because of their race.

On the other hand, the Office of Civil Rights would open an investigation into a school district if, after high-profile police shootings, officials created an assembly for “Black students in order to provide a forum for them to express their frustrations, fears, and concerns” — and excluded white students from the assembly.

The Department would also investigate a class where “students of different races read different materials based on their race … and participate in different discussion groups based on their race.” The investigation would proceed even if the instructor justified the practice by saying that “students often feel more comfortable reading works by authors of their own race.”

An investigation on its own does not indicate that such a practice is illegal. But school officials would have to justify such race-conscious policies by showing that they further a “compelling interest” and are “narrowly tailored.” This is an exacting standard that officials would have a hard time meeting, especially in light of Supreme Court precedent, including the recent ruling barring race-based affirmative action in college admissions.

Some school districts across the country have reportedly created “affinity” groups that are limited to students or teachers of certain races, which have in some cases triggered civil rights complaints by conservative groups. The guidance suggests that the Biden administration will look skeptically on such practices insofar as they limit participation to people of specific races.

Still, the guidance offers a number of other examples that would not run afoul of civil rights law.

A school could, for instance, support an Asian American students’ group that created an event that offered a “safe space for students to discuss hate incidents against Asian students” — so long as such an event does not exclude any student based on their race.

Similarly, a school could sponsor a “National Black Parents Involvement Day.” It could also host focus groups and support groups focusing on Black students and parents.

“While the groups and event expressly limit their agendas and focus to Black students and/or parents, none of the groups or events exclude or limit individuals’ participation based on race,” the guidance explains.

The letter, signed by Lhamon, notes “that many schools, colleges, and universities offer spaces and activities for students … in order to cultivate inclusive communities that feel welcoming to students from populations that have traditionally been underserved.” These efforts are allowed so long as they “are open to all students regardless of race,” Lhamon concludes.

Matt Barnum is interim national editor, overseeing and contributing to Chalkbeat’s coverage of national education issues. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Students shouldn’t shy away from talking about race in college essays, Biden officials say

2023-08-14T19:05:21+00:00

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High school students shouldn’t shy away from talking about their race or ethnicity in college application essays, according to new guidance issued Monday by the Biden administration.

Similarly, school counselors, mentors, and employers should feel free to mention a student’s race in a college recommendation letter, the guidance states.

“The Supreme Court’s opinion recognized what we know to be true: That race can be relevant to a person’s life or lived experience and may impact one’s development, motivations, academic interests, or personal or professional aspirations,” Vanita Gupta, a top-ranking Justice Department official, told reporters on Monday. “That impact can still be considered in university admissions.”

The guidance package may offer some clarity as many high schoolers and school staff are trying to make sense of how the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling striking down race-based affirmative action affects what they should tell colleges about themselves and whether it’s advantageous — or risky — to talk about race in their applications.

In June, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his majority opinion that college admissions officers could look at how race had affected an applicant’s life “through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.”

But some high school counselors have expressed concern that the Supreme Court’s decision could be confusing for students of color and lead some to avoid talking about their personal identities.

The new guidance suggests, consistent with the court’s decision, that colleges may consider a student’s individual experience of race or racism, even though they cannot give advantages to students solely because of their race.

The guidance is not legally binding, and what is and isn’t allowed likely will continue to be decided by courts.

Still, the guidance may shape how colleges and students respond to the ruling.

According to the guidance, admissions officers can consider how a student’s experience with racial discrimination or the racial composition of their neighborhood or school affected them and how that may influence what they’d contribute to the college.

For example, one student could write in an essay “about what it means to him to be the first Black violinist in his city’s youth orchestra.” Another student could detail how she overcame “prejudice when she transferred to a rural high school where she was the only student of South Asian descent.” A third applicant might discuss “how learning to cook traditional Hmong dishes from her grandmother sparked her passion for food and nurtured her sense of self.”

And a school counselor could write in their recommendation about “how an applicant conquered her feelings of isolation as a Latina student at an overwhelmingly white high school to join the debate team.”

“Students should feel comfortable presenting their whole selves when applying to college, without fear of stereotyping, bias, or discrimination,” two top Biden administration officials wrote in a letter.

Colleges can still tailor recruitment to reach students of color

Though the Supreme Court’s ruling is about college admissions policies, some states and colleges have interpreted the decision to apply to financial aid. Missouri’s attorney general, for example, said that colleges cannot award scholarships that consider a student’s race or ethnicity, leading the state’s flagship university to eliminate a prestigious diversity award.

That left some education equity advocates worried that officials would point to the Supreme Court ruling to limit a slew of other efforts aimed at increasing racial diversity on college campuses.

The Biden administration’s guidance is silent on scholarships — a top education department official said that was because the Supreme Court decision didn’t address scholarships — but it explicitly states that colleges don’t have to “ignore race” when they are identifying prospective students through recruitment efforts.

Colleges can target their outreach to schools and districts that predominantly serve students of color, the guidance states. They can also recruit from high schools that historically haven’t had many students apply to the college — which could be a strategy for recruiting students of color without considering race directly.

Similarly, colleges and universities can also continue to run mentorship or pipeline programs meant to help prepare students from certain schools to attend that college.

That could look like a summer enrichment camp designed for students who attend public high schools near the college. Colleges are also allowed to set aside slots for students who participate in those pipeline programs, as long as it was open to a broad group of kids — such as all juniors at a certain high school.

“Although this decision changes the landscape for admissions in higher education,” Gupta said, “it should not be used as an excuse to turn away from longstanding efforts to make those institutions more inclusive.”

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Biden taps education researcher known for work on school funding as economics adviser

2023-08-11T20:22:59+00:00

President Joe Biden tapped education economist Kirabo Jackson to serve as a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisers on Friday.

Jackson is well-known in education research circles for his work finding that more money spent on public schools tends to boost student performance. His appointment suggests that Biden will continue to promote education funding as a strategy for improving education — and perhaps for winning votes in the coming presidential campaign. At minimum, it’s a rare sign of interest in K-12 education from a White House that has not made schools a centerpiece of its agenda.

“It signals that the administration absolutely wants the CEA to have serious expertise in education policy,” said Josh Goodman, a professor at Boston University who previously worked as a senior economist at the CEA.

Jackson, who will take a leave of absence as a professor at Northwestern University, has focused his academic research on a wide range of issues relating to schools. “[He] has made a number of major contributions in the economics of education literature,” said Goodman.

For instance, while many other economists have shown that effective teachers improve test scores, Jackson went one step further. He found that teachers affect a number of other outcomes including attendance, behavior, and grades. Those factors, Jackson concluded, may be even more important than test scores for students’ long-run success.

Some of his other research has found that parents are good at choosing effective schools. Another recent study of his found positive results from a Chicago program to grant principals more autonomy over their schools.

Jackson’s research has been most influential on the issue of school funding. He coauthored a seminal paper in 2016 concluding that court-ordered school finance reforms boosted children’s economic futures.

He followed that with a recent summary of studies on the relationship between money and school performance, finding a positive link. “I was genuinely curious as to whether [the finding] would hold up if you looked across studies,” Jackson said in an interview earlier this year. “And it turns out, it holds up remarkably well.”

His research has been frequently cited in school funding court cases, and Jackson himself has served as a paid witness in a couple of those cases.

In one recent case in Pennsylvania, a witness for the defense described Jackson as “the individual who, in my view, kind of most singularly effectuated the consensus shift” about money and school performance. The judge in that case ultimately ruled that Pennsylvania’s funding system was unconstitutional.

Jackson will join the three-member Council of Economic Advisers, which uses empirical evidence to advise the president. “The simplest way to think about it is as an internal research group within the White house,” said Goodman.

News of Jackson’s appointment was first reported by Reuters.

Biden’s education policy has already drawn from — or at least been consistent with — Jackson’s academic work. The White House championed a massive infusion of relief funds for schools that passed under the American Rescue Plan.

The president has also pushed to more than double funding for Title I, which sends money to school districts based on the number of students in poverty they serve. This proposal has gone nowhere in Congress. And a recent debt deal with House Republicans means that any funding increase for education will be anemic at best for the rest of Biden’s term.

Outside of funding, Biden has not articulated a clear vision for K-12 schools — despite a series of challenges in the sector, including persistent learning loss. In this year’s State of the Union, Biden only briefly mentioned K-12 education.

Matt Barnum is interim national editor, overseeing and contributing to Chalkbeat’s coverage of national education issues. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Teacher loan forgiveness, one national strategy for solving educator shortages, isn’t working

2023-07-31T21:03:30+00:00

Many schools struggle to find teachers, and many teachers struggle with student loan debt.

So the federal government’s long-running Teacher Loan Forgiveness program seems like a win–win.

But new research suggests that the federal government’s educator debt forgiveness program is not keeping teachers in the classroom and probably isn’t attracting new ones either. Researchers say the program’s complexity limits its reach, and few teachers take advantage of it each year. The bottom line: One of the few tools that the federal government has deployed to combat teacher shortages doesn’t seem to be making much of a difference.

This disappointing finding comes as the pandemic-era pause on federal student loan payments expires in the fall, while many schools have faced crippling teacher shortages.

“The program has really good intentions,” said Brian Jacob, a professor at the University of Michigan and coauthor of the study. But, ultimately, “it’s not effective as it’s currently structured.”

Loan forgiveness does not help retain teachers.

The Teacher Loan Forgiveness program, established in 1998, does exactly what its name says: forgives a chunk of federal student loan debt for public school teachers. This applies to those who teach for five consecutive years in a low- or moderate-income school. The baseline forgiveness amount is $5,000. But for those who teach in chronic shortage areas — science, math, and special education — that figure jumps to $17,500.

This should be appealing to new teachers, many of whom enter the classroom with significant debt. And, in theory, this perk should help schools attract and retain teachers.

Jacob, along with Damon Jones at the University of Chicago and Benjamin Keys at the University of Pennsylvania, decided to test this theory. They compared schools in Michigan on each side of the eligibility threshold that allows teachers’ loans to be forgiven. Eligible schools were those where 30% of students qualified for free or reduced-price lunch, a proxy for poverty. If the program was working, those schools should have had a leg up in getting teachers.

That’s not what the researchers found, though.

Eligible schools didn’t have a higher teacher retention rate. They also didn’t seem to be able to recruit better teachers (though this couldn’t be measured as precisely). A separate study from four other states produced similar non-results.

“The teachers in schools where they would have qualified for loan forgiveness, their patterns of retention or attrition or mobility, were exactly the same,” said Jacob.

But why? The researchers considered a range of options.

Could it be that the loan forgiveness amounts weren’t large enough? Or that financial incentives just aren’t appealing to teachers? Probably not. Prior research has found that even small bonuses can help keep teachers in the classroom.

Perhaps teachers just don’t value loan relief that much? But the researchers conducted a survey experiment showing that teachers say they would be more likely to work at a school that offered debt forgiveness. In fact, they value a loan write-off nearly as much as a cash bonus.

Maybe teachers just don’t know about the program? That could be part of it. In a survey, only 38% of teachers with loan debt said they were very aware of the Teacher Loan Forgiveness programs rules. Most could not correctly answer how many years it took to be eligible for forgiveness.

So researchers sent a select group of teachers mailers informing them of the program and even offered help applying by phone. But that still didn’t move the needle on teacher retention.

“The information alone, or the information with a little bit of assistance, wasn’t enough,” Jacob said.

Complexity, bureaucracy may derail program

To receive forgiveness, a teacher has to know about the program, meet the precise eligibility standards, get a school administrator to submit paperwork, and work with their loan provider to enroll. Each step of the process, while certainly doable, could trip up an applicant. It could make the potential benefits less salient when choosing where or whether to teach. It might even stop some teachers from getting the benefit at all.

“Our research team, highly motivated to encourage take-up of the program, struggled to find clear guidelines on how to navigate the enrollment process,” the study says. For instance, when researchers called loan providers, representatives often did not know details of the program.

Trying to provide teachers with accurate information about the program also proved challenging. In focus groups, teachers described “a lack of trust in offers that sound too good to be true, in some cases doubting the promises laid out in the outreach materials our research team developed,” the study explained.

The researchers suggest simplifying and streamlining the process as much as possible. “Our results suggest that if any future loan forgiveness program is implemented in the U.S., ease of application and eligibility determination may be key to achieving broad participation,” they write.

One other potential explanation for the disappointing results is that teachers have another option to get their loans wiped out: Public Service Loan Forgiveness, an alternative program available to those working in government or nonprofits. This option may be more appealing to some teachers because it will eventually forgive all remaining loan debt. Unlike the teacher-focused forgiveness, though, it only applies after 10 years rather than five.

What’s clear is that relatively few teachers take advantage of Teacher Loan Forgiveness each year. In 2020, the U.S. Department of Education reported that 32,000 teachers received forgiveness through the program. This is a small fraction of teachers who have student loan debt, although it’s not clear how many would have been eligible for Teacher Loan Forgiveness. In 2015, the Government Accountability Office warned that “awareness among potential participants continues to be a challenge.” More recently, the Department of Education noted that it “is working on ways to raise awareness among current and incoming students.”

This is not the only federal teacher shortage program that has been beset with bureaucratic challenges. TEACH Grants help fund the education of aspiring teachers. The grants must be paid back by those who do not teach in low-income schools for at least four years. However, NPR reported in 2018 that paperwork snafus left thousands of teachers who should have benefitted from the program with substantial debt. In 2021, the Department of Education announced an overhaul to protect teachers from having grants unfairly converted into loans.

Meanwhile, student loan debt is likely on many teachers’ minds these days: the U.S. Supreme Court recently struck down the Biden administration’s plan to cancel $10,000 worth of federal student loan debt and the pause of loan payments is coming to end this October.

Matt Barnum is a national reporter covering education policy, politics, and research. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Biden administration announces $130 million loan forgiveness for Colorado CollegeAmerica students

2023-07-25T21:34:43+00:00

About 7,400 students who attended the for-profit CollegeAmerica in Colorado from 2006 to 2020 will automatically get $130 million in student debt forgiven after the U.S. Department of Education found the college made widespread misrepresentations.

CollegeAmerica students will be notified in August that their federal student loan balance has been wiped clean. They also will be reimbursed for the amount they paid on those loans.

The education department used evidence provided by Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser in its forgiveness decision, finding parent-company Center for Excellence in Higher Education gave false information about the salaries and employment rates of its graduates, the programs it offered, and the terms of a private loan product it offered.

“CollegeAmerica, they took advantage of people and preyed on vulnerable individuals,” Weiser said during a Tuesday news conference with the federal education department. “They had tens of thousands of TV commercials, radio, mailers, all of which promoted starting salaries or median starting salary that they claimed their degrees would give people access to. That was fundamentally untrue.”

Federal Student Aid Chief Operating Officer Richard Cordray credited Weiser’s office for its work exposing issues with College America. The Colorado attorney general’s office started investigating the for-profit in 2012, with a final judgment in favor of the state in 2020.

Cordray said issues included CollegeAmerica inflating job placement rates from 40% to 70%. The college also advertised higher salaries for its graduates, sometimes by twice as much.

“Nothing can replace the time these students spent, the years that have passed, and their trust that is broken,” Corduroy said. “What we can do, we will do, to try to make things right.”

The department’s actions discharge federal loans for the 7,400 students. Private loans, however, are not eligible for forgiveness.

The Biden-Harris Administration has forgiven $14.7 billion in relief for 1.1 million borrowers nationally whose colleges took advantage of them or closed, according to a news release.

Students at now-closed Corinthian Colleges, ITT Technical Institute, and Westwood College also have received loan relief.

Jason Gonzales is a reporter covering higher education and the Colorado legislature. Chalkbeat Colorado partners with Open Campus on higher education coverage. Contact Jason at jgonzales@chalkbeat.org.

House Republicans seek 80% cut to federal program for students from low-income families

2023-07-14T20:24:05+00:00

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Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives want to dramatically slash funding for Title I, the long-running federal program that sends money to schools based on the number of children from low-income families that they serve.

A bill advanced by a Republican-controlled House subcommittee on Friday seeks to cut Title I grants by 80% or nearly $15 billion.

The proposal is part of a broader package of GOP-backed cuts to schools and other federal programs. The bill would also ban the use of funding to teach “critical race theory,” although the concept is not defined.

Since Democrats control the Senate and White House, the deep cuts appear unlikely to be enacted. Even some Republicans may blanch at the idea, which would lead to spending reductions in their own districts’ schools. Still, the move highlights Republicans’ growing critique of American public schools — in how they’re funded, what they teach, and how they responded to the pandemic.

“While Title I grants do support school districts everywhere, including rural schools in districts like my own, these funds disproportionately support big city public schools: the same public schools that failed to educate the most-vulnerable children entrusted to them, by closing their doors for almost two years,” Rep. Robert Aderholt, a Republican from Alabama, said in a subcommittee hearing Friday.

It also underscores just how far apart the two parties have moved on education issues: President Joe Biden has sought to dramatically increase Title I funding.

“I don’t think this can pass Congress, but it’s incredibly concerning that this is what the leaders of this committee think is a reasonable thing for Congress to do,” said Sarah Abernathy, executive director of the Committee for Education Funding, a coalition of education associations that supports more money for schools.

The House proposal represents an initial volley in how much to fund various federal programs in the upcoming fiscal year. The cuts to Title I are justified, Republicans on the subcommittee said in a messaging document, because some COVID relief funding provided to schools ”remains unspent and further investments will not be provided until these funds are used responsibly.” A major chunk of the proposed cut would come by rescinding Title I money that was approved by Congress last year.

House Republicans are also seeking to eliminate Title II, which among other things provides professional development to teachers — or as the subcommittee’s Republican members put it, “teacher training programs that send teachers to expensive weekend workshops.”

The proposal would hold steady funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which helps schools educate students with disabilities. It would also provide a modest boost for the federal Charter Schools Program, which supports the expansion of charter schools.

Although the legislation received initial approval from subcommittee Republicans, it’s a long way from being enacted. Any final spending law will have to be approved by the Senate and signed by the president.

What is clear is that the big education funding increases that Biden initially hoped after being elected for will not be forthcoming: The president has already made a deal with Republicans to limit discretionary federal spending, including for education.

The vast majority of money that schools receive come from state and local sources. Funded most recently at $18.4 billion, Title I accounts for a small share of the several hundred billion spent on education each year. But by design, the money flows disproportionately to schools serving more students from low-income backgrounds. That means any cut to Title I would hit those schools hardest. It would also have a larger impact on schools serving more students of color.

The proposal would affect district, charter, and private school students alike. (Private school students in poverty receive Title I services provided by their local district in coordination with the student’s school.)

How Title I funding is used varies from school to school. But it typically supports instruction for students from low-income families, including by hiring more teachers to reduce class size, adding class time, and providing coaching to help teachers improve. Most research has found that more money for schools boosts student performance. Studies on Title I in particular are more limited and mixed, though.

Republicans link COVID aid with Title I cut

House Republicans’ effort to cut Title I appears motivated by the fact that schools have received large sums of federal COVID relief money, which was distributed through the Title I formula. The biggest tranche came from the Biden-championed American Rescue Plan. Republicans have questioned whether that money has been used effectively and suggested that schools have been slow to spend it. Republicans have also voiced concern that high levels of federal spending have contributed to inflation, which some research supports.

Nat Malkus, a fellow at the American Enterprise, a conservative think tank, said some of these concerns are legitimate. “Boatloads of money went out in ARP, more than school districts were ready to use effectively and without any of the guardrails that could guide the spending,” he said.

School officials, on the other hand, say that the money has provided crucial support throughout the pandemic. And they now appear to be on track to spend down the relief dollars as part of a multi-year plan. They have until fall of 2024 to do so, and may seek extensions.

“They haven’t spent it all yet because they didn’t have to,” said Abernathy. “If you want to give local control, that’s what happens.”

House Democrats predicted that if the Republican bill were enacted, it would result in tens of thousands of teachers losing their jobs. “We are witnessing a widespread attack on public education that should horrify all of us,” said Rep. Rosa DeLauro, a Democrat from Connecticut. A number of education groups also condemned the proposal.

Malkus agreed that if the cuts are ultimately enacted it would have harmful effects. “There’s no doubt that it’s going to hurt students,” he said. But he also emphasized that the proposal faces long odds and perhaps should be seen as more of a messaging document: “It’s something that you should take seriously, but not literally.”

Title I was enacted in 1965 under President Lyndon Johnson as an effort to improve the education of disadvantaged children by providing additional funding to their schools. Ever since, various Republicans — including presidents Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump — have been trying to cut or eliminate the program.

In 2020, Trump’s education secretary Betsy DeVos proposed combining Title I and other federal education programs into a sharply reduced block grant that districts could spend as they see fit.

But Title I has persisted, even when Republicans have fully controlled the federal government, in part because it has developed a constituency of teachers and school administrators who support the program. And most school districts in the country receive some Title I funding. Even many Republicans have been loath to back cuts in funding to their local schools.

“It’s a program that a lot of schools get,” said Abernathy. “It is generally very hard to slash funding for big formula programs that go to most Congressmembers’ constituents.”

Matt Barnum is a national reporter covering education policy, politics, and research. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Denver education research going forward but not without a fight

2023-07-13T17:15:00+00:00

A study that seeks to understand the effects of Denver’s education reform policies is moving forward — but not without significant pushback on whether researchers should have access to the student data that would allow them to answer key questions.

The disagreement highlights how politicized education research can be — even as access to data is critical to providing the information that might cut through the politics.

“Data are power,” said Katharine Strunk, dean of the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education. “That is true in any walk of life. It has grown increasingly political as we have seen the general polarization around public education. It is weaponized, and it doesn’t need to be.”

Parker Baxter, who directs the university’s Center for Education Policy Analysis, plans to examine the academic growth and graduation rates of Denver students who attended schools that were closed for poor performance, new schools opened to offer better options, or schools that received district turnaround grants.

These education reform strategies were used in Denver from 2008 to 2019, when a union-backed school board took office and these policies fell out of favor.

To carry out the study, Baxter requested access to anonymized student data from Denver and 11 comparison districts. In Colorado, unlike many other states, the elected State Board of Education must sign off on such requests. Usually they are approved, but in this case, Denver Superintendent Alex Marrero opposed the request. It was the first time state officials have had to grapple with district opposition. No other district publicly objected to being included in the data set.

In June, a divided State Board of Education voted 5-4 to grant Baxter’s request. Board Chair Rebecca McClellan and member Angelika Schroeder, both Democrats, joined three Republicans to support releasing the data. Democratic board members Lisa Escárcega, Kathy Plomer, Rhonda Solis, and Karla Esser voted no after a nearly two-hour public hearing.

Education policy sometimes divides Democrats. The same 5-4 split has marked recent State Board decisions to grant a charter appeal and remove the Adams 14 district’s chartering authority.

The opposing board members argued that Baxter’s research questions were too narrow and that his conclusions might be limited. Education department staff had recommended approving the request because it might help inform state policy — reasoning that sparked even more concern for some board members.

Solis pointed to a case study of school improvement in the Greeley-Evans district where she previously served as a school board member. She thought the study failed to consider the community organizing that preceded school improvement efforts. Those efforts wouldn’t have been as successful without the community work that came first, Solis said.

“When you don’t have the whole story, then people can weaponize certain areas to say, ‘They did it this way,’” Solis said at the June meeting. “But did they really? Because there were all these other elements. My concern with the research is that it tells a narrative but not the whole narrative.”

Esser said Baxter’s study might attribute all the improvements to the reform strategies when other changes might have had greater impact. Denver increased per-student funding, reduced student-teacher ratios, and expanded training and collaboration during the same time period.

“We’re going to say these are the only changes we’re looking at, and then we’re going to say that it was the portfolio method that led to this improvement or it didn’t,” she said. The portfolio method or model is another term for Denver’s approach of supporting school choice and a range of school types.

Schroeder said she was “amazed” at her colleagues’ opposition.

“I’m not sure I’ve ever been part of a discussion about research where people were afraid of the results because of how they’ll be used,” she said. “That’s what seems to be going on here. Good research does little more than create new questions and you keep going.”

The study is a followup to one Baxter published earlier this year that attributed significant improvements in student test scores and graduation rates to education reform strategies. One criticism of the first study was that without student-level data, the study couldn’t determine which strategies actually made a difference and didn’t entirely account for how the large increase in white, more affluent students during the same time period may have affected test scores.

Baxter said he hopes the next study can answer those questions more definitively — and he can’t do it without student-level data. Baxter has been a supporter of education reform, but he said that won’t influence his findings, which he hopes to publish in early 2024.

“People are already talking about what they think the impact of the reforms were, but we have not had empirical evidence to inform that debate,” he said. “I have opinions on the reforms, and I have hypotheses, but I think I’m demonstrating my commitment to the facts by doing the research and being willing to publish the results” wherever they lead.

Denver dispute unusual in part because it was public

Politics sometimes seeps into education research. In 2016, Louisiana ended a data-sharing agreement with MIT and Duke University after researchers at the two universities published a study that showed negative outcomes in the first year of the state’s voucher program. The state superintendent said researchers should have given the program more time before publishing any findings.

But researchers told Chalkbeat the kind of public pushback that happened in Colorado, with elected officials questioning research methodology, is rare. More often, an education department or school district might slow-walk a request, charge large amounts of money for data, or say data aren’t collected in ways the researcher can use. Some institutions only provide data for studies that align with their priorities, researchers said.

“I think people are sometimes cagey about saying that they don’t want to provide data because of the nature of a research question,” said Dan Goldhaber, director of the Center for Education Data & Research at the University of Washington. “I don’t think we typically see it spill out into the open like this.”

Doug Harris, a Tulane University economics professor who heads the National Center for Research on Education Access and Choice, said the federal government could help by requiring states to make more data available while also providing money to support data collection and analysis. It’s not ideal for elected officials to make that call, he said.

Colorado’s system might allow for some transparency around decisions, he said, but could also have a chilling effect on researchers who watch the process and predict that politicians won’t like their research question.

The nature of a study like Baxter’s will address some of the concerns State Board members raised, Harris said. For example, if other schools or districts made changes that also helped student learning, the improvements at turnaround schools or at new charter schools will look relatively smaller. That’s the benefit of using a large set of individual student data and comparing data within Denver and across districts.

Strunk said she sees Michigan, where she previously was an education professor, as a model. The Michigan Education Data Center, created through a partnership between the state education department and its flagship public universities, serves as a central clearinghouse to clean and store data, review requests, and help researchers refine their proposals.

It’s true, she said, that research questions have to be carefully designed to not mislead policymakers. For example, it would be wrong to study Michigan’s policy holding back third-graders who are poor readers by comparing students who are retained with those who are not. Instead, a researcher would want to compare only students from similar backgrounds who were eligible for retention and look at outcomes for those who were and were not held back.

And because education policies almost always involve complex tradeoffs and conflicting values, politics will probably be unavoidable.

“It’s not just the fault of districts and state agencies,” she said. “It’s also the fault of researchers who are careless, when data is cherry-picked in certain ways. I don’t see a way out of it not being political unless you make it so dry, with a 20-year moratorium on using the data, and then it’s not useful.”

Bureau Chief Erica Meltzer covers education policy and politics and oversees Chalkbeat Colorado’s education coverage. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.

Biden says Supreme Court ruling should not deter colleges from efforts to diversify their campuses

2023-06-29T22:45:09+00:00

President Joe Biden, responding to the Supreme Court’s decision Thursday that severely restricts how colleges can consider a student’s race in the admissions process, called on colleges and universities to find alternative ways to create racially diverse student bodies.

“The court has effectively ended affirmative action in college admissions, and I strongly, strongly disagree with the court’s decision,” Biden said in a Thursday news conference. “We cannot let this decision be the last word.”

In lieu of considering race, Biden urged colleges to give strong consideration to the adversities students have faced, such as whether they overcame hardship or racial discrimination and whether they come from a low-income family. Colleges could also consider where a student grew up and where they attended high school, Biden said.

Already, some college recruitment programs zero in on communities where many low-income Black and Latino students live as part of their efforts to boost student diversity on campuses. Biden’s comments appeared to be aimed at preserving those efforts.

Colleges “should not abandon their commitment to ensure student bodies are of diverse backgrounds and experiences that reflect all of America,” Biden said.

While colleges can no longer explicitly consider a student’s race as part of a holistic admissions review, the court’s opinion does allow colleges to look at how race affected a student’s life, so long as it’s tied to a unique skill or character they’d bring to the school. Discussions like that typically come up in an applicant’s personal essay.

In a fact sheet, White House officials said the Education and Justice departments would issue guidance within the next 45 days to help colleges and universities navigate which admissions practices and student support programs “remain lawful.” That will likely involve poring over the Supreme Court’s most recent and past decisions on affirmative action, and looking for any wiggle room.

In his 6-3 opinion for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that Harvard’s and the University of North Carolina’s race-conscious admissions policies were unconstitutional because they did not have “sufficiently focused and measurable objectives” that warranted the use of race; they used race in a “negative manner” that involved racial stereotyping; and their policies did not have “meaningful end points.”

“That is a list of faults with the UNC and Harvard programs, but it could be read as a blueprint for what would pass muster in some subsequent lawsuit,” said Anthony S. Chen, an associate professor of sociology at Northwestern University, who is publishing a book on the history of affirmative action next year.

But the ruling “doesn’t tell us specifically, well, what does a ‘sufficiently focused and measurable objective’ look like?” Chen added.

Federal guidance — and potentially future litigation — could help fill in that gap.

Some university officials say they will be looking for workarounds.

At the University of Colorado’s School of Medicine, which regularly gets 10,000 applications for 184 spots, that could include putting more weight on essays and responses to questions about past experiences, advocacy work, and personal attributes, said Shanta Zimmer, the senior associate dean for education.

Those questions can help illuminate whether an applicant speaks another language, whether they’ve had to seek primary care in an emergency room, whether they are the first in their family to go to college, or whether they have worked with community groups to improve health outcomes for marginalized communities, Zimmer said.

Given the correlation between patient health outcomes and the race and ethnicity of health care providers, admitting diverse medical students is “not just about what the class looks like,” Zimmer said. “It’s about how patients get healthy and how they survive, literally.”

Notably, the Supreme Court carved out an exemption that allows military academies, such as West Point, to continue to consider race in admissions, citing their “potentially distinct interests.” In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said the exemption was too narrow, given that civilian universities could also have national security interests in maintaining racial diversity.

In his speech, Biden directed the Education Department to analyze which admissions practices are likely to produce a more inclusive and diverse student body, and which practices “expand privilege instead of opportunity,” such as “legacy” admissions policies that favor the children of alumni.

The Education Department will release a report in September, White House officials said, that will lay out strategies for how to boost diversity and use student adversity as a factor in admissions. The report will also detail practices that hurt the admissions chances of students from “underserved communities,” and explain how to run outreach and recruitment programs so they still create diverse applicant pools.

After the Supreme Court’s ruling, several school leaders and education equity advocates called on colleges to get rid of legacy admissions that tend to favor wealthier, white students as a first step.

Opponents of legacy admissions include Shavar Jeffries, a civil rights lawyer who heads the KIPP charter school network, which enrolls some 120,000 students nationwide, most of whom are Black and Hispanic students from low-income families.

“Legacy admissions transfer privilege across generations, disfavoring first-generation KIPP students,” Jeffries said in a statement. “The Supreme Court’s decision should be a wake-up call for colleges to reimagine their admissions practices.”

Erica Meltzer contributed reporting to this article.

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Feds launch $10 million school desegregation program after stops and starts

2023-05-18T23:00:00+00:00

In a surprising move, federal education officials announced last week that they had created a new $10 million grant program to fund school integration efforts.

The funding is a small fraction of the $100 million that President Biden has tried to get Congress to put toward this program since he was elected. But it represents a noteworthy, if small, win for integration advocates who’ve spent years lobbying the federal government to take a bigger role in supporting school desegregation.

“This is a relatively small grant program, but it’s part of a larger, multi-year movement,” said Philip Tegeler, the head of a civil rights organization, the Poverty & Race Research Action Council, who spoke at an event about the program this week. “The response to this program from local educational agencies and states is going to determine what happens in the future.”

Advocates hope that if the program attracts interest from many school districts, it could help build the case to boost spending down the line.

But it’s unclear how many school districts will want to take on the politically fraught and logistically complicated work of desegregating schools at a time when many communities are fighting over how to teach about race and racism in school, and some states and districts are retreating from the racial equity work they started in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

Eighteen states now have laws or other restrictions limiting how schools can teach about racism and sexism, according to a tracker compiled by Education Week, and several school districts have brought back school police after removing them over concerns that they disproportionately arrested Black students. Many educators also are bracing for a decision from the U.S. Supreme Court that’s expected to prevent colleges from considering a student’s race in the admissions process.

Still, dozens of school districts, including some of the nation’s largest, have expressed interest in integrating schools in recent years and could be prime candidates for this new funding.

Notably, the new grant program prioritizes initiatives that would integrate students from different socioeconomic backgrounds, though prior versions of this program floated by Biden and others have included preferences for integration by both family income and student race. Federal officials say districts could still use this money to create more racially diverse schools, though that’s not the main focus.

Supreme Court rulings have made it very difficult for school districts to consider student race in desegregation plans and to create integration plans that cross school district boundaries, where most school segregation exists.

The roots of this program go back to 2016, when former Education Secretary John King tried to launch a similar initiative in the final days of the Obama presidency. The education department created a $12 million grant program and received applications from dozens of school districts that wanted to participate. But the Trump administration killed the program before it started.

“This very similar program was started in 2016, but folks never got awards,” said Kayla Patrick, a special assistant in the education department’s planning and policy development office. “We are really excited to have this opportunity to actually see the entire program through. Our hope is that this is just step one and we can get to the place where we’re scaling up.”

This time around, the education department is using existing funding through a federal program that’s meant to create safe and healthy schools and provide students with access to a well-rounded education.

“Research suggests that income segregation is increasing and that students in socioeconomically isolated schools (i.e., schools overwhelmingly composed of children from low-income backgrounds) have less access to the critical resources and funding that are necessary for high-quality educational experiences,” a notice for the grant states. “This disparity can ultimately have detrimental effects on the individual lives of students and the foundation of democracy.”

Federal officials expect to award four to eight grants to school districts that are in the planning stages of integrating their schools and one to three larger grants to districts that are putting their integration plans into action. The timeline is relatively short: Applications are due in July and work could begin as soon as the fall.

Some integration advocates say that even in the face of legal limitations, the federal government can do more than start a competitive grant program. That approach only appeals to districts that already want to do this work, but doesn’t touch the many places where there is little appetite for change.

“I think students deserve access to diverse learning environments in whatever communities they are,” said Halley Potter, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank that supports school integration, “even if those are communities that have a long way to go in terms of recognizing the need for integration.”

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

As GOP ramps up school culture wars, Democrats weigh a counterattack

2023-04-21T10:00:00+00:00

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news organization covering public education in communities across America. Sign up for our free weekly newsletter to keep up with how public education is changing.

As the country’s furious political fights engulf schools, Democrats have mostly played defense.

Many critics blamed Democrats for the extended school closures during the early stages of the pandemic, saying they put educators’ interests ahead of students’. Then Republicans cast themselves as defenders of “parents’ rights,” while accusing the left of trying to “indoctrinate” public school students.

“We were in a really bad space politically around these issues,” said Lanae Erickson, a senior vice president at Third Way, a liberal think tank that often advises the Democratic party.

But after putting up little resistance in recent years, there are some signs that national Democrats are ready to fight back.

Party leaders and their allies are piloting new messaging and proposed legislation meant to challenge Republicans’ stance as the party of parents. They are emboldened by polls showing that most parents oppose book bans and worry more about school safety than critical race theory creeping into the curriculum, and are betting that the GOP’s efforts to dictate what students learn and to restrict LGBTQ students’ rights will ultimately alienate moderate voters.

Until recently, “The Republicans felt like, ‘We can’t lose on this,’ and the Democrats felt like, ‘We can’t touch this,’” Erickson said. “That dynamic is beginning to shift.”

Democrats’ interest in a more muscular response will be tested as Republicans escalate the school culture wars ahead of the 2024 presidential election. This week, Florida expanded its ban on classroom lessons about sexuality and gender identity, which has been a top priority for likely presidential contender Gov. Ron DeSantis, and Republicans in Congress advanced new nationwide restrictions on transgender student athletes.

But among advocates who have been urging Democrats to forcefully fight back, some still question the party’s resolve.

“I think they’re doing better,” said Keri Rodrigues, co-founder and president of the National Parents Union, which generally aligns with Democrats on education. “But they’re still terrible.”

Democrats start to fight against the culture wars

The clearest example of Democrats’ new approach came last month when House Republicans proposed the Parents Bill of Rights Act, which would require every school to publish its curriculum and notify parents if a student wants to use different pronouns or restrooms. Democrats branded it the “Politics Over Parents Act” and put forward a counter-resolution, which calls for “authentic” collaboration between parents and teachers along with civil rights protections for students.

The Biden administration echoed the message. After the Republican bill narrowly passed, an education department official told Politico that GOP leaders “are focused more on playing politics than helping our parents, kids and schools.” And in an uncharacteristically forceful op-ed, U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona accused Republicans of being out of touch with families.

“Parents don’t want politicians dictating what their children can learn, think and believe,” he wrote in the Tampa Bay Times last month after Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis rejected a high school African American studies course. And in a recent interview with Politico, he declared that he will no longer “sit idly” while some lawmakers push for “book banning” and “attacking vulnerable students.”

Democrats’ allies are spreading a similar message. In a speech last month, the head of the nation’s second largest teachers union said the school culture wars are “not what parents or the public want.” Instead, they are a Republican ploy to undermine public education “by stoking fear and division,” said American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten.

Democratic lawmakers in red states have vocally opposed curriculum restrictions and laws targeting LGBTQ students, while blue state Democrats have passed laws protecting trans youth and ensuring that students learn about marginalized groups.

President Biden has proposed new rules that would codify federal anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ students, and prohibit states from enacting blanket restrictions on transgender student athletes. His administration has launched investigations into allegations of discrimination against Black and LGBTQ students, and has backed legal challenges to several anti-LGBTQ state laws.

Aaron Ridings, a deputy executive director at the LGBTQ youth-advocacy group GLSEN, said the Biden administration has done more than its predecessors to protect LGBTQ students.

“Unfortunately,” Ridings added, “the level of harm and the attacks against trans and nonbinary communities mean that we have to do more.”

But Democrats have also been stymied by partisan gridlock in Congress and legal challenges to Biden’s anti-discrimination guidance. As a result, while states with one-party control pass laws around curriculum and LGBTQ students’ rights, national politicians are waging school culture wars largely in the realm of rhetoric.

On that front, critics say, Democrats have had a mixed record. While they have spoken out against bills targeting transgender students and curtailing lessons on racism and sexuality, they have also been eager to change the subject to safer topics, such as teacher pay and preschool.

Rodrigues, head of the National Parents Union, pointed to a January speech in which Cardona laid out his vision for public education — but said nothing about protecting vulnerable students.

“What this moment calls for is courageous leadership and a backbone,” she said, “and we’re just not seeing it.”

An education department spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

Republicans keep up their campaign

Meanwhile, Republicans appear confident that education, traditionally Democrats’ strong suit, can be a winning issue for them in the 2024 presidential campaign.

They note that Republican Glenn Youngkin scored an upset victory in 2021 in the Virginia governor’s race on a message of parents’ rights, and DeSantis won a landslide reelection last fall after making school culture wars a centerpiece of his first term. They cite surveys showing that most voters oppose classroom lessons on sexuality and gender identity and want parents to have more control over what schools teach. And they highlight polls from last year that found, for the first time in decades, voters trusted Republicans more than Democrats on education.

Republicans have been undaunted by criticism that they are censoring classroom instruction, arguing instead that they are empowering parents and shielding students from inappropriate content.

“This is not about banning books, this is about promoting transparency,” said Rep. Mark Alford, a Missouri Republican, during debate over the federal parents’ rights bill. “It is our responsibility to protect our children from the evils being taught in some classrooms across the country.”

The bill was a pillar of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s agenda, even though it stands no chance of passing the Democratic-controlled Senate.

In states across the country, Republicans are also continuing to advance legislation that forbids some lessons on racism and sexuality, facilitates book challenges, and targets transgender students’ rights. And the likely contenders for the party’s presidential nomination, including DeSantis and former President Donald Trump, are hammering the message of parent empowerment.

“I will bring parental rights back into our school system,” Trump said during a campaign stop in Iowa last month, when he vowed to cut funding for schools that teach “inappropriate” content or allow transgender athletes to play alongside peers of the same gender.

Democrats insist those policies will turn off independent voters in a general election. They point to the 2022 midterm elections, when several candidates who ran on parents’ rights lost high-profile races, and to polls that show voters favor improving public schools over restricting curriculum.

Now Democrats will try to land a tricky one-two punch: Push back against Republicans’ vision of parents’ rights, then propose an alternative centered on issues such as school funding and safety, which they say reflect most families’ actual concerns.

“That’s how you respond to the parents’ right push,” said Jon Valant, who directs the Brown Center on Education Policy at the left-leaning Brookings Institution. “You make it your own.”

Patrick Wall is a senior reporter covering national education issues. Contact him at pwall@chalkbeat.org.

‘I need a plan.’ As NRA convention begins, Indianapolis teens share fears about gun violence.

2023-04-14T16:59:48+00:00

Raina Maiga looked out her school’s windows from the second floor on Thursday, trying to imagine what she would do in a school shooting.

“I’m hopeless. I can’t jump out the window,” said Maiga, a sophomore at Purdue Polytechnic High School’s Englewood campus on Indianapolis’ east side. “There’s nothing to do. Our school is exposed with windows. If someone walked in here with a gun, I mean, it’s over.”

These are the conversations that Raina and her classmates have on an almost weekly basis.

But this week, those conversations are happening with the backdrop of the National Rifle Association’s three-day annual convention, which is expected to bring tens of thousands of attendees to downtown Indianapolis beginning Friday.

The convention for the powerful lobbying organization — and the warm reception from some Indiana lawmakers — feels tone deaf to Indianapolis-area teens who say gun violence in their schools and communities is their reality and fills them with anxiety on a regular basis.

Ryan Evans, a Purdue Polytechnic junior, remembers the day in 2013 that his sister survived the Arapahoe High School shooting in Colorado. His classmate Huma Moghul recalls the night she heard gunfire in her neighborhood and woke up to a bullet hole in her living room wall. And they all remember the lockdowns they have experienced this year — anxious moments that they try to ease with dark humor about whether they’d survive if a shooter was outside their door.

So far this year, eight people age 18 and under in Indianapolis have been killed by a firearm, per the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department. Sixteen people age 18 and under in the city died by firearms in 2022, up from 14 in 2021.

Among those who died was a 17-year-old Purdue Polytechnic High School student James Johnson III, who was killed in February.

“Nobody ever thinks that it’s going to happen to them,” said Evans. “And I definitely think that James Johnson didn’t think that as well. Because it’s not a thought that somebody should have.”

Students prepare for school shootings

The NRA annual meeting comes roughly three weeks after a person shot and killed three children and three adults at a private Christian school in Nashville. Their deaths sparked outrage during Tennessee’s legislative session, and students rallied for tougher gun laws at the Tennessee State Capitol.

Indiana lawmakers are considering a bill to provide state funding for firearms training for teachers. Rep. Jim Lucas, a Republican from Seymour and the bill’s author, said in February his legislation is a response to mass school shootings across the U.S., according to the Indiana Capital Chronicle.

But to students like Evans and Maiga, that legislation is not the solution. Instead, they say, legislators should stop and think about how the situation is affecting students in schools.

And the onus should not be on schools to arm teachers, or transform buildings into iron fortresses, some students argue.

“We shouldn’t have to be wanding children into schools to prevent guns from entering schools or teaching them how to evacuate to mobile bomb shelters that can be built in schools,” said Evans.

(The convention also starts on the same day that dozens of Indiana school districts received a bomb threat, prompting the closure of school buildings.)

Katie Bolduc, a freshman at Westfield High School, said she’s only known a world with gun violence in schools, where active shooter drills are as commonplace as fire and tornado drills.

“There’s a lot of complacency, it’s something that’s normal and accepted that you have to prepare for,” she said.

But it leaves her feeling unsafe.

“There are weapons that can cause mass casualties in a few minutes, and all I have is a pencil pouch or a water bottle to throw at the shooter, best-case scenario,” Bolduc said.

Lucy Rutter, a junior at Burris Laboratory School in Muncie, said she first started to hear about school shootings in middle school. At that time, it seemed like it wouldn’t happen to her. That’s changed.

“The more I see it, the more I feel like it is going to happen to me, and I need a plan,” she said. “It’s so hard to hear about it in the news every day and feel like I can’t do anything about it.”

NRA convention in town prompts disappointment from students

Having the NRA convention in their backyard only exacerbates the disconnect between lawmakers and the students who spoke to us.

“I do wonder what the conversations are like when talking about actually caring about the lives of people, but then choosing to be a public face at this convention,” said Maiga, who lamented the scheduled presence of Gov. Eric Holcomb and former Vice President Mike Pence at the convention.

Students said that having the convention so close to home is a reminder of how tense and politically charged the topic of gun violence prevention is — and of the sway of organizations like the NRA.

Salsabil Qaddoura, a North Central High School sophomore, leads her school’s chapter of Students Demand Action, a national group of high school and college students that aims to end gun violence and is affiliated with Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action.

She said the NRA convention has her thinking about gun industry accountability, and how it can profit off of young people. The access to guns is there, she said.

“It’s disgusting and insensitive,” she said of the NRA coming to Indianapolis.

The NRA did not respond to a request for comment.

Students consider how to change views on guns

Being a high schooler means having pressures to fit a certain standard, Qaddoura said. That means students are influenced by what they surround themselves with, and there’s a thought of “if you have guns you have that tough-person persona,” she said.

Students said they want to shift the narrative around guns with their classmates to make having a gun less of a status symbol, and to know that it’s OK to ask for help and to talk about gun-violence prevention.

In all the years of doing active shooter drills, “I don’t think I’ve ever had a teacher or school officer talk about how we feel, get under the desk and find what you’re going to throw and prepare,” Bolduc said.

She hopes to start a Students Demand Action chapter to change that.

As leaders of their own Students Demand Action chapters, Qaddoura and Rutter have worked to start a discussion about gun violence. They’ve registered voters, signed petitions, and attended protests and other events.

“A lot of people assume that my only goal is to ban guns, but there are so many other solutions besides banning guns outright,” Rutter said, listing gun safety education, safe storage, background checks, and red flag laws.

Students at Purdue Polytechnic, meanwhile, are organizing a walkout for April 20, the 24th anniversary of the Columbine High School shooting.

Students said they know change can be slow.

“I always hear that change is gradual,” Qaddoura said. But she added that when it comes to gun violence prevention, “We can’t wait.”

Amelia Pak-Harvey covers Indianapolis and Marion County schools for Chalkbeat Indiana. Contact Amelia at apak-harvey@chalkbeat.org.

MJ Slaby oversees Chalkbeat Indiana’s coverage as bureau chief and covers higher education. Contact MJ at mslaby@chalkbeat.org.

Chicago Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson’s win reflects local and national shifts on education

2023-04-12T20:35:00+00:00

The direction of public education in Chicago changed last week when voters elected a teachers union organizer and former middle school teacher to be the city’s next mayor over a former schools chief and education consultant.

Brandon Johnson, 47, clinched victory with 52% of the vote over Paul Vallas, 69, and will be sworn in as mayor on May 15.

He comes to the job with more experience in public education than most, if not all, previous mayors. Johnson will also be the first mayor in recent memory to hold the title of a public school parent. And he’ll be the last with the power to appoint the school board.

But most significantly, Johnson brings a teachers union-friendly perspective that rejects many of the education ideas that once dominated Democratic politics and defined Vallas’ career: a focus on accountability for schools, teachers, and students, market-based school choice, and top-down decision-making from the mayor. Support from Democrats for those ideas began to erode years ago, making Johnson’s rise part of a bigger national shift.

“The former bipartisan ground that the Paul Vallas-esque reformers used to occupy, where do they stand anymore?” said Sarah Reckhow, a political scientist at Michigan State University who studies education policy. “The ground has shifted beneath them.”

Brandon Johnson announced his bid for Chicago mayor on Oct. 27, 2022. His win over Paul Vallas on April 4, 2023 marked the culmination of a years-long effort by the Chicago Teachers Union to influence public policy beyond the classroom.

Johnson’s win is also a win for local progressives, who see it as the culmination of years of effort. His education agenda — which closely mirrors policy papers put out by the Chicago Teachers Union over the past several years — calls for more funding for traditional public schools, higher pay for teachers, and additional social services for students.

Emma Tai, executive director of United Working Families, which endorsed Johnson and helped turn out the vote with an army of field organizers, said Johnson’s victory comes after a “years-long journey” of “sustained, aspirational” organizing.

“Both (Donald) Trump’s secretary of education and (Barack) Obama’s secretary of education endorsed Paul Vallas and he lost,” said Tai. “A working-class majority defeated a bipartisan, wealthy donor consensus on public education. And I think that any Democrats with national aspirations or presidential aspirations need to pay pretty close attention to that.”

Johnson’s victory follows a decade of growing union strength

The start of Johnson’s political career can be traced to the summer of 2011, when he left the classroom to become an organizer with the Chicago Teachers Union.

For more than a decade prior, Chicago had been a testing ground for a vision of school improvement that relied on accountability and pushed publicly-funded, privately-run charter schools as engines of improvement.

In this worldview, held by Democrats and Republicans alike, teachers unions were seen as stubborn barriers to progress, intent on preserving an adult-centered status quo.

When Johnson became an organizer, Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s first chief of staff, had just been elected mayor and Illinois lawmakers had passed a new law reforming teacher tenure and limiting the Chicago Teachers Union’s ability to strike. It was one of dozens of laws passed across the country — in red and blue states alike — aimed at weakening the collective bargaining rights of teachers.

That did not sit well with classroom teachers.

A year earlier, a high school chemistry teacher named Karen Lewis had been elected as the new president of the Chicago Teachers Union on a platform promising to oppose charter school expansion, stop neighborhood school closures, and take on high-stakes testing and accountability.

The headquarters of Chicago Teachers Union sit on Chicago’s Near West Side.

Lewis and Emanuel became foils on the future of public education in Chicago — and nationally. They battled over seemingly everything — how long the school day and year should be; how teachers should be evaluated and compensated; and eventually, whether or not 50 public schools should be shuttered.

Though Emanuel succeeded in shuttering 50 schools, Lewis said the “fight for education justice” would “eventually move to the ballot box.”

“Clearly, we have to change the political landscape in this city,” Lewis said on the day the school board voted on the school closures in 2013.

That moment galvanized more than just the teachers union. Tai, now the head of United Working Families, said those closures prompted her to get into politics.

“I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t want them to be able to do this anymore,’” Tai said. “What’s it going to take so that I never have to be at a Board of Education meeting again, watching as Black parents are dragged out by white jacketed security guards while they’re crying? I never want to have to see that again.”

Johnson was one of the boots on the ground for the teachers union during this time, convening groups of teachers from schools on the South and West Sides and building coalitions with community organizations.

He helped elect City Council members in 2015 and supported Jesus “Chuy” Garcia’s bid for mayor when Lewis was sidelined by a brain tumor. In 2018, Johnson ran for a seat on the Cook County Board of Commissioners and won — a victory Lewis applauded in a letter to teachers when she resigned as CTU president.

But in 2019, the union’s endorsed candidate for mayor, Toni Preckwinkle, lost to outgoing Mayor Lori Lightfoot in a landslide. That fall, teachers went on strike for 11 days and although the union secured some significant wins, the protracted fight left some teachers and parents frustrated. Still, this spring, the union’s existing leadership won re-election.

Chicago Teachers Union members rallied outside City Hall on the 11th day of their strike in 2019.

Johnson’s ascension to mayor is now an ironic — and perhaps fitting — end to three decades of mayoral control over Chicago Public Schools, a major priority of the union’s. In an interview last week, Johnson told Chalkbeat that he still supports eventually relinquishing control to an elected school board now that he’s been elected.

“Anyone else would say, ‘Well, now that we have it, we’re good because we have our mayor. So let’s keep it. Let’s keep mayoral control,’” he said. “That would miss the moment … We still believe that democracy is the best form of governance for our public school system.”

Mayoral campaign becomes an indictment of education reform

The union had tried and failed twice in the last decade to put an ally in the mayor’s office. But Vallas was a different kind of opponent, and the union capitalized on growing skepticism among Democrats about his education record.

He rose to prominence in 1995 as the first CEO of Chicago Public Schools after the state legislature handed control of the system to then-Mayor Richard M. Daley. He became a leading advocate for and adopter of the education-reform playbook touted by both Democrats and Republicans throughout the early 2000s.

Defenders of Vallas say he fixed entrenched problems and improved outcomes for students. But others, including the CTU, say he left a “trail of destruction” in the places where he worked — which Johnson supporters highlighted during an event on the city’s South Side just weeks before the election. Vallas supporters disrupted that event and called their claims “completely untrue.”

Still, Johnson’s campaign continued to focus on Vallas’ complicated schools legacy, even releasing a two-minute ad with parents from New Orleans and Philadelphia talking about teachers being fired during Vallas’ time leading those districts.

Paul Vallas represented a different kind of opponent for the Chicago Teachers Union, which had tried twice to put an ally in the mayor’s office.

Peter Cunningham, founder and board chair of Education Post and former assistant secretary at the U. S. Department of Education, said Vallas — and his record on education running school systems in Philadelphia, New Orleans, and Chicago — were mischaracterized and unfairly maligned. Vallas advocated for more than just school choice and high-stakes accountability, he said. For example, he started a program that still exists to provide Chicago Public Schools students with free eye exams and eyeglasses and developed a school-based teen pregnancy program. He built more than 70 new school buildings — including the one where Johnson eventually taught middle school.

“I would not say the reform movement was a failure in any sense,” Cunningham said. “I would say that it had considerable successes.”

And even though Johnson’s campaign criticized Chicago’s system of school choice that Vallas helped to build, he has taken advantage of it for his three children, two of whom attend a magnet elementary school and one who attends a neighborhood high school that is not his zoned school. That’s a reflection of the way Chicago Public Schools has been reshaped by the changes of the last two decades in ways that are likely to outlast any mayor.

“We’ve seen a lot of improvement in Chicago over the last 15 years,” said Elaine Allensworth, Lewis-Sebring director of the UChicago Consortium on School Research, which has studied Chicago Public Schools since 1990.

More students are graduating high school, going to, and finishing college. Student learning accelerated between 2009 to 2014 — with students gaining six years worth of education in five — according to research out of Stanford University. Out-of-school suspensions have decreased.

“No matter what you think about the reforms of the last 30 years, that’s not the question,” Cunningham said.

“The question is: What do you want to do in the next 10?”

The work beyond the classroom walls begins

The vision laid out by the teachers union more than a decade ago will come to fruition on May 15 when Johnson is sworn in as mayor.

Now, he will have the chance to tackle the issues beyond the classroom, beyond the school building, beyond the district administration. As he moves from an outsider advocating for a certain ideology to decision maker, Johnson will face the realities of governing a city known for its provincial politics, despite being dominated by Democrats.

Johnson will be responsible for a police department grappling with reforms mandated by the federal government and a public health department still dealing with a global pandemic. He’ll oversee multiple city agencies that determine when libraries are open, whether trains run on time, how businesses are licensed, and how to manage garbage pickup and alley rats.

Chicago Mayor-elect Brandon Johnson spoke at a City Club of Chicago luncheon during his campaign for mayor.

Allensworth said educators have an “innate sense” of how those different sectors — such as transportation, public health, and safety — all impact public schools.

“I do hope that having that knowledge will help him be a good strong coordinator of all those different services in the service of young people in Chicago,” she said.

And although Chicago Public Schools has seen a lot of improvement, the pandemic stymied some of its progress. Chicago’s scores on the nation’s report card last year dropped in math and flat-lined in reading. Long-standing gaps between students of color and their white peers remain. The district’s handling of students with disabilities is being monitored by the state, after a 2018 report found it delayed and denied services to those children.

“There’s so much more work to do,” said former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who led Chicago Public Schools from 2001 to 2008 and now heads a nonprofit focused on violence prevention.

Duncan endorsed Vallas and in doing so, didn’t mention education or schools. In an interview with Chalkbeat, he said the mayoral election was as much about education as it was about public safety, noting that when students drop out of high school, they’re more likely to be shot and killed.

“The consequences here in Chicago for educational failure are pretty staggering,” Duncan said. “This is absolutely about education. It’s absolutely about breaking cycles of poverty and helping people have upward mobility and enter the middle class.”

Now, he said the city needs to rally around Johnson. And he applauded the former teachers union organizer for promising to double the number of youth summer jobs from 30,000 to 60,000 and make that employment program year round.

Johnson has also promised to fund the city’s public schools based on need, not enrollment, which has been declining for the past decade. With schools slated to get their budgets this month, it’s not clear if the formula for doling out money will change in time for next school year. He’s vowed to continue investing in support staff — such as social workers, school nurses, and librarians — which Chicago Public Schools has already started doing using federal COVID recovery money.

He’ll have to negotiate a new contract with his former employer, the Chicago Teachers Union, and decide whether to keep current district leadership, including CEO Pedro Martinez, in place.

Tai, with United Working Families, said Johnson’s win does not mean their work is finished.

“I don’t think it’s ever really over,” she said. “But it’s a game changer, a conversation changer, and once again, Chicago’s in the center of it.”

Patrick Wall contributed reporting.

This story has been updated to correct Peter Cunningham’s title.

Becky Vevea is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Chicago. Contact Becky at bvevea@chalkbeat.org.

Schools could limit transgender students’ sports participation under Biden admin proposal

2023-04-06T21:40:35+00:00

The Biden administration on Thursday proposed a rule that would allow schools to place some restrictions on transgender athletes, particularly in competitive high school and college sports.

In a long-awaited proposal, federal education officials said that K-12 schools and colleges cannot establish across-the-board bans on transgender students participating on sports teams that correspond with their gender identity — a direct challenge to laws in several states. But the proposal would allow schools to keep transgender students off certain teams in the interest of “ensuring fairness in competition or preventing sports-related injury,” according to an education department fact sheet.

That language echoes complaints by critics, including Republican lawmakers, who say that allowing transgender girls to compete in girls sports gives them an unfair advantage and poses potential safety risks.

Under the proposed rule, schools would violate federal civil rights law if they enact “categorical bans” on transgender athletes “just because of who they are,” the fact sheet said.

“Every student should be able to have the full experience of attending school in America, including participating in athletics, free from discrimination,” U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a statement.

The proposed rule would codify the administration’s position that transgender students are protected by federal anti-discrimination laws. Still, the proposal is likely to face criticism that it still allows schools to exclude trans athletes, and is sure to be challenged in court by Republican-led states that have passed laws barring transgender girls from joining girls sports teams.

If a school chooses to restrict participation based on sex, education department officials said, it would have to consider the individual sport, the age of the students participating, and how competitive the team is.

Officials said they expected most elementary school students would be able to participate on a sports team corresponding with their gender identity and that it would be particularly difficult for schools to exclude them. But schools would be permitted to adopt policies that limit the participation of transgender students in high school and college, especially in more competitive sports.

“It seems like there would be some clarity on the elementary school level, like let’s not ban third graders from playing on a soccer team,” said Suzanne Eckes, a professor of education law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who has followed lawsuits over trans student athletes. “At the high school level, we’ll have to see how that plays out.”

Less than 2% of high school students identify as transgender, according to a 2017 CDC survey of 10 states and several large districts, and only a fraction of those students participate in school sports.

Many states have passed laws restricting transgender athletes

Still, at least 20 states have passed laws that ban transgender athletes from playing on sports teams that match their gender identity, according to the Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit that tracks policies affecting LGBTQ people.

On Wednesday, Kansas became the latest state to enact such a ban, passing a law that bars transgender girls from playing on girls sports teams. The law targets a minuscule number of students: Out of 106,000 student athletes in the Kansas State High School Activities Association, only three are transgender girls, a spokesperson told KCUR.

A number of states that restrict transgender athletes have already sued the Biden administration, arguing that guidance saying federal anti-discrimination laws protect transgender people infringes on states’ rights.

Last June, federal education officials put forward another rule stating that LGBTQ students are protected from discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that prohibits sex discrimination at school. (That rule is not yet final, but education department officials expect it will be in May.)

At the time, the Biden administration announced it would undertake a separate rule-making process regarding participation on school sports teams — a move that disappointed many advocates for LGBTQ students, who wanted federal officials to move faster to protect the rights of transgender student athletes.

This new proposal wades into that more contentious political territory, though it remains to be seen how strongly the education department would enforce such a rule.

The education department could conduct investigations into whether a school had improperly excluded a trans student from a sports team, a senior department official said. In those cases, officials could withhold federal funding from schools to urge compliance, though no school has ever lost money for violating Title IX.

Trans students have already gone to court in several states to challenge laws that restrict their participation in school sports. In West Virginia, a federal judge temporarily halted that state’s law after advocates sued on behalf of an 11-year-old transgender girl who was stopped from joining girls cross country and track teams.

“The right not to be discriminated against by the government belongs to all of us in equal measure,” the judge wrote in his 2021 decision. However, the same judge reversed his decision earlier this year, ruling that the law did not violate Title IX.

Advocates for the student appealed that decision, and a federal appeals court reinstated the temporary pause on the law. Last month, West Virginia asked the U.S. Supreme Court to step in and allow the law to take effect. On Thursday, the court denied the state’s request, with Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissenting.

Republicans say they are protecting cisgender girls

Like other Republicans, West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said the law is meant to defend cisgender girls.

“Our case is simple: It’s about protecting opportunities for women and girls in sports,” he told CNN. Critics say such statements intentionally exclude transgender girls.

Republicans at both the state and national level have vowed to oppose the Biden administration’s Title IX rules, saying they will fight to keep transgender girls out of girls sports.

Last month, Congressional Republicans advanced a bill to revise Title IX’s definition of sex to be based solely on a person’s reproductive biology and genetics at birth. While the bill is unlikely to pass in the Democrat-controlled Senate, Republicans have made the issue a key talking point. In his policy agenda, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Republicans will ensure “that only women can compete in women’s sports.”

At the state level, 20 Republican attorneys general filed a lawsuit in 2021 to block the Biden administration’s guidance extending anti-discrimination protections to transgender students. Last July, a Trump-appointed federal judge agreed to temporarily halt enforcement of the guidance in those states. The administration appealed the decision.

A group of conservative attorneys general also sent a letter to the U.S. education secretary last year that said using Title IX to protect transgender people from discrimination “is an attack on the rights of girls and women.”

“[W]e will fight your proposed changes to Title IX with every available tool in our arsenal,” they wrote.

To Eckes, the matter likely won’t be settled until the Supreme Court weighs in.

“It’s not the end of the conversation,” she said.

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org. Patrick Wall is a senior reporter covering national education issues. Contact him at pwall@chalkbeat.org.

Tennessee House speaker proposes task force to look into rejecting federal education funds

2023-03-13T21:18:16+00:00

House Speaker Cameron Sexton wants to create a task force to study the feasibility of Tennessee rejecting U.S. education dollars to free its schools from federal rules and regulations.

The Crossville Republican filed legislation Monday that would create an 11-member exploratory panel, chaired by Tennessee’s education commissioner, who is currently Penny Schwinn. If the bill is approved by the state’s GOP-controlled legislature, the group would begin meeting monthly by Aug. 1 and would be charged with delivering a strategic plan to lawmakers and Gov. Bill Lee by Dec. 1.

The task force also would include six legislators, two school superintendents, and two teachers — all appointed by Sexton and Lt. Gov. Randy McNally.

The proposal provides the first details of how Sexton would pursue the idea he floated last month at a Tennessee Farm Bureau reception in Nashville.

Declaring his desire to “do things the Tennessee way,” Sexton said the state should stop accepting nearly $1.8 billion in federal education dollars — most of which supports low-income students, English learners, and students with disabilities — and make up the difference with the state’s own funding. He told Chalkbeat that Tennessee would still provide programs that the federal government supports, but that he believes the state could do it better.

The legislation says, “the task force shall develop a strategic action plan to guide the administration and general assembly on whether it is feasible for this state and the political subdivisions of this state to reject federal funding for educational programs or purposes.”

Sexton also is asking the panel to identify processes for rejecting federal funding, as well as for eliminating restrictions tied to receipt of U.S. education dollars.

Asked if Sexton would accept the panel’s findings if it recommended against a funding pullout, his spokesman, Doug Kufner, responded that “those questions can be answered after the task force finishes its work.”

State lawmakers could consider creation of a task force as early as this week. The legislation, which is co-sponsored by Sen. Bill Powers of Clarksville, is scheduled to be taken up Tuesday by the House’s K-12 subcommittee and on Wednesday by the Senate Education Committee.

No state has ever rejected federal funding for its students and schools, because states generally need the money. U.S. dollars typically make up about a tenth of a state’s budget for K-12 education.

But leaders in Republican-leaning states such as Oklahoma and South Carolina have talked about the idea. And Tennessee’s governor and the Senate speaker are open to exploring the possibility, according to their spokespeople.

Tennessee Democrats oppose the change, and many Republican lawmakers have questions about what a funding pivot would mean for Tennessee students.

The lion’s share of federal education funding goes to schools that serve disadvantaged students. And there are other programs and grants funded through the U.S. Department of Education that target certain needs ranging from rural education and English language learners to technology and charter schools. There’s also a variety of federal school grants that go through the U.S. Department of Agriculture to provide free meals to qualifying students.

“This funding lifts up underserved students and rural schools and ensures every kid gets warm meals during the school year,” Senate Minority Leader Raumesh Akbari, of Memphis, said in a statement. “No matter how many studies they do, there will never be a scenario where it’s a good idea to reject billions worth of federal funding for our students and teachers.”

Sexton has identified federally required tests as his main complaint about accepting federal education dollars, but he hasn’t listed others.

Critics suspect that his bigger objections are related to current “culture war” issues about curriculum and whether transgender students should be allowed to use school bathrooms or play sports consistent with their gender identity, which may not correspond with the sex that’s listed on their birth certificates.

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Once an unaccompanied minor, this college student now fights for immigration reform

2023-03-02T23:03:06+00:00

Leer en español.

Edna Chavez knows what it was like to flee her country alone as a teenager. She knows what it was like to make the risky and lonely trek north, to cross the border illegally and be held as an unaccompanied minor in shelters and detention centers.

But the 21-year-old student considers herself among a lucky few, because later she was adopted.

That support allowed her to pursue her education and put her on track for legal permanent residency.

Chavez has met many students with similar backgrounds, but who have no path to citizenship, who have limited education or work prospects, and who have endured discrimination. Chavez wants to do something about it.

“We have to make a radical change in our community, we can’t keep hiding,” Chavez said. “It’s time that someone does something. And that someone has to be me.”

Chavez is planning a rally, which she’s dubbed Students Stand Up for Immigration Reform, on March 11 at the State Capitol.

The rally was her idea, but she has gotten support from immigrant advocacy groups that are helping her coordinate. If enough students need transportation to the Capitol, she will look for ways to provide it.

She is also asking students to write letters and sign a petition asking Congress to renew the provisions of the Immigration Act of 1929. The act was intended to provide a way for immigrants who have been in the country for many years to earn legal status. But its required dates for entry haven’t been updated recently, so most immigrants do not qualify. Previous updates granted amnesty to some immigrants during the Reagan administration.

Updating the act would give many more immigrants a path to legal status and many more young people a way to pursue an education.

“What I really want is for all students to show up to demonstrate that we are better united,” Chavez said. “Together we are strong.”

Chavez is full of hope because she has already overcome so many barriers.

Back home in Guatemala, Chavez said she was fighting against men who tried to force her into prostitution. She felt unsafe and decided one day at age 17 to flee to the U.S. without telling her parents.

Her abusive father wouldn’t have helped, she feared. Even now, her relationship with him is strained.

After a long and dangerous journey, Chavez was confined for months in detention centers and later a shelter for unaccompanied minors. When she turned 18, she was removed from the youth shelter and sent back to a detention center. Then an advocate found a family willing to sponsor her. After she moved in with them, they formally adopted her.

When Chavez moved to Denver at age 18, she enrolled at GALS, a Denver charter school.

Back in Guatemala, she had been forced to drop out of school after second grade. When she started school in the U.S., she didn’t speak English. A year after enrolling in high school, the pandemic shut down school buildings. That meant she also was forced to learn technology on top of everything else so she could continue working toward her diploma online.

But she managed to graduate earlier than planned, last spring.

“Basically I knew nothing,” Chavez said. “I had a ton of obstacles, you could say that, but nothing stopped me from achieving what I had set out to achieve.”

Chavez applied to multiple universities, and was accepted at all but one. The one rejection didn’t deter her because after having visited the Colorado State University campus in Fort Collins, she knew that’s where she wanted to go.

“I felt like I belonged in that place,” she said.

She started college with a few credits she had earned while in high school. Now she’s working on a math degree with a concentration in actuarial sciences.

She said that being successful means having a good education, and then being able to give back to her community.

But she isn’t waiting to give back. She says she’s discovered a passion for helping others. Her mom back in Guatemala tells her it’s like she’s a new person.

Chavez tells her it’s because she is. Having time to spend on learning, instead of working all day, has allowed her to see the world through a different lens, she said.

“I have felt more safe. I have felt more valuable as a woman. I have felt truly fortunate to be in a country that can offer me safety,” Chavez said.

And helping others feel the most joy out of being in a place of safety matters to her.

“I’m doing it out of the love I have for the community,” Chavez said. “I’m doing it from the bottom of my heart.”

Yesenia Robles is a reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado covering K-12 school districts and multilingual education. Contact Yesenia at yrobles@chalkbeat.org.

Schools struggle with lead in water while awaiting federal relief

2023-03-01T12:00:00+00:00

PHILIPSBURG, Mont. — On a recent day in this 19th-century mining town turned tourist hot spot, students made their way into the Granite High School lobby and past a new filtered water bottle fill station.

Water samples taken from the drinking fountain the station replaced had a lead concentration of 10 parts per billion — twice Montana’s legal limit for schools of 5 parts per billion for the toxic metal.

Thomas Gates, the principal and superintendent of the small Philipsburg School District, worries the new faucets, sinks, and filters the district installed for roughly 30 water sources are temporary fixes. The high school, built in 1912, is likely laced with aged pipes and other infrastructure, like so much of this historic town.

“If we change faucets or whatever, lead is still getting pushed in,” Gates said.

The school in Philipsburg is one of hundreds in Montana grappling with how to remove lead from their water after state officials mandated schools test for it. So far, 74% of schools that submitted samples found at least one faucet or drinking fountain with high lead levels. Many of those schools are still trying to trace the source of the problem and find the money for long-term fixes.

In his Feb. 7 State of the Union address, President Joe Biden said the infrastructure bill he championed in 2021 will help fund the replacement of lead pipes that serve “400,000 schools and child care centers, so every child in America can drink clean water.”

However, as of mid-February, states were still waiting to hear how much infrastructure money they’ll receive, and when. And schools are trying to figure out how to respond to toxic levels of lead now. The federal government hasn’t required schools and child care centers to test for lead, though it has awarded grants to states for voluntary testing.

During the past decade, nationwide unease has been stirred by news of unsafe drinking water in places like Flint, Michigan. Politicians have promised to increase checks in schools where kids — who are especially vulnerable to lead poisoning — drink water daily. Lead poisoning slows children’s development, causing learning, speech, and behavioral challenges. The metal can cause organ and nervous system damage.

A new report by advocacy group Environment America Research & Policy Center showed that most states fall short in providing oversight for lead in schools. And the testing that has happened to this point shows widespread contamination from rural towns to major cities.

At least 19 states require schools to test for lead in drinking water. A 2022 law in Colorado requires child care providers and schools that serve any kids from preschool through fifth grade to test their drinking water by May 31 and, if needed, make repairs. Meanwhile, California leaders, who mandated lead testing in schools in 2017, are considering requiring districts to install filters on water sources with high levels of lead.

As states boost scrutiny, schools are left with complicated and expensive fixes.

As it passed the infrastructure bill, Congress set aside $15 billion to replace lead pipes, and $200 million for lead testing and remediation in schools.

Thomas Gates, principal and superintendent of Philipsburg Public Schools in Montana, stands outside a building in which half the faucets revealed high enough levels of lead that the district had to repair or turn off the fixtures.

White House spokesperson Abdullah Hasan didn’t provide the source of the 400,000 figure Biden cited as the number of schools and child care centers slated for pipe replacement. Several clean-water advocacy organizations didn’t know where the number came from, either.

Part of the issue is that no one knows how many lead pipes are funneling drinking water into schools.

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates between 6 million and 10 million lead service lines are in use nationwide. Those are the small pipes that connect water mains to plumbing systems in buildings. Other organizations say there could be as many as 13 million.

But the problem goes beyond those pipes, said John Rumpler, senior director for the Clean Water for America Campaign at Environment America.

Typically lead pipes connected to public water systems are too small to serve larger schools. Water contamination in those buildings is more likely to come from old faucets, fountains, and internal plumbing.

“Lead is contaminating schools’ drinking water” when there aren’t lead pipes connecting to a municipal water source, Rumpler said. Because of their complex plumbing systems, schools have “more places along the way where lead can be in contact with water.”

Montana has collected more data on lead-contaminated school water than most other states. But gaps remain. Of the state’s 591 schools, 149 haven’t submitted samples to the state, despite an initial 2021 deadline.

Jon Ebelt, spokesperson with the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services, said the state made its deadline flexible due to the COVID-19 pandemic and is working with schools that need to finish testing.

Greg Montgomery, who runs Montana’s lead monitoring program, said sometimes testing stalled when school districts ran into staff turnover. Some smaller districts have one custodian to make sure testing happens. Larger districts may have maintenance teams for the work, but also have a lot more ground to cover.

Outside Burley McWilliams’ Missoula County Public Schools office, about 75 miles northwest of Philipsburg, sit dozens of water samples in small plastic bottles for a second round of lead testing. Director of operations and maintenance for the district of roughly 10,000 students, McWilliams said lead has become a weekly topic of discussion with his schools’ principals, who have heard concerns from parents and employees.

Several of the district’s schools had drinking fountains and classroom sinks blocked off with bags taped over faucets, signs of the work left to do.

The district spent an estimated $30,000 on initial fixes for key water sources by replacing parts like faucets and sinks. The school received federal COVID money to buy water bottle stations to replace some old infrastructure. But if the new parts don’t fix the problem, the district will likely need to replace pipes — which isn’t in the budget.

The state initially set aside $40,000 for schools’ lead mitigation, which McWilliams said translated to about $1,000 for his district.

“That’s the one frustration that I had with this process: There’s no additional funding for it,” McWilliams said. He hopes state or federal dollars come through soon. He expects the latest round of testing to be done in March.

Montgomery said Feb. 14 that he expects to hear “any day now” what federal funding the state will receive to help reimburse schools for lead mitigation.

Back in Philipsburg, Chris Cornelius, the schools’ head custodian, has a handwritten list on his desk of all the water sources with high lead levels. The sink in the corner of his office has a new sign saying in bold letters that “the water is not safe to drink.”

According to state data, half the 55 faucets in the high school building had lead concentrations high enough to need to be fixed, replaced, or shut off.

Cornelius worked to fix problem spots: new sinks in the gym locker rooms, new faucets and inlet pipes on every fixture that tested high, water bottle fill stations with built-in filtration systems like the one in the school’s lobby.

Samples from many fixtures tested safe. But some got worse, meaning in parts of the building, the source of the problem goes deeper.

Cornelius was preparing to test a third time. He plans to run the water 12 to 14 hours before the test and remove faucet filters that seem to catch grime coming from below. He hopes that will lessen the concentration enough to pass the state’s thresholds.

The EPA recommends collecting water samples for testing at least eight hours after the fixtures were last used, which “maximizes the likelihood that the highest concentrations of lead will be found.”

If the water sources’ lead concentrations come back high again, Cornelius doesn’t know what else to do.

“I have exhausted possibilities at this point,” Cornelius said. “My last step is to put up more signs or shut it off.”

KHN correspondent Rachana Pradhan contributed to this report.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

Tennessee is talking about rejecting federal education funding. What would that mean for kids?

2023-02-16T11:00:00+00:00

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news organization covering public education in communities across America. Subscribe to our free Tennessee newsletter to keep up with the Shelby County public school system and state education policy.

When House Speaker Cameron Sexton recently floated the idea of Tennessee rejecting U.S. education dollars to free its schools from federal rules and restrictions, he made the pivot sound as simple as making up the difference with $1.8 billion in state funds.

“I don’t think the legislation would be too hard to do,” he said last week after publicly declaring his desire to “do things the Tennessee way” at a Tennessee Farm Bureau reception on Feb. 7.

But the way federal funding works is pretty complex. Some districts and schools are more dependent than others on that money, which is directed to schools that serve disadvantaged students and programs that target certain needs ranging from rural education and English language learners to technology and charter schools. A related web of state and federal laws and policies created in response to the federal grants also likely would have to be unwound.

Sexton told Chalkbeat he’s working on legislation to “start a conversation” about the possibilities. And once filed, his written proposal might answer some of the many questions that Tennesseans are asking about what such a change would mean for kids and schools.

But for now, here are a few answers, along with more questions to ponder:

Is the proposal in Tennessee serious?

While a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Education dismissed Sexton’s comments as “political posturing,” the House speaker said he’s dead serious.

“I absolutely think we should do it,” Sexton told Chalkbeat.

Sexton noted that, based on the latest budget information, Tennessee could tap into $3.2 billion in new recurring revenues, which would more than cover any lost federal funds for education.

“Now is the time to look at it,” said Sexton, who as House speaker is one of the state’s most influential Republicans. “It doesn’t mean that you do it this year or you have to do it in the next six months, but it starts with the idea.”

Spokespeople for Republican Gov. Bill Lee and Lt. Gov. Randy McNally expressed openness to Sexton’s proposal, while several education leaders in Tennessee’s GOP-controlled legislature expressed outright enthusiasm.

“I would do everything in my power to pass that bill,” said Rep. Scott Cepicky, of Culleoka, who chairs a House education subcommittee and said he “wants Tennessee to have more autonomy when it comes to educating our kids.”

“It’s intriguing,” added Rep. Debra Moody, of Covington, chair of the House Education Instruction Committee. “I think my constituents at home would love it.”

Others were more reserved in their comments.

“It’s a thought-provoking idea, but I’d like to see details,” said Senate Education Committee Chairman Jon Lundberg, of Bristol. “I have questions about what federal strings would be removed and, more importantly, do those strings need removing? Right now, I don’t know.”

Can Tennessee say ‘no’ to federal money?

Probably. No state has rejected the funding so far, mainly because states typically need the money, which on average makes up about a tenth of their budgets for K-12 education.

But Republican leaders in other states have talked about the idea before, and Oklahoma lawmakers are currently considering legislation to phase out federal funding over 10 years for pre-K through 12th grade. A smattering of small school systems across the nation already have passed on federal money because of the cost of compliance.

“States do not have to accept federal funding at first glance,” said Matthew Patrick Shaw, assistant professor of law, public policy and education at Vanderbilt University. “These are carrot-stick programs in which the federal government has policy objectives and, in order to encourage states to go along with them, offers money that they believe states need to operate these programs.”

Would the change disrupt finances for students and schools across Tennessee?

Possibly, but a lot would depend on how it’s done.

Through a program known as Title I, the federal government distributes hundreds of millions of federal dollars to Tennessee schools that serve large concentrations of students from low-income homes to help improve achievement. If Tennessee replaced Title I funding with state money, would it still use the federal formula for distributing that money? Sexton hasn’t said.

The same question applies to federal funds that go to Title III programs to support English language learners, or for Title V programs to support rural education.

Sexton says Tennessee would still cover the costs of all of those programs, as well as free meals funded through assorted grants from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

But in Memphis-Shelby County Schools, where all but eight of the system’s 155 district-run schools have Title I designations, some officials aren’t convinced about the stability of state funding.

“If Tennessee decided to do it our way, what does ‘our way’ look like?” asked school board member Amber Huett-Garcia, whose district expects to receive more than $892 million in federal funding next year.

“Would it achieve equity? Would Memphis continue to receive the share that it currently gets?” she continued.

What federal strings does Sexton want to cut?

Testing is the main problem, according to Sexton.

“I don’t think the TCAP test measures much of anything, and I think teachers would tell you that you’re teaching to a test,” said Sexton about the state’s annual test under the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program.

States that take federal money must give annual assessments in reading and math in grades 3-8 and once in high school. They also are required to administer a science test one time each in elementary, middle and high school grades. Thus, each state must give 17 tests annually, though no individual student takes more than three of those tests in a given school year.

Sexton said Tennessee could scrap TCAP — which Tennessee developed through its testing companies to align with the state’s academic standards — and create a better test with the help of its educators.

But several education advocates note that states already have more flexibility than ever to develop their testing, evaluation, and accountability systems under a 2015 federal law crafted with the leadership of former U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee.

“When shepherding the Every Student Succeeds Act, Sen. Alexander was laser-focused on Tennessee and what Tennessee would need to be successful,” said Sasha Pudelski, national advocacy director for the School Superintendents Association.

States receiving Title I funds also must participate in national tests of fourth- and eighth-grade students in reading and math every two years. Known as the nation’s report card, the National Assessment of Educational Progress allows comparisons across states and is an important marker for showing how students are doing over time.

Lundberg, a key education leader in the Senate, said such testing data is important for Tennessee.

“I want to make certain that we’re able to continue comparing Tennessee to Montana or California or Michigan,” he said. “If we really want to be No. 1 in the nation in education, we need to be able to measure apples to apples across states.”

Incidentally, the TCAP exam that Sexton wants to scrap is the same standardized test that a 2021 Republican-backed reading law uses as the only criterion to determine whether third-graders can progress to the fourth grade. Lawmakers have filed numerous bills this year to address concerns about the retention policy, which kicks in with this year’s class of third graders.

What other federal mandates are considered burdensome?

Few would dispute that accepting federal funding comes with a lot of red tape. Mounds of paperwork and numerous audits of how money is spent are all part of a huge bureaucratic infrastructure that comes with administering billions of dollars of federal funding.

But Sexton, who said there are “a gazillion restrictions” he doesn’t like, did not enumerate other burdens beyond testing, despite Chalkbeat’s multiple requests to his office for a list.

Marguerite Roza, a Georgetown University professor who researches education finance policy, said she suspects the bigger objections are related to current “culture wars” about curriculum and whether transgender students should be allowed to use school bathrooms or play sports consistent with their gender identity, which may not correspond with their sex assigned at birth.

“Those strings come from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights,” Roza said.

Civil rights enforcement is the mission of that office based on the passage of federal laws such as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title IX of education amendments passed in 1972, and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which prohibit discrimination based on race, sex, and disability.

And Tennessee has been at the forefront of culture war legislation. It passed more laws in 2021 aimed at limiting the rights of transgender people than any other state in the nation, according to an analysis by The Associated Press.

The state also has passed laws in recent years to prohibit the teaching of certain concepts related to race and sex in classrooms and to allow an appointed state panel to ban certain school library books statewide if members deem them inappropriate for the ages of students who can access them.

If Tennessee rejects federal funds, would the state still have to ensure students’ civil rights protections under federal laws, including for students with disabilities?

The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, is a federal funding statute that says schools must identify students with disabilities and provide them with a free and appropriate public education tailored to their needs. But generally speaking, legal experts say, those requirements apply only to states that accept IDEA funds.

“If I were a parent of a child with a disability, this would be a major concern,” said Gini Pupo-Walker, state director for The Education Trust in Tennessee. “Would my child’s rights and needs be protected without the federal funding and oversight?”

Sexton says the state would still fund services that are currently part of IDEA and would come up with a similar program that he believes could be better.

But the Tennessee Disability Coalition says there’s no assurance that a Tennessee version would give families the same or better protections than under IDEA or other federal laws designed to protect students with disabilities.

“It’s hard for the disability community to trust Tennessee when our state’s track record hasn’t been so great,” said Jeff Strand, the coalition’s government affairs coordinator. “Our state institutions for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities have a long history of abuses, and we continue to see a troubling pattern of actions such as our state’s choice not to accept federal funding to expand Medicaid services.”

Gov. Bill Lee speaks to advocates for people with disabilities gathered at the Tennessee State Capitol on Feb. 4, 2020.

Another concern is where families could appeal when the system isn’t working for their students. Under IDEA, they can call for a meeting at school to speak with teachers, administrators, and case managers. If they’re not satisfied, they can appeal all the way up to the Office of Civil Rights. Dozens of disability-related cases in Tennessee schools are currently being investigated by that federal office, which has the power to take away funding from states or schools that don’t follow the law.

“It’s already tough to live with a disability in Tennessee,” said Strand. “A change like this would cloud a specific longstanding avenue that ensures that the rights of students with disabilities are being protected. And it clouds it for no good reason.”

Beyond IDEA, federal civil rights laws are hard to unpack because some are also linked to receipt of federal funds, so it may depend on how state laws are structured.

The Office of Civil Rights also enforces Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, a civil rights statute which prohibits discrimination against individuals with disabilities, as well as Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which extends this prohibition against discrimination to government services such as public schools, regardless of whether they receive any federal financial assistance.

Several legal experts believe many Tennessee families likely would turn to the courts over alleged violations of those laws based on the state constitution, which guarantees equal access to a system of free public education, or the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees equal protection under the law and due process of law.

“If you want to know how this change would affect children,” said Vanderbilt’s Shaw about the possibility of rejecting federal funds and restrictions, “there’s just a lot of uncertainty.”

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Summer meals, funding for high-poverty schools: What the federal spending bill means for students

2022-12-21T23:17:52+00:00

A new bipartisan federal spending bill could send more money to schools serving students from low-income families and increase access to summer meals.

The bill, unveiled Tuesday, includes tens of billions of dollars committed to schools, student support programs, and college funding. Among the bill’s provisions are additional investments in programs that support English language learners, child care for student parents, rural education, as well as increased funding for historically Black colleges and universities and other historically under-resourced higher education institutions.

Here’s a look at five ways it could affect students and families across the nation:

The bill creates a permanent Summer EBT program

The bill makes permanent a pandemic-era Summer EBT program that provides families with grocery benefits in the months when schools are out of session. Under the program, families eligible for free or reduced-price school meals can receive $40 per child each month.

It also allows grab-and-go or delivery options for summer meals in rural areas, said Lisa Davis, who oversees the No Kid Hungry campaign at the nonprofit Share Our Strength. Eligible students can now take home up to 10 days’ worth of meals instead of being required to consume them at the meal sites, the nonprofit said.

The change would ease access in areas where it can be difficult for students to reach meal sites while parents are away at work, Davis added.

“Summer can be the hungriest time of year,” she said. “The whole school meals infrastructure goes away.”

But Davis said the permanent programs, while positive overall, will come at the cost of some pandemic relief programs being eliminated earlier or scaled back — like SNAP emergency allotments, which provided additional food stamp benefits amid the pandemic.

“There is an element of robbing Peter to pay Paul that is very disappointing,” she said. “It’s tough, but I think the tradeoff is worth it.”

An increase to the maximum Pell grant award

The bill also increases the Pell grant maximum award by $500, or just over 7%, to $7,395. It’s the largest increase to the federal grant program — which covers some college costs for students from low-income families — in more than a decade and higher than the $400 increase provided last year.

“The purchasing power of the Pell grant has dipped below 30% of the cost of full-year public tuition and fees, and that is a trend that has really not been arrested over the past decade,” said Reid Setzer, director of government affairs at The Education Trust. “Trying to build that back up is a key approach in trying to make college more affordable.”

An uptick in Title I funding

The bill increases Title I by 5%, or $850 million — a slightly smaller jump than the 6% boost that Congress provided last year, and significantly less than the tripling of Title I funding that President Joe Biden vowed on the campaign trail. The bill would see an allocation of nearly $18.4 billion to the program, which sends extra funds to high-poverty schools.

Setzer said they were pleased with the increases to the program, though noted The Education Trust had advocated for larger sums.

“This is just building on what we have seen — a steady expansion,” he said.

Many of those schools have received hefty sums under the COVID relief packages that sent nearly $130 billion to the nation’s schools, but those funds are temporary and must be allocated by fall 2024.

“We know that there is a need, specifically for kids who are in Title I schools,” said Alicia Kielmovitch, a senior policy adviser at WestEd. “Any additional resources to help close that learning loss gap would be seen as a positive.”

Federal money can be used for transportation costs for school desegregation

The bill also removes language that blocks federal money from going toward transportation costs for school desegregation. Advocates and some lawmakers have spent years trying to eliminate the anti-busing rule, which Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia has called “a relic of an ugly history” when school integration faced widespread resistance.

Recent bills have removed portions of the rule, and the latest act would scrap the last remnants of the restriction.

“I am proud of the bipartisan work to get rid of this language in order to give states and school districts room to advance voluntary initiatives to promote school diversity,” said House Appropriations Committee Chair Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut.

More money for grants supporting students with disabilities

The bill adds more than $900 million in grants to support students with disabilities — a 6% increase to reach just over $15 billion. Such programs provide services to millions of students across the nation.

The spending bill — expected to pass this week — comes in the waning days of the 117th Congress, as seats will soon change hands and Republicans prepare to take control of the House of Representatives.

“We’ve got a divided government again,” Setzer said. “That being said, there is baseline bipartisan support for many of the things we care about, including, I think, increases to Title I and Pell.”

Patrick Wall contributed reporting.

Julian Shen-Berro is a reporter covering national issues. Contact him at jshen-berro@chalkbeat.org.

13 Chalkbeat stories that defined 2022

2022-12-21T19:15:00+00:00

This was the year when many of the pandemic-era challenges facing America’s schools went from acute to chronic.

Classrooms fully reopened, but attendance and enrollment have yet to fully rebound. Tutoring and mental health programs got off the ground, but staffers remained in short supply. Students began making academic progress, but new national data underscored how far they’d fallen behind. Each step toward recovery, moment of joy, and successful lesson came with a reminder of the pandemic’s ongoing fallout.

Meanwhile, the nation’s conflicts continued to envelop schools. Republican lawmakers and local activists redoubled their efforts to restrict what students can learn about racism and LGBTQ issues. And shootings erupted on and off school grounds, cementing gun violence’s new status as the leading cause of death for America’s young people.

Below are 13 stories from Chalkbeat reporters across the country that documented those forces in action and explained what it all meant for America’s schools:

February 3: Schools got $190 billion in COVID relief from the feds. What’s happened to it?

This year, schools were figuring out how exactly they were going to use the biggest chunk of their billions in federal COVID relief. Tutors? Building renovations? Both? Matt Barnum explained the state of play — and how to find your district’s plans for yourself.

“The idea that schools aren’t spending it quickly partly reflects a monthslong lag in the data, not local officials dragging their feet. And the best evidence available suggests that schools are making seemingly reasonable purchases: buying masks, computers, and air filters, while adding summer school programs, tutoring, counselors, and teachers. But district plans vary widely in quality, and there are more than 13,000 school districts across the country. Zoom out further, and, so far, information at the state and national levels is limited, incomplete, or nonexistent, making it difficult to closely monitor this unprecedented infusion of federal cash.”

March 11: Iowa scrapped teacher training on equity. Students of color felt the sting of that decision.

Volta Adovor was one of several high school students asked to help shape a conference for Iowa’s teachers focused on racial equity in 2021 put on by the state education department. Once Iowa’s legislature began considering a bill that would restrict how teachers talk about racism, it all ground to a halt, as Kalyn Belsha reported.

“The deferred conference stands as just one illustration of the nation’s about-face on centering race and equity in teachers’ work over the last year. For the students, though, the fallout has been both local and personal. After state officials asked them to share their time and experiences as students of color, the apparently open-ended postponement has left some feeling doubly dismissed. ‘We wanted to give solutions,’ Adovor said. ‘It was just us talking about things that we cared about.’”

March 19: As schools try to recover, COVID’s toll lingers: ‘We haven’t seen fine, ever’

This story, by Kalyn Belsha, Melanie Asmar, and Lori Higgins reporting from Tulsa, Denver, and Detroit, captured the exhaustion of last spring, when schools were inching toward “normal” but nothing came easily.

“When the virus seemed like it was under control, the omicron wave of cases brought half-empty classrooms or temporary returns to virtual learning. It’s been a year of survival and triage for teachers, school leaders, students, and their families. Now a shift is underway. Mask mandates have largely lifted, and more Americans say they are ready to leave the pandemic in the rearview mirror. But teachers like [Ana] Barros are still grappling daily with issues that COVID has left in its wake, most of which defy easy solutions. ‘I really feel scared to say that we’ve turned a corner,’ she said. ‘The things that we were struggling with, even outside of COVID, are just still there.’”

April 12: ‘Am I not allowed to mention myself?’ Schools grapple with new restrictions on teaching about gender and sexuality

As laws restricting how teachers can talk about gender and LGBTQ issues took effect, Kalyn Belsha chronicled the effects on classrooms in Tennessee and beyond.

“A history teacher skipped over PowerPoint slides about the fight for gay rights during a lesson on the civil rights movement. Another English teacher hinted that Oscar Wilde was, ‘you know,’ instead of saying he was gay while teaching ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray.’ Queer symbolism throughout the text went unmentioned. To 17-year-old Aneshka, who asked that their last name be withheld, these were all indications that a new law requiring teachers to notify parents about lessons on gender and sexuality had had an effect at their eastern Tennessee high school.”

June 7: Student voices on Uvalde: Our leaders ‘are just not going to protect us’

After 19 children and two adults were shot and killed at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, in May, we turned space over to students to reflect. Meleena Salgado, then a junior at John Hancock College Preparatory High School in Chicago, wrote about the moment she heard what had happened.

I was feeding my dogs, and my dad rushed in and said a school had been shot up. My heart just sank. I was frustrated that there was another one. I hate to use that term because there were people who were lost. But I was just like, come on. No matter how many are hurt, [politicians] are just going to say, ‘Oh wow, what a tragedy,’ and then we’ll find out about the next one. I’ve been worried about a school shooting since I was little. The oldest fear I have about being shot up at school is when I was, maybe, in third grade. I was in the bathroom alone and heard this really loud bang, and I thought, ‘Oh, God, maybe this is it.’ (That bang turned out to be someone dropping a textbook in the hallway.)

Aug. 1: As fewer kids enroll, big cities face a small schools crisis

Mila Koumpilova, Matt Barnum, and the Associated Press’ Collin Binkley looked at one consequence of the enrollment declines many cities experienced during the pandemic — more tiny schools — and the pain ahead for communities that will be forced to reckon with their cost.

Chalmers [School of Excellence] lost almost a third of its enrollment during the pandemic, shrinking to 215 students. In Chicago, COVID-19 worsened declines that preceded the virus: Predominantly Black neighborhoods like Chalmers’ North Lawndale, long plagued by disinvestment, have seen an exodus of families over the past decade. The number of small schools like Chalmers is growing in many American cities as public school enrollment declines. More than 1 in 5 New York City elementary schools had fewer than 300 students last school year. In Los Angeles, that figure was over 1 in 4. In Chicago it has grown to nearly 1 in 3, and in Boston it’s approaching 1 in 2, according to a Chalkbeat/AP analysis.

Oct. 24: Nation’s report card: Massive drop in math scores, slide in reading linked to COVID disruption

Matt Barnum dove into one of the biggest stories of the year: scores on national exams that offered the most authoritative accounting yet of learning lost because of the pandemic.

Students in fourth and eighth grade saw unprecedented declines in math and significant dips in reading achievement between 2019 and 2022, according to the results of national exams given last school year and released Monday. The declines were broad-based — affecting students in every state and every region of the country. ‘The results point out and confirm that this is a pretty massive hit to student achievement in our country,’ said Scott Marion, a testing expert and member of the board that oversees the tests.

Nov. 2: A look inside Colorado’s yearslong push to change how schools teach reading

This year saw more schools, school districts, and entire states take a hard look at their reading curriculums and push for changes aligned with the “science of reading.” Colorado was among the most forceful in requiring districts to make changes, and Ann Schimke has followed the story closely.

Peter and his classmates were learning a rule about the English language that they applied over and over that day — when reading and writing ‘hope,’ ‘cute,’ ‘tape,’ and ‘slide.’ Such lessons reflect both a districtwide and statewide shift in how children are taught to read in Colorado. Gone by the wayside are reading programs that encourage children to figure out what a jumble of letters says by looking at the picture or using other clues to guess the word — a debunked strategy still used in some popular reading curriculums. Now, there’s a greater emphasis on teaching the relationships between sounds and letters in a direct and carefully sequenced way.

Nov. 7: Not ‘present,’ and paying a steep cost: How pandemic recovery in Detroit and across Michigan hinges on getting kids to class

Districts across the U.S saw chronic absenteeism spike last school year, and the numbers have prompted a variety of campaigns to boost attendance. Detroit’s challenge is especially acute: Two-thirds of the city’s students missed at least 10% of last school year. The issue extends beyond education, as Koby Levin, Ethan Bakuli, and Kae Petrin explain.

Absences seldom boil down to a decision to skip school, experts say. Interviews with parents and researchers show that families generally understand the importance of regular attendance and do their best to get their children to class. Instead, absences often result from painful but rational choices between a family’s basic well-being and attending school. Problems with housing, health, work, or transportation can quickly spiral into a crisis for a family that lacks money or a social support system.

Nov. 9: Hope, healing, and the return of an annual camping trip for Brooklyn high-schoolers

A multi-day hike outside New York City this fall was much more than a field trip for one group of high-schoolers, as Michael Elsen-Rooney wrote. It was a return to tradition and a chance for students to grow as leaders after several trauma-heavy years.

Surrounded by her classmates on a bright October morning in the woods of Fishkill, New York, Diana Ramirez had no trouble making herself heard. The 14-year-old enthusiastically initiated chants and cheerfully shouted instructions to her peers during team-building activities on a multi-day camping trip organized by their Brooklyn public high school. Speaking up hasn’t always been so easy for the high school freshman — especially during the past several years overshadowed by the pandemic.

Nov. 17: Schools across the U.S. have turned to Paper’s online tutoring. Some worry it’s falling short.

Virtual tutoring has grown in popularity as schools look for ways to help students catch up and struggle to staff up in-person programs. Kalyn Belsha took a look at one popular program, Paper, and found low usage rates and concerns it wasn’t helping the students who needed it most.

The district spent $913,000 in COVID relief funds for Paper to provide its middle and high school students with access to 24/7, on-demand tutoring. But Columbus quietly cut ties with the company in September because too few students were using the tool. District records obtained by Chalkbeat show that less than 8% of students with access logged on last school year. Half of those students used it just once. In some schools, not a single student logged on.

Nov. 18: School psychologist, counselor hiring lags nationwide even as student mental health needs soar

As students struggle, many schools have talked about the ways they are adding mental health support for students. But this fall, many still hadn’t managed to add counselors or psychologists, despite an influx of federal relief money, Patrick Wall, Kalyn Belsha, and the Associated Press’ Annie Ma documented.

Among 18 of the country’s largest school districts, 12 started this school year with fewer counselors or psychologists than they had in fall 2019, according to an analysis by Chalkbeat. As a result, many school mental health professionals have caseloads that far exceed recommended limits, according to experts and advocates, and students must wait for urgently needed help. ‘They have so many students that they’re dealing with,’ said Mira Ugwuadu, 17. ‘I personally don’t want to blame them. But I also deserve care and support, too.’

Dec. 9: How one Chicago school social worker is grappling with COVID’s toll on students

Chicago has doubled the number of social workers in schools. But each of them is still juggling hundreds of students’ needs, as Mauricio Peña documented, at a moment when students are struggling with academics and behavior.

In the bathroom, [Mary] Difino took another deep breath, then headed back to her office. There she tidied up and fixed her desk. She grabbed her soccer bag from that morning’s Piccolo girls soccer team practice and a binder full of drills and activities. Her role as coach for second, third, and fourth grade students is a reprieve from her frenetic duties during school hours. She thought about what was needed to calm the fights and help her students: a restorative justice coordinator, smaller class sizes, perhaps another social worker. But as Difino left for home that night, that wish list seemed far away — and she just felt exhausted.

Schools on track to meet COVID relief deadlines as spending surges, experts say

2022-12-20T19:40:00+00:00

Earlier this year, when $122 billion in pandemic aid remained largely untapped, analysts warned that public schools could forfeit some of the windfall unless spending sped up.

But by this fall, spending had kicked into overdrive. In September, schools were using just over $5 billion in pandemic aid per month — more than $1 billion above the monthly amount this spring, according to a recent analysis by Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University.

School officials say they expected spending to accelerate this school year as planned projects got underway. Now, in sharp contrast to earlier warnings, observers say most schools are on track to meet the deadlines and avoid losing any of the coveted federal funds.

“They had to increase their pace — and they did,” said Marguerite Roza, the lab’s director, who earlier this year said schools needed to spend more per month to exhaust their funds by the September 2024 deadline. Her forecast now: “I don’t think there will be any money left over.”

Roza said her concern with schools’ slower spending before was not the risk of missed deadlines, but the danger of students not getting academic and social support quickly enough. The delayed surge in spending could also precipitate a sharp drop off in services and staffing when the money runs out, she added.

The latest projections offer some validation to school district officials who say they have been steadily spending the federal aid even in the face of staff and supply shortages and critics who accused districts of dallying.

The school system in Wayne Township, Indiana, spent all of the first COVID relief package it received by the deadline in September, said Barry Gardner, who oversees the district’s finances. It has also drawn down nearly 80% of the second package, which expires next September.

The money has helped pay for ventilation upgrades, expanded summer school, tutoring, and mental health services, along with nearly 100 new staff positions — though about one-fifth remain unfilled due to hiring challenges, Gardner said.

Meanwhile, the district has been making plans for the final round of federal aid. It has already spent more than a third of the $37 million, and officials are confident they will use the remainder by the September 2024 deadline.

“This is the message that we’ve been saying all along,” Gardner said. “That we’ve been spending these dollars in a strategic fashion based upon the approved timelines.”

Since 2020, Congress has passed three pandemic aid packages for schools that amount to a staggering $190 billion. The vast majority of the money went to school districts, which could use it for a wide range of purposes — from purchasing masks and desk shields to renovating buildings and hiring teachers, tutors, and counselors.

The final funding infusion was the largest and most controversial. At $122 billion, it was bigger than any single investment the federal government had previously made in public schools. Unlike the first two packages, which had bipartisan support, the Democratic majority in Congress passed the final stimulus bill in March 2021 over the objections of Republicans, who called it unaffordable and unnecessary.

By early 2022, reports began to emerge that schools had so far spent just a fraction of the money in the final stimulus package, known as the American Rescue Plan. Schools acknowledged the slower-than-expected spending, citing hiring challenges and supply backlogs. But to critics, the sluggish pace suggested waste and inefficiency.

“While states and school districts sit on billions, students are struggling,” said South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott in an August op-ed. He introduced a bill, backed by other Republicans, that would convert some of the unspent money into scholarships families could spend on tutoring or private school tuition.

Certain facts are not in dispute. Schools spent little of the $122 billion last academic year — only about 15%, according to Edunomics Lab’s estimate — though they continued spending down the earlier aid packages.

Schools also encountered real difficulties hiring personnel and purchasing supplies, which slowed down spending. Those challenges have continued into this year, with 45% of public schools reporting at least one unfilled teaching position and more than 80% reporting supply chain challenges, according to a nationally representative survey conducted in October.

But interpretations of those facts have varied wildly. While critics said it’s taken too long to get money out the door, others consider the criticism unfair.

“I’ve been calling this panic-mongering basically since day one,” said Jess Gartner, who runs Allovue, a school-finance technology firm.

She and others who work with school districts say criticism of their COVID spending misses the mark for several reasons.

First, the data is incomplete. Federal aid trackers do not capture districts’ real-time expenditures due to reporting lags. And expenses that are spread out over time, such as salaries, might not appear until later spending reports.

Second, districts have been drawing down the first two pools of pandemic aid before starting on the third, which schools have until fall 2024 to allocate.

“Any rational human being is going to spend the dollars that expire first,” Gartner said.

Also, as a condition of the stimulus money, Congress required states and school districts to consult community members and submit spending plans. The plans were not all approved until late 2021 — well into the 2021-22 school year and just as districts were starting to budget for the following fiscal year. Then schools still had to secure vendors, get additional approval for construction projects, and follow elaborate procurement rules.

“You don’t snap a finger and do that in a week,” said Dennis Roche, co-founder of Burbio, a data service that tracks school spending. “It takes time.”

Now, the final aid money is budgeted and long-planned programs are up and running.

For instance, one urban district launched a large-scale tutoring program this fall after nearly a year of planning and finding dozens of vendors, said Jonathan Travers, managing partner of the consulting firm Education Resource Strategies.

“Anecdotally, I have a sense that in a number of districts new initiatives that were in procurement, that were in the planning stage for a long time,” he said, “this fall got off the ground.”

While spending has sped up, it remains more of a marathon than a sprint for many school systems. That includes the one in Paterson, New Jersey, which received nearly $175 million in pandemic aid.

Supply chain issues have forced the district to plan far in advance, with some items that were ordered in May only arriving this month, said Richard Matthews, the business administrator. Other major expenditures that have been in the works, such as new HVAC units and a $14 million custodial contract, should commence next year.

Despite the complexities, Paterson has spent all of its round one funds and nearly 80% of its round two allotment, which helped fund summer and after-school programs, mental health services, and hiring bonuses. The district has also drawn down about 30% of its final aid package — nearly two years ahead of the deadline, Matthews said.

“We’re in pretty good shape,” he said.

Meanwhile, New Jersey lawmakers have questioned the pace of schools’ spending. But officials like Matthews say their top concern is putting the money to good use before it’s gone.

“Our challenge is to make sure not just that we spend it,” he said, “but we spend it wisely.”

Patrick Wall is a senior reporter covering national education issues. Contact him at pwall@chalkbeat.org.

Update: This article has been updated to include Marguerite Roza’s assessment of the potential consequences of schools’ pace of pandemic aid spending.

After a gun scare, our school district is reeling from the trauma — and the financial toll

2022-12-13T20:35:00+00:00

Months after a threat locked down the school district I work in, students and staff are still reeling.

On June 3, we received a report of a gunman at one of our middle schools. While multiple police agencies searched the building, the rest of our district was on lockdown, unsure of what was happening.

Eventually, we learned a student had called in a false report. But the fallout was like nothing I’ve ever experienced. As prepared as we were to protect our students, the crisis left a lasting impact on every member of our school family. Some of our children no longer see school as their safe place. Some teachers struggle, too.

After the incident in June, we spent hours debriefing. We worked with law enforcement agencies. We shifted professional development time away from reading and math instruction so we could run safety drills with teachers instead. We went above and beyond the state-mandated hours of training on physical security. And all of that took resources that hadn’t been budgeted for school safety.

Likewise, we found ourselves revisiting recent renovations to our elementary school because of a small detail with potentially huge impact. The doors were designed to lock with keys – which means a person needs to run over and manually turn them – rather than flip locks. We’re spending more than $40,000 to fix this so that teachers can more easily protect students from a potential shooter.

Was it worth it? Of course. It also meant we were unable to update our outdated learning spaces. Likewise, local residents would like us to add a school resource officer. But at budget time, we will have to make a choice between that officer and a teacher.

The reality is that, in most cases, every dollar allocated to advance safety is money taken from teaching and learning.

Our district is not alone when struggling under the rising cost of security. In 2021, schools and colleges spent $3.1 billion on safety precautions. Yet, as The New York Times reported, researchers at John Hopkins University found little evidence that major infrastructure modifications have stopped violent school events. An article in The Washington Post went so far as to say, “Experts call it ‘school security theater’ – the idea that if a school system buys enough technology or infrastructure, it can keep its children safe from the horrors of a gunman.”

Even so, what is so tough about these decisions is that students and teachers’ feelings of physical safety make a big impact on our schools. As administrators, teachers, and parents continue to see how school violence is threatening our kids’ emotional health and their education, I hope legislators can lessen the financial burden on districts that are making every sacrifice possible to defend our students.

The U.S. Department of Education has announced $1 billion in grant funds will be available through the Bipartisan Safety Communities Act, one step in that direction. Now, legislators must monitor where spending is most effective. Lawmakers should be under the microscope to determine if their decisions to allocate funding to school safety is the best way to defend our most vulnerable, just as schools and teachers must defend their spending and curriculum decisions.

In my district, we work hard to create a welcoming environment for all students every day. We also have to pause throughout the day to remind students what to do in case of a threat. What to do in the classroom. The cafeteria. The playground.

The reality is that, in most cases, every dollar allocated to advance safety is money taken from teaching and learning.

We want to continue to prioritize social-emotional support – not only for the trauma students and educators experienced in June, but for what they may continue to experience as we practice lockdown drills. And that’s before we even get to working on social-emotional skills to cope with the normal situations they encounter in their day-to-day lives.

Schools everywhere are weighing these costs. Since 1999, more than 300,000 kids have been on campus during an act of gun violence, according to a Washington Post estimate. Unfortunately, districts nationwide have been left to fortify their schools while also trying to address other overwhelming issues.

During COVID, we picked up the banner of mental health, made sure our kids are fed, and stepped up in so many other ways. But protecting our kids from guns with limited funding, too? It’s too much.

It takes tremendous courage for school leadership to weigh these competing priorities and make difficult decisions. I feel called to help others understand how hard it is for us to eliminate safety threats and still accomplish all of our other educational goals, too.

Kelly Carpenter-VanLaeken is the chief academic officer of the Gananda Central School District in New York. She began her career in education as a social studies teacher and then became a principal. Kelly is a member of the Institute for Education Innovation and a board member of the GVASCD.

Schools see falling student participation in federal free meals program, new survey shows

2022-12-06T11:00:00+00:00

A new national survey suggests that many schools and families are struggling with this year’s changes to the federal school lunch program.

For two years, school lunches were free for all students at U.S. public schools under a pandemic-era provision that waived income eligibility requirements. But now, months into the first school year since the expiration of those rules, the share of schools with more than half of students using the program has dropped from 84% to 69%, according to survey data released Tuesday by the National Center for Education Statistics.

Across the nearly 1,000 public schools surveyed in October, more than a third said convincing parents to submit free and reduced-price meal applications was a challenge, making it the most common concern. Others cited staffing shortages and increased costs among issues facing their meal programs, according to the survey.

“For two years, there were no charges, there were no letters — none of that was happening,” said Shani Hall, who oversees student nutrition services for schools in Hillsborough County in Florida. Every week, her office sends about 3,000 text messages to parents, urging them to apply for free and reduced-price meals, she said.

“There’s a lot of confusion among parents. They just don’t understand: If they were free before, why are they not free now?” she said.

Districts across the nation are struggling to communicate the change to parents, said Diane Pratt-Heavner of the School Nutrition Association. She noted families of young children may have never seen the application form before, while other families who have come to rely on the meals might now find themselves ineligible.

Language barriers, outdated contact information, unresponsive families, and general confusion can stifle outreach efforts, too.

“The free and reduced-price meal application form was always a barrier for getting eligible kids the meals that they really rely on,” Pratt-Heavner said, noting questions about Social Security numbers have long raised concerns for some immigrant families.

Overall, about 27% of schools said administering the program was more difficult this year than last year, while 22% said it was easier and half reported it was the same.

The survey also suggests fewer public schools are taking part in the federal program. Last March, 94% of public schools reported participating in the federal program — a rate not far from the 96% participation rate in the 2017-18 school year, said Rachel Hansen, the project director for the NCES survey. But by October, that had fallen to 88%.

Hansen called that a “significant drop” and said NCES researchers were still working to understand what had caused the decline. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which operates the federal meals program, did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and official participation rates for the school lunch program aren’t yet available for this year.

Pratt-Heavner, though, cautioned against drawing conclusions from the survey data on school participation — noting some affluent schools might opt out of the federal program if few students were eligible, but that those cases were unlikely to disrupt participation rates nationwide.

“That number does fluctuate a little bit from year to year based on school consolidation and other things like that,” she said. “But it would surprise me if a large percentage of schools dropped out of the program.”

Despite the challenges, free meals remain widely available at many schools. Hall said the majority of schools in her district qualified under the community eligibility provision — meaning the school can offer free meals to all students without collecting household applications because a high percentage of students are eligible based on participation in other programs, like SNAP.

But for students at the other 56 schools in her district, the situation is tougher, as families reeling from the economic hardships of the pandemic and rising costs face additional expenses at school.

Hall said the school district is still looking to donors to help families pay off lunch debt.

“Coming up with either the money to pay for a school meal or to pack a lunch is just so much harder right now,” she said.

Julian Shen-Berro is a reporter covering national issues. Contact him at jshen-berro@chalkbeat.org.

Hidden toll: Thousands of schools fail to count homeless students

2022-11-15T10:00:00+00:00

This article was produced in partnership with the Center for Public Integrity, The Seattle Times, Street Sense Media and WAMU/DCist.

For months, Beth Petersen paid acquaintances to take her son to school — money she sorely needed.

They’d lost their apartment, her son bouncing between relatives and friends while she hotel-hopped. As hard as she tried to keep the 13-year-old at his school, they finally had to switch districts.

Under federal law, Petersen’s son had a right to free transportation — and to remain in the school he attended at the time he lost permanent housing.

But no one told Petersen that.

“They should have been sending a bus for him. … He’s missed so much school I can’t believe it,” Petersen said. “And school is stability.”

Petersen was unaware of a federal law that would’ve allowed her son to remain in his district while they experienced houselessness.

A Center for Public Integrity analysis of district-level federal education data suggests roughly 300,000 students entitled to essential rights reserved for homeless students have slipped through the cracks, unidentified by the school districts mandated to help them.

Some 2,400 districts — from regions synonymous with economic hardship to big cities and prosperous suburbs — did not report having even one homeless student despite levels of financial need that make those figures improbable.

And many more districts are likely undercounting the number of homeless students they do identify. In nearly half of states, tallies of student homelessness bear no relationship with poverty, a sign of just how inconsistent the identification of kids with unstable housing can be.

The reasons include a federal law so little-known that people charged with implementing it often fail to follow the rules; nearly non-existent enforcement of the law by federal and state governments; and funding so meager that districts have little incentive to survey whether students have stable housing.

“It’s a largely invisible population,” said Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit focused on homeless education. “The national conversation on homelessness is focused on single adults who are very visible in large urban areas. It is not focused on children, youth and families. It is not focused on education.”

Losing a home can be a critical turning point in a child’s life. That’s why schools are required to provide extra support.

Nationwide, homeless students graduate at lower rates than average, blunting their opportunities for stable jobs and increasing the risk of continued housing insecurity in adulthood.

The gap is often stark: In 18 states, graduation rates for students who experienced homelessness lagged more than 20 percentage points behind the overall rate in both 2017 and 2018.

The academic cost is not equally shared. Black and Latino children experience homelessness at disproportionate rates, Public Integrity’s analysis showed. Nationally, American Indian or Alaska Native students were also over-represented, as were students with disabilities.

Until recently, it was not clear from federal records which students were hit hardest by housing instability. Data disclosed in U.S. Department of Education reports revealed nothing about the race or ethnicity of students recognized by their school districts as homeless.

That changed in the 2019-20 school year when the federal government for the first time made public the race and ethnicity breakdowns for individual school districts. The pattern that emerged is a story of the country’s sharp inequities, which put some families at far higher risk of homelessness than others.

The McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, first enacted in 1987 and expanded in 2001, requires that districts take specific actions to help unstably housed students complete school. Districts must waive enrollment requirements, such as immunization forms, that could keep kids out of the classroom. They must refer families to health care and housing services. And they must provide transportation so children can remain in the school they attended before they became homeless, even if they’re now outside the attendance boundaries.

Earl Edwards, an assistant professor at Boston College’s School of Education and Human Development, argues that McKinney-Vento was premised on an idea still pervasive in the policy debate on homelessness: Like a tornado that levels towns at random, housing misfortune has an equal chance of afflicting anyone, regardless of who they are.

In the 1980s, that rhetoric was a potent argument in favor of expanded federal support for homeless services. It was also wrong.

The McKinney-Vento Act started as an inadequate policy

The McKinney Act — later renamed — took shape at a time when the Reagan administration, if it acknowledged homeless people at all, regarded them as having chosen a life on urban skid rows, said Maria Foscarinis, who helped write the law.

Foscarinis, the founder of the National Homelessness Law Center, reframed homelessness as a broader structural problem impacting families, people of all races, even suburbanites. The outcome was a race-neutral solution, despite data at the time that went counter to that theory.

Foscarinis said the law’s architects knew it was inadequate and planned to follow it with homeless prevention programs and housing. But they faced stiff resistance. It would have been better to include race-conscious language tracking the demographics of homeless children, she added, but doing so could have jeopardized the entire effort.

“Had we done that, it would have torpedoed the whole thing, which would have hurt Black communities even more,” she said. “Then, we would have nothing at all.”

Figures now available down to the school district show the consequences of homelessness policy that doesn’t address race directly.

Nationally, Black students were 15% of public school enrollment but 27% of homeless students in 2019-20. In 36 states and Washington, D.C., the rate of homelessness among Black students was at least twice the rate of all other students that year.

Boston College’s Edwards said the disconnect lies between the reality of housing inequality and the policies intended to address it.

“If you don’t recognize that Black people, during the time when you were establishing the actual policy, were disproportionately experiencing homelessness” — and that housing discrimination, urban renewal, blockbusting and other systemic factors pushing Black people out of housing were key drivers — “then you make a policy, and the policy doesn’t have anything in place to prevent those things from persisting,” Edwards said.

And under-identification of homelessness could impact Black students more than peers of other races.

In interviews with Black students who experienced homelessness while enrolled in Los Angeles County public school districts, Edwards found that many distrusted school personnel, who underestimated their academic ability, sent them to the principal’s office for the smallest perceived slights, and threatened to call child protective services.

As a result, Edwards found, many students went unidentified under McKinney-Vento because they feared that sharing their situation would only make things worse. They paid for transit passes out of pocket. They were forced out of their home districts. They navigated college admissions alone. If they were lucky, they found mentors outside of the school system.

Those experiences aren’t an accident, Edwards argues, but the product of historical patterns. For example: “Calling child protective services would not be a severe threat to Black students if racial disparities within the institution itself were less pronounced.”

Beneath the race-neutral veneer of McKinney-Vento, American Indian or Alaska Native students and Latino students also experience housing instability at higher rates than their peers in the majority of states.

In Capistrano Unified, a 44,000-student school district in southern California, the rate of homelessness among Latino students was roughly 24% in recent school years compared to about 2% among the rest of the student body.

“It’s not anything that we’ve really done research on, so I wouldn’t even be able to speculate” as to why, said Stacy Yogi, executive director of state and federal programs for the district.

Across California, Latino students are 56% of public school enrollment but 74% of homeless students.

A 2020 report from the University of California, Los Angeles, found that Black and Latino students who experience homelessness in the state are more than one and a half times as likely to be suspended from school as their non-homeless peers. They also miss more school days and are less prepared for college.

Public Integrity’s analysis also found that students with disabilities have higher rates of homelessness than the rest of their peers in every state except Mississippi, suggesting that a significant share of students who already require additional support attend school uncertain of where they will sleep that night.

“They’re experiencing trauma, and trauma has a pretty significant impact,” said Darla Bardine, executive director of the National Network for Youth, a policy and advocacy group focused on youth homelessness. “You have to navigate an overly complicated system, and it’s this competition for limited resources where young people and children and families are just inherently disadvantaged.”

EJ Valez, who has limited vision and requires large-print materials for reading and braille instruction, was among them.

Valez experienced housing instability for most of his youth, bouncing between homes and schools in the Bronx and Reading, Pennsylvania.

“I’m surprised I made it out of school,” he said.

As a teenager, he said, he couch-surfed with friends and acquaintances after he became estranged from his family.

“Somehow I could retain information, but at no point in my childhood before full-on adulthood was there ever actual stability,” said Valez, now a student at Albright College in Pennsylvania and a member of the National Network for Youth’s National Youth Advisory Council. “No one cares about classes if we don’t know where we’re going to put our heads at night.”

That, he said, is why extra help from schools is so critical.

Hidden homelessness in America

It might seem like common sense to assume that where more children experience poverty, more will experience homelessness, too.

But that’s not what the data from school districts show. One of the most surprising patterns we found is that reported homelessness among students didn’t mirror poverty in 24 states.

The finding runs counter to a growing body of empirical evidence supporting the connection between poverty and housing instability. Children born below 50% of the poverty line had a higher probability of eviction than higher-income peers, lower-income households are more likely to experience forced mobility, and renters who are forced to move end up in higher-poverty neighborhoods than renters who move voluntarily.

“There should be a stronger relationship between homelessness and poverty,” said Jennifer Erb-Downward, director of housing stability programs and policy initiatives at the University of Michigan’s Poverty Solutions, “and the fact that there’s not supports that there’s under-identification taking place.”

Districts can tell teachers and staff to look for common signs of housing instability among students — fatigue, unmet health needs, marked changes in behavior. But those aren’t always apparent.

If they’re following the law, districts will survey families so they can self-identify as homeless. But some parents fear that acknowledging their housing struggles could prompt the government to take their kids away.

And then there’s the gulf between what people commonly think of as homeless and the more expansive definition Congress uses for students. Living in a shelter, on the streets, in a vehicle or in a motel paid for by the government or a charitable organization are included, but that’s not all.

More than 70% of children eligible for services were forced by economic need to move out of their homes — with or without their family — and in with relatives or friends, a practice that the U.S. Department of Education defines as “doubled up.”

Research on doubled-up students shows there’s good reason to provide them with help: They earned lower grades, for example, and were less likely to graduate on time.

In Riverside County, California, Beth Petersen’s son met the definition of doubled up for months, having lived temporarily with her sister and with friends.

Only Petersen didn’t know it at the time.

Eventually, the two found housing outside the Temecula Valley Unified School District her son had attended for years. He switched districts, keeping up with the schoolwork but struggling to make friends.

Then a friend of Petersen’s who works at a charter school told her that her son had the right to re-enroll in the Temecula Valley schools because the McKinney-Vento law allows students to stay in the same school they attended before becoming homeless.

In early September, Petersen moved with her son into a two-bedroom apartment — still outside the district boundaries — paid for by a homeless prevention organization and shared with another family. Under federal law, her son is considered homeless because they live in transitional housing.

Petersen re-enrolled her son in Temecula Valley Unified but problems persisted. She said she pleaded with the district for weeks, trying to secure bus rides for the teenager. The district never responded to her emails, she said. He ultimately missed a month of classes, Petersen estimated, because she could not afford to continue paying acquaintances to transport her son every day.

The California Department of Education intervened in late September to ensure her son received transportation.

“This has been a teachable moment for the district and there are protocols and … barriers that have been removed to ensure the law is met,” an employee at the state agency wrote Petersen in an email.

A statement provided by Temecula Valley Unified in response to detailed questions regarding the Petersens said the district “does everything in its power to support our McKinney-Vento families experiencing homelessness” and has “highly responsive site and district teams,” but declined to comment further.

Experts think students like Petersen’s son are among those most likely to go unidentified and unassisted because their families don’t realize they qualify for help and schools too often fail to fill the information gap.

Petersen’s son missed over a month of classes due to transportation issues with Temecula Valley Unified.

When that happens, “we’re not even including most of our kids who are experiencing homelessness in the definition of who’s homeless,” said Charlotte Kinzley, supervisor of homeless and highly mobile services for the Minneapolis Public Schools. “So we haven’t even named the problem.”

In Minneapolis, the reported graduation rate for homeless students is at least 26 percentage points below the rate for all students. The district introduced programs in the last few years to help schools find more students experiencing housing instability and connect them with assistance. Lesson plans for teachers help high school students understand if they qualify.

Across Minnesota, districts generally reported homeless rates that loosely mirrored trends in free- or reduced-price lunch eligibility, suggesting some consistency in identification.

“It’s not a matter of getting the right count or getting the numbers,” said Melissa Winship, a Minneapolis schools counselor who works with students experiencing homelessness. “It’s a matter of those students and families having those supports and resources that they deserve.”

Data on student homelessness is collected by districts and funneled to the federal government by states, which can choose to leave out any districts that did not report having any homeless students. Our data adds those excluded districts back. We assume they identified no homeless students, since they’re not in federal data.

Our analysis focused on non-charter districts in the 2018-19 and 2019-20 school years. In addition to comparing poverty and reported homelessness, we applied a common benchmark used by education researchers and some public education officials — that one of every 20 students eligible for free- or reduced-price lunches experience homelessness under the federal definition.

In each school year we analyzed, more than 8,000 districts did not meet the one-in-20 guideline.

DeSoto County, Mississippi, for instance, identified fewer than 300 homeless students, according to state records Public Integrity reviewed. Its share of students eligible for free- or reduced-price lunches suggests the district has three times the number it reported.

That’s not the only reason to suspect an undercount. In 2018, local landlords filed more than 4,000 eviction cases, according to an estimate from Princeton University’s Eviction Lab.

By comparison, Mississippi’s Vicksburg Warren School District identified about as many homeless students as DeSoto despite having less than half as many children eligible for free- or reduced-price lunches.

The DeSoto County schools did not respond to requests for comment.

It’s possible that some school districts genuinely have fewer homeless students than this benchmark predicts. But multiple researchers told us that they see the one-in-20 threshold as a conservative estimate.

J.J. Cutuli, a senior research scientist at Nemours Children’s Health System, said the analysis bolsters the anecdotal experiences of school district staff, shelter personnel, and people who’ve lived through periods of homelessness.

“You’re giving us a clue as to the magnitude of this problem. And that’s really the important part here,” he said.

The University of Michigan’s Erb-Downward said the reason numbers are critical is because “we, somehow, as a society, have agreed that it is OK for the level of poverty and instability that children experience, from a housing perspective, to exist.”

“If we don’t actively track that, and have a conversation about what the level [of homelessness] really is, I don’t think we’re being forced to actually look at that decision that we’ve made societally,” she said. “And we’re not really being forced to say, ‘Is this actually what makes sense? Is this actually what we want?’”

Why tracking homeless children in America is an ‘uphill battle’

The federal government, state education departments, and families have few options to hold districts accountable if they fail to properly identify or provide assistance for students experiencing homelessness.

The U.S. Department of Education delegates enforcement to states. States where school districts fail to follow the law are subject to increased monitoring, but the federal agency would not say how often that happens. A spokesman said only that the agency “engages in monitoring and compliance activities that can include investigating alleged non-compliance.”

Public Integrity reviewed dozens of lawsuits in which families and advocacy groups alleged that school districts denied students rights that are guaranteed under the federal McKinney-Vento law.

Families experiencing homelessness have sometimes prevailed in their standoffs with education agencies, winning reforms like agreements to train school personnel in the law and, in one case, a toll-free number for parents and children to contact with questions about their rights.

“There’s not really a ton of capacity for actually investigating and dealing with these complaints,” said Katie Meyer Scott, senior youth attorney at the National Homelessness Law Center. “We have a problem where there’s not necessarily an investment in enforcement at either the federal or state level.”

As an extreme last resort, the U.S. Department of Education can cut funding — a step officials are loath to take because that would ultimately harm the very students the agency wanted to help. The agency said it has never penalized a state in this manner.

A 2014 investigation by the Government Accountability Office found that eight of the 20 school districts its staff interviewed acknowledged they had problems identifying homeless students. The watchdog agency found that the U.S. Department of Education had “no plan to ensure adequate oversight of all states,” with similar gaps in state monitoring of school districts.

State audits in California, Washington, and New York have also made the case that many school districts fail to identify a significant number of students who qualify for the rights guaranteed under federal law. Advocacy groups and researchers, too, have surfaced examples.

In Michigan, state Department of Education guidelines call for an investigation if school districts identify fewer than 10% of low-income students as homeless. Erb-Downward found that all but a handful of Detroit schools fell below this threshold in the 2017-18 school year.

Public Integrity’s analysis points to similar problems. Detroit’s public school district, the largest district in the state, identified 255 fewer homeless students than the Kalamazoo Public Schools in 2018-19, despite having four times as many students and a much higher poverty rate.

Detroit school superintendent Nikolai Vitti said in a statement that the district’s efforts to improve in recent years include adding full-time staff to its homeless student office, a residency questionnaire with its student enrollment form, referral systems, and public information about available services.

Homeless student numbers have tripled in the past several years, Vitti said. But, he added, “We are aware there is still an undercount.”

Detroit’s public school district, under Superintendent Vitti, have sought to improve its count of students experiencing homelessness.

A statewide review this year identified 120 Michigan school districts, roughly 20%, in need of additional monitoring, department spokesman Martin Ackley said. The state is asking those districts to provide evidence that they are in compliance with federal law.

The state expects to finish the reviews this winter and will provide technical support to districts struggling to meet federal requirements.

Districts in other parts of the country willing to explain likely undercounts offer a variety of reasons.

In the Chester-Upland School District outside of Philadelphia, interim homeless liaison Dana Bowser said many families consult district staff as a last resort when they can’t find a solution to their housing troubles on their own. Language barriers make some parents reluctant to come forward, she added.

Florida’s Broward County Public Schools described struggles to overcome limited funding, stigma, and fear of immigration services as “skyrocketing home prices and lack of regulation around rental fees have created an unfortunate climate in which more individuals and families are facing homelessness, including middle-class income families.”

And in the Yuma Union High School District along Arizona’s borders with both California and Mexico, where our benchmark predicted more than five times the number of homeless students than was reported in the 2019-20 school year, school officials said they do not report a child as homeless if they do not apply for and receive services under McKinney-Vento. The National Center for Homeless Education advises officials to count enrolled homeless children and youth even if they decline services available to them.

In Oklahoma, hundreds of districts report that no students experience homelessness. Tammy Smith, who oversees the state’s homeless student programs, hears a common refrain from school leaders when she asks why.

“They tell me, ‘We’re going to take care of all of our students, whether we identify them as homeless or not,’’’ Smith said. “I remind them it’s federal law, but it’s kind of [an] uphill battle.”

Leaving homeless children out of official records is a problem even if a district does manage to support them without properly counting them, said Amanda Peterson, the director of educational improvement and support at the North Dakota Department of Public Instruction.

“If we are not able to tell the story, we’re not able to show that there’s discrepancies in the graduation rate, then what ends up happening is that it’s easy for legislators, community members, others to just close their eyes to the issue and just say, ‘Well, if it’s not reported, it doesn’t exist, and therefore we don’t need to worry about it,’” she said. “There’s harm if we just sort of push it under the rug.”

Yuma Union High School District does not count students as homeless if their family doesn’t apply for services under McKinney-Vento.

‘Not enough money’ to support homeless students

Federal programs provide school districts little financial incentive to survey students’ housing situations more thoroughly. Money to serve these vulnerable children is limited and does not increase automatically as districts identify more of them, Public Integrity found.

Instead, the U.S. Department of Education awards funds to states using a formula that factors in poverty rates. States use their share to award competitive grants to districts.

Calling them paltry is an understatement.

The funding amounted to about $60 per identified homeless student nationwide before the pandemic. One state received less than $30 per student.

That’s a fraction of what school districts actually spend to support homeless students, according to a recent study by the Learning Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group. The four districts profiled by LPI spent between $128 and $556 per homeless student identified. In two of those districts, McKinney-Vento subgrants accounted for less than 14 cents on every dollar the district spent on homeless education programs.

And that’s the districts awarded federal grants. Most get nothing.

Until a temporary funding influx during the pandemic, only one in four districts nationwide received dedicated funding. Washington state, which got the lowest amount in the 2018 fiscal year at $29 per identified student, passed a law in 2016 to provide additional support and resources.

“I would argue that a state like Washington has better identification, but it’s not reflected in how the feds dole out the money from McKinney-Vento,” said Duffield of SchoolHouse Connection.

Even in states that receive hundreds of dollars per student, the money does not stretch far, experts said. And it’s definitely not enough to provide long-term assistance for students without stable housing.

One sign of its inadequacy: Many districts don’t even bother applying for the federal money. In Oklahoma, just 25 of the state’s 509 districts requested funds.

Smith, who oversees the state’s homeless student programs, urges districts to apply. She said superintendents tell her, “There’s not a monetary benefit for us to identify them. So that’s not where we’re spending our time.”

In 2021, the American Rescue Plan made $800 million available to states and districts to identify and support homeless students, some of whom became disconnected from schools after the COVID-19 closures of 2020. The historic funding influx was seven times the annual budget awarded to schools to support their homeless students in 2022, making federal funds available to districts that had not previously received money.

In Wayne County, Michigan, where Detroit is located, the additional funding was sorely needed, said Steven Ezikian, the deputy superintendent of the Wayne County Regional Educational Service Agency, which helps train local districts to identify and support students experiencing homelessness.

“McKinney-Vento does not provide nearly enough funding,” he said. “Frankly, there’s just not enough money for them to do all the work for the amount of kids that we have.”

The traditional level of funding to support homelessness has left many districts struggling to fulfill the law’s requirements.

“There [are] more and more students in crisis and the districts are not really getting more and more resources to help,” said Scott, the senior youth attorney with the National Homelessness Law Center. “It comes down to resources rather than any kind of bad intent. The lack of investment in our schools over time is obviously hitting homeless students even harder.”

In April, 92 members of the U.S. House of Representatives signed a “Dear Colleague” letter, urging the chairwoman and ranking member of the House Education Committee to renew the $800 million in funding, which represents 1% of the federal education budget, for the fiscal year that started Oct. 1. It would be money well spent, they argued.

“Investing in a young person’s life will enable them to avoid chronic homelessness, intergenerational cycles of poverty, and pervasive instances of trauma,” the letter read.

Budget bills from both chambers of Congress requested boosts in the program budget that are far short of what the House members requested. Federal budget negotiations will likely resume in December.

Temecula Valley Unified, the district Beth Petersen’s son attends, received $56,000 to serve homeless students through the American Rescue Plan — about $470 per homeless student identified. District staff did not respond to questions regarding funding for homeless education programs. State financial records for the several years before the American Rescue Plan show the district received nothing.

Petersen watches from her apartment steps as her son leaves for the school bus.

Early on a Monday morning in October, Petersen sat at the kitchen table in her shared apartment, applying makeup under the glare of a bowl-shaped ceiling light. Her son emerged from the bathroom, barefoot but otherwise dressed for school. Petersen peered around the corner. Did he want anything for breakfast? He shrugged. No, he was fine.

But then he remembered an assignment that was due: a photo with his mom clearing him to attend a sexual education course. He stooped beside her and angled his laptop for a selfie. Beth could hardly remember the last time she needed to review any of his assignments. He was always a diligent student, even these last few months.

“Do not miss the bus coming home or we will be up a creek,” she said as the pair walked outside, the air crisp as morning haze yielded to blue sky.

At 7:02 a.m., a yellow school bus turned the corner. It slowed to a stop before them, the fruits of Petersen’s long struggle to make the promise of the McKinney-Vento law a reality.

The doors opened, and her son was on his way.

Chalkbeat journalist Lori Higgins contributed to this article.

Amy DiPierro and Corey Mitchell are journalists with the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates inequality.

About our analysis

Public Integrity used a statistical modeling technique called simple linear regression to measure the strength of the association between the percent of students identified as homeless and, separately, three measures used to approximate the incidence of economic disadvantage or poverty:

the percent of students eligible for free- or reduced-price meals
the percent of school-age children under the poverty line
the percent of school-age children in households that are under 50% of the poverty line.

We used federal data aggregated to the level of school districts and similar educational agencies, composing separate models by school year and state. We fit models for each state and the District of Columbia where there was sufficient data in the 2018-19 and 2019-20 school years.

We considered that a model showed a link between a variable we tested and homelessness if the model accounted for at least 20% of the variation in rates of homelessness and if the probability of coincidence driving results at least as extreme was relatively small. Twenty-four states failed this test on each of the three measures of economic disadvantage.

We assumed districts not included in federal data identified no homeless students. Districts may occasionally be left out in error. But we think our count is conservative in another way. That’s because there are additional districts that specifically told the Department of Education they have no homeless students, but the agency categorized them with districts reporting a low number of students and suppressed those figures.

For more details on our analysis, read our white paper.

How student loan borrowers can take advantage of President Biden’s forgiveness plan

2022-10-15T01:19:22+00:00

Student loan borrowers across the country will have until December 2023 to apply for up to $20,000 in forgiveness from the federal government.

The Biden administration has rolled out “a short and simple” online application that borrowers can fill out on their phone or computer.

The one-time maneuver by President Joe Biden is meant to help address the student debt crisis that has ballooned to over $1.7 trillion. Biden plans to cancel $10,000 in debt for each borrower who makes less than $125,000 a year, or $250,000 for taxpayers who file jointly. He also wants to provide an additional $10,000 in relief for any borrower from a low-income background.

The student loan cancellation should help millions of borrowers, although it won’t address the larger issue of the rising cost of college and the continuing accumulation of new debt.

Here are points on how to go about claiming the loan cancellation and the big questions surrounding Biden’s plan.

Do I have to apply for student loan forgiveness?

Yes.

The Biden administration may issue automatic relief to some borrowers who have income data on record with the Education Department. Experts say, however, not to rely on that and for loan recipients to plan to apply for forgiveness.

What loans are eligible? And how will this work for borrowers?

Publicly held loans are eligible, including subsidized loans, unsubsidized loans, parent PLUS loans, and graduate PLUS loans held by the U.S. Education Department.

Michele Shepard, Institute for College Access and Success college affordability director, said borrowers, including parents who took out loans for their child’s education, should be prepared to fill out the application.

“The expectation is once borrowers do apply, they will receive either full relief — have their balance totally wiped out — or whatever amount they’re eligible for will be taken off their account,” Shepard said. The institute is a nonpartisan nonprofit that advocates for affordability, accountability, and equity in higher education.

If the government forgives a loan, the borrower’s payment schedule will be updated based on how much was forgiven, she said. Borrowers can also enroll in income-driven repayments — that is, recalculating payments based on the borrower’s income — which could also lower their monthly bill.

The federal program will forgive up to $20,000 of publicly funded loans, but will not offer forgiveness for private loans.

How can student loan borrowers apply for loan forgiveness?

The application process doesn’t ask for a borrower’s Federal Student Aid identification number or any other supporting information. Instead, borrowers will just need to fill out the short application that includes a borrower’s Social Security number.

Borrowers can fill out the form here.

After borrowers apply, the Education Department will reach out if it needs additional information.

The White House said that borrowers should beware of scams.

Karen McCarthy, the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators vice president for public policy and federal relations, said borrowers should familiarize themselves with their borrower information, including how much they owe and what kind of loans they have.

The best way to do that is by checking their Federal Student Loan Identification account.

How borrowers can get notified about the application process

While Chalkbeat and other news publications will continue to provide information about the application process, the best way to stay up to date with developments is to sign up for the federal government’s newsletter about the topic.

Shepard said loan servicers should communicate with borrowers, but the newsletter will let them know updates as they become available.

Readers can sign up here.

Borrowers can also get text and email alerts by opting into those on their Federal Student Loan Identification account.

Just in case, borrowers should plan for delays

While the federal government plans to get applications approved by the turn of the new year, Shepard said it’s smart to prepare to have to continue repaying loans if there’s a lag.

“I do think people should protect themselves and be prepared to manage if they need to enter repayment for a little bit if their application doesn’t go through right away,” Shepard said.

Will this even happen, since there are lawsuits over student loan actions?

It’s hard to say until the legal challenges play out, but the Biden administration has so far continued with its plan.

The newest lawsuit from conservative advocacy group the Job Creators Network argues Biden violated federal procedures by failing to seek public input on the program.

Last month, six Republican-led states filed suit accusing the administration of overstepping its executive powers. And another lawsuit out of Wisconsin was recently dismissed.

How will this address the cost of college nationwide?

It won’t.

But the Biden administration has promised changes so student loan repayment is less of a burden.

The department is proposing to reduce monthly payments for low- and middle-income borrowers by cutting in half — from 10% to 5% of discretionary income — the amount that borrowers have to pay each month on their undergraduate loans.

The rule would also forgive loan balances after 10 years of payments — instead of 20 years — for borrowers with original loan balances of $12,000 or less. And it would cut interest as long as borrowers make payments on time.

So what’s the goal for tackling college costs?

State investment in college has decreased significantly in the last several decades. And there doesn’t seem much momentum to help change the sticker price of a college education.

But the debt conversation has spurred a larger conversation about how to help students manage the cost of college, McCarthy said.

McCarthy advises families to fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid to help understand the total cost of college to them. She also encourages offering families long-term financial planning for college.

She suggests schools and counselors engage students in in-depth discussions about college options, because the cost of a private college vs. a public institution, or a four-year college vs. a two-year education, varies wildly.

NY state officials seek to ‘shift the narrative’ around struggling schools

2022-10-03T23:30:04+00:00

After a two-year pause brought on by the pandemic, New York state officials are restarting their system for identifying struggling schools.

In doing so, officials want to begin to “shift the narrative” about how low-performing schools are viewed by the public, state officials said Monday during the Board of Regents meeting.

“When we talk about a ‘good school,’ who are we including and who are we excluding?” asked State Education Commissioner Betty Rosa.

As part of the shift, officials this year plan to relabel schools considered in good standing as “schools identified for Local Support and Improvement, or LSI.” The label is similar to those used for struggling schools. For example, the lowest-performing schools used to be called Comprehensive Support and Improvement schools, or CSI, but will now be called “schools identified for Comprehensive Support and Improvement.”

The changes are supposed to be reflective of a system that pushes for improvements and support for all students, officials said, referring to the model as “continuous improvement.”

Asked if parents could get confused, officials said they’re planning to share more resources with families that clarify the changes, though they did not provide specifics.

The Board of Regents is set to pass the tweaked plan on Tuesday. The plan will then go out for public comment, which officials said they will review and could potentially propose additional changes later this winter. School accountability determinations won’t be released before that process is done.

Officials determine whether a school is struggling based on information from previous school years. For this school year, the metrics that officials began using in 2019 will be tweaked or paused altogether, officials said, citing the ongoing effects of the pandemic.

The state education department will use state test scores or Regents exam results from 2021-22 to look at student performance in math, reading and science, but they won’t measure student growth because there isn’t more complete data from before last school year.

Officials will, however, use older data to look at trends in graduation rates, which have risen during the pandemic as the state paused Regents exams. They will also look at older data to measure English proficiency rates among students who are learning English as a new language.

Additionally, at high schools, officials won’t measure college and career readiness, which previously was determined by looking at how many students earned advanced diplomas, career certificates or took accelerated classes.

Accountability measures for a school’s graduation rate and chronic absenteeism – defined as a student missing 10% or more school days — will be considered through percentile rankings, meaning officials will study how students in specific subgroups compare to each other.

While these changes will be temporary and will only be in effect for this school year, officials signaled they could be the start of more permanent tweaks to how the state labels schools.

“The plan approved by [the U.S. Department of Education] lays the groundwork for systemic changes to our state’s accountability plan to make it more responsive to our parents and communities while meeting the needs of all New York State students,” said Chancellor Lester Young Jr. in a statement. “Our accountability system builds on our work to improve academic achievement, provide equitable support systems, and enhance customer service.”

Measuring how well schools are doing is required by the federal government. Specifically, at least 5% of the state’s Title I schools, or those that serve a large share of low-income students, must be identified as needing extra support.

But as the pandemic took hold and state assessments were paused, such requirements were waived. New York state officials tried to get another waiver for this school year, but federal officials denied that request. Instead, state officials proposed a modified accountability plan, which federal officials approved last week.

In 2019, New York officials created a new accountability system that, most significantly, took into account whether students were growing in reading and math. The system still used state test scores and graduation rates as ways to determine academic progress at schools, but they also measured college and career readiness and chronic absenteeism.

Even before the pandemic, state officials did not aggressively intervene in schools they determined to be struggling. As required by the federal government, those schools are required to create plans for how they’ll improve.

Jeff Smink, deputy director of Education Trust New York, said his organization is glad the state is restarting the accountability system, and much of the tweaks presented Monday appear to be technical changes due to the lack of data from the last couple of years.

While Smink acknowledged that graduation rates must be one of the indicators for high school, he’s worried that it won’t be a very accurate measure, given that the state waived Regents exams as the public health crisis wore on — making it easier to graduate. Smink is also concerned that the state hasn’t yet released statewide test scores so that schools have “baseline data” on reading and math. Schools also need context on how they compare to other districts, Smink said.

“Not having any data for the last two years made it clear how important it is to have assessment data because it feels like the public is flying blind without it,” Smink said.

The temporary changes rolled out on Monday made sense to Aaron Pallas, a professor at Teachers College and an expert in testing because the pandemic made it impossible to look at student growth before last school year. Few students actually took state exams in 2020-21; just one-fifth of children took the tests in New York City at the time.

Many other states are “probably all in the same boat,” Pallas added.

The “narrative shift” also is reflective of this newer Board of Regents and state education department, which has seen some turnover in recent years and does not like to focus heavily on test scores, Pallas said.

“All of that suggests wanting to come up with terminology that doesn’t stigmatize those schools,” Pallas said.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Math and reading scores plummet on national test, erasing 20 years of progress

2022-09-01T04:01:00+00:00

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news organization covering public education in communities across America. Sign up to receive the latest in education news straight to your inbox.

In a grim sign of the pandemic’s impact, math and reading scores for 9-year-olds across the U.S. plummeted between 2020 and 2022.

The declines erase decades of academic progress. In two years, reading scores on a key national test dropped more sharply than they have in over 30 years, and math scores fell for the first time since the test began in the early 1970s.

Put another way: It’s as if 9-year-olds were performing at the same level in math as 9-year-olds did back in 1999, and at the same reading level as in 2004.

“I was taken aback by the scope and the magnitude of the decline,” said Peggy Carr, who heads the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the test. “The big takeaway is that there really are no increases in achievement in either of the subjects for any student group in this assessment — there were only declines or stagnant scores for the nation’s 9-year-olds.”

The scores, released Thursday, are the first nationally representative look at how students across the U.S. performed in math and reading just before the pandemic compared with this year. They come from a long-running version of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a test known as “the nation’s report card” that’s able to compare student achievement across decades.

The sample included nearly 15,000 9-year-olds from 410 schools, about two-thirds of whom were in fourth grade.

Carr said while her team usually shies away from ascribing a reason to score increases or decreases, it’s obvious in this case that the disruptions wrought by the pandemic were a major factor in the declines.

“It’s clear that COVID-19 shocked American education and stunned the academic growth of this age group,” Carr told reporters on a Wednesday call. “No other factor could have had such a dramatic influence on student achievement in a relatively short period of time.”

The scores could influence how state and district officials choose to spend their remaining COVID relief dollars — and fuel debates about whether public schools are adequately serving students in a time of great need. Many school districts already are devoting chunks of federal money to academic recovery, but there’s little evidence so far showing what difference those efforts have made for struggling students.

“Supporting the academic recovery of lower-performing students should be a top priority for educators and policymakers nationwide,” Martin West, a professor at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education and a member of the board that oversees the national test, said in a statement.

Federal education officials cautioned that these scores shouldn’t be used to penalize schools. Rather, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a statement, these results should spur states and schools to use their federal aid “even more effectively and expeditiously” on strategies like high-dosage tutoring, hiring more staff, and running after-school programs. High-poverty schools especially have an unprecedented amount of money at their disposal, but some have struggled to spend it.

The education department would be watching, Cardona said, to make sure schools are “directing the most resources towards students who fell furthest behind.”

Reading and math score declines were most severe among students who were performing at the lowest levels. That means kids who hadn’t yet mastered skills like addition and multiplication, or who were working on simple reading tasks, saw their scores fall the most.

The gap between higher- and lower-performing students was already growing before COVID hit, but federal officials say the pandemic appears to have exacerbated that divide.

“There is still a widening of the disparity between the top and the bottom performers, but in a different way,” Carr said. “Everyone is dropping. But the students at the bottom are dropping faster.”

Officials noted that when they asked students about the tools they had available to them during remote learning, higher-scoring students were more likely than their struggling peers to say a teacher was available to help them with their math or reading work every day or almost every day — a disparity that could have contributed to the growing divide.

There were some differences across subject areas. Declines in math were pervasive, but Black students saw a particularly sharp drop.

Reading scores dipped by similar amounts for white, Hispanic, and Black students. But reading scores held steady in city schools, rural schools, and for English learners. To Carr, those were the only bright spots in the data.

“The fact that reading achievement among students in cities held steady, when you consider the extreme crises that cities were dealing with during the pandemic, is especially significant,” she said.

Officials said while these scores are an important indicator of the pandemic’s effect on elementary schoolers, the data doesn’t offer any insight into how long it could take for students to rebound academically. That won’t be clear, Carr said, until there’s more district, state, and federal data to analyze.

Data gathered from other state and national tests this year show elementary-age students are starting to rebound in reading and math after students saw dips, or made less progress than usual, earlier in the pandemic. But by some measures, middle schoolers are recovering more slowly, or not at all — raising concerns about whether enough is being done to support older students, who have less time to catch up.

Schools have a tall order ahead this year: Academic recovery efforts have been hampered by a host of issues, including a rise in student absenteeism, staffing challenges, and growing student mental health needs. In some schools, educators are also contending with an uptick in behavioral challenges and classroom disruptions.

A trove of federal data slated for release in late October will shine more light on how older students are faring. That will include scores from fourth and eighth grade students across the U.S., in individual states, and in certain cities.

“I am a little worried,” Carr said. “It’s difficult to predict what the recovery will look like. We’ll just have to see.”

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan promises ‘targeted relief.’ Are you eligible?

2022-08-24T20:59:39+00:00

In a long-awaited announcement, President Joe Biden on Wednesday said his administration will cancel $10,000 in student loan debt for borrowers who make less than $125,000 a year, or $250,000 for taxpayers who file jointly. In addition, Biden said many students from low-income backgrounds will receive an additional $10,000 in relief.

The unprecedented maneuver by Biden should reach over 43 million borrowers and even wipe out loan repayments for some. But it likely won’t fix some of the larger issues surrounding student debt — namely the cost of college and the large amounts borrowed by some to foot the cost of college. Nationally, student debt has ballooned to over $1.7 trillion.

U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona said in a news release Wednesday that student loan debt has hindered many Americans’ ability to achieve their dreams — including buying a home, starting a business, or providing for a family. The department also announced other changes to make repaying loans easier.

“Getting an education should set us free; not strap us down,” Cardona said. “We’re delivering targeted relief that will help ensure borrowers are not placed in a worse position financially because of the pandemic, and restore trust in a system that should be creating opportunity, not a debt trap.”

Biden ran on canceling at least $10,000 in student loan debt and faced pressure from advocates to cancel much more. He repeatedly delayed a decision amid intense debates about whether debt cancellation would advance economic justice or disproportionately benefit higher-earning Americans during a time when the working class is struggling.

The plan provides more help to the students who started with the least. About 27 million Pell Grant recipients should be eligible to receive up to $20,000 in loan forgiveness. Pell Grants cover a portion of college costs for students from low-income families, with the large majority of eligible students coming from households that earn less than $60,000 a year.

Kyle Southern, The Institute for College Access and Success associate vice president of higher education quality, said there’s two sides to the announcement. It’s life changing, especially for borrowers from low-income backgrounds. But a larger conversation about student debt needs to happen, especially when it comes to which students leave college with debt.

The cap on how much debt will be forgiven means white borrowers will have a larger share of their debt relieved than Black and Latino borrowers from low-income backgrounds, who on average owe more than white students do upon leaving college.

The announcement should fuel further conversations about how to invest in the Pell Grant program and support for institutions that serve a high number of students of color.

“We’re very conscious that we haven’t yet broken the cycle that feeds those kinds of debt-based approaches to higher education,” Southern said.

In a recent CNN opinion article, Derrick Johnson, NAACP national president and CEO, said “$10,000 in relief is like pouring a bucket of water on a forest fire” for Black Americans who owe almost double the student debt that white Americans do — almost $53,000 on average for Black college goers.

Shanique Broom, 31, who lives in Denver, sees the Biden plan as a drop in the bucket. She owes more than $300,000 after attending Central Michigan University for her bachelor’s and master’s degrees and the University of Denver for her doctorate.

Shanique Broom

She’s happy for the relief, but wishes students from low-income backgrounds were eligible for more debt relief.

“I was wanting something more equitable,” said Broom, who works in education policy. “But realistically, with how this government, this administration, just like our country has operated, I didn’t even expect this.”

She said students whose families have fewer resources have to borrow more just to cover living expenses while they’re in college.

“It’s like you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t,” Broom said. “I spent my whole life trying to live this American Dream of obtaining my degree, but put myself into debt. My future is clouded.”

Biden and his administration also received praise for the debt cancellation plan. Felipe Vieyra, who graduated from the University of Denver in 2012 with over $60,000 in student loan debt, said he already texted friends about his excitement. The 32-year-old said the $10,000 the government will forgive should bring down his student loan debt to $20,000. He has spent years chipping away at the debt on his own.

At one point he lived out of a storage room for $200 a month because he couldn’t afford other rent. He said the $20,000 he will still owe feels more surmountable.

“This gives me more control,” he said.

He added that he’s not sure whether the announcement helps students of color see college as more attractive. The percentage of students enrolling straight from high school into college has been dropping. Many of those choosing jobs instead cite aversion to debt and higher pay for entry-level jobs.

A recent report from The Institute for College Access and Success showed half of all Colorado students graduating college in 2020 held debt, on average $26,424. In 19 other states, average debt for college graduates was more than $30,000, while in six states it averaged more than $35,000.

“It’s still expensive to go to college,” Vieyra said. “And that needs to be addressed one way or another.”

Colorado Department of Higher Education Commissioner Angie Paccione said debt relief is especially helpful for students who went to college but didn’t complete a degree. Paccione said in Colorado there are 700,000 people who attended a higher education institution but didn’t graduate, “which means they have probably at least half the debt that they accrued, but they don’t have a credential that helps to maximize their earning potential.”

She said she expects unintended and yet-unknown consequences and political backlash, especially from those who already paid off their loans. But this generation, she said, “is suffering disproportionately more than what it cost me to pay.”

“What I’m fearful of is that there will be people who see it as a handout instead of a helping hand up,” she said.

The administration expects to release more details on the student loan forgiveness plan, specifically on how to apply for loan forgiveness.

Southern said he hopes the administration will clearly communicate how students can take advantage of the debt forgiveness and that federal officials “automate as much as possible.”

We have to be really vigilant in making sure that this program is widely known and easy for people to access the benefits that they’re entitled to,” he said.

The Biden administration announcement also included several other actions related to student loan repayments.

It will extend the pause on repayment, interest and collections until Dec. 31 for borrowers who will still owe payments beyond the cancellations.The pause extends the delay put in place at the start of the pandemic.

The department also is proposing to reduce monthly payments for low- and middle-income borrowers.

The proposal would cut in half — from 10% to 5% of discretionary income — the amount that borrowers have to pay each month on their undergraduate loans. The rule would also forgive loan balances after 10 years of payments — instead of 20 years — for borrowers with original loan balances of $12,000 or less. And it would cut interest as long as borrowers make payments on time.

Borrowers like Broom with high student loan debt will likely get the most relief not from the $20,000, but from the income repayment changes. Nonetheless, she expects her payments will still be thousands of dollars a month, akin to paying a second mortgage, she said.

The administration also plans changes that will make it easier for borrowers working in nonprofit jobs or the military to use the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program. And the administration said it’s taking steps to hold private schools accountable for high debt and will publish an annual watch list of programs that contribute to high student debt.

The list will name programs with the highest debt levels in the country. The department will request improvement plans from those colleges and that will outline how the college intends to bring down debt levels.

Kids are at low risk for monkeypox, but schools can take precautions, CDC says

2022-08-19T19:00:00+00:00

Children and teens are at low risk for contracting monkeypox, but schools can still take steps to prepare for possible exposures or cases, officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday.

So far, a handful of the 14,000 confirmed cases of monkeypox in the U.S. have been among kids under 18, a CDC official said. In other countries, monkeypox has been much less common among children than adults, too.

In a new fact sheet, the CDC says the risk of getting monkeypox at school or in an early childhood setting is low. There’s been only one known case to date — an Illinois day care worker who tested positive for monkeypox earlier this month. All of the potentially exposed children and adults got screened, and none had tested positive as of last week, the local health department said.

Many of the precautions the CDC suggests schools take will sound familiar after two and a half years of following COVID protocols. That includes routinely cleaning and disinfecting classrooms, asking students and staff to regularly wash their hands, and providing personal protective equipment to staff who care for sick students.

Here’s what else the CDC says K-12 schools, early education providers, and after-school programs can do:

Understand the symptoms of monkeypox and how it spreads

Adults and children can contract monkeypox if they have close, personal contact with an infected person. So far, most monkeypox cases have been associated with sexual contact, though it’s possible to spread the virus by touching contaminated objects or fabrics — such as toys, books, and blankets — or a surface the infected person has used.

The main monkeypox symptom to watch for is a rash that can appear on the genitals, as well as the hands, feet, chest, face, or mouth. The rash may look like pimples or blisters at first and then scab over. Other signs include fever, chills, muscle aches, and other flu-like symptoms.

But the CDC cautions that many illnesses can cause a rash and fever in children, including chickenpox, so kids who haven’t had a known exposure should be assessed by a doctor.

Know what to do in case of an exposure

Schools should follow the steps they normally would to avoid the spread of illness, the CDC says. If a school does have a case of monkeypox, staff should clean and disinfect the places the infected person spent time, as well as any items or surfaces they touched. Schools should wash any linens or towels the infected person used, and throw away any items that can’t be sanitized.

There’s no test for monkeypox right now, unless a person develops a rash after being exposed. Children and teens who are exposed should be monitored for symptoms for 21 days, the CDC advises.

During that period, parents and caregivers of kids who were exposed should take their temperature daily, check their skin for new rashes, and look in their mouth for any sores or ulcers. Schools should also be prepared to watch for symptoms so they can communicate with families. School officials should ask their local or state health departments for guidance on how best to do that.

In most cases, children and staff who were exposed to an infected person don’t have to be excluded from school. “It is important to avoid stigma and fear-based exclusion of children and adolescents,” the CDC says.

Generally, contact tracing will be possible, since the virus spreads through touch and schools will know which students and staff were in a particular classroom. But in cases where contact tracing isn’t possible and there was a high degree of exposure, a health department may limit a student’s participation in school or other activities.

“The health department will consider the age of the individual and their ability to recognize or communicate symptoms, the types of interactions in the environment, and the risk of more severe disease to others in the setting,” the CDC says.

Students or staff who develop symptoms while under monitoring should isolate at home.

Know how to handle symptoms at school

If a student shows signs of monkeypox at school, school staff should bring the student to a private space away from other kids, such as an office. If they’re at least 2 years old, the child should wear a well-fitting mask and a parent or caregiver should pick them up and have them checked by a doctor.

Staff who are monitoring the possibly infected student should avoid close contact, if possible, the CDC says, but still attend to the child in an age-appropriate way, such as changing their diapers or calming them down if they’re upset. The school staffer should wear a gown and gloves if close contact is needed, such as to hold the child.

If the child has a rash, staff should try not to touch it and cover it with clothing, if possible. The staffer should also wear a KN95 mask, or other well-fitting mask, and wash their hands.

Widespread vaccination isn’t recommended for children or school staff, the CDC says, but vaccines are available for people who’ve come into close contact with a person infected with monkeypox. The American Academy of Pediatrics says that the Jynneos vaccine can be recommended for children under 18 after they’ve been exposed to monkeypox.

Have questions? The CDC is hosting two webinars on Monday for early education providers from 2 to 2:30 p.m. Eastern, and for K-12 schools from 3 to 3:30 p.m. Eastern.

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Without free school meals for all, many fear lunch debt will return ‘with a vengeance’

2022-08-02T11:00:00+00:00

For the last two years, any public school student in the U.S. could eat lunch for free. This year, that’s over.

That means Shani Hall, who oversees student nutrition services for Florida’s Hillsborough County schools, will be poring over her list of local residents and community groups that have offered financial help. When students accumulated meal debt in the past, those are the people who’ve wiped out balances.

Last year, for example, a local church pitched in $21,000 to cover old meal debts for high school juniors and seniors.

“Whenever we get a donor that reaches out to us, we keep that contact information and say: ‘Are you still interested?’” Hall said. “There is a lot of need out there.”

As the new school year gets underway, the end of a pandemic-era free meals provision is likely to mean the return of student meal debt. That’s because families who qualify for free meals may not realize they have to fill out paperwork again, and then struggle to pay the fees. Other students who ate for free during the pandemic might rack up debt before realizing their families don’t meet the low income thresholds.

“Before the pandemic, unpaid school lunch debt was a huge problem,” said Crystal FitzSimons, who oversees school nutrition work for the nonprofit Food Research & Action Center. “We are very concerned about unpaid school meal fees and them returning with a vengeance.”

How school meal debt affects students

The issue of school lunch debt rose to prominence in the years leading up to the pandemic. Three-quarters of school districts reported students had unpaid school meal debt by the end of 2017-18 school year, according to a survey of 800 districts conducted by the School Nutrition Association, a national nonprofit representing school food workers. That stacked up to nearly $11 million in unpaid meal debt at the 570 districts that disclosed their totals.

That debt can have big consequences for families.

In Illinois, for example, when a seventh-grader’s application for free meals was incorrectly processed, the student racked up nearly $1,000 in meal debt without his family realizing it, The Counter reported. The student eventually qualified with a second application, but as his family struggled to pay off the old debt, the district wouldn’t allow the high schooler to attend school events, like his homecoming dance.

Elsewhere, school districts have given students with meal debt cold sandwiches instead of hot lunches, or even hired debt collectors to go after families.

There are some working to change that. A few states, such as California and South Carolina, ban the use of collection agencies for school meal debts. And last month, House Democrats introduced legislation that would prohibit school districts from hiring debt collectors to retrieve unpaid meal debt. The bill also would give schools money to wipe out students’ old debt if they eventually qualify for free or discounted meals.

But it’s unclear what the future of that legislation will be — so far, it’s advanced along party lines without Republican support. And in recent months, the free school meals have repeatedly gotten caught in the political crosshairs.

Congressional Democrats pushed to extend the pandemic-era free-meals-for-all provision earlier this spring, but Republicans objected to the costs and it was left out of the school meals law that passed last month. Last week, a deal reached by Senate Democrats on a federal spending package also excluded a provision that would have made it easier for more schools to offer free breakfast and lunch to all students.

Still, many schools and big-city districts, such as New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago, will continue to offer free meals to all their students without any forms. They can do that through a decade-old federal program that allows schools with large shares of students from low-income families to serve free meals to all kids. The growing program offered free meals to nearly 15 million students the year the pandemic began, or about 3 in 10 U.S. students.

How schools are trying to help

Some districts that historically haven’t participated in that federal program, like Hillsborough County, will start this year. The district will offer free meals at 174 schools this year, expanding access to potentially tens of thousands of kids.

“We listened to families who were worried about losing free lunches,” Superintendent Addison Davis told parents in an email.

The program isn’t districtwide, though. So Hall and her team are calling, texting, and emailing families at the other 56 schools that still have to fill out paperwork. Hall worries some families will still slip through the cracks — especially parents of younger children who never had to fill out forms before.

Some districts have decided to cover additional meal costs this year to help families who are losing access to free meals. Pennsylvania’s North Penn School District, for example, will cover the cost of free breakfast for all students, and if a student qualifies for a reduced-price lunch, they will get a free meal.

Officials there saw school meal debt climb in the years leading up to the pandemic. That debt totaled around $5,500 in the 2018 school year, then grew to $15,500 the following year, and ballooned to just over $26,000 as the pandemic shuttered school buildings in spring 2020.

For the last two years, there’s been a zero balance, but with more families tumbling down the economic ladder since the pandemic began, officials don’t expect it to stay that way.

“It’s definitely something that we are preparing for,” said Melissa Froehlich, the district’s coordinator of school nutrition services. “I can see it easily going way higher than $26,000.”

Elementary school students in Pennsylvania’s North Penn School District line up for a meal in February 2022.

Similarly, Jenison and Hudsonville schools in Michigan will give free meals to all students that qualify for reduced-price ones. Officials hope the change will help around 1,000 families. The need was evident as officials saw a spike in students eating school meals when they were free.

“It removed a lot of stigma, but also it just became easier to use the program,” said Mary Darnton, the food service director for the two districts. She’s hopeful covering reduced-price meals “will also encourage more families to apply, because in the past even that small cost was prohibitive.”

The combination of school meal debt horror stories and the two-year pause on meal fees could also encourage schools to find other ways to cover debts, instead of sending collectors after struggling families.

“You can make choices about resources,” said Thurston Domina, a professor of education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, whose research found that when schools offer free meals to all students, it reduces suspension rates. “Maybe that culture has shifted — not a prediction, but it’s a hope.”

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Indiana’s post-Roe world is what these high school students have prepared for

2022-07-28T17:54:31+00:00

Since 2021, a group of students who support abortion rights at Hamilton Southeastern High School in Fishers, Indiana has met once a month to discuss topics that don’t come up often in their classrooms. They’ve analyzed everything from the makeup of the Supreme Court to legislation restricting abortion.

But now, this group — named Royals for Women’s Rights after the high school’s mascot — realizes that activity has also prepared students for a world in which Roe v. Wade no longer exists.

Meredith Kuhl, the group’s founder, said its members knew that as the Supreme Court’s ideological makeup shifted over time, the chances of a reversal of its 1973 decision establishing a constitutional right to an abortion was “a very strong possibility.” But that prospect also shaped the group’s work.

“We were willing to put in the time and the resources to create a safe space and create one that was very education focused,” Kuhl said. “We kind of have this saying: ‘Education first, activism second.’”

Royals for Women’s Rights is an outlier in Indiana, a conservative state where abortion rights are threatened as residents await the outcome from a special legislative session beginning this week. While anti-abortion organizations actively engage students across the country, Kuhl and her classmates had to blaze their own trail with guidance from national organizations like Planned Parenthood or ACLU by using the educational materials they publish.

Kuhl, who graduated from Hamilton Southeastern this year, remembers the notifications that lit up her phone the morning of June 24, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. Now, the students find themselves engaging directly with a polarizing debate in which Indiana is playing a prominent role.

In the special legislative session that began Monday, state lawmakers are considering a bill that would effectively eliminate legal abortions in Indiana. Additionally, in an incident that drew nationwide attention shortly after the end of Roe, an Indiana doctor performed an abortion on a pregnant 10-year-old girl who had traveled to the state from Ohio, where new state restrictions prevented her from receiving the procedure.

While Royals for Women’s Rights previously prioritized education over activism, the latter has now taken on additional urgency.

The group’s next president and rising senior Gabby Paredes, who will take over Royals for Women’s Rights when Kuhl begins attending Indiana University in the fall, said it will continue this effort into the school year.

“It took 50 years for the other side to overturn Roe v. Wade, and it’s gonna be more long years of fighting,” Paredes said. “That requires the younger generation to use their voices and stand up.”

Kuhl and other current Hamilton Southeastern students joined hundreds of other protestors demonstrating and holding signs outside the Indiana Statehouse as the special session began.

“Seeing everybody from different sides of the political spectrum and groups that all kind of collectively joined forces for this was probably the most memorable part,” Kuhl said about Monday’s demonstration in Indianapolis.

Creating a community to turn to

Kuhl said she wanted to start the club after an anti-abortion group was formed by fellow students at the school.

“As with any issue of this nature that’s controversial and that’s constantly being debated, I thought both perspectives needed to be represented,” Kuhl said.

Kuhl began with the support of one of her teachers, and she created a leadership board and planned what topics they would cover, like disparities in health care and current laws. When she thought of what the students needed, the first thing that came to mind was education.

Oftentimes, she said, meetings would discuss the politics surrounding reproductive rights. In addition to the Supreme Court and state bills restricting abortion, students discussed previous decisions the justices had shared publicly, in order to understand the issues better so they could speak about the topic with confidence.

“We think in order for people to be successful activists, they really need to understand the complexities and the facts behind them,” Kuhl said. “Because there will be people who don’t agree with you in life, and if you want to have a productive dialogue, simply stating your opinion isn’t going to do anything.”

The group’s initial meetings were held over Zoom. But when Royals for Women’s Rights held its first in-person meeting, enough students attended to fill a classroom, with around 40 in total. They covered a variety of topics each month, and many students asked for more information on certain subjects.

However, sometimes members of the club felt isolated.

When the group looked for other student-led abortion rights groups in Indiana, they mostly found anti-abortion groups instead. In the past, student organizations like Royals for Women’s Rights have run into controversy when they take place at Indiana schools. In 2017, for example, a student group supporting abortion rights sued a Carmel, Indiana school with help from the ACLU of Indiana, after the group was not permitted to post signs like their anti-abortion counterparts had in the past.

However, Kuhl said the group has not experienced retaliation after she founded the Royals for Women’s Rights group in 2020.

The group also looked at the practical impacts of legislation outside of Indiana. When Texas passed the Heartbeat Act last year that prohibits doctors from performing abortions once a “fetal heartbeat” is detected, the club pulled resources together to teach students what that looked like in practice.

Now that Indiana is considering its own major changes to abortion law, the group organizes carpools and resources in messaging groups for those who want to attend rallies together.

“It was honestly great to have a community like that to turn to, and use our voices to stand up and fight back,” Paredes said. “Because that’s definitely something powerful, and something that we can continue using, especially now.”

Helen Rummel is a summer reporting intern covering education in the Indianapolis area. Contact Helen at hrummel@chalkbeat.org.

Feds urge schools to reexamine discipline of students with disabilities, calling it ‘an urgent need’

2022-07-19T20:37:20+00:00

Federal education officials are urging schools to reduce rates of suspension and expulsion for students with disabilities, as many schools continue to grapple with higher levels of student stress and misbehavior.

That means schools should be looking closely at their discipline data for disparities, officials said. Schools also should be training staff to help students with disabilities who struggle with their behavior without removing them from school.

“We don’t have to choose between protecting students’ rights and giving schools the tools to identify and deliver safe, appropriate interventions,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said on a Tuesday call with reporters. “This work is especially urgent now as our schools and our students and families continue to heal from the pandemic.”

The education department released a series of letters and documents on Tuesday that spell out states’ and school districts’ responsibilities to avoid discriminating against students with disabilities when it comes to school discipline. Top officials underscored that adults contracted to work in a school, such as school police officers, are subject to these rules.

The documents don’t include much new information, and mostly aim to clarify what’s already in federal civil rights laws. But they do serve as a reminder that the Biden administration is watching how schools treat students with disabilities as the effects of the pandemic drag on.

Schools that fail to meet those legal obligations could be investigated for possible federal civil rights violations. If the department finds students’ rights have been violated, schools are typically required to take action to fix the problem.

The guidance package, described as the most comprehensive ever issued on this topic, comes about a year after the Biden administration announced a review of previous school discipline guidance and sought feedback from schools, parents, and others.

But controversial guidance that aimed to limit suspensions and expulsions for students of color — issued in 2014 under President Obama and revoked in 2018 under President Trump — remains under review. Education officials offered no details about whether that guidance would be reissued, and no timeline for when a decision would be made.

Education officials noted that this new guidance doesn’t prevent schools from suspending students with a disability when their behavior is a threat to other students or themselves — likely an attempt to counter potential pushback. The 2014 guidance about racial disparities faced intense scrutiny and some criticism from school leaders and educators who said it took away discipline options that made schools less safe. Some conservatives have said schools don’t need more discipline guidance at a time when they’re dealing with more student misbehavior. And while many schools have hired more mental health staff, they remain in short supply.

The documents include explicit reminders that schools need to determine if a student’s behavior was a result of their disability before issuing a punishment such as a detention or out-of-school suspension.

They also say that schools must sometimes make “reasonable modifications” to avoid discriminating against students with disabilities. That could mean adapting or choosing not to apply certain school rules when a student’s behavior is related to their disability — such as not giving detention to a student for using profanity if they have Tourette syndrome and it sometimes causes them to curse involuntarily.

And the department cautions that students with disabilities shouldn’t be suspended or expelled at all for certain non-violent or subjective misbehaviors, such as being late to class, skipping school, or disrespecting a teacher.

The documents also note the persistent connection between race and disability in school discipline rates. Officials said while they weren’t sure if the pandemic had made those gaps worse, they believed disparities have persisted in recent years. The year the pandemic began, for example, Black children with disabilities made up about 17% of all students with disabilities, but accounted for nearly 44% of students with disabilities who were suspended or expelled for more than 10 school days.

“It’s positive that they’re making those connections for people,” said Rachel M. Perera, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy who has studied civil rights enforcement in school discipline. “But something that seems to be missing is more practical guidance on what that means. OK, if a school district has these types of disparities, how do you go about reducing them? How do you actually address that?”

The guidance urges schools to turn to alternatives to removing students from school, such as providing one-on-one counseling or conducting a more intensive evaluation of a student’s behavior. It also says schools should provide ongoing training and coaching to help staff put these practices into action, and Cardona noted schools can use their federal COVID relief dollars to pay for such activities.

Knowing what to do instead is tricky, Perera said. Suspension rates tend to fall when schools emphasize alternatives to suspensions, but racial disparities in who is disciplined don’t go away.

Behavior challenges were a common theme last school year, as many students adjusted to being back in-person in school buildings with their peers. Many principals noticed an uptick in student fights and classroom disruptions that they attributed to the pandemic, a recent federal survey showed, though a sizable share didn’t see any change compared with pre-pandemic times.

Districts responded to the increase in student misbehavior in divergent ways, too. Some suspended students more often than before the pandemic began, while others suspended students at lower rates. Some districts, like New York City, that tried to continue with efforts to use alternatives to suspensions and expulsions found it especially challenging this past school year, as schools faced a spike in staffing shortages and more conflicts between students.

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Meals to go, fresh veggies: What the extension of meal waivers means for schools

2022-06-24T18:36:41+00:00

As food and other costs continue to rise, schools are getting help from federal legislation that will reimburse schools for meals at higher rates than usual and bring back rules that make it easier to get food to children and teens over the summer.

The legislation, known as the Keep Kids Fed Act, was sent to President Biden on Friday after it cleared Congress.

The measures are seen as a lifeline for school nutrition programs, many of which have grappled with missing food deliveries, staff shortages, and higher prices for staples like chicken, milk, and paper products this year. Schools had gotten higher reimbursement rates over the last two years, but those were set to expire at the end of the month. The additional funds will make it less likely that schools will have to dip into their education budgets to cover the cost of their meal programs in the upcoming school year.

The legislation also extends several pandemic-era waivers that had allowed schools to run grab-and-go meal programs and deliver food to students in the summer months. Those waivers were also going to end on June 30.

That will make a big difference in districts like Houston, which had delivered meals to students in 25 apartment buildings across the district last summer. Betti Wiggins, the officer of nutrition services, worried about not being able to reach those students again this year.

“Absolutely, I’ll be all over apartment buildings,” she said. That will help with “what the summer program was designed to do: Feed kids who do not have two meals available to them in the summertime.”

Congressional Democrats had pushed to extend the meal waivers earlier this spring, but Republican leaders shot that down, in part because of the price tag. This proposal covers the added costs with unspent agriculture department funds, as well as $400 million in COVID relief dollars that were originally set aside for colleges and universities.

The measures are only for one school year, but advocates say they will make a meaningful difference for families.

This summer, many school districts had planned to shorten their summer meal programs or give out food at fewer sites without the waivers in place. Starting in July, students would have had to eat each meal on site.

Now, school officials say they’ll be able to resume programs that allow families to pick up multiple meals at once and take them home. That will ease the burden on working parents and caregivers who have to drive a long distance to feeding sites, especially as gas prices skyrocket.

“We’re already hearing from a lot of our partners on the ground that parents are really, really frustrated,” said Lisa Davis, who oversees the No Kid Hungry campaign at the nonprofit Share Our Strength. “People are having to really think about it: Is the cost of the trip every single day more than the value of the food that my child is getting? It’s agonizing for parents.”

The waivers also allow schools and summer feeding programs to give out meals at centralized sites, instead of only in areas where there is a high poverty rate. For Charleston County schools in South Carolina, that means Walter Campbell, the executive director of nutrition services, will be able to add a public library back to the meal site list that he planned to drop if the waivers went away.

Still, the changes may come too late for some school districts, especially smaller ones that can’t afford to make sweeping changes to their meal programs at the drop of a hat. Advocates also worry about whether families will find out about the changes, since many districts put out the word about how their summer meal program would run months ago.

“Because of the timing, I think unfortunately, we will see communities where summer meals aren’t as available as they would have been if Congress had gotten this done in March,” Davis said. “But I think we will see many more sites, and many more kids served than we would if Congress didn’t do this at all.”

One big change is that families will again have to fill out paperwork to qualify their children for free and reduced priced meals when school starts in the fall, a requirement the waivers had lifted over the past two years. During the pandemic, schools were able to give meals to all students at no cost without checking their family income.

But between the higher reimbursement rates and the waiver of fines if schools can’t meet the usual nutrition standards — a common occurrence when delivery trucks arrive half-empty or without certain products — school nutrition officials say they hope they can redirect that money into healthier meals for students.

Wiggins in Houston, for example, didn’t think she’d be able to afford putting out salad bars at schools this year, but the extra funds will allow her to buy more fresh fruits and vegetables, which tend to cost more.

Campbell in Charleston County says the higher reimbursement rates mean he’ll be able to get burgers without a bunch of fillers in them. Patties that are mostly meat and spices cost 90 cents each, while the versions with additives cost 40 cents to 50 cents each, he said. And he’ll be able to buy healthier buns and salad dressing, too.

“We don’t want products with high-fructose corn syrup,” he said, but the healthier alternatives cost more. “Having these additional funds will allow us to continue doing what we’ve been doing.”

Still the legislation won’t fix the supply chain issues many schools expect will continue into next school year. That means schools will keep jumping through hoops to put food on students’ plates. Campbell’s district, for example, is working with 14 neighboring districts to order the same ingredients to reduce the chances they’ll get shorted. They’ve learned to use the same meat to make chicken sandwiches as chicken parmesan.

“You get creative with the menu,” Campbell said. It’s “talking to your distributor and saying: ‘Well, what do you have? What can you get hold of?’”

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Overturn of Roe v. Wade could add to child poverty

2022-06-24T15:00:00+00:00

New restrictions on abortion could increase child poverty and hurt women’s educational prospects, among other potential impacts on American schools.

The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade on Friday hands abortion rights to the states, 26 of which already have or are very likely to enact laws that will ban or sharply curtail the practice.

As a result, experts predict at least some increase in teen births, higher rates of childhood poverty, and decreased female participation in the workforce — though the magnitude of those changes are difficult to predict.

“It is so clear that we have an evidence base that women’s mental health, women’s economic prospects, women’s educational prospects are going to be damaged by lack of access to abortion,” said Sarah Cohodes, an associate professor of economics and education at Columbia University. “If it follows past patterns, and there’s no reason why that won’t, it will be focused on young people and Black pregnant people.”

Child poverty

Economists have shown that abortion access affects a pregnant person’s decision whether and when to have a child, with a variety of effects on their lives and their families.

“Short term, what you’re going to see is a rise in child poverty,” Barnard College Professor of Women and Economics Elizabeth Ananat said. “Women use the access to abortion as one of the tools for family planning and for timing births so that they come at a time when the parent is best able to support a family.”

A study conducted at the University of California, San Francisco, known as “The Turnaway Study,” showed people who were denied an abortion and went on to give birth experienced an increase in household poverty lasting at least four years relative to those who received an abortion.

In concrete terms, that means those women struggled to cover basic living expenses like food, housing, and transportation. They also experienced blows to their financial security, like lower credit scores, increased debt, and a higher likelihood of bankruptcy and eviction.

The children they already had were more likely to experience developmental delays, lower test scores, and behavioral issues.

“That is directly attributable to the stress and strain on their mother and on their family, from being forced to carry this unwanted pregnancy to term,” Ananat said.

Poverty affects children’s performance in school, and there are “decades of social science research” to prove it, Cohodes said. Research has directly linked anti-poverty programs to better academic outcomes, including test scores and graduation rates.

Teen births and graduation rates

Teen pregnancy rates in the U.S. have been dropping for decades, and federal statistics show they hit another low in 2020.

Abortion rates among teens have fallen dramatically over the same period, though they increased between 2017 and 2020. They also vary widely across states, and teens who do get pregnant already face a variety of restrictions on abortion access in many parts of the country. In many (but not all) states where abortion access will be newly limited, teen abortion rates were already low.

That means drastic changes are unlikely. But the new restrictions are likely to have some effect on teen birth rates, Ananat said.

“If the abortion rate goes down [further], as it is predicted to when this happens, then what that will do is lead to more women forced to carry to term who don’t want to, it may well mean more teens,” she said. “Those are all going to be pressures on schools.”

Teens who have children face new obstacles to continuing their education.

Just over half of young women who gave birth as teens received a high school diploma, according to a 2018 study by Child Trends, a nonpartisan research institute. That’s in comparison to 90% of those who did not. Exactly how much of that gap is caused by having a child, as opposed to other factors, has been debated by researchers, but experts generally agree teen parenthood has an impact.

For young women who want to pursue higher education, graduating high school on time (if at all) is a “huge milestone,“ said Cohodes.

“It’s very hard to see that happening for young women who have an infant in a society that doesn’t have a lot of support for people with infants that don’t have resources on their own.”

Kevin Lang, a Boston University economics professor, found in a 2015 study he co-authored that unwed pregnant teens who gave birth between 1940 and 1968 — pre-Roe — were 16% more likely to drop out of high school compared to those who miscarried.

Today, contraception is more advanced, graduation rates are higher, and abortion will still be accessible to some at varying degrees, Lang said, but the research helps anticipate a general trend.

Another challenge: Schools may lack the support teen parents need to reach graduation, especially given the closure of programs designed for them in recent years.

“There are pregnant and parenting students now and we don’t see overwhelming support and programming options for those students in the current system,’’ Cohodes said.

The education workforce

New restrictions on abortion are also likely to have some affect on the teaching force, roughly three-quarters of which is female, if educators leave the workforce as a result of pregnancy or lack of child care.

Broadly, experts expect abortion bans or limitations to have the heaviest impact on young women, low-income women, and women of color. U.S. teachers are college educated and mostly white.

“This is not going to be a big aggregate impact,” Lang said. “What there will be are specific cases where both the teacher who was not planning to get pregnant is affected by this, and of course, the classroom where she was planning to spend the year.”

Ananat said that although the number of teachers in affected states forced to leave the workforce will likely be modest, when they do leave it will likely be sporadic and unpredictable. She expects that will only be an added strain on districts already struggling to staff buildings during the pandemic era.

“Given the teacher shortage that many places are reporting right now, even small increases in teacher attrition — especially sort of unpredictable teacher attrition — can be something that is really felt by a system,” she said. “This could be sort of like the straw that breaks the camel’s back in some situations.”

Supreme Court decisions moving forward

After the draft opinion overturning Roe was leaked last month, some conservative and right-wing voices have suggested the decision could influence the Supreme Court to revisit other landmark civil rights cases like Brown v. Board of Education, which banned the practice of “separate but equal” schooling, and Plyer v. Doe, which protects the rights of undocumented children to an education.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said he hopes to “resurrect” Plyler during a recent appearance on a conservative talk show.

There’s currently no reason to think that either case is at imminent risk. Brown v. Board, unlike Roe, is “super precedent,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett said during her confirmation hearings. While Plyler doesn’t have that level of consensus, it also hasn’t been a longstanding conservative target.

“I hope it’s just much ado about nothing,” Derek Black, an education law professor at the University of South Carolina, told Chalkbeat in May. “But we’ve certainly seen polarization on issues, so I obviously don’t rule out the possibility.”

Jessica Blake is a summer reporting intern for the Chalkbeat national desk. Contact her at jblake@chalkbeat.org or on Twitter at @JessicaEBlake.

‘A loud message’: LGBTQ students protected from discrimination, proposed rules say

2022-06-23T18:08:25+00:00

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LGBTQ students who face discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity are protected by the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination at school, according to proposed rules issued by the federal education department on Thursday.

Some schools already applied the law this way, officials noted, but the proposed rules make it clear that the protections outlined in the 50-year-old federal civil rights law known as Title IX apply to LGBTQ students.

“We must see this opportunity to better protect LGBTQ youth, who face bullying and harassment, experience higher rates of anxiety, depression and suicide, and too often grow up feeling that they don’t belong,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona told reporters. “Today we send a loud message to these students, and all our students: You belong in our schools.”

The proposal is the latest step by the Biden administration to strengthen protections for LGBTQ youth, who have increasingly come under attack by new state laws that limit teaching about gender and sexuality, restrict what bathrooms transgender students can use at school, and limit access to gender-affirming health care. Officials spent the last year gathering feedback about these rules, talking with students, parents, lawyers, and others.

The proposed rules build on a memo federal officials issued last year saying that a 2020 Supreme Court ruling that found sex discrimination includes sexual orientation and gender identity would apply to Title IX.

But federal education officials didn’t weigh in on whether state laws that bar transgender students from participating on school sports teams that correspond with their gender identity run afoul of federal civil rights law. Cardona said the department would undergo a separate process to decide if it will issue rules around eligibility for school sports teams.

“The department recognizes that standards for students participating in male and female athletic teams are evolving in real time,” Cardona said. “And so we decided to do a separate rule-making on how schools may determine eligibility while upholding Title IX’s non-discrimination guarantee.”

The department did not issue a timeline for that process, but officials acknowledged the issue is urgent.

The proposed rules also include stronger requirements for schools to provide reasonable accommodations for pregnant students, and they reverse some of the rules the Trump administration put into place under former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos regarding the investigation of sexual assault and misconduct in schools. Colleges no longer have to conduct a live hearing to evaluate evidence in those cases, for example — which had been one of the most controversial parts of the DeVos-era regulations.

Members of the public will have two months to comment on these proposed rules before federal officials can move forward with putting a final rule into place.

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Congress is poised to pass a bill in response to the Uvalde shooting. Here’s what it means for schools.

2022-06-22T22:14:55+00:00

Congress appears poised to respond to the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting, which gripped the nation’s attention and resulted in the deaths of 19 children and two teachers. A bipartisan bill, unveiled Tuesday evening, would add modest gun control rules and provide new funding for a bevy of mental health and school safety programs. It quickly gained support from 64 senators, clearing its first procedural hurdle in the usually gridlocked U.S. Senate.

The bill is Congress’ attempt to avert additional school shootings, and if enacted it will result in some schools getting a bit of extra money to support student mental health and bolster security.

Some education advocates said while they were dubious that such investments would have a direct effect on school shootings — which are high profile but rare — they welcomed the new funding.

“Having more money for school counselors, having more for school safety and health — those are good things,” said Anne Hyslop, director of policy development at All4Ed, an equity-focused advocacy group.

Here are the school-related aspects of the bill:

$1 billion for a broad array of efforts to “support safe and healthy students.” This money could be used in a number of ways including anti-drug programming, mental health services in schools, anti-bullying efforts, school-wide behavioral programs, and training for preventing school-based violence. This funding would be doled by states to “high need” school districts through a competitive application.

$1 billion for school-based mental health support. The money would be spread out in $200 million chunks in each of the next five years and can be used to provide training for and to hire counselors, social workers, and psychologists.

$300 million to bolster school security. This money would go to an existing grant program that was created by Congress in 2018 after the Parkland, Florida shooting. Grants could be used for safety measures including threat reporting systems, security training, coordination with police, and building security measures like metal detectors and locks. In recent years after prior school shootings, many schools have already bolstered security substantially.

$240 million for Project AWARE, which trains school staff to notice and address mental health challenges faced by students.

$50 million for summer and after-school programs for middle and high school students. This would go through an existing federal program known as 21st Century Community Learning Centers.

Codify the creation of a clearinghouse of “school-safety evidence-based practices.” Several federal departments would be in charge of working together to compile and publish “recommendations to improve school safety.” Notably, such a site was previously created after Parkland and still exists.

Ban the use of federal education funds to arm teachers or school staff. This has been an issue since Education Secretary Betsy DeVos said in 2018 that she would not try to stop federal funds from being used to buy guns. It’s not clear how many, if any, schools were using federal funds to do so, and this provision would not affect state-funded efforts to arm school personnel.

Advocates for this bill say the package of initiatives will reduce school shootings, although it’s far from clear how big of an effect it would have. The bill also features efforts to bolster mental health support for children outside of schools, as well as modest new gun rules, including expanding background checks for those between ages 18 and 21.

“Our legislation will save lives and will not infringe on any law-abiding American’s Second Amendment rights,” the bipartisan group of four senators said in a statement. “We look forward to earning broad, bipartisan support and passing our common sense legislation into law.”

Notably, the amounts of money for schools, while not trivial, are not massive either, considering that public schools already spend several hundred billion dollars every year. There are about 100,000 public schools in this country, which means $1 billion is enough to provide each one of them an extra $10,000 (although in practice this money would be targeted toward a small number of schools).

How would these funds affect a typical school? Ultimately, some number would be able to afford things like an additional school counselor or upgraded building security.

Matt Barnum is a national reporter covering education policy, politics, and research. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Supreme Court says religious schools can’t be singled out for exclusion from public dollars

2022-06-21T15:20:43+00:00

The Supreme Court has made it a bit easier for K-12 religious schools to access public dollars, the latest in a string of cases to do so.

Tuesday’s ruling, by the court’s 6-3 conservative majority, declares that states can’t limit religious schools from accessing public funding just because they are religious.

Maine’s voucher program “operates to identify and exclude otherwise eligible schools on the basis of their religious exercise,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority opinion in Carson v. Makin. And that violates the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of religion, he said.

But the decision won’t turn on a money spigot for religious private schools. Maine will have to allow those schools into its small voucher program, but the ruling does not require states to offer funding to religious schools if they don’t already fund private schools.

The decision effectively ends one chapter of litigation, appearing to close the last possible door for states to exclude religious schools from private school aid programs. And it could mark the beginning of a new series of lawsuits, including about whether charter schools can be religious and whether states can exclude private schools of all kinds from government aid.

Backed by a conservative law firm, the latest suit was brought by two families who were eligible for Maine’s small voucher program that pays private or public school tuition for students who are located in rural parts of the state.

One of the families paid for tuition at a religious school with their own money, but would have liked to use a voucher. Another family used a voucher to send their child to a secular private school, but would have preferred a religious school. By state law, religious private schools are ineligible to receive funding from the voucher program.

“The State pays tuition for certain students at private schools — so long as the schools are not religious,” wrote Roberts. “That is discrimination against religion.”

The court’s three liberal judges disagreed. In dissent, Justice Stephen Breyer argued that Maine had actually treated students eligible for a voucher the same as all the other students in the state — eligible for a publicly funded secular education, but not a publicly funded religious education.

“Maine has promised all children within the State the right to receive a free public education,” Breyer wrote. “In fulfilling this promise, Maine endeavors to provide children the religiously neutral education required in public school systems.”

The court’s liberal justices also raised concerns about discrimination in private schools. They pointed out that the schools that the plaintiffs’ children attend or would like to attend have policies that bar gay teachers and students.

“While purporting to protect against discrimination of one kind, the Court requires Maine to fund what many of its citizens believe to be discrimination of other kinds,” wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor in another dissent.

It’s not clear whether the ruling would clear the way for these particular schools to participate in the state’s voucher program, since Maine law generally bars discrimination based on sexual orientation. That itself could be subject to further litigation.

Tuesday’s decision was widely expected and follows similar cases in 2017 and 2020.

This case won’t have much immediate impact beyond Maine, though.

That’s because nearly all private school choice programs already allow religious schools to participate. Maine, as well as Vermont, which has a comparable program, are exceptions. (Vermont lost a similar lawsuit recently, and the state legislature has been wrestling with how exactly to include religious schools.)

Critically, the decision does not require states to offer public funds to private schools. In his majority opinion, Roberts reiterated something he wrote in the 2020 case: “A State need not subsidize private education. But once a State decides to do so, it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.”

This is a blow to private school advocates in Michigan, including former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos who is backing an effort to create a tax-credit funded voucher program there. The state’s constitution bars aid to private schools, religious and non-religious alike, and that appears to be permissible under today’s decision.

Still, Michigan school choice advocates have filed their own federal lawsuit arguing that the barring aid to private schools is unconstitutional. They may draw on aspects of the latest Supreme Court decision to bolster their case.

Meanwhile, there may also be an opening for religious charter schools, a possibility noted in Breyer’s dissent. Presently, charter schools across the country must be secular in their operation and instruction. This decision doesn’t change that, but some legal scholars say in future cases, the same logic could be applied to charter schools.

Might prohibiting religious charter schools amount to an illegal form of discrimination under the Constitution? The Supreme Court may eventually have to answer that question.

“Charter schools are the next frontier,” Preston Green, an education law professor at the University of Connecticut, previously told Chalkbeat.

Matt Barnum is a national reporter covering education policy, politics, and research. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Some states and charter networks slow to spend federal charter money

2022-06-14T20:03:02+00:00

Some states and charter networks have struggled in recent years to spend money provided by the federal government to help start charter schools, according to new data collected by Chalkbeat, much of which has not been previously reported.

KIPP, for instance, won an $88 million grant from the feds in 2019, but has spent less than $20 million of it to date. IDEA charter network has used just $17 million of two grants totaling nearly $200 million. Colorado has only spent half of its $55 million award from 2018. In 2019, the U.S. Department of Education had to redirect $12 million from the program because of “limited demand” from states and would-be charter leaders.

The federal Charter Schools Program, funded at $440 million this year, has drawn substantial attention in recent months after the Biden administration proposed new regulations, which charter school advocates have decried as likely to stifle charter growth.

The new data suggests that the charter sector was experiencing growing pains even before the proposed rules, likely due to COVID-era complications as well as population shifts and political obstacles in certain cities and states. It’s not clear if this is a temporary pandemic blip or a reflection of longer term challenges.

The problem is that in some places “there aren’t enough new charter schools every year,” said Alex Medler, executive director of Colorado Association of Charter School Authorizers. “It could be that new school start ups will pick back up.”

Some places struggle to spend charter start-up funds during pandemic

The Charter Schools Program is a long-running initiative that helps pay for the start-up costs of new charters. Most commonly, states or state-based charter groups win five-year “expected” grants that they then distribute to people in their state who want to launch or grow a charter school. Charter networks and individual charter schools can also receive federal funding directly.

The amount of actual funding can be adjusted upward or downward each year and grantees can seek extensions if they’re having trouble spending the money.

Between 2018 and 2020, organizations from 19 states won grants ranging from $10 million to $100 million. Several charter networks also won grants, including large awards for KIPP and IDEA.

Data on how much of that funding has actually been distributed is not readily available, but Chalkbeat obtained it from many individual grant winners.

Several — including grantees in Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Nevada, North Carolina, and Washington — said they’ve had no problem issuing subgrants to start-up charter schools.

“We’ve had demand for these dollars,” said Terry Ryan, CEO of Bluum, an Idaho group that won a CSP grant. “We can’t build buildings fast enough.” The U.S. Department of Education upped the grant to $22 million from $18 million initially; most of the money has been awarded, and Ryan expects the rest to go out shortly.

Arizona has already awarded $40 million of its $55 million award. “The Department is on track to meet its goal of awarding funds to forty schools … over the five-year grant period and has not experienced challenges with prospective schools,” a spokesperson said.

But a number of other places haven’t been able to issue grants as intended.

“We have run into challenges with spending down this money,” said Dana Smith, a spokesperson for the Colorado Department of Education. She said applications have been lower than expected due to the pandemic, which means the state is projecting to spend $13.6 million less than initially anticipated.

Washington D.C. has issued just one grant — for $1.5 million to a single school — of its $24.2 million award. A spokesperson pointed to the fact that the city’s charter board has said it will not approve new schools until 2023.

Michigan has spent about half of its $47 million award from 2018, providing 20 grants to planned charters, significantly short of its goal of 34. “After two pandemic years it appears that it may be a challenge to meet the original number in the grant,” said Martin Ackley, a spokesperson for the state department of education.

In New York, spending challenges have existed for some time. The state won $86 million in 2018 — even though reviewers worried about the fact that it had still not spent a prior award from 2011.

The state received a waiver to use some of the dollars to help existing charter schools address COVID needs rather than to start new schools, the original purpose of the grant. But New York still has over $20 million remaining from its most recent grant.

“The number of newly authorized charter schools across all New York State charter authorizers has slowed in the past few years,” said a spokesperson for the state education department. “This has an impact on the number and pace of awards under this grant program.” New York City, where most charter schools in the state are located, has reached a cap of charters.

Perhaps the most striking disconnect between original awards and spend down to date come from KIPP and IDEA, two of the country’s largest charter networks.

Since 2010, IDEA has won six grants totaling nearly $300 million, helping it grow at a rapid clip. But it has spent only a small part of its two most recent, and largest, grants from 2019 and 2020. In its applications, the network said it would grow or start 200 schools with the two awards.

That hasn’t happened.

“IDEA scaled back our growth plan significantly beginning with the 2021-22 school year, in large part because we chose not to add the strain of planning, constructing and opening new schools while we were also trying to operate our existing schools during the pandemic,” said Lynnette Montemayor, a spokesperson for IDEA.

The network has also gone through leadership turmoil with both its founders departing in recent years.

“It’s hard to say at this point what percentage of funds will have been spent by the time all our CSP grants sunset,” Montemayor said. “We are in discussions with the Department about our amended funding needs.”

Meanwhile, KIPP had initially said it would open or expand 52 schools by 2022. A reviewer noted that this “massive expansion” was “very ambitious,” but the network won an $88 million award anyway in 2019.

To date, the network has only used 20% of those funds, and now says it will open 38 schools by the end of this year. “We have not been able to spend this grant as expected due to the COVID-19 pandemic,” said KIPP foundation spokesperson Maria Alcón-Heraux. “Our KIPP Regions have had to reevaluate their growth strategies and reprioritize or delay the opening of new schools.”

Alcón-Heraux pointed to staffing needs created by the cascade of pandemic challenges. “With a limited staff to handle the onslaught of new responsibilities, our teams had to pause on growth plans until our schools reached a level of normalcy,” she said.

KIPP has asked the U.S. Department of Education for an extension to use the money and is still aiming to use all the funds from its initial award, Alcón-Heraux said.

Political headwinds, COVID add challenges for new charters

The CSP spending challenges could reflect many factors: pandemic-era challenges, political hurdles, parental demand, or overly ambitious plans.

Charter schools had been facing new political challenges leading up to the pandemic. Blue states passed laws limiting growth or declined to lift caps on charter schools. Several cities became less hospitable to charters. Perhaps reflecting those challenges, the number of new charter schools dropped sharply in 2016 and 2017, but bounced back in 2018 and 2019.

Although data is limited, Medler, who has been involved in CSP for years, says that the spending challenges pre-dated the pandemic.

During the pandemic, charter school enrollment has spiked, although much of that came from existing virtual charter schools.

The new data from CSP suggests that some of the political obstacles before the pandemic remain, and that some charter schools faced new pandemic-created challenges. Population shifts away from certain places may also be having an effect.

The charter sector could face yet another hurdle soon. The Biden administration has proposed a slew of new CSP requirements including a detailed “community impact analysis.”

The rules have not been finalized yet, but if they are, they could make it even more difficult to spend the money, by barring for-profit companies and perhaps deterring others from applying. It’s also possible that the shortage will mean that the rules won’t end up making a big difference in who gets a grant, since the grant competitions will be less competitive.

“Moving forward, we do not anticipate less demand for this program,” said Luke Jackson, a U.S. Department of Education spokesperson. “As we evaluate public comments on our proposal, we are hopeful that we will have a charter school program that encourages quality, accountability, and integrity in charter schools across the country.

To charter critic Carol Burris of the Network for Public Education, all of this is more evidence that the program is poorly managed. “There is always this disconnect between reality and need,” she said. “Regardless of what happens with the regulations, there is a real issue with states applying for the amounts that are more than they need.”

But Nina Rees, president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said that particular spending challenges may reflect unique issues of each grantee, like IDEA’s leadership turnover.

Only certain places get CSP funding each year, she said, “but that doesn’t mean that there’s no growth in other parts of the country, and that there’s no need for more support to grow charter schools.”

Rees says there should be more flexibility to move dollars among different parts of the CSP and more money for the program generally. The National Alliance is currently pushing to increase funding for the CSP from $440 million to $500 million to back continued charter growth.

This story has been updated to include additional context on KIPP’s CSP grant, including how many schools the network plans to open by the end of this year.

Matt Barnum is a national reporter covering education policy, politics, and research. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Cardona urges support for educators as rocky year comes to a close

2022-06-09T19:07:05+00:00

The nation’s education secretary said it’s time to boost teacher pay and add new kinds of support for educators struggling after two and a half pandemic school years.

“We need to prioritize education, not just when schools are closing, but when they’re open, and we need to level up and raise the bar,” said Miguel Cardona in a speech Thursday. “I’m using the bully pulpit to say, the last few years I’ve been fearing and fighting COVID. The next two years, I’m going to be fearing and fighting complacency.”

Cardona spoke to an audience of educators in New York City, where he pushed his vision for “supporting and uplifting” teachers in the midst of “enormous challenges.”

He called for action, saying increasing teacher salaries is key to increasing retention.

“We could talk all we want about supporting teachers, we could show up with coffee and donuts in May on Teacher Appreciation Week,” he said. “But how we show that we value them is by our wallets.”

As of 2019, the average teacher salary was $63,645, a figure that has barely budged in decades. On average, teachers make about 20% less than other college graduates, with an even wider gap in 25 states. The typical starting salary is $41,770. (These numbers don’t include health care and retirement benefits, though, which are often better for teachers than private sector workers.)

The secretary touted the Biden administration’s latest federal budget proposal, which included $350 million for programs meant to improve teacher recruitment and retention, $132 million to improve teacher preparation, and $20 million to increase teacher diversity. The budget proposal also seeks to add $19 billion in Title I funding, which could help schools pay teachers more.

But Cardona’s speech belied an awkward reality: he has little power to enact his vision. There is no indication that such investments will be approved by Congress. Biden’s first budget was dramatically scaled back by lawmakers, and this year’s proposal could face a similar fate.

Ultimately, teacher salaries are based mostly on state and local decisions, which Cardona has little ability to influence.

On Thursday, Cardona linked pay with another challenge facing schools: convincing teachers to stay in the classroom after the challenges of the pandemic.

“Out of crisis, there’s opportunity,” Cardona said. “So let’s use this moment of disruption, not to build it back the way it was. That’s not good enough.”

He encouraged districts and states to use federal COVID relief dollars for pay increases or bonuses — and some already have — though those funds are temporary and dwindling.

So far, there’s been no indication of a substantial increase in the number of teachers leaving the classroom during the pandemic. Teacher turnover was slightly up in some states going into this school year, but that followed unusually low turnover the year before.

Teachers usually leave during the summer, so it’s too soon to say whether quit rates will increase after this year. A number of school districts have reported a sharp uptick in teachers leaving mid-year, and surveys suggest that teacher stress remains high.

In addition to teacher pay, Cardona said that the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, teacher residencies, and guided leadership and mentorship programs could be tools for ensuring teachers are well prepared and incentivized to stay.

“We need to have resources, training, and make sure that our educators are supported in this process,” Cardona said. “As we support the whole child, we must also support the whole educator.”

Biden admin says $174 million has gone to defunct charter schools, defending new rules

2022-06-07T22:13:02+00:00

Roughly 15% of the charter schools that received federal start-up funding either never opened or closed within a few years, according to a top U.S. Department of Education official, even though the schools received $174 million.

Assistant Education Secretary Roberto Rodríguez argued that those numbers underscore the need for greater oversight of the federal Charter Schools Program in an interview with Chalkbeat.

“It’s important to make sure that the stewardship of the program — particularly with respect to accountability and fiscal responsibility — is there,” he said.

It’s the Biden administration’s latest effort to fend off criticism of its proposed changes to regulations of the long-running program, which has awarded billions of dollars in grants since 1995 to help launch charter schools. Among other things, the proposed rules would require applicants to show that there is local demand for the schools and that they would not exacerbate segregation. The rules would also limit funds from going to charter schools run by for-profit companies or to schools that haven’t been approved to open.

The proposal has prompted a furious backlash from charter school supporters who say it would curtail charter growth and hurt applicants without institutional backing.

The closure of some schools — which Rodríguez suggests represents a lack of fiscal responsibility — is actually an example of the charter sector working as intended, countered Nina Rees, president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

“The underlying premise of this argument is that it is more acceptable to provide a substandard education and remain open, as is the case for too many low performing district schools,” she said.

More than 25,000 public comments for and against the regulations have poured in. The department must now respond to these comments and then can issue a final rule.

Rodríguez suggested that the administration isn’t backing away from making changes, but hinted that officials would try to make them less burdensome.

“The concern that’s been raised around the amount of time and effort that it would take to meet some of those requirements — that’s something we’re looking at and paying close attention to,” he said.

Highlights from the interview, edited for length and clarity, are below.

Chalkbeat: The proposal reads to me that, if a charter wants to open in a city with declining public school enrollment, that that school would have a harder time getting a federal CSP grant. And almost every city in the country right now is seeing declining enrollment. Do you agree with that characterization?

Roberto Rodríguez: No — district enrollment is only one of a number of factors that might indicate demand for new schools. We might look at access to specialized programs, we might look at waitlists at existing charter schools and demand for a school network to grow. The policy objective here was making sure that quality is the goal around our public charter schools.

When you say “quality” of schools, I don’t see anything in the proposal speaking to quality or student achievement. Can you say why that’s not included and what you meant when you talked about quality?

There are three aspects. One is providing greater accountability, transparency, and fiscal responsibility. The second is to make sure the program is driven by and more responsive to the needs of communities. The third is to encourage — not require, but encourage — collaboration between our federally funded charter school programs and other neighborhood schools in a way that is mutually beneficial and in a way that benefits students.

They don’t speak to student achievement per se in part because the federal government is not a charter authorizer. Those authorizing bodies should continue to be empowered to set the standards, including the academic standards, that schools need to meet. That is not an area that we believe was appropriate for the federal government to get involved in.

But we did want to get involved in some of those quality issues. This is in part trying to be responsive to the fact that we know 15% of grantees, as we looked back across the program, either never opened or were closed by the end of the grant period. That’s 930 schools that received over $174 million in federal funding. It’s important to make sure that the stewardship of the program — particularly with respect to accountability and fiscal responsibility — is there.

[According to details later shared with Chalkbeat, this analysis looked at 6,410 federal charter grants issued by states between 2001 and 2020. In 385 cases, the school did not open, while 545 schools quickly closed. Data was not available in 2013 or 2014, or from certain states.

A prior analysis by the Network for Public Education, which opposes charter schools, estimated larger figures using different methods. It found that 37% of schools that received a grant between 2006 and 2013 closed — at any point — or never opened, accounting for over $500 million in grant funding.

Rees of the National Alliance argued that the data released by the feds is outdated, and said that, according to her group’s analysis, about 6% of more-recent grants went to schools that have since closed.]

Let’s imagine that someone wanted to start a charter school and plans to serve mostly Black students because the founder believes those students have been historically under-served. But let’s also imagine the school would be in an area or a city that has many non-Black students. Would that charter school be seen by the department as exacerbating school segregation and thus less likely to receive a charter school grant?

I can speak to the policy objectives here, which are really to promote greater diversity — diversity by design — across all of our programs.

That said, I don’t think in your scenario that school would be disqualified from receiving a grant at the federal level. The intention here is not to mandate particular percentages of demographics in terms of enrollment at a charter school. It is to rather focus on encouraging more diverse-by-design schools and to make sure we’re taking a look at some of the factors around enrollment and projected enrollment in schools.

One of the criticisms from the charter school community is that these proposed rules, if enacted, would be burdensome. Do you worry at all that this would deter applicants, particularly those without any existing institutional support?

The goal here was to try to do more to solicit a needs analysis, just as we do with many other programs across the department that address K-12 education. There is a parallel objective around addressing for-profit entities that operate charter schools — not entities that might partner with charter schools for services, but entities that might be for-profit operators. Which is something the administration would like to address in this rule — to make sure we are not, from a federal level, supporting dollars that are going to for-profit entities operating charters.

All of that said, we’ve received a lot of comments on this rule that the team is reviewing right now, and we’re closely considering and deliberating on that feedback before making a decision to finalize anything.

One of the currents that we’ve seen in this comment is the worry about burden — the amount of time and effort that it would take to meet some of those requirements. That’s something we’re looking at and paying close attention to and will really be considering carefully before we finalize any rule.

The objective here is not to increase burden or create undue burden on applicants. The objective is to have some reflection of community input.

Can you speak about the timeline for issuing a rule and how that is going to intersect with running a CSP grant competition this year?

We are certainly continuing to wade through the many comments that came in. We are committed to addressing those comments and maintaining some of the objectives that I’ve spoken to and trying to weigh that with the existing timelines.

We know we need to try to finalize something, if it’s going to be applicable for this year’s funding, this summer. That is certainly a goal that we would like to meet. There are some other dollars that have a longer timeline within the program. We’re assessing that in real time now, honestly, to determine what’s possible this summer.

Biden after Uvalde school shooting: ‘Why are we willing to live with this carnage?’

2022-05-25T15:17:55+00:00

President Biden urged lawmakers to act after 19 students and two teachers were shot and killed at a Texas elementary school on Tuesday.

“Why are we willing to live with this carnage?” Biden asked in an emotional speech, where he said the pain of losing a child was like “having a piece of your soul ripped away.”

“Don’t tell me we can’t have an impact on this carnage,” he said, singling out gun manufacturers and gun lobbyists.

The shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, marked the deadliest school shooting since 20 students and six educators were shot and killed at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Connecticut in 2012.

The incident is the latest shooting at an American school that has led to mass casualties — reigniting deep-seated concerns from families and educators about how to keep children safe at school. The tragedy also raises longstanding questions about what schools should do to guard against violence and how gun ownership should be regulated in the U.S.

The Uvalde attack marked the 27th school shooting that involved injuries or deaths this year, according to a tracker maintained by Education Week, with each bringing its own trauma to a community.

Little has changed in response, with federal legislation meant to limit access to guns or prevent mass shootings repeatedly failing to make its way through Congress. In the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting, families that lost children advocated unsuccessfully for state and federal gun control measures. Though survivors of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, which killed 17 students and school staffers, had success pressing some states to pass tighter restrictions.

“We need to do something,” David Hogg, a survivor of the Parkland shooting who became an activist in its wake, wrote on Twitter Tuesday.

Over the last decade, Biden has played a prominent role in trying to pass gun control legislation. President Obama tapped Biden to lead the White House’s efforts on guns after the Sandy Hook shooting. Biden lobbied unsuccessfully for federal legislation to expand background checks on gun sales.

“When in God’s name are we going to stand up to the gun lobby?” Biden asked Tuesday, his voice raw. “When in God’s name are we going to do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?”

According to police and news reports about Tuesday’s shooting, an 18-year-old gunman, a student at a nearby high school, entered Robb Elementary with a handgun and possibly a rifle on Tuesday morning and opened fire. The school enrolls some 570 students in second to fourth grade, nearly all of whom are Latino, state data show. It was two days before the district was set to let out for summer break.

Though each school shooting is uniquely devastating, the aftermath is often similar for the communities that have been shaken by loss: grief, confusion, anger.

Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, who spent most of his career as an educator in Connecticut, said he’d never forget “the ripple effect of fear and heartbreak that spread among students and teachers” in his home state after the Sandy Hook shooting. Federal education officials are offering on-the-ground support to the Uvalde community and resources from an emergency program that helps schools recover from a violent or traumatic event.

In Uvalde, the district’s police chief, Pete Arredondo, said that the district was notifying families that had lost loved ones and was providing services to them.

“Our prayer tonight,” Biden said, “is for those parents lying in bed trying to figure out, will I be able to sleep again? What do I say to my other children? What happens tomorrow?”

Chalkbeat has compiled resources and advice for parents and educators responding to trauma in their communities or helping children process violence elsewhere. Find those resources here.

Sarah Darville contributed reporting.

Kalyn Belsha is a national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Schools could get extra time to spend COVID relief on building fixes

2022-05-13T22:28:50+00:00

Schools may get more time to spend federal COVID relief funding on building renovations, the U.S. Department of Education said in a letter Friday.

The announcement is welcome news for school district leaders worried that inflation and supply chain challenges would make it difficult to finish planned building upgrades before the current September 2024 deadline.

The department’s letter says states can apply for extensions, giving schools until April 2026 to spend the last bit of COVID funds on facilities improvements.

“We are grateful for the flexibility and clarity that Secretary Cardona is providing around school construction timelines and in particular, HVAC upgrades,” said Daniel Domenech, executive director of AASA, the school superintendents association, which had pushed for an extension.

The move reflects the fact that many school districts have decided to put some of their COVID relief money into facilities projects, especially HVAC upgrades. To some that’s a savvy use of one-time funds, especially in places like Detroit and Newark that received large sums and have aging buildings or other longstanding facilities issues.

But to others, spending emergency funds on construction fails to prioritize the heightened and immediate needs of existing students. Extending the deadline underscores that some of the projects won’t bear fruit for many years after school was first disrupted by the pandemic.

Federal officials are walking a careful line, saying they discourage schools from using COVID relief for “new construction” but giving their seal of approval to upgrading existing buildings.

“The Department does understand the need for schools to address urgent and pressing projects, including school infrastructure projects, intended to safeguard the health and safety of students, educators, and staff during this pandemic,” wrote Assistant Education Secretary Roberto Rodríguez in the letter.

Schools that receive extensions would still have to commit the funds to specific projects by September 2024, but they would have another 18 months to actually spend those dollars. For instance, a district could sign a contract for a building renovation in September 2024 and then pay that contractor over a period of 18 months.

“Requests for longer may be considered related to extraordinary circumstances,” Rodríguez wrote.

AASA, whose leaders have been in discussions with department officials, is telling its members that they can count on waivers.

“We feel confident that [states] will not hesitate to apply for this additional spending runway,” the group says on its website. “Superintendents should feel confident that you have more time to complete and draw down funding for these projects.”

Local school leaders say that the $190 billion in COVID relief from the federal government has been a critical lifeline over the last two years. Schools have used the money to buy devices to allow for remote learning, hire more counselors or social workers, expand tutoring programs, and avoid disruptive budget cuts — in addition to planning building renovations.

Fiscal experts caution against spending too much money on recurring costs like staff, making building expenses an appealing option. And research shows that improved ventilation and building quality can boost student learning.

But some advocates and parents want districts to more aggressively spend on students’ current needs.

Detroit recently announced a $700 million facilities plan using exclusively COVID relief funds. The plan, which includes construction of new buildings, is set to be completed by fall 2025.

At a recent school board meeting, one parent challenged this focus, and suggested hiring more teachers instead. “I really was hoping instead of just seeing the facility plan and the new blueprint and updated blueprint that we would really get an overhaul of staff within our buildings to really supplement the learning,” the parent said.

Nonbinary students aren’t reflected in federal civil rights data. That might change.

2022-05-10T11:00:00+00:00

When the Oregon Department of Education announced that it would allow students to record their gender as “X” instead of “M” or “F” in its state-level systems, Corvallis School District changed its own system to match.

But when the time came to report enrollment to the federal Office for Civil Rights, Corvallis encountered a problem. The mandatory Civil Rights Data Collection didn’t allow districts to report nonbinary students, just males and females.

Corvallis’ assistant superintendent, Melissa Harder, recalled receiving an email from the data specialist in the finance department: “The federal government wants me to make a decision on whether or not a student is male or female. And I don’t think I should do that.”

Several districts across the country have faced the same dilemma. But that might be about to change, as the federal Office for Civil Rights has proposed expanding its data collection to include nonbinary students for its 2021-22 report, for which submissions begin this December.

Melissa Harder, the assistant superintendent of Corvallis School District in Oregon. While Corvallis allowed students to record their gender as nonbinary, the federal Office for Civil Rights only allows two gender options: male and female.

If that change happens, it wouldn’t require school districts to collect this data. Still, it would be a significant step toward assembling data on nonbinary students across the U.S. Already, at least 10 states, plus the District of Columbia, allow districts to report a third gender category, and some districts like Denver Public Schools collect that information on their own, too.

Researchers with LGBTQ organizations say that data is crucial to understanding the school experiences of nonbinary students, who report high rates of harassment, bullying, and other forms of targeted discrimination.

Still, it remains unclear how useful the data would be in its early forms — and advocates, researchers, and school officials say even with federal support, districts who want to offer additional gender marker options will still have to navigate disjointed systems that define gender differently.

Why federal data matters

The Office for Civil Rights has required public schools to submit data to the Civil Rights Data Collection every other year since 1968. The exact content changes regularly, but data from the collection has been used to analyze chronic absenteeism, sexual assault, school safety, harassment, and bullying.

The Office for Civil Rights also uses data from the collection to investigate discrimination allegations, review whether schools are addressing nationwide civil rights problems, and develop policies and guidance for administrators. For instance, the office recently quantified continued widespread use of restraint and seclusion for students with disabilities.

Adding nonbinary students would include data on any LGBTQ students for the first time, though the data would still not reflect transgender students who are not nonbinary or LGBTQ students more broadly.

Joseph Kosciw, who directs the research institute at the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, said that the CRDC’s expansion could help answer important civil rights questions, which are currently difficult to research for nonbinary students.

“You want to see — as we do around other identity characteristics — how is school safety? And how is access to education?” he said.

Not everyone agrees the data would be useful or appropriate to gather. Parents Defending Education, a small grassroots group known for opposing critical race theory, objected to the proposal, saying it would “empower schools to actively question and engage with children on gender and sexual identification issues that fall outside of the purview of public schools and are matters to be dealt with exclusively by parents.”

Others are concerned about whether districts can responsibly collect data on nonbinary students. Student privacy advocates at the Center for Democracy and Technology have raised concerns that schools may need more time to consider nonbinary students’ safety and privacy — especially considering the recent flurry of laws passed in Florida, Texas, Alabama, and other states, which restricts LGBTQ+ curricula, trans athletes’ participation in school sports, or transition-related health care.

“This information can be powerful, but also, you have to be just as protective of those students’ rights and make sure that information can never be used against them,” said Elizabeth Laird, the center’s director of equity and civic technology.

Some don’t believe the data would be useful or appropriate to gather. Others believe that it could help answer civil rights questions.

The center also noted, like GLSEN and other organizations, that collecting only data on nonbinary students could mean missing important information about harassment of transgender students.

If the changes do happen, districts that don’t already let nonbinary students use an X gender marker could skip that section when the data is first collected. In the future, all schools would be required to fill out something for nonbinary student enrollment, even if they just indicate that they don’t collect it.

The Office for Civil Rights did not respond to multiple requests for comment on whether it has specific goals for future data on nonbinary students or whether it anticipates the number of nonbinary students will be large enough to analyze.

But the office’s statement on the proposed changes argues that the new data would help identify discrimination and “provide a greater understanding of the experiences of nonbinary students.”

To Damien Lopez, the CRDC’s proposal would bolster organizations like Garden State Equality working to improve school experiences for LGBTQ students in New Jersey.

Lopez helps train New Jersey school staff on state law and general best practices for working with LGBTQ students through Garden State Equality’s Safe Schools & Inclusive Curriculum program. In his work, Lopez sometimes hears calls to support trans and nonbinary students dismissed due to limited or nonexistent data at the school level.

“People will say, ‘Oh, but there’s not really those students in the classroom.’ But you don’t know that unless you report the numbers,” Lopez said. “The more that we acknowledge that trans kids are there, then the more that we can support them and create a safe environment.”

Getting an accurate picture

New Jersey is also one of the dozen states currently collecting nonbinary student enrollment numbers. Its most recent tally of nonbinary students statewide: 85.

But estimates from academic research centers suggest there are potentially several thousand trans or nonbinary students in New Jersey. The difference makes Lopez concerned that not enough schools are creating safe environments for nonbinary students to come out.

“It’s sad to see,” Lopez said.

Researchers and experts widely say that they expect school-based initiatives to undercount nonbinary students, and there isn’t a good nationwide estimate of how many nonbinary K-12 students are in schools right now.

The Trevor Project’s 2021 survey of 35,000 LGBTQ youth ages 13-24 found that one in four LGBTQ respondents identified as nonbinary, regardless of whether they also identified as transgender. The Williams Institute also consistently estimates that roughly 0.75% of youth ages 13-17 are transgender, but does not estimate how many LGBTQ+ students are nonbinary.

State youth health surveys, which allow students to anonymously self-identify without making any official changes in their records, often find higher rates of trans and nonbinary youth than other sources.

Survey methods differ between states, so they’re hard to compare; some combine trans and nonbinary student data, while others ask for those identities separately. Across 10 states, anywhere from 1% to 12% of high school students indicate they are transgender, nonbinary, or gender-expansive in these surveys. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that, based on state health surveys in 2017, an average of 1.8% of high school students reported being transgender, specifically.

Some districts, like Chicago Public Schools, have used these youth health surveys to examine health disparities for LGBTQ+ students. That approach has brought Chicago some of the best data they currently have, according to the district’s LGBTQ+ and Sexual Health Program Manager Booker Marshall. But it still has limitations, and Marshall thinks the federal data might offer a clearer picture.

“It’s interesting to be able to get at a federal level — potentially — official numbers on nonbinary students,” they said.

At the same time, Marshall said, any new research from the CRDC would only reflect nonbinary students who specifically want to change their gender marker within their districts’ records — which isn’t everyone. Some nonbinary students who use a chosen name and pronouns with their teachers and other students aren’t interested in using the district’s X gender marker, Marshall said.

“The federal government wants me to make a decision on whether or not a student is male or female. And I don’t think I should do that.”

Crucially, those low numbers could also make the data difficult or impossible to interpret, especially at first.

Newly introduced CRDC data can be tricky to analyze, since not all districts collect and report it, according to American Institutes for Research Principal Researcher Stacey Bielick. Bielick works with the National Center for Education Statistics to improve the quality of the CRDC data.

Researchers may need to take creative approaches to analyzing and aggregating the data, she said.

“It will eventually come into its own, but initially, there’s going to be some issues,” Bielick said.

To Marshall in Chicago, the quality and usability of the data isn’t the only important consideration.

Even if the data isn’t perfect, they said, “It is a big deal to have nonbinary gender affirmed federally for young people.”

For districts, change is complicated

If the federal government allows districts to report nonbinary students, it will be the last piece of the puzzle for school officials in Corvallis, Oregon, where the district and state data systems already allow it.

But for many districts, attempting to add that option means getting tangled in state or proprietary systems they don’t control.

Boulder Valley School District in the Denver suburbs has had a detailed anti-discrimination policy covering transgender students in place for 10 years, and the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Justice pointed to the district’s policies as an example of best practices.

Even so, students can’t yet list themselves as nonbinary in their records. A representative for the district said that the IT team is still waiting for the state to make changes to its data collection or student information systems.

Ridley School District, which serves about 5,500 students in the Philadelphia suburbs, reports similar limitations.

For districts like Corvallis, federal changes would allow consistency in their collection and reporting of student gender information. But many districts must navigate state or proprietary systems out of their control.

“Our student information system doesn’t currently give us access, and that gets updated by the state requirements,” explained Superintendent Lee Ann Wentzel. “We would have to follow the state’s lead.”

Philadelphia itself added the option for students to identify as nonbinary on its virtual education platforms last year. The state system has a new field to report gender identity.

But Wentzel said that her smaller district could not afford to independently make system-wide changes to how students report the data to their schools. If the Pennsylvania Department of Education required vendors to add a new nonbinary option, her district could use it. Otherwise, Ridley would likely have to report to the CRDC that her district doesn’t collect nonbinary student information, she said.

Wentzel is also a member of The School Superintendents Association, which has been urging the Office for Civil Rights to streamline, rather than expand, federal data collection.

The association questioned in a public comment whether nonbinary student data will be usable or accurate “until we have more flexible state policies that enable and encourage districts to collect and report this data.”

Denver Public Schools modified its student information system in July 2021.

Ongoing changes in Denver and Chicago

Meanwhile, districts who have already made these changes say that they are still navigating how their schools’ systems interact with other platforms.

A Chicago Public Schools official said the district’s Title IX office requested that the CRDC add an option for nonbinary students after the district launched a customized student information system in 2019. Illinois added a similar option this school year, according to the state board.

“It’s difficult for us to navigate when systems are not accepting affirmed names and nonbinary gender markers, because that’s not aligned with our system,” said Marshall, who has coordinated the district’s effort to sync its internal systems with its trans-inclusive policies. “It takes a lot of testing, and a lot of time and resources, a lot of people to implement these changes.”

Levi Arithson, the LGTBQ+ program director for Denver Public Schools, sees the issues with balancing technical changes with students’ needs firsthand.

Denver Public Schools has been grappling with similar problems since it modified its student information system in July 2021. The changes were in large part prompted by online learning systems during the pandemic, according to Levi Arithson, program manager of LGBTQ+ equity initiatives at the district.

Students who went by different names in class were suddenly interacting through online platforms that display students’ legal names. Arithson said schools started contacting him about students having issues with the system.

“Oh, we need to figure this out — now,” they recall thinking.

The initial changes took about four weeks to implement, according to DPS’ product integration team. But the team estimates it researched the options for about two academic years first.

Students can now select from six gender categories — male, female, nonbinary, transgender, other, and prefer not to answer. The district also uses an extensive toolkit to help LGBTQ students understand where their name and gender marker changes show up.

Denver’s primary student information system, Infinite Campus, offers nonbinary student options. Around 650 districts across the country have enabled options besides M or F in Infinite Campus, according to CEO Charlie Kratsch, though that covers a wide range of gender identifiers and includes “other” or “unavailable.”

But adding more specific options can bring complications, too. Officials with both Chicago and Denver say they have had issues with legal names and preferred names not aligning on standardized tests run by the College Board, which administers the SAT and other exams. Mismatches between the districts’ data and the systems that absorb it can cause unexpected problems, like difficulty matching students with the correct accommodations for their disabilities or their test scores.

According to Arithson, it’s an ongoing process to balance these technical changes with students’ needs.

“It’s hard to say, ‘Well, I’m considering students first’ if there’s some type of data complication and the student is getting lost,” they said. “But in my mind, these students have waited long enough to get what they need to be able to feel seen in school and to feel like they can be themselves.”

Marc Long, a product manager at Denver Public Schools, works with vendors to improve students’ experiences.

Product manager Marc Long said the Denver Public Schools product integration team is still working behind the scenes with vendors and other systems to make sure students have a smooth school experience.

“We cannot dictate to other governmental agencies or to third-party vendors what they accept from us as a value,” said Long. “If they require an M or F in the field, we can send them another value, but then they literally just don’t have to consume what we send.”

Right now, Denver sends students’ legal gender markers to the state and federal reporting systems. But the CRDC’s proposed new definition of “nonbinary” wouldn’t line up with Denver’s six options. Long’s team would have to decide whether to combine multiple markers under the federal X, or take another route. Similar problems have taken anywhere from several hours to several weeks for them to address, according to Long’s manager.

To Arithson, the challenges are worth the payoff, and a federal policy change might encourage some of the educational technology vendors to catch up with students’ needs.

“The systems are outdated and they need to be updated,” he said. “We’re human beings living in bureaucratic systems that move slowly. What do we need to do for them to see us and our humanity?”

What type of coverage of LGBTQIA communities in schools is the media missing? Let us know in our short survey.

Kae Petrin is a data & graphics reporter for Chalkbeat. Contact Kae at kpetrin@chalkbeat.org.

Why the latest fight about charter rules matters — for schools and education politics

2022-05-09T22:42:47+00:00

“I am not a charter school fan,” Joe Biden said when he was running for president.

Right now, charter school advocates aren’t fans of President Biden either.

The Biden administration has proposed new rules for a federal program that offers start-up money to charter schools. Reflecting longstanding critiques of the charter sector, the rules would consider how prospective charter schools affect nearby district schools.

The move has drawn support from politicians and organizations skeptical of charter schools. But charter advocates see this as a plot to limit their growth. Their pressure campaign against the rules has garnered support from conservatives outlets and politicians, as well as Colorado’s Democratic governor and the Washington Post editorial board.

It’s a fight that is a long time coming — a culmination of more than a decade of shifting politics around charter schools, in which they have gone from a bipartisan darling to polarizing policy. At the same time, the backlash underscores the significant political capital that charter supporters maintain. Charter schools as a political force at the federal level may be down, but they are not out.

“This move will likely please teachers unions and Democrats,” said Zachary Oberfield, a political scientist at Haverford College, where he’s studied charter schools. Still, he thinks officials may have underestimated the backlash. “I don’t think this is a slam dunk politically for the Biden administration.”

The regulations could affect where and whether charter schools grow

The proposed regulations would apply to the federal Charter Schools Program, created in 1995 to help charter schools open and grow. The education department has awarded billions of dollars in grants in the years since, and most charter schools that opened between 2006 and 2016 received CSP dollars.

The new rules wouldn’t affect existing charters. But for proposed schools looking for federal help, the rules would, among other things:

Give priority to charter schools that collaborate with school districts. Schools that do things like share best practices or coordinate transportation plans would receive priority for the funds.
Require a “community impact analysis.” This would delve into whether a prospective charter school has community support and is in response to “unmet demand,” as evidenced by “over-enrollment of existing public schools,” among other things. That analysis would also have to provide evidence that the charter school would not exacerbate school segregation.
Bar the use of some of the funding until the charter school has a facility and is approved to open.
Ban charter schools controlled by a for-profit company from receiving a grant.

How the rules would actually affect the growth of charter schools is unclear. Biden has not sought to cut funding for the grants or end the program entirely. In general, the regulations would only affect how applicants for a grant are ranked.

The community impact analysis, for instance, would be one metric in the grant competition, the regulations say. The rules also specifically note that schools that serve mostly students of one racial or economic background would still be eligible for a grant if the segregation were due to “community demographics.”

The “priority” for charter-district partnerships could be designed as an absolute requirement, a bonus, or simply a friendly invitation for those types of applicants. The regulations don’t say.

To charter advocates, these new rules — particularly the first two — capitulate to anti-charter arguments and could keep deserving schools from receiving start-up money.

They worry that the extra rules could discourage some applicants from applying in the first place because they find them too onerous or don’t think they would qualify. Advocates also fear that funds would be diverted from cities where they say charter schools are most needed and successful because that’s also where district enrollment has been declining the most.

“The ultimate people who stand to lose the most from these rules are the very individuals that this administration would want to support — these are the teachers, leaders, community organizers at the local level who don’t have any other funding,” said Nina Rees, president of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Luke Jackson, an education department spokesperson, declined to make anyone from the department available for an on-the-record interview. Jackson recommended that Chalkbeat speak to supporters of the proposal, including Carol Burris, executive director for the Network for Public Education, a group that opposes charter schools.

Department officials have insisted that the proposal is modest in scope and that the administration is not against charter schools. “I do support high-quality public charter schools and I’ve seen examples of their effectiveness,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said at a recent Congressional hearing. “What I do think we have are reasonable expectations around getting an understanding about what the needs are in the community.”

He’s also described the critiques of the proposal as based on “misinformation.”

This fight is a test of charters’ political strength

The backlash to the proposed rules has been fast and furious.

Op-ed pages have been flooded with denunciations of the proposal. “Stop Biden’s and Democrats’ war on charter schools,” read the headline of a Fox News article. The Washington Post editorial board called the rules “flagrantly wrongheaded.”

A string of Republican elected officials have criticized the rules, and so have a few Democrats, including Colorado Gov. Jared Polis, a charter founder himself, and three Democratic U.S. senators. The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools sent a series of alerts to its supporters. “Act Now: DC Bureaucrats Plan a New Attack on Charter Schools,” read one email.

The department has received more than 20,000 public comments in response to the proposed rules — many were critical, but many others are supportive.

Other support has come from prominent Democratic Rep. Rosa DeLauro, as well as longtime critics of charter schools, including the national teachers unions and the Network for Public Education.

“The community impact analysis would address one of the most concerning features of urban charter schools in the U.S. — their potential to accelerate the concentration of the poorest and neediest students in the public schools they draw from,” wrote Philip Tegeler and Oluwatoyin Edogun of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council, a D.C.-based advocacy group that supports the regulations.

The sentiments in the proposed rules reflect years of critiques about charter schools — that they exacerbate segregation, hurt school district finances, and are sometimes run for profit. Those ideas have clearly influenced the Biden administration — unlike other presidential administrations, which consistently backed charter schools.

“It was one of these rare and disappearing policy areas where Democrats and Republicans were not on totally different pages,” said Oberfield.

The regulations and the backlash highlight two key political realities: Charter schools have lost some of their support from Democrats, but they still retain significant political power, both through elite opinion and a now-large constituency of charter graduates, teachers, and parents.

What happens next? The department will have to synthesize and respond to the thousands of comments that have come in about the proposed rules. Then officials will decide whether to make changes or stick with the proposal.

Charter school advocates are hoping that the Department of Education will run this year’s CSP grant competition under the old rules.

Matt Barnum is a national reporter covering education policy, politics, and research. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Gov. Polis opposes proposed charter school federal grant changes

2022-04-29T22:14:09+00:00

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis has publicly and loudly opposed proposed changes to federal rules that could make it harder for charter schools to get start-up grants.

Polis, a Democrat who founded a charter network in Colorado in 2004, wrote a three-page letter to U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona earlier this month listing several concerns. Polis’ letter is notable because while there has been strong opposition to the proposed regulations from Republican governors, Polis is one of few elected Democrats to speak against them.

Polis also penned a Friday op-ed in The Washington Post in which he said the federal education department should go “back to the drawing board” on the changes.

The start-up grant program, Polis wrote, “is the only source of dedicated federal funding to support the growth of high-quality charter schools, and we must ensure the program can meet the clear demand for these life-transforming schools.”

Colorado charter leaders and supporters have reacted with alarm to the proposed rule changes. Declining enrollment and shifting political winds have made it harder to open new charter schools even as charter enrollment grew over the last several years.

The proposed regulations would place more emphasis on the impact of opening new schools, including in areas with declining enrollment. But charter advocates say children and their families deserve options even if there are open seats in traditional public schools.

The comment period for the proposed rule changes has closed. Cardona has disputed that the changes would make it harder for new charter schools to open.

Charter schools in Colorado are publicly funded but privately run by nonprofit groups. More than 15% of Colorado K-12 students attend a charter school, the third highest rate in the nation.

The Colorado Department of Education participates in the federal start-up grant program. New charter schools can apply for funding for onetime startup costs such as equipment or teacher training. Colorado’s most recent award was $55 million to be used between 2018 and 2021, but the state likely won’t spend all that because it hasn’t had enough applicants lately, said Bill Kottenstette, the executive director of the state schools of choice office.

The proposed federal rule changes would require charter schools seeking the grants to meet several new criteria. Among them: Applicants would be required to conduct a community impact analysis to show there is “sufficient demand” for their school and that opening it would not increase racial or socioeconomic segregation in the community. The analysis would be used as part of the criteria to determine which schools get a start-up grant.

Priority would be given to charters that plan to partner with traditional schools or districts.

Polis took issue with proposed priority that charters be racially diverse, arguing that some charters intentionally serve a single population of students that have been traditionally marginalized. In his letter to Cardona, he cited two examples: Kwiyagat Community Academy, a charter school founded by the Ute Mountain Ute tribe in Towaoc, Colorado, and the Robert F. Smith STEAM Academy, a Denver school modeled after historically Black colleges.

But Robert F. Smith STEAM Academy is not a charter school. It is an innovation school, a district-run school with charter-like autonomy. Polis’ Post op-ed only mentions Kwiyagat.

Polis also pushed back on the requirement that charter applicants partner with traditional schools or districts. “If a large district refuses to partner with charter schools, the district would succeed in placing the proposed charter school at a disadvantage for funding,” he wrote. “The focus of this proposal is on bureaucratic inputs, rather than what is best for families.”

Colorado’s largest school district, Denver Public Schools, for many years collaborated with charter schools, sharing buildings and tax money and encouraging the replication of high-performing charters as a school improvement strategy. A quarter of Denver’s approximately 200 public schools are charters, and they serve more than a fifth of the city’s students.

But the district’s attitude toward charters is shifting due to political changes on the school board and declining enrollment. In the past four years, 11 Denver charter schools have closed on their own or announced plans to do so. Most have cited declining enrollment.

At the same time, three new charter schools recently applied to open in Denver. The school board is set to vote soon on whether to authorize them. The vote will happen as the district is grappling with the need to close traditional schools because of a decrease in students.

State law doesn’t explicitly limit the reasons that school boards can reject charter applications, but many interpret the law to mean districts can’t base a denial on enrollment. A bill that would have given districts more grounds for turning down new charters failed last year in the state legislature.

Melanie Asmar is a senior reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado, covering Denver Public Schools. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Dubious research, vexing guidance: CDC struggles to help schools during pandemic

2022-04-18T11:00:00+00:00

In January of last year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention mischaracterized an outside study about school reopening. The researcher emailed the agency to complain, but the error was never corrected.

In fall 2021, a CDC study acknowledged that it could not identify the direct effects of masking on COVID spread in schools. The agency nevertheless claimed the study supported the need for universal masking.

And just a few months ago, the CDC failed to clearly describe how revised masking guidance applied to young children, causing significant confusion. The agency’s pages for schools and childcare centers still contain outdated information.

Many have debated the substance of the CDC’s recommendations to schools throughout the pandemic. But a Chalkbeat review suggests that over two years, the agency fell short at a more straightforward task: to communicate clearly and accurately with schools about its guidance and research.

The CDC did not respond to requests for comment about a detailed list of concerns.

Those missteps have left school officials without a precise sense of the benefits and downsides from different mitigation measures, including masking. In other cases, officials missed or disregarded CDC guidance because it was unclear or overly complex.

“Every step along the way, the communication has been very bad,” said John Bailey, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of a newsletter about the pandemic and schools.

“They had a really hard job. This has never happened before in anybody’s lifetime,” said Doug Harris, a Tulane University researcher who has studied schools through the pandemic. Still, he said, “The quality of research coming out was disheartening.”

Dubious research

The CDC has played a central role in publishing and disseminating research related to schools and the pandemic. Its “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report” is meant to produce “timely, reliable, authoritative, accurate, objective, and useful public health information and recommendations.” The agency’s press and social media arms often spotlight specific studies, drawing media attention.

And yet much of the research the CDC has released and promoted is strikingly limited, even flawed.

Take the issue of masking. Remarkably, two years into the pandemic, there is little definitive research on either the benefits or the downsides of requiring masks in American schools, even though the CDC has released a number of studies on the topic.

For instance, one paper compared COVID rates in schools with and without required masking in Arizona, but didn’t adjust for vaccine levels, testing rates, or other safety precautions in schools that might explain differences between schools. “If you’re really going to assess the utility of masking, you’ve got to control in any study for all those other things,” said Susan Hassig, a Tulane epidemiologist.

Another CDC study using national data found pediatric COVID cases were higher in counties without school mask mandates — but the authors admit at the end that “causation cannot be inferred” from their study. That is not a small caveat. If the studies could not establish the effect of masking, what exactly is the point?

Nevertheless, CDC promoted these results, suggesting a direct link between masks and COVID spread. “New [CDC] data reinforce the benefits of masks and vaccinations in preventing #COVID19 outbreaks in schools,” Director Rochelle Walensky tweeted about the Arizona findings.

The CDC also published a dubious analysis suggesting that COVID-19 increased diabetes risk in children. Again, the paper failed to account for other factors that might explain diabetes rates.

“They were releasing and even highlighting a lot of studies that were pretty correlational and not very convincing,” said Harris.

Jay Varma, who was previously a health advisor for New York City, says clear information on the effectiveness of different mitigation measures would have been especially helpful — but was lacking. “What if I do this ventilation technique? What if I try this masking approach? What if I do this distance?” he said.

In other instances, the CDC simply mischaracterized research evidence.

In March 2021, the agency announced an important shift to its guidance: it was relaxing recommended distancing in schools from six feet to three feet. In an accompanying scientific brief, it claimed that COVID transmission in schools was low “even when student physical distancing is less than 6 feet.” One piece of evidence was a Florida study that purportedly showed that COVID spread was higher when fewer students were learning in person.

In fact, the study showed exactly the opposite, undermining the new guidance. After Chalkbeat inquired about this discrepancy, the CDC quietly corrected its brief but did not change its characterization of the overall research.

In another case, the CDC published a paper in early 2021 that mischaracterized research by Harris and Hassig, who found that school reopenings did not contribute to hospitalization rates when COVID spread is low to moderate. But their study could not make firm conclusions about school reopening when case rates were high.

The CDC paper described the first part of the results but omitted the second part. “I emailed them immediately — you’re missing the whole point of the study,” Harris said. The CDC never corrected its report, and the misleading reference remains.

A lack of clarity

The CDC has also struggled throughout the pandemic to provide clear guidance to schools.

The agency did not get off to a good start on this front. The agency issued guidance in May 2020 about reopening schools. But the brief “decision tree” included little more than obvious tips like complying with local health guidance and ensuring those who are sick stay home. More detailed guidance was reportedly suppressed by the Trump administration.

Over the summer, the CDC issued additional guidance, but it was often contradicted by Trump himself, who criticized the agency’s approach.

“Unfortunately, at the time where the guidance was most needed, it was least available,” said Sasha Pudelski of AASA, the school superintendents’ association.

Recent communication challenges cannot be blamed on the Trump administration, though.

In summer of 2021, the CDC released a new round of detailed recommendations for schools on masking, quarantines, and distancing. But by fall, it was clear that a crucial part of that guidance had not been widely followed.

Throughout, the CDC highlighted the need to quarantine “close contacts” — generally defined as people who were within six feet for an extended period of someone who contracted COVID.

In a confusing but crucial caveat, the guidance instructed readers to “see the added exception in the close contact definition.” On a separate page, the agency noted that for students in K-12 schools, the threshold for a close contact had been lowered to three feet if students were masked.

This guidance didn’t seem to trickle down, possibly because it was not widely publicized and was hard to find and understand. (Chalkbeat even created its own guide to help confused school officials.)

“Districts do not appear to be following CDC quarantine guidelines, which while unclear, do recommend that masked students be exempted from quarantine — a less rigid recommendation than we are currently seeing among most districts,” noted analysts at the Center on Reinventing Public Education in August 2021.

As the school year began and the delta variant raged, precautionary quarantines were widespread and schools struggled to help students continue learning. Many of those quarantined might have been unnecessary if the CDC’s guidance had been understood and adhered to.

This February, the CDC issued another update to its schools guidance. This time, it recommended that schools and child-care centers make masks optional when community COVID levels are low to moderate.

Most K-12 school officials got the message. The update specifically mentioned K-12 schools, and the change garnered widespread media coverage. But the takeaway was muddled for providers of early childhood education and childcare, which were not specifically mentioned in the new guidance.

Economist and influential commentator Emily Oster wrote an article for The Atlantic based on the assumption that the CDC was still recommending masking for young children. She learned this was incorrect only after someone with the CDC reached out to her directly.

“There is a fair amount of people looking to this guidance and trying to interpret it and the way that it is currently stated is extremely difficult to interpret clearly,” Oster told The 74.

Despite new guidance being issued months ago, CDC’s pages for schools and childcare centers still contain outdated information, including a reference to “universal indoor masking.” On its site, the agency notes that it is in the “process of updating this page with these new recommendations.”

Matt Barnum is a national reporter covering education policy, politics, and research. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

NYC schools have spent just half of this year’s COVID relief, report says

2022-04-12T22:32:08+00:00

Last spring, New York City schools celebrated its receipt of $7 billion in federal stimulus dollars as the administration of former Mayor Bill de Blasio planned how it would reopen buildings following two school years disrupted by the pandemic.

But as of the first week of March, the education department had spent just half of the $3 billion in federal COVID stimulus dollars it had planned to spend through June 30, according to a new report from Comptroller Brad Lander. All of the money can be spent through the 2024-2025 school year.

De Blasio and his administration last year devised a plan to spend those stimulus dollars on a slew of items. That included operating school buildings, extra academic support for students, and an ambitious new reading and math curriculum.

The report, based on data obtained from the education department, found the city has spent:

Less than a quarter of the $984 million plan for boosting academic recovery and instructional support
24% of what had been planned for investments to care for “the whole child,” which includes social emotional supports
65% of costs associated with reopening school buildings

The education department called the report a “mischaracterization of our stimulus spending to date” because “the snapshot of data as of early March does not account for all spending,” said Dan Weisberg, first deputy chancellor, in a statement.

“This funding continues to be available to the Department of Education beyond this year, and we are evaluating ways to utilize any unspent funds to continue supporting students and schools going forward,” Weisberg continued.

New York City’s slow spending mirrors issues seen in school systems across the nation facing labor shortages and supply chain issues that have struggled to spend their COVID relief dollars.

In response to questions from the comptroller’s office, education department staff blamed the underspending on many reasons, including pandemic-related delays, difficulties in hiring and supply chain issues, and problems with contracting and procurement, the report said.

But separately, a department spokesperson said the “full and final account” of stimulus spending won’t be known until the fall, when the city completes its fiscal year accounting. She added that spending in many categories, such as building accessibility, will rise “significantly” before the end of this fiscal year.

Reasons for underspending can include “work not beginning until later in the fiscal year to goods and services having not yet been fully received,” for various initiatives, the spokesperson said.

In a news release, Lander raised concerns about his office’s findings.

“The city cannot afford to squander this opportunity to invest in the programs and supports to help our young people begin to succeed again academically, process the trauma they’ve experienced, and address long-standing inequities in our school system,” he said. “We still have an opportunity to spend this one-time funding wisely – but the clock is ticking.”

In some areas, the department appeared to be near or on track with that spending. It has spent most of the money it earmarked for reopening school campuses, which includes health and safety costs, and to “maintain current services.” It spent about 70% for its Summer Rising program that wrapped up in August, but city officials said the remainder of the money can be used in the future.

The comptroller’s office raised concerns about the low spending for academics and so-called “supporting the whole child” initiatives, which include social and mental health supports. Spending delays, the report said, “mean that schools are failing to provide urgently needed additional support” after “the trauma of the prior two school years.”

Slow spending on academic support

The city has spent 22% of the nearly $1 billion it had planned for extra academic support and programs, the report found. Included in that bucket was $350 million that went directly to schools to provide extra tutoring for their students and professional support for teachers. Schools have spent just under a third of that money, according to the report. Chalkbeat reported in February that some school leaders were struggling to spend this money because they couldn’t persuade enough staff to work overtime and oversee such programs and services. This money was reserved for this year only, and schools must return any unused money.

Academic recovery also included a $49 million initiative called “Early Literacy for All,” which included a tool to screen K-2 students for reading skills, as well as hiring more reading coaches and providing more training to K-2 teachers. The city has spent $10 million for this.

The department has only spent 12% of the $251 million it planned for extra support in special education and creating more pre-K special education seats. At least $158 million of that money went directly to schools to provide extra services for students with disabilities. But Chalkbeat recently reported that just 35% of the children who were offered services will have participated. On top of staffing issues, children were not guaranteed transportation to these programs, and some parents said it was unclear what services their children would receive.

About $17 million has been spent of $202 million planned for the creation of a new culturally responsive reading and math curriculum, called “Mosaic.” The plan was originally to roll out the curriculum by the fall of 2023, but education department officials told the New York Daily News last month that it will only be available to middle school grades by then.

Low spending on ‘whole child’ investments

Similar to academics, the city has spent about 24% of its planned investments in initiatives to support “the whole child.” The city has spent just a third of its planned $80 million for social-emotional support, which includes plans to hire more social workers and a three-year, $18 million contract for a screener for schools to assess their students’ social-emotional skills. Officials have spent $1 million of the $12 million reserved for expanding restorative justice programs.

Lander’s office noted that these funds can be rolled into the $1.8 billion in federal funds planned to be spent next fiscal year, which begins July 1. They can either be used as planned or allocated to different priorities.

The report suggests the department could use unspent funds to provide salary parity to teachers and staff at community-based preschool special education programs. It could also be used to increase support for English language learners, for whom advocates had hoped there would be specific, dedicated COVID stimulus funding, similar to the money for students with disabilities.

The education department is expected to release an updated spending plan for stimulus dollars “in the coming weeks,” according to Lander’s report.

Here is a link to the report.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Summer jobs for all — except NYC’s undocumented youth

2022-04-06T21:50:46+00:00

Three years ago, then-16-year-old Javier hoped to get a summer job to gain some work experience.

He tried filling out an application for the city’s sprawling Summer Youth Employment Program, but quickly discovered that applicants needed a social security number. He didn’t have one. Javier, who emigrated from Honduras to Brooklyn in 2016, is an undocumented immigrant.

The teen “was disappointed with the system.” He couldn’t understand how the city expected him to attend school and graduate but wouldn’t let him get professional experience.

“I know they are trying to give us as much knowledge as they can for the future,” said Javier, who asked to use his middle name for privacy reasons, “but when I discovered I can’t be part of the program, it was like, damn, how this is possible?”

The city’s Summer Youth Employment Program, or SYEP, is the largest of its kind in the country, offering job and enrichment opportunities to youth ages 14-24. Participants are paid minimum wage, or $15 an hour, while younger youth get a stipend.

Mayor Eric Adams plans to expand the program from about 75,000 slots to 100,000 this summer. His goal is to offer a job opportunity to every young person who wants one.

But this city program still excludes undocumented youth, who may have entered the United States without legal permission or have stayed longer than they were authorized to. There were 77,000 undocumented youth ages 16-24 in New York City in 2019, according to Julia Gelatt, senior policy analyst at Migration Policy Institute. (A breakdown of 14 and 15-year-olds was not available.)

Officials say there are legal barriers that prevent them from offering jobs to undocumented youth through the $170 million summer program, which is funded largely through city dollars but also through millions in federal and state aid.

“Because SYEP is an employment program and youth are paid a wage, federal guidelines require that participants are legally allowed to work in the United States and must be able to submit their I-9 documentation,” or documents that verify an employee’s authorization to work, said Mark Zustovich, a spokesperson for the city’s Department of Youth and Community Development, which oversees SYEP.

Lowell Herschberger, who helps pair youth with jobs through SYEP at the nonprofit Cypress Hills Local Development Corporation, said he gets questions every year from school leaders and youth about opportunities for undocumented people.

“SYEP has done some innovative things around partnering with schools to make a more cohesive and great program that goes year-round, but the undocumented youth continue to be left out in the cold,” he said.

Advocates say these children’s families are more likely to need the cash that comes from SYEP since they are not eligible for many public benefits and tend to work in low-wage jobs. Nearly 29% of undocumented New Yorkers were living in poverty as of 2017, according to city estimates. That’s compared to 18% of naturalized citizens at the time.

Advocates and lawmakers are searching for a workaround. Some have suggested offering stipends to youth instead of paychecks to avoid legal issues. The program itself could be around enrichment and work-based learning instead of traditional employment.

The city and state have implemented multiple programs to offer more benefits and rights to immigrant New Yorkers, including undocumented youth, such as offering tuition assistance for the state’s public universities through the New York DREAM Act, said Vanessa Luna. She is co-founder of ImmsSchools, which holds family workshops and provides professional development for educators on supporting undocumented students.

“I think we have a responsibility as the largest district in the country to create a pathway to internships for students that are immigrants that have different types of immigration status,” Luna said.

Public Advocate Jumaane Williams said he’s lobbying for a program that would operate parallel to SYEP, offering “educational enrichment” programming to undocumented youth that would provide participants with a stipend instead of a paycheck.

He unsuccessfully proposed legislation to create such a program in 2019.

Advocates are concerned, however, that undocumented youth could be paid less and not get the same type of work opportunities as their peers under such a structure. Youth without social security numbers, for instance, cannot be paid over $599 because anything above that requires filing work authorization documents, said Monia Salam, program director for work-based learning at ExpandED schools.

Some programs have been able to work within these confines, Salam pointed out. Last summer, for example, the city offered $599 stipends to nearly 500 students at 19 schools with high immigrant populations for participating in “work readiness” training, she said. Participants were not asked for their social security numbers.

“The problem is that all of these solutions are just duct tapes — they are not systemwide solutions, they’re not equitable,” Salam said. “What we’re asking for is that the city commits to this and says, ‘We’re gonna have a summer job for all young people regardless of their immigration status and create a system similar to SYEP where everyone can apply.’”

Williams acknowledged that equity is a concern, but that a systemwide change could involve big hurdles, such as changing federal laws. His idea, he argued, provides some level of access to everyone.

He said he’s had some preliminary discussions with the Adams administration about his vision.

Zustovich, from DYCD, said the Adams administration would welcome a change in federal laws and “is proactively investing in unique programs to address those disparities and, to the extent possible, help level the playing field for undocumented youth.” He did not immediately elaborate on those programs.

Reema Amin is a reporter covering New York City schools with a focus on state policy and English language learners. Contact Reema at ramin@chalkbeat.org.

Has the federal government underestimated the progress of high school students for decades?

2022-03-31T21:18:38+00:00

At a recent event at Stanford University, Netflix founder and education donor Reed Hastings offered a familiar refrain about educational outcomes in the U.S. “We all know the data — that for 30, 40, 50 years, it’s pretty flat,” he said. “We’ve got a mediocre, by international standards, system that’s not getting any better.”

Hastings didn’t cite any specific numbers. But there’s a good chance he had in mind one particularly troubling trend: 12th graders’ scores on federal math and reading exams have barely budged since testing began in the 1970s. Those stagnant results have worried politicians and policymakers for decades, inspiring calls to remake public education.

But what if that data isn’t telling the full story? What if we’ve been misunderstanding high school achievement for decades?

A growing number of researchers say that’s a real possibility. High school dropout rates have fallen substantially since the 1970s, which means more students who would have left high school altogether are now taking these tests, known as NAEP. Comparing scores across decades without acknowledging that, these researchers say, paints a misleadingly grim picture of the country’s progress.

“It’s a big deal,” said Kirabo Jackson, a Northwestern University education researcher. “It’s not just some weird quirky theoretical idea — no. It’s a problem.”

“There’s almost no doubt in my mind that declining dropout rates have pushed down high school NAEP scores,” said Marty West, a Harvard University professor and member of the board that oversees the exam.

It’s unclear how big of an effect the change in dropout rates is having on test scores, in part because the federal government has done little to figure this out. When questioned, federal officials have said dropout changes could affect high school scores, but downplay the likely impact.

At stake is the accuracy of the conclusions drawn from “the nation’s report card.”

Since 1971, the federal government has given periodic exams to American students in elementary, middle, and high school. The tests are administered by the National Center for Education Statistics and overseen by an independent board. (A spokesperson for the governing board referred questions to NCES.)

The NAEP scores are widely reported on, including by Chalkbeat, and touted by policymakers. The exams are sometimes referred to as the “gold standard” of student assessments, and for good reason: There are no other national tests that so carefully track the progress of American students.

But there’s no indication that officials are addressing a long-standing challenge that could be skewing our understanding of high school scores.

In 1970, 17 of every 100 teenagers and young adults had dropped out of high school, according to estimates from the Census Bureau. By 2020, the number had fallen to just 5 in 100.

This encouraging trend could obscure progress elsewhere. Students who have dropped out by the time the test is given at the end of high school, simply aren’t counted, and those students are much more likely to be low-scoring. That probably means that high school scores are always artificially inflated— but the problem was likely worse decades ago. Over time, scores might appear stagnant because high schools are doing a better job of keeping more students in school.

The 12th grade trends are “misleading,” said Andrew Ho, a Harvard professor who until recently served on the NAEP governing board. “I would essentially asterisk every grade 12 trend.”

“It’s really important not to ignore this,” said Drew Bailey, an education researcher at the University of California, Irvine.

In an interview, NCES Commissioner Peggy Carr said the agency has not attempted to estimate how dropout rate changes are affecting high school scores because it would be difficult to do so precisely.

“We think that a change in graduation rate is likely to have an impact,” she said, but suspects it’s a modest one. “That’s my educated guess.”

NCES does note that the exam is only given in schools, but it doesn’t specifically highlight the possibility that declining dropout rates are pushing down progress in 12th grade.

Some researchers think the agency needs to do more. “It’s a disservice that the NCES is doing to even report the 12th grade NAEP without these considerable caveats,” said Jackson.

Carr says the onus is on skeptics to prove this concern is significant. “Give me the results that you’re using,” she said. “I’m not denying there probably is some impact on the scores. I’m just saying, how much is it?”

No one knows for sure. NAEP does not follow individual students over time, which makes figuring this out challenging.

When Kristin Blagg, a researcher at the Urban Institute, examined why American students have made notable gains in elementary and middle school, but not high school, she couldn’t find any “smoking gun” explanation. But the data was limited, and she suspects that changing dropout rates are dragging down progress.

“It’s definitely a substantial part of the story,” said Blagg.

Her paper, published in 2016, called for NCES to collect better data to help understand stagnant high school scores.

Recently the agency announced a number of shifts to NAEP, but they do not include any efforts to understand whether changes in dropout rates are affecting scores at the end of high school.

“At a minimum, this issue deserves much more serious examination than it has received to date,” said West, the Harvard professor and NAEP board member.

Still, even if high school students have made more gains in the long-run than have been widely believed, it’s likely that schools could be improved even further. And more recently, test scores have stagnated not just in high school but in lower grades too.

“The relevant question in education policy isn’t whether we’re doing better than we were X years ago,” said West. “The relevant question is whether our school systems are meeting the challenge of the day.”

Matt Barnum is a national reporter covering education policy, politics, and research. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Congress rejected Biden’s bid to double Title I. Now he’s asking again.

2022-03-28T22:25:30+00:00

Joe Biden is not giving up on his signature education idea: providing schools with more money, particularly those serving lots of low-income students.

That’s the takeaway from the president’s latest education budget proposal, released Monday, which calls for more than doubling funding for Title I.

But recent history suggests schools shouldn’t count on this new money coming through. Biden got only a fraction of what he asked for last year, and it’s not clear there will be a path through Congress for this big budget increase, either — particularly since many forecasters expect Republicans to win additional seats this November.

“If we couldn’t get some of these priorities done when we had Democrats in the House and Senate and the White House, I’m not all that optimistic that this year is the year,” said Noelle Ellerson Ng, advocacy director of the school superintendents association, which backs Biden’s budget proposal.

The White House’s latest budget calls for allocating $36.5 billion to Title I, the longstanding program that sends money to schools serving students from low-income families and other disadvantaged students.

That’s the same amount Biden sought for Title I last year, though he ultimately got just $17.5 billion. But there are some indications that the Biden administration is scaling back its ambitions in response to the political challenges.

Notably, it separated the $36.5 billion request into two different pots: $16 billion in “mandatory” spending and $20.5 billion for “discretionary” spending, which is how Title I has traditionally been allocated. Reading between the lines, some see the $20.5 billion as Biden’s more realistic ask.

“It’s like, what’s your pipe dream budget and what’s your real budget?” said Ng.

In a budget briefing event, department official Roberto Rodriguez did not directly answer when asked why the administration had divided its Title I request. But he did note that $20.5 billion would still be a significant boost for Title I.

In another shift from last year’s proposal, the Biden administration is no longer suggesting it wants to rewrite the Title I formula or aggressively push states to overhaul their own funding formulas. (The administration does want to set aside $100 million for voluntary state and local commissions to “address inequities in school funding.”)

The administration is also calling for a significant increase in funding for students with disabilities, including grants to states under IDEA. Biden wants $18.1 billion for the program, an increase from $14.5 billion. Again, Biden called for a big increase in his last proposal; what was enacted was only a modest boost.

Meanwhile, the administration is calling for increases in spending on English learners, community schools, and teacher residency and grow-your-own preparation programs.

Biden is also pushing for $100 million for a new program to provide grants to communities seeking to integrate schools by race and class. This was proposed but eventually nixed in the most recent enacted budget.

And the administration is seeking $1 billion for a new program to expand access to mental health professionals in schools.

One program that wouldn’t get a boost under the Biden budget: money to help charter schools open and grow. But Biden isn’t seeking to cut the program, either. That represents something of a victory for charter schools, which Biden has criticized.

The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, though, is still pushing for funding to increase, from $440 million to $500 million. “We had hoped that the President’s budget would have gone further and increased funding for the start-up, growth, and replication of high-quality charter schools,” CEO Nina Rees said in a statement. Notably, charter schools have significant support among Republicans in Congress.

If this budget proposal meets a similar fate as last year’s, Biden’s education department will find itself a funhouse mirror version of the Trump administration’s position. During Trump’s tenure, Secretary Betsy DeVos sought cuts to the education budget, but Congress largely discarded her proposals.

Ultimately, the vast majority of school funding comes from state and local sources, rather than federal ones, so the federal budget is not likely to make or break school district finances.

Matt Barnum is a national reporter covering education policy, politics, and research. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

U.S. schools are flush with cash, but struggling to spend it on schedule

2022-03-15T09:00:00+00:00

It seems like a balanced equation: Schools need a lot of help, but they also have record sums of federal money to spend.

If only it were that simple.

Across the country, schools are struggling to spend their COVID relief dollars as quickly as planned. Their efforts are running up against a national labor shortage and supply chain issues, which are making it difficult to do things like hire tutors or renovate dilapidated buildings.

“We’ve got money we’d like to spend if we can get the personnel to be able to do so,” said Avis Williams, superintendent of Selma City Schools in Alabama. “Not being able to get the social workers so we can truly address the trauma and the needs that our families have has caused us to go slower than I would have liked.”

When the consulting firm Education Resource Strategies recently surveyed officials in 21 large school districts, nearly all said they were behind on their plans for spending federal dollars.

Plenty of money is still being spent, and school leaders say the funds have been critical to helping students recover. But the delays could have important political and educational consequences.

To some Republican lawmakers, the slower spending is a sign that schools received too much federal relief, a concern that may have played a role in Congress’ decision to scale back President Joe Biden’s proposed education budget. And where schools are unable to hire or make the purchases they want to, kids are going without the support officials hoped would come from the $190 billion in federal help.

“It’s been a case of ‘best laid plans,’” said Jonathan Travers, who works with school officials through ERS. “People moved forward with plans that presumed labor availability that wasn’t there, that presumed an ability to get additional hours from existing staff that they couldn’t get.”

Some schools just can’t find enough staff

Many school leaders wanted to help students recover from the pandemic by bringing on new people — especially tutors, school counselors, and teachers.

Finding them has been challenging.

In Jefferson County, Colorado, a suburban area outside Denver, chief financial officer Brenna Copeland says the district had wanted to hire family engagement liaisons to help schools work with parents. But officials realized they couldn’t fill many of the positions they had posted at the beginning of the year, much less hire more.

“There are so many vacancies in just the baseline wraparound support we’re trying to provide students already,” she said. “In the fall, we wanted to launch more things mid-year.”

The district also delayed a planned after-school tutoring program and wasn’t able to hire staff to provide extra support for students struggling in class.

Overall, Copeland said, the district will likely only spend 40% of what it initially budgeted for new federal funds for this year. The remainder will roll over into next year.

In Selma, Williams has run into the same problem. She wanted to hire 12 new part-time teachers to help students who are behind in reading; the district only found one. Williams also wanted to bring on up to five social workers, but she couldn’t find any.

“We need the personnel,” she said. “Despite our best efforts, we’re not able to fill them because of the workforce shortages that we’re seeing in our area.”

Some ambitious tutoring programs have also faced challenges getting enough tutors.

It’s hard to solve those problems with temporary funding, both because it takes time to attract people into new fields and because large pay raises aren’t sustainable.

Another option is to pay existing staff more to take on beefed-up summer or after school programs. Many schools have done that, but some have run into the reality that many teachers aren’t interested in adding anything to their plates.

“People are tired, and it’s difficult to find people at this point that are willing to trade whatever little precious time they have — with families and at home — for money,” Mark Cannizzaro, president of New York City principals union, told Chalkbeat in February. This has led some schools in the city not to serve as many students as they would have liked in a tutoring program.

This school year has also been taxing on many teachers, which could again limit summer school offerings.

Schools have been hit by supply chain challenges and construction backlogs

Schools also planned to use the money to purchase physical things, like additional technology or upgraded ventilation systems. The problem is schools are not the only institutions facing shortages. When schools look to sign a construction contract or buy new laptops, they’re encountering delays.

AASA, the school superintendents association, found that many of its leaders — over half in a survey — are worried that they won’t be able to use the funds for building upgrades “due to supply chain issues, labor and material shortages, and the current timeline and pace of these projects.”

Simply fixing school building windows to improve ventilation has been challenging, said Williams. “It’s just taken way longer than we would have expected,” she said.

Similar issues have cropped in school districts in Illinois, Michigan, North Carolina, and South Dakota.

“In my nearly 30-year career, I’ve never had an issue where we have money and can’t adequately spend it,” Grand Rapids superintendent Leadriane Roby said during a school board meeting. “Everybody’s running into the same issue.”

The slower-than-expected spending is a real challenge, but some have overstated the case, relying on an outdated federal portal to claim that only a tiny fraction of the money has been spent.

The spending difficulties also vary widely, and many districts got only modest amounts of federal money. Districts that got a lot — typically those that serve the highest concentration of students in poverty — may simply spread out their spending over more years than they initially expected. There’s still time: schools have through September 2024 to budget the last pot of funds.

Some are hoping that the federal government will extend that deadline. AASA has asked the U.S. Department of Education to do so for building projects.

The politics of this are dicey. Republicans opposed earmarking so much funding for schools, and Democrats may be wary of acknowledging that the money will take years to spend.

Regardless, some leaders realize they’ll have to reassess their plans and keep working to find the staffers they need.

“We are doing some hiring fairs and trying to be creative as far as how we are filling these positions that we have,” said Williams. “We’ve not given up yet.”

Matt Barnum is a national reporter covering education policy, politics, and research. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Food and staff shortages are still vexing school lunch programs. Costs may keep rising, too.

2022-03-10T21:40:44+00:00

School meal programs have faced a host of challenges this year. Staples like chicken, pizza, and muffins are hard to come by. Food deliveries often arrive late, or not at all. There’s still a shortage of cooks and drivers. Inflation is pushing costs up.

Now, schools may be faced with another test: the end of federal waivers that have kept meal costs down and made it easier to serve students food during the pandemic. Their omission from the latest federal budget deal has schools bracing for costs to increase next year and scrambling to plan their summer meal programs.

“School nutrition directors are really worried about what happens next, summer food sponsors are really worried about how they’re going to operate their programs,” said Crystal FitzSimons, the director of school programs for the nonprofit Food Research & Action Center. “We think it’s going to be a crisis.”

Early in the pandemic, federal officials issued several waivers that allowed schools to serve meals in ways they typically wouldn’t be able to under federal rules. Those allowances, extended through this school year, permitted schools to continue to do things like hand out grab-and-go meals when students had to quarantine or temporarily return to virtual learning, and serve meals in classrooms to allow for more social distancing.

Those provisions may be less necessary now, as cases fall and schools return to more normal operations. But the waivers also meant schools got back more money per meal than they typically would during the school year. That helped offset rising food costs and higher pay for cafeteria workers and delivery drivers that many schools offered to remain competitive in a tight labor market — pressures many schools are still facing.

When the waivers expire, schools will take in $1.65 less per meal on average, a 36% drop, according to a federal estimate.

Almost 90% of school meal programs that responded to a fall survey said they relied on the waiver that raises reimbursement rates this school year, according to an agriculture department report released earlier this month. Programs using the waiver were less likely to be running their school meal program at a financial loss.

The waivers also permitted any student to eat meals at no cost to them, lifting paperwork requirements for schools and helping families whose income shifted suddenly during the pandemic.

Advocates like FitzSimons say those provisions have “had a tremendous impact on both making sure that kids are in the classroom, nourished, and ready to learn.”

The waivers are set to expire at the end of June, and the Biden administration and Congressional Democrats had pushed to extend those provisions in the latest federal budget deal. But the waiver extensions weren’t in the package the House passed on Wednesday. The Senate is expected to approve that legislation as early as this weekend.

Leading Republican lawmakers have objected to continuing the school meal waivers in part because of the added costs, the Washington Post has reported. That higher reimbursement rate will likely cost the federal government some $8 billion this school year, a January agriculture department estimate found. The lawmakers saw the waivers as a temporary fix that was no longer needed.

Many schools expect to face higher school meal program costs, food supply issues, and labor shortages through the summer and into next school year, though, the recent federal report found.

When the waivers expire, schools will also again face financial penalties if they can’t meet the usual national nutrition standards, which can happen when schools have to substitute food items if an order gets canceled or arrives without certain ingredients. Nearly nine in 10 school food programs that responded to the federal survey this fall reported that they’d made such substitutions.

“Schools want to be investing more in students for addressing learning loss, and all sorts of other needs,” said Carolyn Vega, the associate policy director at Share Our Strength, a nonprofit that works to address child hunger. “So it would be really terrible for them to also have to try to use that money for school meals when there was another way that we could help offset those higher costs.”

Advocates say there could be more fallout from the expiration of the waivers, too. If another COVID wave or variant arises later this year, schools wouldn’t have the option to offer grab-and-go meals or make meal deliveries to students at home if they have to quarantine or learn virtually.

And advocates worry the end of the waivers will make it harder to serve food to children over the summer, which is usually a difficult time to reach families.

While summer meal programs typically have to be set up in areas where many students from low-income families live, the pandemic-era waivers permitted summer meal programs to run in more places, such as shopping plazas or community centers that are more centrally located but have lower poverty levels in the surrounding area.

Uncertainty about the extension of the waivers, FitzSimons said, has complicated efforts to hire summer staff, choose locations, and decide how many meals to serve.

Schools had hoped to gear up for more typical meal operations this summer and fall, Vega said, but they’ve faced a lot of obstacles.

“This school year ended up being a lot more challenging than anyone ever envisioned, between the supply chain issues and ongoing pandemic-related issues with the delta wave and then omicron,” she said. “We did not have the time and space to think through all of those things and begin that transition process.”

Kalyn Belsha is a national reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at kbelsha@chalkbeat.org.

Biden hoped to reshape school funding. A new budget deal shows that’s not likely anytime soon.

2022-03-09T18:43:22+00:00

While campaigning for president, Joe Biden vowed to triple funding for Title I.

Last year, Biden aimed to get much of the way there by proposing to more than double the program, which sends extra money to high-poverty schools.

Now, it looks like schools will have to settle for far less.

A bipartisan budget package unveiled early Wednesday increases Title I by just 6%, or $1 billion, and includes a smaller-than-requested boost for funding to support students with disabilities. It’s the latest blow to the Biden’s administration’s education agenda, and means that high-poverty schools won’t be getting the sustained windfall some officials and advocates were hoping for.

“It is hard to not think about what could have been,” said Anne Hyslop, director of policy development at All4Ed, an advocacy group that backs federal spending increases. “In the context of those really big proposals, this feels very small.”

At the moment, many public schools are flush with cash thanks to a rebounding economy and the Biden-championed American Rescue Plan. The COVID relief package sent nearly $130 billion to American schools, a massive sum that schools have started spending on things like tutoring programs and ventilation upgrades.

But that money is only temporary, and the Biden administration had hoped to make a more lasting impact on how schools are funded. The administration sought a $20 billion boost to Title I and vowed to use the money to encourage “states to examine and address inequalities in their school funding systems.”

In all, Biden proposed a 41% increase in U.S. Department of Education spending.

“We can’t lose this moment — this chance for a reset in education — by going back to the same pre-pandemic strategies that did not address inequities,” U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a January speech. “It means increasing funding for Title I schools — those serving communities most in need and, in many cases, hardest hit by the pandemic.”

Wednesday’s bipartisan budget proposal falls far short of those ambitions, increasing Title I from $16.5 billion to $17.5 billion. Although a House budget document touts the change as “the largest increase in the program in more than a decade,” the effect will be modest, as it will be spread out among millions of students from low-income families.

Grants for helping students with disabilities would also increase by $400 million, short of the $2.6 billion extra that Biden sought. In total, the K-12 portion of Department of Education spending would increase by about 5%.

In prior administrations, such a budget might be greeted favorably by education advocates. Many breathed sighs of relief when proposed cuts during the Trump administration were averted. But in light of the Biden administration’s big asks, rising student needs, and inflation that is stretching each dollar, some will see this as a loss.

In some ways, Biden appears to be a victim of his own initial success. The COVID relief money may have stoked inflation and made some in Congress wary of additional spending. It also sent a great deal of money to schools, making it harder to make the case that they needed even more.

“The appetite, even among Democratic members of Congress, for big spending proposals is different than it was a year ago,” said Hyslop.

The modest increase in this bill does not bode well for Biden’s long-term goal of tripling Title I funding. Many analysts expect Republicans to retake control of Congress next year, which would make it even less likely that schools will see additional funding increases. Republican Senator Richard Shelby, ranking member of the appropriations committee, praised Wednesday’s budget for “reject[ing] liberal policies.”

A spokesperson for Cardona and the department did not immediately offer comment.

The budget bill came after months of negotiations between Republican and Democratic leaders and Congressional leaders had hoped to enact it by the end of this week in order to avoid a government shutdown. But is not a done deal yet — some Democrats have reportedly raised concerns that the bill shifts some COVID relief money away from states.

Matt Barnum is a national reporter covering education policy, politics, and research. Contact him at mbarnum@chalkbeat.org.

Biden urges Americans to consider tutoring, mentoring in schools

2022-03-02T03:07:24+00:00

President Joe Biden has a message to Americans: Consider becoming a tutor or serving as a mentor at your local school.

“The American Rescue Plan gave schools money to hire teachers and help students make up for lost learning,” Biden said during the State of the Union address Tuesday. “I urge every parent to make sure your school does just that. They have the money. We can all play a part: sign up to be a tutor or a mentor.”

The President beseeching citizens to pitch in at schools is an unusual move, but reflects the tumult of the last few years, as the pandemic drove school staffing shortages and students fell behind academically. Children’s “lives and education have been turned upside down,” Biden said.

A number of states and school districts have been working to staff big new tutoring programs meant to help students catch up, paid for with federal COVID relief. At the start of this school year, Oklahoma was searching for 500 math tutors; Chicago was recruiting 850 math and reading tutors; and Dallas was looking for 1,800 tutors. Many planned to have recruits go through significant training, and a national labor shortage has contributed to hiring difficulties, making it unclear if many Americans will respond to Biden’s call or if schools will be equipped to take advantage of them.

There’s a solid evidence base to support expanding tutoring and mentoring efforts. Frequent, small-group tutoring has produced large learning gains, and mentoring in schools has been linked to better grades and an increased likelihood of attending college.

Schools have also struggled to stand up tutoring programs that rely on existing educators, many of whom are exhausted by pandemic-era teaching. In New York City, some schools had planned to use COVID relief money to pay teachers to tutor on Saturdays or after school, but haven’t been able to keep those programs fully staffed.

Still, a recent survey found that less than a third of district superintendents said they had a shortage of tutors. The most acute shortage areas were substitute teachers and bus drivers. In response, several states have recently loosened requirements for substitute teachers, while others are considering changing rules to encourage retirees to return to classrooms.

NYC schools received a windfall in relief dollars. Some are struggling to spend it.

2022-02-28T18:43:34+00:00

The promise of more than $7 billion in federal COVID relief funding for New York City schools inspired some families and educators to imagine big changes in this year’s classrooms.

And while hundreds of millions of dollars have been distributed directly to schools to create extra tutoring, professional development, and more arts programming, some schools have struggled to spend the money.

There are varied reasons why some of this funding remains unused. Tutoring and enrichment programs require finding staff to work extra hours in a moment when educators feel overworked. Some parents and students have been slow to sign up for programs held after school or on weekends. In other cases, schools that already receive grants for arts programming are finding it difficult to spend even more money on the arts.

The result could mean schools leave money on the table. Any unspent funds “will not be rolled into next year,” according to a spokesperson for the city’s education department. City officials will review how unused dollars can be spent after this year, but a spokesperson declined to elaborate.

This could put principals in a tricky position, balancing burned out staff with the need to help students.

“People are tired, and it’s difficult to find people at this point that are willing to trade whatever little precious time they have — with families and at home — for money,” said Mark Cannizzaro, president of the principals union.

New York’s experience spending the cash seems to mirror national trends. Schools across the country have had trouble convincing existing staff to take on additional responsibilities, even for extra pay, following several stressful years.

Direct relief to schools

Much of the city’s COVID relief dollars will be spent centrally for school building operations, expanding pre-K for 3-year-olds, and other district-wide initiatives. But hundreds of millions have been sent directly to schools. In one pot, $350 million is slated for academic, arts, and social-emotional support for their students. Each school received between $75,000 to $600,000, based on enrollment and their share of high-needs students. One-fifth of these dollars must be used for arts programming.

The potential uses for the money are broad. Schools are required to use some portion for professional development and planning time for staff overseeing literacy instruction as well as for providing extra support to students learning English as a new language.

In addition to those requirements, schools can use the money to pay teachers overtime for overseeing enrichment programs, to buy supplies for enrichment programs, and to hire outside organizations to oversee extra support for students. And some can also be used to bolster academic recovery programs for students with disabilities, on top of $158 million schools received this fall to help those children, according to education department budget documents.

Schools cannot use their portion of the $350 million to hire full-time staff since it is temporary funding, but principals can spend it on part-time staff in certain areas, such as for art classes. (Officials have urged schools to use funding increases outside of COVID relief to hire more staff if they need.)

It’s unclear how much money city schools have spent. A department spokesperson said it is “too soon” in the school year to provide spending data.

But Cannizzaro, with the principals union, said a “high percentage” of schools have struggled to earmark all of their relief dollars, and he hopes the city will provide more flexibility. “A lot of schools feel they’re gonna end up giving money back,” he said.

Teacher burnout, student turnout

One Manhattan principal has been unable to get more than three teachers to sign up for a new Saturday tutoring program that offers English and math instruction as well as STEM-related activities. At the same time, student turnout has been low. Originally for students with disabilities, the program is now open to any students who need extra help. Separately, the principal used some of the arts funding to hire a vendor who could teach tap dancing.

“We’re not servicing as many kids as we would have liked,” said the principal, who requested anonymity because she was not authorized to speak to the press. “If I can’t spend it all before the deadline, what can I do?”

Recognizing her teachers are burned out, one Bronx principal used some of the COVID relief money to create what she thought to be a low-lift for her staff: a program to tutor elementary students for one-and-a-half hours daily after school. The program serves students with disabilities, English learners, and children who are struggling with reading and math. But getting teachers on board has still been “absolutely insane.” She convinced five teachers to rotate shifts, but one of them quit several months in, she said.

The principal said she understands it’s been a hard year — as tough as a first year for many teachers — but still felt disappointed.

“They would just have to stay one hour with their kids and [I was] trying to make it as cush as possible, and they’re like, ‘Uhh I kinda can’t,’’ she said.

One Brooklyn principal used his portion of the dollars to partially cover the salary of one of the school’s teaching coaches, who work with early career teachers — one of the allowed expenses. But he said he’s struggled to spend the pot of money dedicated specifically for extra services for students with disabilities, which only became available to schools nearly two months after school started. Eight teachers have offered to work before or after school for about an hour with roughly 20 students with disabilities. But because of limited staffing, the school is offering the program in cycles over the course of the year and has about 40 students on a waitlist.

“We probably need 40 hours a week of people working,” said the principal, adding that he can’t provide the speech and occupational therapy parents are asking for.

To be sure, some schools have torn through the dollars. As of October, Bronx High School of Business had spending plans for 93% of its $172,000 slated for general academic recovery services, said Robert Effinger, a history teacher at the school who also sits on the School Leadership Team. But the school had only used about 11% of its dedicated arts funding, he said.

Effinger said he’s noticed many more “per session opportunities,” or ways teachers can earn extra money, he said. The largest of these opportunities is to help oversee extra support for students with disabilities, while another is tutoring and grading students who are trying to make up a course they didn’t complete last year, which he’s helping with. But he also noticed that none of his colleagues were rushing to sign up for a Saturday program the administration tried to launch about a month after the school year started. That program did not come to fruition, he said.

Despite the challenges of spending all her money, the Bronx principal thinks it might get easier as the year wears on. She’s noticed teachers becoming more open to considering overtime opportunities. She said she will find “creative” ways to spend the money, such as on more programming during the school day but she’s not sure about other principals.

“On my end, it will be spent, but I know I have colleagues who will not,” she said.

College in prison: Colorado may expand education for incarcerated

2022-02-18T17:30:21+00:00

In bringing college classes to more incarcerated people, Colorado officials hope to both enlighten students and cultivate significant social benefits.

The federal government plans to almost double the number of colleges nationwide offering incarcerated people the ability to earn a college degree and to enable them to once again qualify for federal Pell Grants to cover tuition and other educational expenses.

In Colorado, several institutions have indicated interest in joining, and state officials hope they can offer four-year degrees to students. So far, only Trinidad State College in southern Colorado has participated in the federal Second Chance Pell Experimental Sites Initiative.

Graduate Demitrius Herron, 23, said the program feels more like a first chance at a good education for many. Herron entered the Youthful Offender System at age 17. During his six-year sentence, he said he took numerous classes, eventually taking advantage of the Trinidad State Second Chance Pell program. He graduated with two associate degrees — one in science and one in the arts.

Demitrius Herron poses for a photo at his college graduation. He earned two associate degrees while incarcerated.

He said the program takes people at their lowest point, “and someone says to you, ‘Hey, here’s my hand. Let me help you up.’”

Numerous studies have shown the benefits of prison education, including lowered social costs and recidivism rates. About 90% of incarcerated people will be released from prison, said Melissa Smith, Colorado Department of Corrections assistant director of prison programs.

The program benefits not only students, but also their families and communities, Smith said.

The federal program, which began in 2015 under the Obama administration, offers classes from 131 colleges to incarcerated students in 42 states. The federal government plans to add 69 schools, opening up the possibility for more Colorado colleges and universities to participate.

The U.S. will also expand federal financial aid eligibility to incarcerated students starting in July 2023. Incarcerated people haven’t been eligible for federal aid since 1994, when Congress passed a tough-on-crime bill sponsored by then-Sen. Joe Biden. The number of students who were receiving an education in prison dropped off significantly.

For decades previously, incarcerated people had access to federal aid.

The Second Chance Pell program gives incarcerated students the ability to gain the necessary skills to thrive once they exit the prison system, Smith said. The program also helps instill in families that education can lead to good job opportunities, she said. Potentially, it can lead to stopping a cycle of imprisonment that plays out among families of color and those who are low income.

Herron said he’s thankful for the education he received while in the Pueblo Youthful Offender System, a maximum security facility housing people ages 14 to 25 sentenced as adults. The Second Chance program truly provides a chance to better your life, he said.

“There’s a lot of people who were victims of circumstance,” he said. “They weren’t given the belief or confidence that they had all the same opportunities as everyone else.”

When he entered prison, Herron said he wasn’t confident. He was sad and depressed. But education helped him grow in ways he never thought possible. He was a speaker at his graduation ceremony, graduated magna cum laude, and after release, enrolled at Colorado State University Pueblo.

Trinidad State College began enrolling students through the program in 2020 and enrolled about 74 incarcerated students in the fall, according to LiAnn Richardson, the college’s division chair for prison education.

Eleven incarcerated students in the fall 2020 class have earned associate degrees.

Even before the Second Chance Pell program, the college taught incarcerated students. It offered an entrepreneurship program.

Trinidad partners with about 10 prisons. Instructors use online platforms to teach to students across the state. The original plan was for professors to teach classes in the prison, but COVID made those plans difficult, Richardson said. In most cases, students aren’t allowed to work on computers and must use paper and pencil to do their work.

Richardson said she hopes more schools will step up. She wants students to have the chance to earn a bachelor’s degree while in prison.

“Trinidad State can only offer so much. We’re just not a big institution,” she said. “Having partners come on board and be able to fill in those gaps and offer things that we cannot is going to be great for students.”

Herron said he believes incarcerated people will take the opportunities if they’re presented. He watched peers who he thought would never want to attend a college class find themselves and thrive.

“If you gave them all the right materials, they would walk out of there with a doctorate,” he said.

Cardona to educators: ‘I know you’re stretched’

2022-01-27T17:27:44+00:00

Education Secretary Miguel Cardona challenged schools to keep their focus on getting struggling students back on track Thursday, while acknowledging that the disruption caused by the latest wave of COVID cases has exhausted the country’s educators.

“I know you’re tired, I know you’re stretched,” Cardona said in a speech delivered Thursday from the Department of Education, where he laid out his priorities for the months and years ahead. “I see you, and I understand what you’re going through. It will get better.”

Cardona’s words come as the omicron variant has left many schools struggling to fill staffing gaps. Without enough substitute teachers, educators have had to fill in for colleagues, combine classes, and try other stopgap solutions. Those challenges have prompted some schools to return to virtual learning for days or weeks and depleted educators’ and families’ reserves.

And while the education secretary noted the progress the nation had made in returning nearly all schools to full-time in-person learning, he said reopening and keeping schools open was critical but also insufficient for helping students recover.

“We must make up for lost time,” Cardona said. “Our hardest and most important work lies ahead. It’ll be what we’re judged against. As educators and leaders, we’re either closing educational opportunity gaps, or making them worse with the decisions we’re going to make in the next coming months and years.”

Cardona called on schools to use some of their billions in COVID relief funds to invest in academic recovery, calling specific attention to intensive tutoring, after-school programs, and summer school.

He asked school district leaders to try to give every struggling student at least 90 minutes a week of targeted support from a trained tutor — a strategy known as “high-dosage” tutoring that has proven successful in some cities that have tried it.

“We cannot expect classroom teachers to do it all,” Cardona said.

Many states and districts are now trying to ramp up massive tutoring programs, but have run into difficulties finding and hiring enough tutors. Some have boosted pay for tutors or expanded their programs more slowly because of the challenging labor market.

And with schools reporting an uptick in students struggling with behavior and mental health this year, Cardona called on districts to use their pandemic aid now to hire more mental health staff, such as counselors, psychologists, and social workers, and to pay community health partners for help.

Cardona also said schools should be investing in hiring and retaining paraprofessionals — an important role for supporting students with disabilities that has been especially difficult to staff this year due to the low pay.

The education secretary cautioned that a lack of mental health or other support shouldn’t lead to suspensions and expulsions for students who are suffering from trauma.

Cardona also used the speech to reiterate some of President Biden’s longer-term goals for funding education, including directing more money to schools that serve more students from low-income families, raising teacher pay, and expanding preschool.

On the campaign trail, Biden called for tripling Title I funding for low-income schools, and his administration has proposed doubling it in its federal budget for this school year, a move that would send an additional $20 billion to those schools.

Cardona urges schools to use COVID relief money to hire staff, raise pay

2021-12-17T22:53:37+00:00

As staff shortages continue to snarl school operations, federal education officials are urging states and schools to use COVID relief funds to hire staff and raise pay.

“While some districts have expressed concern about investing in increasing compensation with short-term recovery funds, our nation’s children need support now,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona wrote in a letter sent to state education agencies and school districts on Thursday. “School districts should act with urgency.”

The message is an acknowledgement that staffing issues have disrupted schools’ recovery plans this year, adding a major complication to efforts to get kids back on track academically and provide much-needed consistency. In the last month, a number of districts have cited those gaps as they temporarily returned to remote learning — a notable backslide for the Biden administration, which has made getting every school to offer fully in-person learning a priority.

Some school districts have raised pay for hard-to-fill roles, including bus drivers, custodial staff, and special education assistants, and tried new recruitment tactics to get more applicants.

Other school leaders have resisted boosting salaries or adding new positions, fearing covering the additional costs with aid money that will eventually disappear. But Cardona urged districts to rethink if they have been hesitating to use COVID relief funds to hire — and do everything they can to avoid future cuts to in-person learning.

“Districts should ensure that continuous in-person learning and enrichment opportunities are available for all students, and that days of in-person programming are not reduced,” he wrote.

Specifically, the letter encourages school districts and states to consider offering hiring and retention bonuses, raising salaries, and providing premium pay. Cardona highlighted a California district offering $6,000 signing bonuses to teachers, and a Utah district that’s raising pay for bus drivers to $21 an hour, in addition to covering their licensing costs.

Elsewhere, pay hikes have gotten results. After Detroit boosted its teacher pay — in addition to offering hazard pay and bonuses — it had 1,000 applicants for 140 open positions this fall.

Shortages of substitute teachers have also been a major issue nationwide. Without them, educators have had to cover for their colleagues out sick or in quarantine this year, adding to their workload and sense of exhaustion.

To build those substitute pools, Cardona says schools should consider raising hourly rates for subs, offering bonuses to anyone who gets a substitute teaching license, and assigning subs to the same school all year to provide more consistency. One California district, he noted, reached an agreement with its teachers union to create a standby substitute teacher position at every school.

Others are taking similar measures. Chicago, for example, is spending millions to hire more full-time substitutes and to expand its sub pool.

States and districts can take other steps to help, too, Cardona wrote. He encourages officials to make exceptions for the next year or two that will allow retired educators to come back into schools without losing their pension, or that will allow current educators in line for retirement to collect their pension while they continue to work.

Lawmakers in Michigan took a step in that direction this week, passing legislation that would loosen education requirements to allow school support staff to substitute teach this year. (The state education department opposes the change, and it’s unclear if Gov. Gretchen Whitmer will sign the bill into law.)

The letter also suggests ways schools can reduce the burdens on existing staff, acknowledging that losing more educators would add to the challenge ahead.

He encourages districts to make time for things like debriefing sessions after especially stressful days, and to consider adjusting school schedules to add planning time for teachers.

“Now, more than ever, supporting educator well-being is critical for retaining our current educators and staff,” he wrote.

‘Mask whiplash’ hits Tennessee students adjusting to conflicting mandate orders

2021-11-18T23:51:57+00:00

After more than a year of mask-wearing in her school, Sam Whittier’s 9-year-old daughter was excited to see her teacher’s smile this week without a face covering.

But two days after Gov. Bill Lee signed a law to essentially ban mask mandates in Tennessee public schools as of Nov. 12, a federal judge blocked the ban based on a legal complaint that the statute violates federal disability law.

A day later, the Whittiers’ school board in Williamson County voted to lift its mask mandate anyway, based on declining COVID-19 cases.

“My daughter went from feeling very excited, to very let down, to very happy, all in a matter of days,” said Whittier of the emotional roller-coaster from flip-flopping directives that he calls “mask whiplash.”

Battles over school mask mandates are playing out weekly in school board meetings and courtrooms, but it’s the students and their families who must adjust on the fly to the changing orders.

“It feels like this isn’t about common sense or mitigating the virus anymore,” said Whittier, a father of three children in public schools south of Nashville. “It’s become a political power struggle among adults, and unfortunately, our kids are caught in the middle.”

The rules could change still again for his kids’ schools.

In Nashville, U.S. District Court Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr. is set to hear arguments Friday in the lawsuit filed by the parents of eight Tennessee children with disabilities who want the state law’s masking provisions struck down. They say universal masking in schools is a reasonable accommodation for their children, who are more susceptible to catching the virus, and that the new law doesn’t adequately protect them.

The lawsuit also claims the state’s rollback of mask mandates has put public schools in an “impossible” financial situation, since districts risk losing state funds if they don’t comply with the state law, but could lose federal aid if they don’t follow federal disability law.

A ruling is expected after Thanksgiving.

In the meantime, families are generally sticking with what they’re told by school administrators. But there’s confusion there, too, as district staff try to untangle legal questions created by the new state law, orders from local health officials, and rulings from federal judges in four separate Tennessee cases.

This week near Memphis, five suburban school districts switched from universal masking to optional face coverings, defying orders from the local health department and another federal judge’s ruling that health officials still have authority to issue mask mandates.

“It’s chaos,” said Charles Lampkin, a Memphis dad and pastor who worries about long-term social and emotional impact to his six children attending a mix of public and private schools in Shelby County.

“The kids are watching all the arguing and bickering. They’re the ones who are being hurt the most,” he said.

Lampkin recounted two recent conversations with his sons.

His 12-year-old asked how young people are supposed to know the right thing to do when adults can’t agree on something as simple as whether to wear a mask to keep the virus from spreading.

His 10-year-old, meanwhile, vowed that, when he grows up, he “won’t put kids in these kinds of situations where they don’t know what’s going to happen next.”

“It blew me away,” Lampkin said of the talks. “This whole pandemic has been traumatic for our kids, and we adults need to be asking ourselves whether we are easing the blow for them or making it more profound. With all the fussing and quarreling, I’m afraid it’s the latter.”

Wearing a mask in school remains one of the most polarizing issues of the pandemic, contributing to the social and emotional toll on kids who may also be behind academically due to disruptions to their education.

Therapists are seeing more cases of depression and anxiety among school-age children, many of whom are trying to process mixed messages about masking, said Stacie Hopkins, director of a child and adolescent treatment unit on the outskirts of Memphis through Lakeside Behavioral Health System.

“Children are faced with taking sides over how their parents may view the COVID policies,” she said. “Some children have suffered panic attacks because they fear being exposed [to the virus] by a classmate who is not wearing a mask.”

Hopkins urges adults to keep the lines of communication open with their kids. Mask policies may be rapidly changing, but adults can provide consistent support and model good behavior.

“Continue to encourage children with basic health practices like washing your hands, covering your mouth when you sneeze or cough. It’s OK to keep them updated on mask policies,” she said.

But some parents have taken more drastic measures over mask confusion and COVID policies.

Nicole Wilkins, of Memphis, is now homeschooling her three teenagers, while Franklin mom Monique Koupal has moved her 8-year-old son from Williamson County Schools to a private school in Nashville. Private schools aren’t covered by the new state law and are free to set their own mitigation policies.

“We left public schools to avoid all the inconsistencies,” said Koupal. “My son is anxious and has ADHD and I knew he wouldn’t be able to handle mixed messages on things like masks.”

Sam Whittier and his wife are sticking with public schools in Williamson County and trying to provide extra support during all the transitions. They also avoid talking negatively in front of their children about the conflicting orders and confusion. But it’s a challenge.

“I’m frustrated with all the back and forth and all the political fighting,” Whittier said. “People seem to want to lump you into being on one side or another of this debate, but there’s so many people in the middle who just want to see common sense. We need to move in that direction — because COVID is not going away.”

Parents are spending new child benefit on food, education. But will Congress keep it?

2021-11-15T19:29:26+00:00

Earlier this year, Congress decided to try a remarkably straightforward approach to reduce child poverty: give their families more money.

As part of the Biden-backed American Rescue Plan, Congress expanded the child tax credit, which provides cash benefits to most households with children, including some of the country’s poorest families. The IRS has been distributing that money monthly since July.

How well has it worked? Initial data suggests the expanded program has cut child poverty and child hunger substantially — although the impact would be greater if all eligible families were receiving the payments. There’s not hard evidence yet, but previous research suggests that the monthly payments also could boost student learning. Indeed, many low-income families say they have used the funds on their children’s education.

There is “consistent and broad evidence that this policy is working as intended,” said Zach Parolin, who has studied the program at Columbia University’s Center on Poverty and Social Policy. “There’s some strong evidence from the past that these types of income boosts will be beneficial for students at increasing their learning potential.”

But the move was only temporary. Now, Congressional Democrats and the Biden administration are wrangling over whether and how to extend the program as part of a major social spending package. Critics, including many Republicans, have argued that it discourages work and amounts to federal overreach. If no deal is reached, the size of the benefit would fall and the country’s poorest households would be partially or fully excluded from it.

Here’s what we’ve learned about how the expanded program has affected families and children so far.

The child tax credit has substantially reduced poverty and hardship among children and families.

The new monthly payments began going out in July: $300 per month for each child under 6 and $250 per month for older children. (The monthly checks will continue through December. The other half of the credit will be distributed in a lump sum at tax time.)

The money seemed to pay almost immediate dividends to low-income families. A Census survey showed most low-income parents said they spent at least some of it on food, more than any other item. Many also said that the extra money helped pay for regular expenses. (Data on how the money is being used is based on parents’ responses to surveys, not actual spending data.)

Before, about 30% of low-income parents said their household sometimes or often didn’t have enough food to eat. After July, that proportion sharply dropped to 21%. Low-income households without children showed no similar decline, suggesting that the change was directly due to the new tax credit.

Another analysis estimated that the payments prevented 2 million children from going without enough food.

Lafleur Duncan, a parent in Brooklyn, has been using some of the federal money to feed her son, who just entered high school. Duncan, who lost her job as a nanny when the pandemic hit, said her family would not have had enough food otherwise. “It stopped the big hole,” she said. “It’s been hard enough, but it would have been harder without that extra help.”

After the monthly payments reached families, child poverty also appeared to fall significantly. (Poverty is defined by a family’s monthly income — below roughly $2,300 for a family of four, for instance.) One study estimated that the tax credit reduced the poverty rate among children from about 16% to 12% — effectively keeping 3 million children out of poverty. Black and Latino children were especially likely to benefit.

If Congress doesn’t renew it, the expansion would end after this year. The credit would drop back to $2,000 per child, it would be delivered in one lump sum at tax time rather than monthly, and the poorest families would no longer be fully eligible. That would mean poverty and food insecurity would likely jump back up.

Biden’s latest proposal would keep the increased payments — of $3,600 or $3,000 annually depending on the child’s age — for one year. After that, they would fall back to $2,000 per child, but the poorest families would remain fully eligible for the increased amount.

“We are praying and hoping that they will expand it because a lot of parents are still struggling,” said Duncan, who has been an advocate for the program.

Some eligible families have not received the benefit — reducing its impact on poverty.

In many ways, the child benefit seems to be working as intended. But in one key respect it isn’t: Not all families eligible for the new money are receiving it.

The problem appears to be that the benefit is administered by the IRS, which directly deposited the monthly funds into households’ bank accounts. However, many low-income families don’t file federal income taxes because they don’t owe anything. Those are typically the families who are newly eligible for the program.

Teresena Medlock, of Memphis Lift, a parent advocacy group, has seen that play out with some of the families she works with. “Some of the families, they don’t have income, so they have to go through other channels,” she said.

Those parents have to fill out a separate online form in order to claim their benefit, but many may not realize that. Some nonprofits and government agencies are working to spread the word. (The last day to claim the benefit this year is Monday; after that the credit can only be collected via tax filing next year.)

It’s not clear how many eligible families have not gotten the benefit, but it’s likely several million or more. In the Census survey, low-income families were the least likely to say they have received the payments.

This has meant that initial projections that the child tax credit would cut poverty by 40% so far appear to have been overstated. The study of monthly poverty rates found that the payment reduced poverty by about 25% — a meaningful amount, but not as large as it would be if all eligible families were receiving it.

“Some are still missing out,” said Parolin. “The current effects aren’t living up to the potential effects.”

Many families say they are spending the new money on education.

Many families who are getting the money are spending it on more than household expenses.

In the Census survey, 30% of all families (and 40% of low-income families) said they used some of the money for educational costs, including school supplies, private school tuition, transportation to school, or tutoring. Black and Hispanic parents were especially likely to use the money for education. This was among the most common things parents said they spent the money on.

Ericka Njemanze, who lives in Oakland, California, with her three school-age kids, says she’s used the extra money to help pay for an after-school program that costs $600 a month. “They’re getting social engagement,” she said. “They’re getting educational activities that they didn’t get two years ago.” Another $32 a month goes to a supplementary online math program that she works through with her son, who struggles in math. “It helps me show him multiplication,” she said.

Medlock, of Memphis Lift, thinks even more low-income families would use the money for education if they had their basic needs met. “Do I put shoes on my child’s feet and do I put clothes on their back or do I pay for two hours of tutoring?” she said. “As a parent, we’re going to feed, clothe and put shoes on our child.”

For parents who are using the money for education, the program is functioning a bit like what’s known as an education savings account, which provides a pot of money that families can use on their child’s education. This idea is typically championed by school choice advocates, and some have noted the connection. “Democrats Accidentally Deliver a Massive Win for School Choice,” two writers recently wrote in the National Review, a conservative publication, referring to the child tax credit.

In this case, though, parents aren’t required to spend the money on education, and the funds don’t come out of government education budgets.

National school choice groups have largely been mum on the program and whether it should be continued. Spokespeople for EdChoice and the American Federation for Children, two prominent school choice groups, both said they do not consider the child tax credit a school choice initiative. (EdChoice is a supporter of Chalkbeat.)

But Derrell Bradford, president of 50CAN, a school reform group, says he does think it’s a form of parental choice.

“This to me is great news,” he said. “Low-income families, when given the opportunity to spend money on their children, make pretty good decisions about what they want to spend the money on, including education.”

Because the expansion launched so recently, research hasn’t yet examined whether it is helping children do better in school. But prior studies have found that anti-poverty programs, including an earlier version of the child tax credit, help students make tangible academic gains. Researchers recently estimated that because academic benefits are likely to accrue from the child tax credit, expanding the program would partially pay for itself in the long term.

Correction: An earlier version of this piece misspelled Derrell Bradford’s name.

Biden’s new vaccine-or-test rule will apply to some school districts, too

2021-11-04T17:12:37+00:00

Large swaths of the country’s public school employees could be required to get vaccinated against COVID or regularly tested under rules being rolled out by the Biden administration.

Due to the way the Occupational Safety and Health Administration works with states, the requirement would apply to public school districts in 26 states.

A number of those states already have vaccine-or-test rules for teachers and public school employees. But about a dozen — including Michigan, Indiana, and Tennessee — don’t, and will soon be required to adopt rules that are “at least as effective” as OSHA’s. Those rules would then apply to employees of school districts in those states with 100 or more employees.

This would mean new requirements for roughly one in four public school employees nationwide, estimates Nat Malkus, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. How effectively the rules will be enforced remains unclear, however, and the new regulations must clear a thicket of legal challenges.

“There are a lot of wrinkles,” said Malkus.

President Biden announced plans for a workplace vaccine-or-test mandate in September, and details were released this week by OSHA.

Under the rule, private employers with 100 or more workers would have to ensure that employees are either fully vaccinated against COVID by Jan. 4 or submit weekly test results. Unvaccinated workers will also be required to wear masks in the workplace.

In many states, these regulations would directly apply to private companies with 100 or more employees, including private schools, but would not apply to public agencies.

A number of other states would have to update their own plans with a comparable version of the OSHA rule — which would apply to public schools. School districts would be in charge of enforcing the rules, with the state providing oversight and responding to complaints.

The complicated patchwork of new regulations speaks to the Biden administration’s far-reaching effort to pressure more Americans to get vaccinated. “It’s the administration taking advantage of whatever levers they can find,” said Malkus.

Biden argues that the rules are essential to halt the spread of COVID and boost the economy. “While I would have much preferred that requirements not become necessary, too many people remain unvaccinated for us to get out of this pandemic for good,” he said Thursday.

Public health experts say that high vaccination rates in schools can help reduce COVID spread and avoid disruptions to school. A handful of school districts that have imposed their own vaccine requirements without a testing option have seen high rates of vaccination. But other districts have struggled to stick with a tough mandate while facing political pushback and staffing challenges.

Meanwhile, Republicans have argued that the new rules amount to a federal government overreach and impinge on personal medical decisions. They have vowed to challenge the move in court.

“If your expansive reading of the law succeeds, the American people can expect further abuses, as it is hard to imagine any requirement that the law would not allow,” 24 Republican attorneys general wrote in a September letter to Biden. “You will fail in court.”

On Thursday, Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb directed the state’s labor department to work with the attorney general to bring a lawsuit. “This is an overreach of the government’s role in serving and protecting Hoosiers,” he said.

That underscores the question of whether states will actually move to adopt the new rules, as required, and how vigorously they will be enforced.

“This is going to be the first test of that rule: which states comply and amend their plans?” said Julia Martin, an education lawyer. “And which states enforce that new amended part of the plan?”

OSHA threatened last month to remove authority from three states that it said had not adopted required COVID safety rules. If the federal government does take over workplace safety enforcement in a given state, the rule would no longer apply to public schools.

Pre-K, free lunch, Pell grants: What the D.C. reconciliation plan would mean for kids and schools

2021-10-28T21:48:22+00:00

Legislation pushed Thursday by President Biden includes proposals that would reshape many aspects of children’s lives, from whether they attend preschool to whether their families can afford basic needs like food and housing.

The scaled-down but still sweeping legislation would make it easier for states to offer universal pre-K, expand free school meals, and cement a cash benefit for the country’s poorest families with children.

“We can finally take us from 12 years to 14 years of universal education in America,” Biden said at the White House Thursday morning, referring to the proposed pre-K expansion.

Most of the proposals won’t directly affect the country’s K-12 schools, and a plan to devote billions to upgrading America’s school buildings was dropped during negotiations, along with the promise of free community college. But the bill does include modest funding increases for students with disabilities and teacher training programs — and research suggests that the antipoverty provisions could have lasting effects on children’s learning.

It remains unclear whether Democrats have the support to pass the $1.85 trillion package, which emerged after months of internal haggling between progressives and moderates. (The program would be paid for by hiking taxes on corporations and wealthy households.) Republicans have remained firmly opposed to what they see as government largesse.

But Democrats say they’re close to a final deal. Here’s what it would mean for families and schools.

More money for families with children

One way the federal government has long tried to help parents is with what’s called the child tax credit. Before the pandemic, most parents received a $2,000 tax rebate for each child. That left out the country’s very poorest families, though, since households that didn’t make enough money to owe income taxes didn’t get the full benefit.

The program changed this year. The American Rescue Plan — Biden’s big stimulus package, passed in March — boosted those benefits for one year, so families were eligible for $3,600 credit for each child aged 0-5 and $3,000 for each older child. The money has been distributed in monthly checks starting in July. Crucially, the lowest-income families were made eligible for the full payments, too. (The payments shrink for high-income families, and the wealthiest families aren’t eligible.)

The new legislation would temporarily keep the child tax credit at its higher dollar amount and permanently expand eligibility.

In other words, the $3,600 and $3,000 credits would continue for another year. After that, the payments would return to $2,000 per child. Families who don’t owe federal taxes — again, the poorest families — would remain eligible for the benefit. (In tax parlance, the credit would be “fully refundable.”)

“The full refundability part is really important,” said Zach Parolin, who has studied the impact of the expanded tax credit as a senior fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Poverty & Social Policy. “Those families who need the benefit the most would be getting it.”

Research has shown that students tend to do better in school when their families receive anti-poverty benefits, including food stamps, housing vouchers, and cash payments. And the additional money distributed this year appears to already have had an effect on children’s well-being.

Soon after the benefits began, the number of children who went without enough food in a given week dipped from 6.6 million to 4.6 million, according to a survey of parents. Forty percent of low-income families said they have also spent some of this year’s tax credit on educational expenses.

The payments also led to a sharp decline in child poverty. The program has not reduced poverty as much as some hoped it would, though, because it hasn’t reached everyone who qualifies. That’s likely because families who don’t file taxes need to sign up with the IRS. Federal and state officials have started campaigns to spread the word.

Steps toward universal preschool

The legislation also includes billions to help states launch or grow pre-kindergarten programs open to all 3- and 4-year olds. The goal is to eventually reach some 6 million children through a combination of school districts, Head Start, and private providers, the White House says.

“It’s a tremendous opportunity,” said Steven Barnett, founder of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University. “How successful it is will not just depend on the federal government. It will depend on state and local governments.”

State governments would have to opt into the program, and eventually foot some of the bill. Barnett said a number of states have hoped to expand their programs and would be poised to use new federal money to do so. Others might be more reluctant because of the price tag.

Parents would have the choice of whether or not to send their child to pre-K. Presently, 44% of 4-year-olds and just 17% of 3-year-olds are enrolled in publicly funded preschool.

The bill would also expand child care subsidies for parents, which could ease the financial burden on families and draw more women into — or keep more women in — the labor force.

The White House argues that early childhood education benefits children for years to come. Indeed, a number of studies have shown that children do better academically in both the short- and long-term after attending preschool.

One recent study found that children who enrolled in Boston’s universal pre-K program were 6 percentage points more likely to graduate high school and 5 points more likely to enroll in college. Some other studies looking at Head Start and at pre-K students in Tennessee have come to more equivocal conclusions, though.

“We’re still trying to figure out why is that the outlier here,” said Diane Schanzenbach, an education economist at Northwestern, referring to the disappointing Tennessee findings. “We don’t know.”

Still, the evidence for pre-K is strong, Schanzenbach said. “This is a sensible investment,” she said.

Free school lunches for more students

The bill also aims to offer free school meals to 8.7 million additional children. It would do so by making it easier for every student at a school to qualify for free lunch through a program known as community eligibility.

For the next five years, schools could qualify if 25% (rather than 40%) of students are eligible for subsidized meals. The feds would also incentivize school districts to adopt community eligibility by providing more generous reimbursements for the cost.

States would also have the option to offer free meals to all students statewide.

Research suggests that school-wide free lunch eligibility can raise test scores while reducing disciplinary incidents and bullying.

Boosts for Pell grants, HBCUs

The legislation would add $550 to the annual Pell grant, which helps low-income college students pay tuition. Currently, Pell grants are set at $6,495.

The bill also would invest $3 billion in historically Black, tribal, and minority-serving colleges and universities, although that’s significantly less than Biden originally proposed. Also not included: free community college.

Small K-12 programs, including efforts to bolster teacher diversity

Although the efforts are relatively modest in scope, the proposed legislation includes a handful of programs designed to improve training for school staff and influence the new teacher pipeline. They include:

$200 million for the preparation and professional development of Native American language teachers
$161 million to improve training for staff who work with students with disabilities.
$113 million for “grow your own” programs that recruit teachers “who live in and come from the communities the schools serve.”
$112 million for teacher residency programs, which are typically teacher training programs run by school districts in partnership with local universities.
$112 million to support school principals.

Indicted Tennessee senator steps aside, for now, as leader of key education committee

2021-10-27T23:16:23+00:00

A Tennessee legislator is stepping aside temporarily as the Senate’s top education leader after being indicted on charges of violating federal campaign finance law.

Sen. Brian Kelsey announced his decision Wednesday on the Senate floor after lawmakers kicked off a special session aimed mostly at curtailing COVID-related mandates for vaccinations and masks.

“I’m totally innocent,” the Germantown Republican said in remarks that lasted three minutes. “I trust in time the truth will prevail and I will resume my leadership role on the education committee.”

Lt. Gov. Randy McNally named Sen. Jon Lundberg, a Republican from Bristol and the committee’s vice chairman, as interim leader during the special session, which likely will stretch into next week.

A spokesman for McNally later said the speaker would not comment further at this time about a more permanent successor while the senator challenges the charges in court — a process that could take months or years.

The nine-member committee is the primary gatekeeper of hundreds of proposals annually that can affect Tennessee students, educators, and schools. Kelsey has served on the panel for a decade, and McNally named him the leader in January after long-time chairwoman Dolores Gresham retired last year.

An attorney from Shelby County and influential conservative voice, Kelsey has been a passionate advocate of education choice policies like vouchers that would provide state funding to help families pay for private school tuition. He also helped craft language in a 2021 law that restricts classroom instruction about systemic racism.

Last week, a grand jury indicted Kelsey and Joshua Smith, the owner of a Nashville social club, on charges they illegally concealed the transfer of $91,000 during Kelsey’s failed U.S. congressional campaign in 2016.

Kelsey, who is up for reelection next year, is to appear in federal court on Nov. 5. If convicted, he could face up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine on each of five counts.

In his remarks, Kelsey said he believed he was operating within the law. He questioned the timing of the indictment, five years after the alleged offense and under the administration of President Joe Biden, a Democrat.

Under Senate rules, Kelsey would have had to appear before a Senate ethics committee about his leadership position or be suspended had he not stepped aside.

McNally thanked Kelsey for his decision. “I think this will allow you to concentrate fully on your case and not be burdened with the issues of chairmanship,” the speaker said, “and I appreciate you as a senator and as a person.”

Lundberg takes the helm as the legislature takes up thorny matters in the days ahead such as school mask mandates and several bills to make school board races partisan contests.

He did not immediately respond when asked to comment on his new role.

Biden admin: New effort to start COVID vaccination sites at schools on the way

2021-10-20T14:10:30+00:00

Ahead of the expected authorization of the COVID vaccine for children ages 5 to 11, the Biden administration says the shots will be distributed to school-based clinics as well as pediatricians’ offices, pharmacies, and other sites.

The federal government will also launch a program helping school districts start school-based vaccination sites by “matching” districts with vaccine providers, officials said Wednesday.

“Our planning efforts mean that we will be ready to begin getting shots in arms in the days following a final CDC recommendation,” the White House said in a statement.

The Biden administration’s plan signals schools will continue to play a role in completing a massive challenge of both logistics and persuasion: vaccinating the 28 million children ages 5-11 across the country. A new federal campaign “to increase vaccine confidence” will involve schools, as well as local health departments and faith leaders.

School-based clinics have already vaccinated many students 12 and up. In New York City, the country’s largest school system, officials said vaccinations were offered at every campus with eligible students during the first week of school. In Newark, pop-up clinics in schools helped quickly increase its youth vaccination rate this summer. In Colorado, officials found school clinics had the welcome side effect of sometimes drawing in students’ relatives, too.

“The kids make the decision that this is the right thing for them to do, and then they bring the family along,” Dr. Sonja O’Leary, a pediatrician and medical director of Denver Health’s school-based health centers, said in May.

Elsewhere, though, vaccine pushes have been less well received. Tennessee’s health department, for instance, stopped vaccine outreach targeting minors after Republican lawmakers balked, dubbing it a form of peer pressure.

Polling shows that a significant share of parents are hesitant to vaccinate their child. A September poll found that only a third of parents of children ages 5-11 said they would vaccinate their child right after the shot is approved. Another third said they would “wait and see,” and the final third said they would either not vaccinate their child or only do so if required. Among children 12-17, the same poll found that about half had received at least one dose of the vaccine.

Polling shows vaccine skepticism is strongest among Republican parents, but that there is some hesitancy among parents of all political leanings.

Most parents also oppose school vaccine requirements, but many believe that schools should encourage vaccination.

The Biden administration’s plan does not mention making vaccines mandatory for school attendance. California recently announced that it would eventually require the vaccine for students who attend school in person.

Last month, U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said he supported vaccine requirements for teenagers, for whom the Food and Drug Administration has fully approved the vaccine. “It’s the best tool that we have to safely reopen schools and keep them open,” he said. “We don’t want to have the yo-yo effect that many districts had last year, and we can prevent that by getting vaccinated.”

School repair should remain in federal bill, Philly officials urge

2021-10-08T21:11:12+00:00

Philadelphia Superintendent William Hite and U.S. Rep. Dwight Evans advocated Friday for school-repair initiatives to remain in a federal bill that would provide funding for the district to restore older buildings.

Parents and teachers have complained for years about dangerous conditions in Philadelphia schools, especially around asbestos, and have called for greater transparency about existing problems and repair efforts.

Hite and Evans said two proposals could help pay for repairs in older, historic school buildings in Philadelphia, such as Julia R. Masterman Laboratory School and the Academy of Palumbo High School in South Philadelphia. But other schools in the state also have needs, they said.

“Philadelphia is not alone,” Hite said. “This is a statewide problem. And these two proposals will help provide statewide solutions. The average age of our school buildings in Pennsylvania, which serve more than 1.7 million students, is 57 years old — almost a decade older than the national average.”

The average Philadelphia school building is 75 years old.

Evans, a Democrat whose district includes parts of Philadelphia, has proposed the Rehabilitation of the Historic Schools Act, and U.S. Rep. Bobby Scott, also a Democrat, proposed Rebuild America’s Schools Grant Program. As a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, which oversees taxes, Evans included his school-repair tax credit, which also passed the House last year, in President Biden’s Build Back Better bill. The legislation would allow an existing federal tax credit to be used to repair historic school buildings, such as Palumbo, which was built 91 years ago.

The Build Back Better bill has been estimated at $3.5 trillion over 10 years, though Biden has acknowledged it will likely need to be scaled down to pass. The proposed spending plan includes an extensive social safety net with child tax credits, paid family leave and universal prekindergarten.

In order for schools to qualify for the rehabilitation tax credit they would have to be on the historical lists, Evans said. “In the next week or two, some decisions will be made. I want to make sure this is on the table,” he said.

Scott’s proposal would distribute $82 billion dollars to school districts across the U.S. to improve school facilities. The funding would mandate a 10% state match, requiring legislators in Harrisburg to invest in school buildings to take advantage of the federal program.

There is no dedicated state or federal funding for school facility improvements across Pennsylvania.

Philadelphia’s Board of Education approved Thursday the issuance of two series of bonds designed to fund necessary capital improvements. The district generated $375 million from the bonds for its capital improvement program, which was approved by the board in May.

Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President Jerry Jordan said the union supports school facilities funding in federal legislation. “We’ve been clear on that from the start,” he said.

Palumbo’s principal Kianna Thompson said the school has some classrooms that have damage to the paint and plaster that needs to be corrected caused by some flooding in 2018. The school now has a new roof with areas to eat and play basketball.

“Additional funding for infrastructure would be greatly needed,” she said.

Biden is pressuring states to drop bans on mask mandates. Will it work?

2021-09-08T20:36:44+00:00

In his first several months in office, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona had largely steered clear from controversy. But recently he’s waded directly into a debate roiling school boards and state houses across the country: whether schools should require all students and staff to wear masks.

“We cannot sit around,” he said last month, as the Biden administration pushed back against states banning school mask mandates. “We have to do everything in our power, including civil rights investigations.”

Soon after, he announced investigations into five states — Iowa, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah — saying they may be violating the rights of students with disabilities.

Republicans blasted the move as federal meddling. “It is inappropriate for the Office for Civil Rights to spend taxpayer dollars to intimidate states that are responsive to parents’ needs and balance freedom with public health,” said Rep. Virginia Foxx, the ranking Republican on the House education committee. “Biden and his cronies are using the Department of Education as a propaganda tool against states and governors that disagree with them.”

The partisan breakdown is clear. What’s less clear is whether the department’s effort to encourage masking is on strong legal ground and whether it’s likely to succeed in changing state policies. So Chalkbeat asked a number of lawyers and legal experts.

Here’s what we found: The feds have some legal basis, but they also face a number of legal, political, and practical hurdles in stopping states from banning masking requirements. However, the department’s actions may bolster lawsuits from parents and advocates advancing similar claims — which, if persuasive to federal judges, could quickly halt state mandate bans.

The department’s argument: Bans on universal masking keep kids with disabilities out of school.

Barring mask requirements could effectively limit access to school for some students who have medical conditions that put them at greater risk of getting severely ill from COVID, the feds argue. They point to a number of parents of children with disabilities who say they feel forced to choose between an in-person education and their health.

That, the Biden administration claims, could violate those students’ right to a “free appropriate public education” and amounts to illegal discrimination under federal law.

In opening an investigation, the feds have not made a determination of any such discrimination and they have promised to be a “neutral factfinder.” But Cardona has made clear where his sympathies lie. “This Department will continue to use every tool in our toolbox to protect the health and safety of students,” he wrote in a blog criticizing states that bar masks requirements.

A number of lawyers and legal scholars say the department has a decent legal case.

“It is a viable claim, for sure,” said Joshua Weishart, a law professor at West Virginia University. “Even if that were not the purpose of statewide bans on mask mandates, federal law prohibits administering policies in ways that have the effect of excluding students with disabilities.”

“I think that it is a very reasonable way to protect children’s health,” said Julie Underwood, an expert on education law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Any kind of ban on the masking that would preclude children with disabilities from being able to attend school because it would be dangerous for them if they were to catch COVID impedes their right to access education,” said Selene Almazan, legal director at the Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates, which advocates for students with disabilities.

The arguments on the other side

Other legal scholars are more skeptical of the Biden’s administration’s claims. “I don’t think their legal position is terribly strong,” said Joshua Dunn, a professor at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs who regularly writes about education law issues.

Indeed, there are a number of arguments that critics of the department’s position might raise.

For one, some students with disabilities might find it difficult or impossible to wear a mask throughout the school day — that creates a challenge if some students with disabilities need universal masking but others need exemptions. “It wouldn’t be surprising to find another group of parents saying, ‘for my child these mask mandates are particularly harmful and in violation of their IEP,” said Dunn, referring to individual education programs, which spell out accommodations for disabilities.

Dustin Rynders, an attorney at Disability Rights Texas, which sued the state over its ban on mask mandates, says those tensions aren’t irreconcilable and that his organization has supported various masking accommodations for students with disabilities. He added, “If you have a child who truly can’t wear a mask, it makes it all the more important that everyone who can does.”

A number of polls shows that more parents support mask mandates than oppose them, although there is little if any data specifically on the view of parents of students with disabilities.

Skeptics of masking in schools also claim that the evidence doesn’t support the practice, and therefore shouldn’t be legally required. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, for instance, cited a recent New York Magazine article, which questioned the prevailing recommendations of universal school masking from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics. (There is little empirical evidence about the effects of masks in schools, but there is stronger evidence outside of school settings, which some experts say likely apply in schools too.)

A final potential weakness of the department’s argument is that it would effectively require universal masking in all districts across the country. “If it is your position that students with disabilities are entitled under Section 504 to be educated in schools in which everyone is wearing a mask, does this policy apply to all school districts?” Republican members of the House education committee wrote in a pointed letter to Cardona.

The Biden administration isn’t going that far, though, perhaps because that could create a massive political backlash.

Kelly Leon, a spokesperson for the Department of Education, emphasized the value of local decision-making. “Statewide bans make it impossible for schools and school districts to make local, on-the-ground assessments of the needs of their school and students,” she said.

The feds face practical challenges in getting states to lift bans on mask mandates

Aside from the legal issues at play, experts and advocates say there is another major hurdle that the department faces in pushing states to rescind masking requirements: time.

“Interviews, reviewing facts and statements, drafting a decision, determining corrective action, and clearing internally are lengthy processes at the best of times and [the department] will want to be thorough here,” said Julia Martin, an education lawyer who advises states and districts. Federal investigations sometimes take months or longer.

States also have the right to appeal any investigatory finding made by the department.

But as the school year unfolds, time is of the essence for advocates and parents who say mask mandates are needed to protect students with disabilities. It’s not clear that the feds will be able to intervene in time to make a meaningful impact.

Leon said the department “will begin collecting data from each state ... in a timely manner while ensuring the process is done thoroughly.”

The other challenge is how to enforce a decision. The feds’ chief leverage is the ability to cut off federal funds to recalcitrant states. But this would be an extreme and unprecedented move that the department would be reluctant to undertake. Typically, the department reaches some resolution with a state. But with the politics so fraught, such a resolution might be unusually difficult.

“Ultimately federal agencies have the power of the purse,” said Rynders. “The hard part there is: are you ultimately willing to cut off funds to a state to enforce your priorities?”

Private lawsuits may offer a clearer and swifter path

Critics of mask mandates bans don’t just have to rely on the Biden administration, though. In fact, parents have filed lawsuits in a number of states — Iowa, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah — advancing a similar legal theory as the Department of Education.

They may be able to get results quicker. In Tennessee, parents have already won a temporary restraining order against the state’s mandate ban. “Plaintiffs have identified ways that they have been excluded from participating in school programs and activities, including from physical education classes, and socializing with their peers when within the school buildings and at lunch,” wrote federal district court judge Sheryl Lipman.

Shep Melnick, a professor at Boston College, said the federal investigations could help existing private lawsuits and encourage others. “A lot of these investigations are aimed at imposing various costs on states and school districts and publicizing the issue,” he said. “There is a symbiotic relationship between the investigation” and the lawsuits.

In Iowa, a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of 11 parents cites the department’s investigation as evidence against the state’s mask mandate ban.

“We view the Department of Education investigation as being congruent with our lawsuit, as are the other similar lawsuits that have been filed around the country,” said Veronica Fowler, spokesperson for the ACLU of Iowa. “This is a very clear disability discrimination situation.”

Leon said the department does not comment on pending litigation but that officials are “closely monitoring” existing lawsuits around masking.

In Texas, the lawsuit from parents of students with disabilities goes to trial in early October.

“I think the lawsuits are, of course, what tends to have a more impactful difference,” said Rynders, whose organization is bringing the suit. “But I welcome [the department] to use their platform and their soapbox to communicate what is right for students with disabilities.”

Feds open civil rights investigations into 5 states limiting school mask mandates

2021-08-30T17:15:09+00:00

Federal education officials are investigating whether attempts in five states to block schools from mandating masks constitutes a civil rights violation for students with disabilities.

The U.S. Department of Education’s civil rights office launched investigations in Iowa, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah on Monday, saying policies in those states may have prevented schools from taking steps to protect students whose medical conditions related to their disabilities put them at greater risk of getting severely ill from COVID.

The move marks the latest escalation in tensions between federal and state officials over who can set the terms for safety precautions in schools.

“The Department will fight to protect every student’s right to access in-person learning safely and the rights of local educators to put in place policies that allow all students to return to the classroom full-time in-person safely this fall,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a statement.

Cardona had warned officials in all five of those states earlier this month that their attempts to block school mask mandates could be seen as preventing school districts from fully reopening for in-person learning — a duty they have under the law that provides COVID relief to schools. Separately, Cardona said that he was prepared to use civil rights investigations to push states to act — though it remains unclear how quickly these investigations could prompt any changes.

Education department officials said the investigations would be conducted “over the coming weeks.”

Officials said they hadn’t opened investigations in Florida, Texas, Arkansas, or Arizona because court orders or other state orders are preventing bans on mask mandates from being enforced there for now — allowing schools to require masks if they choose.

But the education department said it would continue to monitor those states and would take similar action if court decisions are overturned, or if state officials there try to prevent school districts from putting mask mandates in place.

Mask requirements have become a focus of a contentious start to the school year in places like Tennessee, where Gov. Bill Lee issued an executive order on Aug. 16 allowing parents to opt their children out of local mask mandates. “Parents are THE authority & will be the ultimate decision-makers for their individual child’s health & well-being,” he tweeted.

Lee has since been hit with two lawsuits challenging his order, one from the Shelby County government, which has a mask mandate, and the other from families who charge the order violates the Americans with Disabilities Act. And at least a dozen school districts have ignored Lee’s order as pediatric COVID cases continue to surge.

Teachers association officials in the state’s two largest districts and some parents are pushing back. Michele Sheriff, head of Metro Nashville Education Association, said schools in Tennessee’s second largest district already have seen thousands of students forced to quarantine or isolate due to COVID.

“The problem will only get worse as the year goes on unless our local elected school boards have the freedom and autonomy to make decisions that are best for their school communities,” she said at a press conference Monday morning.

Polls show that a majority of U.S. parents and the general public support mask requirements in schools.

There is limited research about the effects of masking in schools, but research in other settings suggests that masks can reduce the transmission of COVID-19 indoors.

Matt Barnum and Marta W. Aldrich contributed reporting.

How would you spend $500 million? Memphis school district wants to know

2021-08-20T23:54:40+00:00

If you had $500 million, how would you spend it to improve Shelby County Schools?

Local residents have through Sunday to take a survey and share their opinions with the Memphis school district about how to spend some of its federal stimulus money.

The district’s $503 million grant is its third multimillion-dollar grant under the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund. The Biden administration has provided the series of grants to states, charter school networks, private schools, and public school districts to help cover the extra cost associated with education in a pandemic, such as laptops and technology upgrades for virtual learning and masks, plexiglass barriers, and other protective equipment in classrooms.

The district has already decided that about half of the grant will go toward repairs to aging school buildings. Future projects include merging Treadwell Elementary and Treadwell Middle School into a New Treadwell K-8 school, a multiyear project estimated to cost $34 million, and a new high school in Frayser, another multiyear project estimated to cost $89 million.

Some innovative uses of the money in other parts of the country include an Arkansas Tutoring Corps that will recruit and train tutors to help students who fell behind academically because of the pandemic’s disruption to education, and Washington, D.C.’s Out of School Time initiative, which will provide grants to community organizations to develop neighborhood-based intervention programs.

The Shelby County Schools feedback survey asks community members to rank spending options like smaller class sizes, new virtual learning opportunities, and more mental health services.

Tennessee districts must send their spending plans to the state department of education by Aug. 27. The state will award distinctions to districts that emphasize academics in their spending plans.

The district’s total budget, which includes construction costs, salaries, and academic programs, is about $2.2 billion, its largest ever.

Biden pushes back as governors, including in Tennessee, try to block school mask mandates

2021-08-18T22:20:30+00:00

President Biden ratcheted up the political battle over school safety rules Wednesday, telling federal officials to step in after several governors took steps to block school mask mandates while COVID cases continue to rise.

Biden told Education Secretary Miguel Cardona in a memo to take action in response to state and local rules that might interfere with schools reopening safely. Earlier Wednesday, Cardona told the New York Times that the department would use federal civil rights law to push back.

“We cannot sit around. We have to do everything in our power, including civil rights investigations and even referring matters to the Department of Justice for enforcement if necessary,” Cardona said.

Over the last few weeks, governors in Florida, Texas, Arizona, and Tennessee have moved to ban mask mandates or give parents the final say in whether students wear masks at school, essentially voiding mandates from school districts or local health departments. The legal details vary, and a number of school districts have said they will not follow those orders.

But Tennessee’s experience illustrates the confusion and concern that can follow.

Since Gov. Bill Lee’s executive order gave parents the right to opt out of school mask policies earlier this week, districts have been grappling with the best way to keep students and staff safe. The health department in the state’s largest county, Shelby County, has said that its mask requirement for schools and daycares still stands, and issued a new mask requirement on Wednesday afternoon for all indoor public settings. The two largest school districts in the state say that they plan to continue with their mask requirements, too.

Still, the order worried some families. “It puts parents like me in a really difficult position,” April Thompson, a Memphis parent and teacher, said earlier this week.

Federal civil rights law would trump a state executive order, making it an appealing strategy for the Biden administration. Under federal laws, students with disabilities are entitled to a free and appropriate education, and all students are protected from racial and other kinds of discrimination.

The education department’s office for civil rights could proactively launch investigations if officials believe a state or local policy barring mask mandates is violating students’ rights, Cardona said, or look into complaints from parents and others who say students are experiencing discrimination because of a state order.

But civil rights investigations typically take several months, so it’s unlikely they’d result in changes anytime soon.

Cardona took another tack in a letter sent to Tennessee officials on Wednesday. He said that under the March federal law that’s sent billions in COVID relief dollars to schools, districts are required to come up with plans to safely return to in-person learning. The state’s actions to block mask mandates, he argued, could prevent them from fulfilling this legal obligation.

Cardona sent similar letters to officials in Arizona, Iowa, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Utah.

Meanwhile, the new school year has begun in many states. In some districts, many students have had to quarantine after COVID exposure, quickly disrupting the year. In places that have yet to start, federal officials are trying to persuade families who had intended to send their children back for in-person learning to continue to do so, especially those who chose to keep their children learning remotely for much of last year.

“As educators, we know in our hearts how important in-person learning is for student success — even before the data emerged on the devastating impact of school building closures during the past 18 months,” Cardona wrote in a blog post Wednesday. “That is why our priority must be to help ensure that every student can safely return to school in person.”

As the political battles rage on, officials in Memphis and Nashville schools have said that their decision to require masks was prompted by the number of rising COVID cases among school-age children.

Tennessee nurses and doctors are struggling to provide care for the thousands of patients flooding local emergency rooms. On Tuesday evening, one doctor described the scene in a Memphis emergency room as simply “a war zone.”

What does $6 billion in COVID relief buy in Michigan schools?

2021-08-16T13:59:35+00:00

School leaders delivered books to children’s doors, hired tutors, replaced hard-to-clean carpeting, and offered more summer school than ever before. Now they’re upgrading ventilation systems, replacing water fountains with more sanitary water-bottle fill stations, and adding soap dispensers.

Some are investing in thousands of laptop computers and expanding virtual learning programs in case COVID-19 resurges during the school year. Others, more confident the pandemic is ending, are investing in programs that bolster traditional learning.

Beyond that, a lot of school leaders don’t yet know what they’ll do with the windfall of roughly $6 billion in federal COVID relief coming over three years. It’s the kind of money school leaders never envisioned and know they’ll never see again.

That’s why they want to ensure it’s spent wisely, according to interviews Bridge Michigan and Chalkbeat Detroit conducted with leaders in five Michigan communities: Benton Harbor, Flint, Alpena, Traverse City, and Niles.

“I don’t want to commit to spending this money on something I’m not 100 percent sure is going to make a difference in the lives of children,” said Eric Lieske, principal and CEO of Flint Cultural Center Academy, a K-8 charter school.

“I need to get these kids back first and I need to get feedback from my staff on what they think they need to make sure we’re impactful,” he said. “I want to see the kids back. I want to see how they’re engaging and how they are emotionally.”

That sounds reasonable to state Board of Education President Casandra Ulbrich.

“When you have a big pool of money like this it makes sense to come up with a very strategic plan,” she said. “It provides the opportunity to be very creative.”

Congress approved $189 billion for the nation’s K-12 schools over three years from the Elementary Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) and Governors’ Emergency Education Relief funds. The most funding is targeted for districts with high poverty and large populations of students of color, English language learners, students with disabilities, migratory families, and other groups most affected by the pandemic.

Michigan was awarded about $6.1 billion over three years. Administrators across the state who spoke with Bridge and Chalkbeat suggested it may take all of those 36 months to decide how to spend it. School boards and superintendents have wide discretion. The money can be used to support safe, in-person instruction, to recover learning loss during the pandemic, or to support the academic, social, and emotional needs of students.

That kind of money also comes with expectations of higher achievement.

“I get that. I should be held accountable,” said Dan Applegate, superintendent of Niles Community Schools. “Our scores should get better. I’ve got no issue with that.”

The biggest challenge, he and others said, will be finding and attracting high-quality teachers when every other school district in the country now has the money to compete for them, too.

But test scores aren’t everything, school administrators across the state said.

People who expect dramatic increases in test results might be underestimating the severity of the pandemic’s disruption on education, said Katharine Strunk, director of the Education Policy Innovation Collaborative and a professor of education policy at Michigan State University.

“There’s real learning recovery that needs to happen,” she said.

Early data indicates student achievement has been significantly disrupted during the pandemic, particularly for younger students, students of color, and those from low-income families.

“Kids didn’t learn normally for a year and a half, so how do we accelerate learning so they’re basically where they’re supposed to have been?” Strunk said. “And it’s not just about academic achievement; it’s about social and emotional learning. I think kids can catch up. I think it will take a lot of really strategic effort.”

Bridge Michigan recently visited five districts across the Lower Peninsula to see how they’re spending the unprecedented funding. Here’s what we found:

In Benton Harbor, beefed-up summer school and drones

The first thing students see when they enter Benton Harbor High School is an image of themselves reflected back on an eye-level tablet in the entryway. Next they hear an electronic voice instructing them to “please come closer” while it measures temperature and warns, if necessary, “please wear mask.”

Early arrivals might see custodian Louis James spraying a thin mist of disinfectant over all surfaces using one of the $5,000 electrostatic disinfection machines the district purchased with COVID relief funds.

Custodian Louis James disinfects the Benton Harbor High School cafeteria with new cleaning equipment bought with federal COVID-relief funds.

It’s immediately clear that safety is a priority for Benton Harbor, which is receiving $29,000 per pupil in federal funding, second only to Flint Public Schools.

In a district where 42 percent of families live in poverty, 16 percent of parents never finished high school, and some buildings are 100 years old, the needs here are high. But so are the goals of Superintendent Andraé Townsel, who arrived a year and a half ago with a mandate to turn around a troubled district that had low test scores, high debt, declining enrollment, and a looming threat of closure.

He arrived a few weeks before the pandemic got a toe hold in Michigan and launched the district into the kind of turmoil he couldn’t have predicted. Equally unimaginable was the extra $46.7 million — almost double the district’s annual budget — he would soon have to turn around the struggling, cash-strapped system.

“Our students are going to have more structure, more materials, more enhanced curriculum, more resources such as computers, cleaner facilities, safer facilities, more extra-curricular activities and a wealth of supports all the way around,” Townsel said.

One place Townsel invested COVID relief funds to minimize learning loss is summer school — tripling the teaching staff, extending the program two weeks, and doubling enrollment. Students spend mornings focused on math and reading and afternoons on creative activities such as photography, culinary arts, vocal music, jewelry making, and stop-action animation.

“It’s still basically tied into our math and science, and through the day they also get a great dose of (English language arts),” said Mike Gillespie, an athletic coach who is co-teaching a summer school math class at Fair Plain Middle School.

Benton Harbor Superintendent Andraé Townsel challenges a student to more quickly complete a multiplication worksheet during a summer school math class at Fair Plain Middle School.

Around him, students showed off beaded bracelets they had made and talked about how they measured ingredients for orange smoothies.

“We wanted to do summer school like this for years but didn’t have funding,” Chief of Schools LaWanna Shelton said. “Thanks to the additional funds, we very comfortably planned the best for our kids. There wasn’t a limitation. … We weren’t tied down or held back from being creative and innovative.”

That innovation extends into the school year, too, when students will be able to enroll in new programs including one that will use drones to teach technology.

The district also invested in laptops for every student, wireless hotspots, textbooks, school supplies, counselors, tutoring, and professional development that will set up staff to address student needs that were exacerbated during the pandemic.

“Our goal is to focus on climate and culture in addition to curriculum and instruction,” Townsel said.

Flint charter adds staff to help students catch up

William Lewis used a red plastic ruler and a chubby stick of sidewalk chalk to draw precise shapes on the ground — a 9-inch square and 10-centimeter equilateral triangle.

Without federal funding, Flint Cultural Center Academy wouldn’t have offered summer school and William would have been home playing with his little brother.

“I’d rather be here in summer school so I can learn. I’m having fun doing this right now,” the 7-year-old said as he studied his ruler to decide whether to use the centimeter or inch side.

William Lewis, 7, draws a square on the sidewalk outside Flint Cultural Center Academy as part of a summer school math activity.

Nearby, teacher Katie Simpson gave the next set of instructions to her third graders.

“You’re going to really have to think because this might be tricky,” she said. “The top and the bottom of the rectangle are going to be 11 inches and the sides need to be 7. Make sure you use the inch side, and we start at zero because he’s our hero.”

There will be other heroes at school next year, too, because of ESSER funding.

Lieske, the charter’s principal and CEO, is using ESSER money to add staff including a guidance counselor and a reading interventionist to help students struggling to return to school — particularly the 28 percent of students who learned remotely the past year.

The charter school opened two years ago in a new building already outfitted with ventilation systems and technology that schools in places like Benton Harbor lack.

Flint Cultural Center Academy has been allocated $3.1 million over three years, or about $3,700 per student, in federal COVID relief funds.

Flint Cultural Academy Charter School will receive $3.1 million in federal Covid-relief funds.

“We’re doing everything we can to respond to the trauma families, kids and staff experienced” during the pandemic, Lieske said. “I wish we could say we’re fully prepared but that would not be an honest answer. I do think we’re working hard to make sure we have the right staff in place and the right protocols in place.”

One thing that will help is the hiring of a “COVID responder” whose salary is funded through federal relief dollars.

“He was the go-to person if I had a report of sick kids or staff not feeling well. We made sure staff had a person to go to and that families knew that this person was going to” coordinate an appropriate response, Lieske said.

Unlike some other administrators who use the federal funds to bolster virtual learning, Lieske is all-in on in-person learning. Unless a dramatic coronavirus resurgence forces school closures, Lieske will have his 450 elementary and middle school students in the building every day.

After all, the whole point of the two-year-old charter school is to connect students to active, hands-on learning at arts and cultural organizations in the neighborhood. For example, students take music classes through the Flint Institute of Music, visit the Longway Planetarium for science lessons, and regularly visit the Flint Cultural Center, which is connected to the school by a walkway.

Alpena boosting professional development to help students

Preston Wiser dripped spots of pink paint onto black paper he laid inside a plastic salad spinner. Then he made his prediction: “Maybe the whole paper will be filled with the same color or maybe it will turn into a big spiral.”

Preston, 9, pumped the mechanism of the household device a dozen times with all his might and waited to see what centrifugal force would do. When the spinning stopped he peered inside to find most of the paint had settled into a pink blob on one side of the paper.

“Heavy on one side. That’s not what I would have hypothesized on that,” instructor Justin Christiansen-Cooper told him as the next student tested her own hypotheses using all four available paint colors.

The summer camp, which blends art with science, technology, engineering and math, is an ESSER-funded partnership between Alpena Public Schools and Art in the Loft, a nonprofit that offers a gallery, performances, and hands-on art programs for all ages.

Ronny Hegenauer, Maddison Taylor, Preston Wiser, and instructor Justin Christiansen-Cooper create spin art at Art in the Loft studio in Alpena. The lesson is part of a federally funded summer school program for Alpena third-, fourth-, and fifth-graders.

“I hope kids leave here with a love of art and that they can see connections with art in all they do – science, English, writing, math,” said Christiansen-Cooper, executive director of Art in the Loft and a former Denver teacher.

His program is one of several federal programs the district hopes will help students recover from learning losses they suffered during the pandemic.

“My goal for the summer was to let kids have fun with hands-on experiences that can help them re-engage with school,” said Meghan Gauthier, Alpena’s assistant superintendent for instruction.

That was a real priority for the district, she said, and it wouldn’t have happened without the massive influx of ESSER funds. The money allowed the district to boost pay enough to attract teachers who had intended to use the summer to decompress after a particularly stressful school year. Other districts Bridge visited also offered teacher incentives but none as high as Alpena, which paid $55 an hour for instructional time and $32 an hour for planning time.

Alpena received $10.4 million in COVID relief funding or about $2,950 for each of its 3,500 students.

“It’s a lot of money and we want to use it purposefully,” Gauthier said. “How do we leverage it, and be smart, and make sure to continue with COVID recovery but also think long-term when we’re talking about staffing, professional development, and all the things that are going to last” after the funding runs out.

One way is to give teachers and principals a say in how some money is spent. The district allocated $550,000 – about $150 per student – for school-based teams to spend on local needs in their buildings. One, for example, intends to use its money to hire a behavioral specialist to improve discipline.

Alpena spent about $700,000 last year to purchase access to online education programs for about 800 students who chose independent virtual learning. Another $25,500 per week went to pay teachers who mentored them, tracked their progress, and checked in with them at least weekly.

Alpena also used COVID relief funds to transport summer school students in a district that spans 600 square miles. It used other funding for professional development that will prepare teachers to accelerate lessons next year to make up for lost learning time. Alpena said it is also beefing up training in online delivery methods, Superintendent David Rabbideau said.

“We say, ‘I can’t wait to get back to normal,’ but there are some things we don’t necessarily want to go back to, like the idea that education has to be the way it was before — six hours a day sitting in a seat in a classroom,” he said. “We learned that while a lot of people struggled with remote learning there were a lot of people that were very successful.”

Kyla Lasi gives a thumbs up after sampling the ice cream her summer school class made at Traverse Heights Elementary School in Traverse City.

In Traverse City, summer learning that doesn’t feel like school

Madeline Ross adjusted her wide-brimmed hat and peered through the white veil covering her face. This isn’t her usual teaching attire, but this isn’t usual summer school in Traverse City, either.

“We’ve never really had the funds to have a robust elementary school summer program. We’re doing a lot more than we ever have,” Superintendent John VanWagoner said.

That’s thanks to $14.9 million in COVID relief funds, or about $1,655 for each of the district’s 9,000 students.

“I don’t think I ever told you about my pets. I have ten thousand of them,” Ross, a first-year teacher who lives on a farm told a summer school student at Traverse Heights Elementary.

“Bees!” shouted a few students who recognized her beekeeping attire and noticed the hive smoker, jar of honeycomb and diagrams of drones laid out on a table.

“How do you think bees help me on my farm?” she asked.

Nine-year-old Kyla Lasi’s hand shot up. “They pollinate,” she said.

The lesson was part of the week’s focus on Michigan agriculture that also included a visit from Grand Traverse Land Conservancy and a chance to make homemade ice cream.

“I thought about designing a perfect program. It had to be engaging and feel so different than what students typically experience that they can’t wait to come. And then we’re going to sneak in some reading and math, and they’re not even going to realize they’re learning,” said Kirsten Morgan, summer school coordinator and principal at Blair Elementary School. “We’re watching kids learn in an authentic, joyful way.”

Teacher Madeline Ross shows students beekeeping equipment during a summer school class on Michigan agriculture at Traverse Heights Elementary School in Traverse City.

Traverse City is a wealthy district with pockets of poverty, said Morgan, who tried to pull as many children as she could out of those pockets and into summer school classrooms.

“What we experienced across our district is that the divide got even more pronounced during the pandemic. It got even wider,” as students – particularly those in high school – spent big portions of the school year learning online, she said.

“My deep fear is that if we don’t use these months in summer effectively there will be a generational impact for kids that aren’t able to hop right back on the treadmill and keep rolling,” she said. “A lot of our kids are going to be just fine but there is a population of students that are more profoundly impacted.”

Those are the students COVID-relief funds are meant to help.

Traverse City students spent the year moving back and forth between in-person and virtual learning as conditions of the pandemic changed. It was stressful but most teachers soon became adept at pivoting between the two or sometimes using both simultaneously.

The pandemic forced teachers and students to make changes that otherwise would have taken years to adapt to, and now VanWagoner wants to build on that by investing in technology, professional development, and online learning management systems.

The flexibility allows students to transition seamlessly between online and in-person learning, he said. That’s important, not just during the uncertainty of a pandemic, but at other times when students might have to miss school.

“Parents are going to expect us to create these flexible systems for learning,” he said.

Niles students received new Chromebooks and reading and math supports

Videos loaded slowly. Programs crashed. The screen sometimes froze. Finally, the battery on his school-issued laptop stopped holding a charge.

“Then I just couldn’t do anything so I stopped trying,” said De’Mauri Dotson, 12. “Last year is the only year I did bad. I just couldn’t do it.”

De’Mauri’s mother, Kristy Pratt, knew he was struggling last year but was determined to keep him safe from COVID-19 so she kept him home. He enrolled in Niles Community School District’s fully online Virtual Viking program.

“I don’t think he really learned last year, and he’s a fast and great learner. It’s like last school year didn’t exist, but I have no doubt he’s going to catch up,” Pratt said.

Teacher Adam Roark helps De’Mauri Dotson, 12, on his Chromebook during a summer school lesson. Students were studying planets and creating plans to colonize Mars.

About 20 percent of the district’s 3,400 students attended virtual school for at least half the year.

Federally funded in-person summer school is intended to help students like De’Mauri catch up. So are the 1,400 new Chromebooks the district bought with COVID relief funds. For the first time, every student in the district will have their own computer, and they’ll all work, too.

The district is scrapping its oldest laptops — some more than seven years old.

“They probably really had reached their end of life two or three years ago,” said district computer technician Dan Napier, who somehow managed to keep them mostly functional through last school year.

Eighth-grader Shayla Peppers got to try her new Chromebook during summer school at Ring Lardner Middle School.

“It’s a lot faster” than the computer she was issued last year, she said. “The mouse actually moves.”

The Chromebooks aren’t just for virtual learners, though the district will continue to offer remote options for families who want it. Students will use the Chromebooks in classrooms, too.

“When we purchase curriculum materials we always get both print and digital resources,” said Ann Bingham, director of curriculum, instruction and assessment. “Forever we’ve had these digital materials but nobody used them,” she said. “How could they? They didn’t have” enough computers, she said.

District computer technicians Rob Schuster left, and Dan Napier work in an art room in Niles High School to prepare hundreds of new laptop computers for distribution to students.

Technology alone won’t erase the effects of the pandemic. That’s why the district is investing a lot of its $11 million in COVID-relief funds — $3,200 per student — in professional development, tutoring, reading and math interventionists, behavior specialists, and summer school.

“We have more summer programming now than we ever have. We joked in central office that we were like Oprah giving away summer programs. ‘You get a summer program! You get a summer program! You get a summer program!’” Bingham said.

Children who weren’t able to attend got regular visits from “book fairies,” teachers who hand-selected books that would challenge young readers without frustrating them.

That seems to be a districtwide theme as teachers target lessons to individual needs of students who spend time each day in flexible learning pods where they can catch up on specific math or reading skills they lack.

“We know even the kids who were learning in person all year are going to need intervention,” Superintendent Dan Applegate said. “Our goal is to make sure we have interventions in place for the next two or three years,” he said. “It’s not going to be a one-year fix.”

As schools hire teachers and counselors, a funding cliff looms

2021-08-06T16:09:58+00:00

The schools of Greeley, Colorado are in the midst of a hiring spree.

The 27-school district, about an hour north of Denver, plans to hire 12 social workers, eight counselors, seven attendance monitors, another seven credit recovery specialists, five health aides, three nurses — plus 46 teachers.

The spending, and similar hires in school districts across the country, are being made possible by unprecedented sums of federal coronavirus relief money. But those dollars can only be used for the next few years. Unless lawmakers increase funding over the long term, districts will face a steep “funding cliff.”

That has experts and school officials debating how to balance what students need now with their balance sheets down the line — and whether it’s responsible to use relief money to add large numbers of staff.

“When we ask CFOs what they’re worried about, they immediately go to: the money isn’t reoccurring,” said Marguerite Roza, who runs Edunomics Lab, an education finance think tank. Hiring counselors and teachers now, she said, means districts could be “stuck going through very painful layoffs in two years.”

On the other hand, many educators and families are clamoring for additional academic and mental health support after more than a year of disrupted school, and research suggests that these investments could help. If this isn’t the time to hire people, they’re asking, when is?

“Our kids need people,” said David Simpson, a middle school principal in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “Our kids need the resources now.”

Schools are adding teachers, counselors, and social workers

Greeley is not alone. New York City is hiring teachers to reduce class sizes or add co-teachers in more than 70 schools, plus hiring 500 social workers. Schools will get additional money they can use to add staffers, too.

“Now, they will have money to hire new teachers, art, music, gym, you name it,” said City Councilman Mark Treyger.

Detroit is planning to add enough teachers to substantially reduce class sizes. Chicago is hiring dozens of counselors to shrink large caseloads in many schools.

In Grand Rapids, Simpson’s middle school is bringing on another counselor, a coach to support students still learning remotely, a literacy adviser, and an additional language arts teacher to reduce class sizes. With two full-time counselors, one will be able to focus on academics while the other pays special attention to students’ social development and mental health.

“Having the dollars,” he said, “allowed us to reimagine what that counseling role could look like.”

Districts that are hiring say they’re trying to do so carefully by hiring some contract staff or planning not to fill future vacancies.

“We’re asking them to think ahead,” Boston superintendent Brenda Cassellius said of schools in her district planning to add staff. “If this is a priority right now and it’s not a one-time cost, how do you want to sustain this position?” If the position is temporary, she said, schools should be transparent about that with families and staff.

It’s not clear yet how many roles are being added nationwide. Only a handful of 100 large districts’ spending plans emphasized reducing class sizes, according to a review by the Center on Reinventing Public Education, though many more mentioned adding additional mental health and academic support.

Some districts have gone the opposite way, saying they don’t plan to use the new money to hire many new staff because of funding cliff concerns. Aleesia Johnson, the head of Indianapolis Public Schools, said recently that the district is focused on training existing educators, not adding new ones.

“There are 10 additional days in our calendar this year specifically for teacher development,” she said. “If our teachers feel prepared and better supported ... then we’ll see the outcomes in the instruction.”

Why staffing is still such an appealing option for schools

As the new school year approaches, students will enter with academic gaps and greater mental health challenges. Some students haven’t been inside a school building for a year and a half. Adding teachers, counselors, and other staff seems like one way to make sure schools can help students navigate the years ahead.

“An overall sense of safety and wellness and connection to school is going to be our number one priority as we come back,” said Susan Arvidson, a lead counselor at the Saint Paul Public Schools in Minnesota, which is adding nine counselors to its previous 150. “All of these students have been a bit lost.”

It’s possible to avoid hiring by paying existing staff more to take on additional responsibilities, like summer school or afterschool programs. That’s happening in many places, but some schools have found teachers reluctant to take on extra work, even for additional pay after such a stressful year and a half.

Adding staff can also be the path of least political resistance. Smaller classes are popular with teachers and parents, while many families are not enthusiastic about alternatives like longer school days. Local unions, which are often politically influential, tend to support more hiring, which adds to their membership rolls.

Regardless, research suggests that students do benefit from additional staff in schools. Having more counselors has been found to reduce student misbehavior and boost college enrollment. Teaching assistants appear to improve test scores. Students tend to learn more in smaller classes, according to a number of studies, although the size of these gains varies.

Research on non-teaching roles remains fairly limited, said Richard Welsh, an education professor at NYU, but is promising. “From what we do have, it tells us that this might not be a bad investment,” he said.

But questions remain about cost effectiveness and the funding cliff

Some are still wary. Roza of Edunomics has criticized the increases in staff in schools over the last several decades as a mistaken use of scarce resources.

“Long-term, I worry about it as a strategy,” she said. “It’s the strategy that we’ve tried for 20 or 30 years — when you have a need, you hire some more people.”

She argues that it would be better for schools to extend the school day or pay existing teachers more to take on additional students, citing a study that projects that test scores would rise if more effective teachers were assigned larger classes.

There is little definitive evidence that those alternative strategies are more cost effective, but there are potential downsides to quickly adding staff. Studies of class size reduction have found that a hiring binge can mean bringing on less experienced or less effective teachers.

This concern may be particularly acute now, during a broader labor shortage. It’s even possible that schools won’t be able to hire all the new staff they want.

In Greeley, schools have hired nine of their hoped-for 12 social workers, but they’re having trouble filling the remaining jobs. School starts next week.

“Social workers are very much in demand right now,” said Theresa Myers, the district spokesperson. “Everybody is scrambling to hire these same positions.”

As many schools move ahead with hiring, the funding cliff looms. The last federal relief money must be spent by early 2025.

It’s also true that such a steep cliff is not inevitable. The future of President Biden’s proposal to more than double Title I funding remains uncertain. If it becomes reality, districts serving students from low-income families could get another big boost, shrinking the funding cliff.

Some say the onus shouldn’t be on local schools to avoid hiring, but on policymakers to provide more sustained funding for schools.

“We’re constantly hoping that our state will come through with additional resources for us,” said Myers. “We’ll see where we are in three years.”

Aaricka Washington contributed reporting.

A Bronx principal turned congressman unveils ambitious Green New Deal for nation’s schools

2021-07-15T21:19:12+00:00

New York City Democratic Congressman and former principal Jamaal Bowman returned to his public school roots in the Bronx on Thursday to unveil a pricey federal proposal that would help construct energy-efficient schools, hire more staff and create more culturally responsive curricula.

The $1.43 trillion package would create hundreds of billions of dollars in grants over 10 years that districts could use to do “green retrofits” of buildings — such as installing solar panels and getting rid of toxic substances — for the nation’s top third of highest-need schools, as measured by socioeconomic indicators. Other schools could also qualify for partial grants and low- or no-interest loans, according to a news release about the bill.

“Schools, as the heartbeat of our communities, can be the epicenter of clean, green, renewable sustainable energy, not only for themselves but for the extended, larger community,” Bowman, who aligns with a group of the most progressive federal Democratic lawmakers, told reporters outside of Sousa Junior High School in the Bronx.

Bowman’s package is meant to address “environmental justice, economic justice, and racial justice” by sending more resources to the highest needs schools, as well as teaching children about systemic problems. He said he wants students to understand the history of redlining, which blocked people of color from getting loans to buy property in certain neighborhoods, and why school buildings in low-income communities tend to be in more disrepair than those in more affluent neighborhoods.

Improving school buildings is a perennial issue, but it gained renewed attention during the pandemic when many districts scrambled to repair their ventilation systems as a way to protect against coronavirus transmission. In New York City, officials raced to fix faulty ventilation systems at buildings before they reopened for students this past year.

Recent research has found that upgrading school facilities results in better student performance.

Bowman is hoping that his proposal, dubbed the Green New Deal for Public Schools, will be included in a broader infrastructure plan as the White House negotiates a new budget. With 22 co-sponsors and a price tag exceeding $1 trillion, it is an ambitious measure introduced by the freshman congressman. Bowman, who was the founding principal of Cornerstone Academy for Social Action in the Bronx before he ran for public office, gave a shout out to his Bronx and Queens colleague, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who co-penned two years ago the Green New Deal, a resolution that maps out a larger plan to combat climate change.

Bowman noted long-standing building issues he experienced in his two decades as an educator and has heard about across the country, such as schools with non-operable or lead-laced drinking fountains and faulty ventilation or HVAC systems, as well as rodent-infested schools. He blamed those problems on “the historic neglect of resources that have not come from our federal government.”

New York City, which is home to the nation’s largest school system, has taken some steps to build greener school infrastructure, including a recent commitment toward a fully electric bus fleet by 2035. In February, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the city would install solar panels on top of 47 public schools. The city’s roughly 1,600 schools that house nearly 1 million students contribute to one-third of the carbon emissions released by all city buildings, officials have said.

Bowman’s bill would allocate federal funds that would help the city do much more, according to Chancellor Meisha Porter.

“There’s no doubt that the new Green Deal for Public Schools will help New York City and districts across the country and will continue to ensure that New York City and New York City public schools chart the path forward for this nation to strengthen academics, build greener schools and combat climate change,” Porter said.

Major sections of the bill go beyond energy efficiency. Another $250 billion in block grants would go toward hiring more staff at high-need schools, which districts could use to hire and train more teachers, paraprofessionals, school psychologists, and counselors. This pot of money could also be used to design curriculum that’s “trauma-informed, culturally responsive, and restorative justice practices,” as well as to partner with community organizations who can offer more services to schools, such as after-school programming, according to a news release.

The city has taken some steps in this regard, as well. Officials recently announced a $200 million plan to bring culturally responsive English and math curriculum to all schools by the fall of 2023. (Schools would be required to use the curriculum unless they get a waiver to use existing courses of study.)

The largest chunk of Bowman’s bill — nearly $700 billion — would go toward boosting Title 1 funding, which goes toward schools with high shares of students in poverty, and toward services for students with disabilities.

The bill’s impact on saving energy could be significant for New York City, if passed, said Jeff Vockrodt, executive Director of Climate Jobs New York, a coalition of city labor unions advocating for more climate-friendly infrastructure. The city could save $70 million in energy costs annually if energy efficiency was improved by just 25% across all schools, according to a campaign the group launched to push for clean-energy schools. The organization recently wrote a letter highlighting their findings to New York’s federal leaders, urging them to build greener schools.

“Just here in New York City, we can have the impact of the equivalent of planting 400,000 trees — that impact on emissions,” Vockrodt said during Bowman’s press conference. “We can create thousands of good union jobs [and] we can address a lot of long-standing facilities issues in schools.”

‘Urgent as it ever has been’: Biden pick says she’ll rebuild civil rights office at critical time

2021-07-13T22:33:28+00:00

Catherine Lhamon, the nominee to lead the federal education department’s Office for Civil Rights, told lawmakers Tuesday that she would push to protect transgender students, reinstate Obama-era guidance around student discipline, and monitor the post-pandemic recovery of students with disabilities and students of color.

Lhamon laid out her vision for the Office for Civil Rights, also known as OCR, in a tense confirmation hearing. The work of enforcing the nation’s civil rights laws in schools, she said, holds “particular importance” as the country tries to move past the pandemic.

“OCR’s work now is as urgent as it ever has been,” said Lhamon, who also held the assistant secretary position for three and a half years during the Obama administration.

If confirmed, Lhamon would take over an office whose work shifted notably under President Trump. Former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos rescinded several guidance documents that Lhamon helped to issue — notably around student discipline and the rights of transgender students — and under DeVos’ leadership, the civil rights office limited its investigations into allegations of discrimination at schools. Disorganization within the office during the Trump years left staff unable to do their jobs properly, some staff have said.

Lhamon said she would return to a more “even-handed enforcement” approach and would work to rebuild the office, so that “we can expect civil rights enforcement to be real and lived for students in schools.”

Here’s a look at some of the big civil rights issues senators raised, and how Lhamon said she would approach them.

The rights of transgender students

Several senators raised questions Tuesday about whether transgender students should be allowed to participate or compete in sports teams that correspond with their gender identity. The issue has gained prominence in recent months as several states have moved to ban transgender girls and young women from participating in women’s sports.

The Biden administration has said that LGBTQ+ students are protected from discrimination based on their sexual orientation and gender at school, which extends to sports and after-school clubs. How the office for civil rights plans to enforce those rights will be a key question for the incoming assistant secretary.

When asked whether she thought transgender girls should be allowed to compete on women’s teams, Lhamon said she would apply the right to protection from sex discrimination to all students. She also pointed to a case she worked on during the Obama administration in which a student who used a wheelchair was told he could be on a track team, but his times wouldn’t count. The resolution she helped reach, she said, allowed the student to compete as a full member of the team.

“I would want to bring that lens to the work in any athletics context so that we’re finding a way not to discriminate against a student who is unusual, not to discriminate against a student who wants to be on the team,” she said.

Students with disabilities

Most civil rights complaints in education center around students with disabilities, and Lhamon said that work would be a priority. Investigations will depend on the kinds of complaints the office receives, Lhamon said, but she said she would seek to address the unlawful restraint and seclusion of students, who often have disabilities.

The use of those techniques has come under new scrutiny after investigations in several states, including Illinois, Colorado, and Virginia found many instances in which students were improperly held down or isolated. Lhamon recalled a case she worked on in which a mother could hear the screams of her 9-year-old child, who was being restrained, while she was driving up to the school.

“That child may never recover from the harm that the school visited on the child, and the child could have died,” Lhamon said. “Those kinds of circumstances are ones I hope never to see repeated.”

Lhamon also suggested there should be “appropriate civil rights guardrails in place” for students with disabilities who continue to learn virtually and that it’s crucial for the office to be collecting data about how students with disabilities, English learners, and students of color are doing in the wake of the pandemic.

“Priorities for me are to know what kinds of opportunities are available to whom,” she said.

Student discipline

A key piece of Lhamon’s legacy from her time leading the office under Obama is the guidance she signed that encouraged schools to reduce suspensions and expulsions for students of color. She made clear on Tuesday that she wants that guidance back in place.

“I think it’s crucial to reinstate guidance on the topic, and I think it’s crucial to be clear with school communities about what the civil rights obligations are,” she said.

If confirmed, Lhamon would likely be involved in drafting any new guidance and would have to navigate calls to change or expand its reach. Some civil rights groups, for example, have asked the Biden administration to place stricter limits on school police, given how Black and Native students, especially, have been disproportionately arrested at school.

School integration

So far, the Biden administration has signaled a willingness to make school desegregation a part of the federal education agenda, most notably through a $100 million proposal to fund the work of districts that want to make their schools more racially or economically diverse.

But how involved the office for civil rights will be in enforcing school desegregation orders, or preventing districts from taking actions that would further entrench segregation in their schools, remains an open question.

In her opening statement, Lhamon noted that her mother attended racially segregated schools in Virginia both before and after Brown v. Board of Education was decided, and that one of the civil rights lawyers who argued the case, Oliver Hill, often drove her mother to school with his son. That experience, Lhamon said, informs her civil rights work. But she didn’t offer many details about how she plans to lead the department on this issue.

When asked what role the federal government should play in integrating schools, Lhamon said she thought it was “crucial” that students are given an opportunity to learn in “environments that reflect the world” and that she was eager to oversee the federal magnet schools program, which often funds schools meant to attract students from different racial and economic backgrounds.

De Blasio keeps mask rules for New York City schools despite CDC changes

2021-07-12T19:39:26+00:00

New York City schools will stick with universal masking for now, despite new federal guidance that OKs ditching face coverings for vaccinated students and teachers, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Monday.

Under new guidance released last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention no longer recommends that staff and students who are vaccinated wear masks inside of schools.

The guidance also continues to recommend maintaining at least three feet of distance between people inside of buildings. However, social distancing should not get in the way of fully reopening buildings to every student, the agency said. If students and staff cannot be distanced, schools should take additional precautions, such as indoor masking.

Mayor Bill de Blasio indicated that masking could go away in the fall, but for now schools will stick with face coverings.

“I’m absolutely confident based on this guidance and everything else we’ve seen that we’ll be able to get all our kids back into school in September, but for now [we’re] sticking with the idea that, you know, wearing the masks is a smart thing to do in schools,” de Blasio told reporters. “We’ll keep assessing as we go along, but I think for now it still makes sense.”

Dave Chokshi, the city’s health commissioner, said the city is still reviewing the federal guidance and would be “coming out with additional information for parents and students in the weeks ahead.”

He also said: “What I will say is that the CDC guidance mirrors the layered approach to prevention of COVID-19 that has worked in our schools thus far. And the key in that layered approach is to use all the tools that we have in our toolbox.”

That layered approach this past year also included a focus on ventilation, health screeners or temperature checks before students entered buildings and COVID testing of students and staff.

Principals are eagerly awaiting whether schools will get rid of social distancing since that will determine many staffing needs. If social distancing requirements remain, department officials have said that roughly 10% of schools may need to find space elsewhere for students — such as auditoriums, gyms, or even in centers run by community organizations — in order to fit everyone.

So far, 10% of children ages 0-17 in New York City are fully vaccinated, according to city health data. Children under the age of 12 are still not authorized to receive coronavirus vaccines. However, vaccinations may become available for children as young as 6 months old by the fall, which could factor into how schools approach protective measures for coronavirus.

The city’s coronavirus positivity rate has been on a slight rise since at least the end of June, when it was about 0.6%. The positivity rate was an average 1.27% over the past seven days, de Blasio said Monday.

Correction: A previous version of this story said 10% of children ages 12-17 are fully vaccinated. In fact, that percentage is for all children ages 17 and younger.

Behind the scenes, civil rights groups urge Biden administration to place limits on school police

2021-06-29T11:00:00+00:00

A few months ago, four top federal education officials got an internal memo from a prominent civil rights group, The Education Trust, offering a roadmap for shrinking the role of police in schools.

The document lays out a vision for a shift in civil rights enforcement, complete with a candid accounting of potential pitfalls. Most notably, it calls on the Biden administration to warn that the presence of police in certain schools, and police involvement in routine discipline, could violate students’ civil rights.

“The Biden administration must counter this dangerous narrative that more police, weapons, and surveillance in schools will help keep schools safe if it wishes to make true improvements to school climate nationwide,” it said.

The memo offers a window into the pressures the Biden administration is already facing on an issue that has roiled many school districts since George Floyd’s murder — what role, if any, police should play in schools. Federal education officials have signaled that they plan to examine the department’s guidance on discipline and police in schools. Civil rights groups are preparing to weigh in, though any changes to school policing are likely to be met with intense pushback.

The Biden administration “might shy away from it, because it is a hot-button issue,” said Dan Losen of UCLA’s The Civil Rights Project, referring to school policing. “But I think it’s a serious issue. The time has come. It’s overdue. It would be hard for them to be totally silent on it.”

A spokesperson for the department did not respond to questions about the memo, including whether education officials have relied on it. Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Education asked for feedback from the public about school discipline and discrimination, including how students interact with school police.

“What we’ve heard thus far from the Department of Education has been very encouraging,” said The Education Trust’s Courtney Bollig. “It’s clear that they understand the importance and the urgency of this issue.”

The federal government’s role in school discipline has been a live issue since 2014, when the Obama administration released guidance pushing schools to avoid suspensions and expulsions. When students of color received a disproportionate share of such punishment, officials warned, that could violate civil rights law. The guidance also encouraged school districts to develop formal written agreements with police that spell out officers’ roles.

There is some dispute about how much of a difference the guidance actually made, with one survey finding that few district leaders changed their policies in response.

Regardless, in late 2018 the Trump administration revoked it, arguing that it had made schools less safe. Officials at the time connected the guidance to the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, though there was little if any evidence to support the tie.

Biden has promised to step up civil rights enforcement, and his education department’s call for public comment is seen as a precursor of potential policy change, including new guidance. (Biden’s nominee to lead the department’s Office for Civil Rights, Catherine Lhamon, helped issue the 2014 guidance when she served in the same role under Obama.)

“We know that students of color are often disproportionately impacted by disciplinary actions,” a Department of Education spokesperson said. “That is why the Department is working to engage a variety of stakeholders on this issue to ensure all students feel safe at their schools.”

Some civil rights groups say reducing the presence of police in schools must be part of that agenda. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, a number of school districts weighed scrapping school police — a number ultimately did, while many others kept them.

“What we hope to see specifically around policing in the new guidance is a clear statement that school policing is harmful to students,” said Katherine Dunn, a program director at Advancement Project, a nonprofit that has advocated to remove police from schools. “This guidance needs to signal to districts that they need to end the use of policing.”

The memo to department officials — created by The Education Trust and the nonprofit National Women’s Law Center — makes a similar case, though it doesn’t go as far as stating that police should be removed completely from schools.

Instead, the groups say the federal government should discourage police from routinely interacting with students, and discourage schools from putting police in schools that serve higher numbers of students of color, especially Black and Native American students. They want federal education officials to say those actions could constitute a federal civil rights violation.

The memo, obtained by Chalkbeat through a public records request, was sent to four department officials, including Ian Rosenblum, who used to lead The Education Trust’s New York chapter.

Realizing these civil rights’ groups goals won’t be easy, though, especially because some school officials, teachers, and students are skeptical about limiting police in schools.

Surveys have found that many students feel safer with police present, but Black students are much less likely than other students to feel this way. Research shows that police officers in schools generally lead to more suspensions and arrests, particularly for students of color, and in some cases, declines in academic performance. But some research, including a recent North Carolina paper, has found that police reduce serious violence in schools.

“There’s one thing everyone seems to agree on,” said Lucy Sorensen, author of the North Carolina study and a professor at the University at Albany. “It’s not good for [police] to be getting involved in minor disciplinary matters.”

While Education Secretary Miguel Cardona has pushed to reduce suspensions and expulsions for students of color, it’s unclear if he would support sweeping efforts to remove police from schools.

“When trained well, when working in partnership with the school to be proactive and a support for students, it’s a positive thing,” he said in May. “I’ve seen models where it works exceptionally well, where it even provides a pathway for students to look at themselves as potential law enforcement officers.”

In Philadelphia, 18-year-old Sheyla Street has had police officers stationed in her schools since she was in fifth grade. Alongside other Black students, she helped lead efforts to reform discipline in her school and citywide.

She’s seen a range of officers: Some have made efforts to connect with students, while others were intimidating. She remembers watching a police officer bang handcuffs on the desk in front of her sixth-grade class when he was looking into a cyberbullying incident — “That was aggressive,” she said — and as a high schooler, a police officer checked her bag each morning as she went through a metal detector at the school’s entrance.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a great way to start your morning off,” she said. “It seems unnecessary.” She’d like to see the federal government push schools to redirect money spent on school police to counselors and mental health support for students.

Other powerful groups may oppose efforts to curtail school police, the memo acknowledges. While national teachers unions have expressed support for school discipline reforms in the past, local unions have sometimes opposed them or protested plans to cut ties with police. The memo also points to AASA, the school superintendents’ association, as a potential opponent.

“They’re correct in saying that we don’t support additional federal guidance,” said Sasha Pudelski, AASA’s advocacy director. “I would have thought that the civil rights community would have seen that the previous guidance did not have much of an impact and not be so invested in having another set of guidance.”

Perhaps a bigger hurdle will be conservatives, many of whom have already rallied against campaigns to “defund the police” at a national level. The issue could be even more fraught now, as a backlash to efforts to address racism in schools continues to gain steam.

“We should be pretty worried about this fall,” said Michael Petrilli, president of the Fordham Institute, a conservative education think tank. “You’ve got all these kids who have been traumatized. Some kids are going to externalize that behavior — they’re going to act out when they get back to school.” More counselors could help, he said, but even still, limits on school police could disrupt school or endanger students and staff.

Others counter that police should not be the ones dealing with student trauma due to the pandemic.

“It’s important to not just talk about taking police out of schools, but also what are we replacing them with?” said Adaku Onyeka-Crawford, director of educational equity at National Women’s Law Center. “How are we adding more adults in the building who are trained to meet the needs of students — replacing the school-based police officer with a nurse, with a counselor, with a mental health professional.”

‘Be very careful’: Cardona expresses concerns about virtual learning next fall

2021-06-25T00:00:00+00:00

As he continues his push to reopen schools, Education Secretary Miguel Cardona says he is concerned about the students who will choose to learn virtually next year — and about schools using that option for students who would benefit from more hands-on help.

“My fear is that the students that need the in-person the most would be students who would either select or take the fully remote option and not get the supports that they need,” he said during an event hosted by Chalkbeat and The Education Trust. “I would also fear systems that have students who do not fit the traditional mold of how schools are designed being pushed out.”

Cardona said he trusts local officials to make decisions for their communities, and understands that some students thrive in remote settings. But his comments underscore the tensions over who will have the option to learn fully virtually in the fall and which families are more likely to choose that kind of instruction.

While some cities and states are rolling back virtual options, many big districts have said they will continue to offer them, in part due to family demand.

National polls continue to show that Black and Latino families are the most hesitant about sending their children back for full-time in-person learning this fall, and are more likely to consider sticking with remote learning. Asian, Black, and Latino students were the most likely to be learning fully virtually as of April, even as in-person instruction became available in nearly all U.S. schools.

The reasons for that are complicated, but polls have found much of parents’ hesitancy is tied to health and safety concerns. COVID vaccines aren’t expected to be available for younger children until later this year at the earliest, and some parents may want a virtual option until then.

The toll of virtual learning has been well documented, and helps explain why officials like Cardona are worried about the continuation of remote instruction. While some students did well in the virtual setup, many students did not, especially those who had struggled before the pandemic.

Across the country, course failure rates were especially high for Black and Latino students, English learners, and students from low-income families. Students with disabilities and English learners learning fully remotely have had among the lowest school attendance rates nationally. Many students have struggled with the social isolation that can come with attending school online, while others were unable to get critical special education support while school was virtual.

In recognition of that, several school districts and states, including New York City, New Jersey, and Illinois, are planning to nix nearly all virtual options this fall in hopes of getting more students back into school buildings and boosting student engagement.

Meanwhile, others planning to offer a full-time virtual option say they’re working to improve that experience. Many will assign students dedicated virtual teachers so educators’ attention isn’t split between a classroom and a screen.

Some education groups are advocating to keep virtual options as a way to provide students with access to additional academic courses or more flexible schedules. Such innovative virtual approaches could benefit some, Cardona said, but full-time in-person learning should be the “default.”

His continued concern, he said, is that some schools might push students who have learning difficulties or emotional needs to virtual options, and that students may choose virtual options because their schools haven’t done enough to address parents’ other worries. Federal education officials have noted in recent reports that Black students historically have been suspended and expelled from school at disproportionate rates, while Asian students have faced an uptick in harassment and bullying during the pandemic.

“I think we’d have to be very careful not to create a system where some students are learning in the schoolhouse and some students that maybe didn’t find the schoolhouse a place where they felt welcome feel that they’re better off not learning in the school,” Cardona said. “That would be detrimental.”

Cardona: I trust teachers to handle history ‘we’re not proud of’

2021-06-25T00:00:51+00:00

Peppered with questions Thursday about whether he supports “critical race theory,” Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said that his department will leave curriculum decisions to state and local officials.

“It’s important that I reiterate at every opportunity I have that the federal government doesn’t get involved in curriculum,” he said during a hearing before the House education committee Thursday.

But he didn’t completely sidestep the issue of how racism should figure into classroom discussions, a question that has engulfed state legislatures and local school boards across the country over the last few months.

Cardona said he trusts educators to do their jobs, including teaching about the progress the country has made combatting racism. “But I think we can do that while also being honest about some of the things we’re not proud of,” he said. “Our educators across the country, I don’t think it’s an issue with them.”

And in an interview that aired Thursday evening, Cardona offered a stronger rebuke of restrictions on what can be taught in classrooms. “I don’t think we should be in the business of excluding what students are discussing or what they’re seeing for fear they can’t handle it,” he said during an event hosted by Chalkbeat and The Education Trust. “I think they can handle it and I think we can become stronger as a nation if we do it well.”

Just months ago, critical race theory was known only as a line of academic thought that argued that racism is deeply embedded in American society.

The phrase was catapulted from obscurity by the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, who claimed that critical race theory had infiltrated the federal government and public schools. At Rufo’s urging, President Trump issued an executive order barring the concept in federal agencies. (Biden quickly rescinded it.) In the telling of critics like Rufo, critical race theory and ideas associated with it overstate the degree of racism in American society and encourage judging individuals based on their race.

Rufo and others in conservative media — as well as the experience of some parents in their local schools — have helped galvanize a far-reaching backlash to a host of efforts to address racism in schools and acknowledge racism in American history. The Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, recently released a toolkit for parents to combat “woke schooling.”

Those concepts include trainings that focus on white privilege or “white supremacy culture”; books for English class that emphasize racism; and the 1619 Project, a series of essays in the New York Times that recast the country’s founding as shaped by slavery and was adapted into curriculum materials for interested schools.

“It’s wrong,” said Alicia Geerlings, a parent in the suburban Philadelphia district Tredyffrin-Easttown, which was recently embroiled in debate over its equity initiative. “If you have somebody in kindergarten that learns you’re the oppressor or the oppressed based on your skin color, how are they going to make friends?”

That backlash animated many of the Republican representatives Thursday. “Are you aware of outcry and frustration right now among parents with the state of education in America?” asked Georgia Rep. Rick Allen.

Supporters counter that efforts like these are needed to address the racism that does exist in schools. “Before you adopted this amazing program … my children were called the N-word every day,” said another Tredyffrin-Easttown parent, Anita Friday. “There were scars they continue to experience.”

Others say the ideas have been misrepresented and amount to a manufactured backlash to efforts to treat people of color equally. “This is a post-George Floyd backlash,” Kimberlé Crenshaw, a law professor who helped develop critical race theory, told The New Yorker. “The reason why we’re having this conversation is that the line of scrimmage has moved.”

Nevertheless, a number of red-state legislatures have swiftly responded. Idaho, for instance, barred schools from requiring students to agree “that any sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, or national origin is inherently superior or inferior” or that individuals are “inherently responsible for actions committed in the past by other members” of the same demographic group.

The Tennessee legislature went further. It banned a dozen concepts from the classroom, including the idea that “an individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual’s race or sex.” Oklahoma passed a similar bill.

Even some conservatives have raised concerns about these laws. “The business of defining, implementing, and policing a list of prohibited ideas gets troubling real fast,” wrote Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, referring to the Oklahoma legislation. “It’s inevitable that middle and high schoolers may experience race- or sex-related distress when talking about Jim Crow, the Holocaust, Korematsu, or Roe.”

Cardona’s emphasis on local control suggests that he will try to steer clear of this controversy, and he has rarely if ever brought up the issue unprompted. Plus, his department is barred by federal law from dictating what is taught in local schools. “My personal opinion on this is secondary to my role as secretary of education around curriculum, which is very limited,” Cardona said. “We don’t promote curriculum. We don’t mandate it.”

Avoiding the issue altogether proved impossible Thursday, though. The Department of Education already emerged as a lightning rod because it mentioned the 1619 Project, as well as Ibram X. Kendi, author of “How to Be an Antiracist,” in its stated priorities for a small program promoting history and civics education.

Cardona faced a number of questions about this inclusion, which he downplayed. “There was a very minor reference to an example that included that,” he said. He also suggested that such questions were political and amounted to a distraction from other work his department is undertaking.

The department will also have to sort through related federal civil rights issues. For instance, one anti–critical race theory group has filed civil rights complaints against a number of districts that have described themselves as systemically racist, saying they have essentially admitted to illegal discrimination. (This is likely intended to deter other districts from making similar acknowledgements.)

Meanwhile, Cardona has placed a major emphasis so far as education secretary on equity, with a particular focus on students from low-income families, LGTBQ students, and students of color.

Indeed, there remain large disparities in education outcomes and opportunity across American schools — and there is also evidence of outright discrimination. For instance, one recent study found that school principals were less likely to respond to an email from a parent they likely perceived as Black, compared to the same email from a white parent.

At the hearing, the conversation about “critical race theory” was dominated by Republicans who were generally critical of Cardona, claiming his department was promoting the concept. But one Democrat defended him — Connecticut Rep. Jahana Hayes, a former national teacher of the year.

“I’m a history teacher, I had to teach about the most painful parts of our history,” she said. “There are some things in our history that we just have to face head on.”

$100 million and many open questions: Here’s how Biden is approaching school integration

2021-06-22T15:50:24+00:00

For the last few years, the Dallas Independent School District has been trying to make some of its schools more economically diverse — and hearing from other districts curious about doing the same.

Its integration program reserves half of a school’s seats for students from low-income families, and the other half for middle- and higher-income students. And while just 14 of the district’s 230 schools are participating this fall, the ambitions are big in a highly segregated district: to create schools that are attractive both to families who already send their children to local public schools and those who might have otherwise bypassed them.

“There’s an appetite for more because we’ve got wait lists of families,” said Angie Gaylord, the Dallas school official overseeing the effort. “It’s been interesting to see so many districts coming to us to see the work.”

Now, President Biden wants to give more school districts money for similar initiatives. His federal budget proposal includes a $100 million grant program that would allow schools to apply for funds to make their schools more racially or economically diverse.

That’s a tiny slice of federal education dollars. But the program could represent a notable shift in federal education policy from indifference or even hostility to school integration to active support of it. If the proposal becomes reality, the Biden White House will arguably have done more to further school integration than either the Trump or the Obama administrations.

“Money helps to both pilot, start, and scale, and so let’s not sleep on that,” said Mohammed Choudhury, who worked on integration efforts in San Antonio and Dallas and will become the Maryland state schools superintendent next month.

At the same time, there is no indication that Biden or Education Secretary Miguel Cardona will make desegregating American schools a central priority — and there are plenty of powerful forces pushing in the opposite direction.

The pandemic strained school communities, and local officials may be particularly wary of any changes perceived as disruptive as they face steep enrollment declines. Legislatures currently banning the teaching of “critical race theory” in classrooms are unlikely to look kindly upon attempts to integrate schools that explicitly consider race. The federal judiciary has grown increasingly skeptical of those efforts, too.

When asked about his plans in a recent interview, Cardona pivoted to talk about factors outside of education policy that drive school segregation.

“We have to be part of the solution. And there are options within the schoolhouse or school systems to provide diversity,” he said. “But I also think we have to look at it more holistically and make sure we’re part of the conversation around how the environment where schools are located lack diversity, or lack the ability for people to move if they so choose to.”

America’s schools are highly segregated by race and family income. In 2018, 40% of Black students in the U.S. attended a public school where 90% or more of their peers were students of color. In 2019, the typical low-income student went to a school where two-thirds of their peers were also low-income, according to an analysis provided to Chalkbeat by University of Southern California researcher Ann Owens.

The halting — and even reversal — of progress toward racially integrating American schools came as courts eased up pressure on desegregation and limited schools’ ability to design their own integration programs.

In the 2007 case Parents Involved v. Seattle, the Supreme Court struck down district-created integration plans that considered students’ race in school assignments, ruling that such programs were discriminatory. “Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin,” wrote Chief Justice John Roberts. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Those legal and political challenges help explain the focus on programs like the integration grants, which advocates, lawmakers, and education department officials have been trying to get off the ground for years. Then-Secretary of Education John King launched a smaller $12 million grant program at the end of the Obama administration that Trump officials canceled a few months later. An expanded grant proposal, the Strength in Diversity Act, passed the House but stalled in the Senate last year, and hasn’t gone anywhere yet this term.

As the Biden administration put together its budget plan, it incorporated aspects of that bill. We “had been thinking about proposals that had bipartisan support, that were voluntary, that were state- and/or district-led and driven,” said Jessica Cardichon, deputy secretary at the Department of Education. “What is the appropriate federal role? Providing the resources to help support those efforts.”

Democrats, who narrowly control both houses of Congress, are optimistic the Biden program will survive the budget process, which wouldn’t require Republican support.

“We recognize there are serious consequences often associated with racial isolation in schools,” said acting assistant secretary for civil rights Suzanne Goldberg. “Schools with a significant or majority or entire populations of students who are Black and Brown tend to be lower-resourced schools.”

Crucially, that program could fund planning efforts — which are often complicated and politically difficult — and create more examples of successful integration strategies.

“Pushing integration high enough on the list can be a challenge, and when there are no resources to support that, it’s especially difficult,” said Halley Potter, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank that supports school integration work.

Some see this as a promising moment. As the pandemic recedes, school districts will have more time and space to consider changes. In the wake of George Floyd’s murder last year, many districts expressed a renewed interest in improving conditions for students of color, who have been found to benefit from integrated schools. Advocates say that momentum could still be harnessed, though it’s unclear whether backlash to racial equity efforts will impede that work.

“It’s hard to tell what direction this is headed in,” said Stefan Lallinger, who heads the Bridges Collaborative, a group of school districts, housing authorities, and other organizations working to advance school integration. “Do you think of the segregation that exists in your community as part and parcel of the broader racial injustice that exists ... or are you able to, in your mind, separate the fact that your child goes to a segregated school from that fact that you participated in a Black Lives Matter protest a month ago?”

In the last year, lawmakers in North Carolina and Massachusetts have proposed legislation to further school integration, and districts like Milwaukee have revived talks, too, noted Gina Chirichigno, the director of the The National Coalition on School Diversity.

“There has been a shift,” she said. “People are really thinking about the longer-term issues and seeing this as an opportunity to change some things.”

But the voluntary grant program would not prompt any changes in the many segregated communities where officials have no interest in volunteering. It will also likely be a hard sell to get districts to collaborate on integration — something critical to real progress, since most segregation occurs between schools in different districts.

Aside from the grant proposal, the Biden administration has said little else about school segregation or its plans to address it. (Biden himself has opposed federally mandated school desegregation efforts, which drew criticism during the campaign from Kamala Harris, his then rival and now vice president.) Education Secretary Cardona has rarely talked about the issue and he doesn’t plan to mention segregation at an “equity summit” Tuesday, according to prepared remarks.

Over the long term, the department’s Office for Civil Rights will play a key role in determining the Biden administration’s path forward. School integration advocates hope the office will actively enforce school desegregation orders that are still in effect and try to prevent districts from taking steps that would further entrench segregation in their schools. Many see President Biden’s pick to head the office, Catherine Lhamon — nominated last month and not yet confirmed — as an ally.

In the meantime, advocates for school integration say there is more the Biden administration could do beyond its $100 million plan.

One step, they say, would be to reissue the guidance scrapped by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos in 2018 about how school districts can legally consider students’ race in school assignment policies in the wake of the Parents Involved decision. (The decision limited, but did not bar completely, consideration of race.)

Kimberly Lane, who oversees magnet schools for Wake County schools in North Carolina, said that clarity would be welcome. “It’s a real challenge to try to figure out how to do the work in an environment that is legally acceptable and meets the needs of the students and the community,” she said. The district uses magnet schools to help reduce economic segregation. “As districts, we don’t know where the line is.”

For now, the Biden administration won’t say specifically whether it’s working to reinstate that guidance. “We are looking at all of the ways in which we can support schools in achieving racial diversity in their student bodies,” Goldberg said in response to a question about the guidance.

Another idea would be to tie school integration efforts into any new federal spending on education. Biden has proposed spending billions more on school infrastructure and pre-kindergarten, and some integration advocates say districts should be encouraged to build new schools in places that would lead to more diverse student bodies, for example.

“What I’m looking for is a proactive approach that puts integration at the forefront of the spending that is going to happen over the next couple of years,” Lallinger said, “so that we’re not then trying to dig ourselves out of a hole.”

Sarah Darville contributed reporting.