A company that makes tests for lead poisoning has agreed to resolve criminal charges that it concealed for years a malfunction that resulted in inaccurately low results.

It’s the latest in a long-running saga involving Massachusetts-based Magellan Diagnostics, which will , according to the Department of Justice.

While many of the fault-prone devices were used from 2013 to 2017, some were being recalled . The Justice Department said the malfunction produced inaccurate results for “potentially tens of thousands” of children and other patients.

Doctors don’t consider any level of lead in the blood to be safe, especially for children. Several U.S. cities, including Washington, D.C., and Flint, Michigan, have struggled with widespread lead contamination of their water supplies in the last two decades, making accurate tests critical for public health.

It’s possible faulty Magellan kits were used to test children for lead exposure into the early 2020s, based on the recall in 2021. Here’s what parents should know.

What tests were affected?

The inaccurate results came from three Magellan devices: LeadCare Ultra, LeadCare II, and LeadCare Plus. One, the LeadCare II, uses finger-stick samples primarily and accounted for more than half of all blood lead tests conducted in the U.S. from 2013 to 2017, according to the Justice Department. It was often used in physician offices to check children’s lead levels.

The other two could also be used with blood drawn from a vein and may have been more common in labs than doctor’s offices. The company “first learned that a malfunction in its LeadCare Ultra device could cause inaccurate lead test results – specifically, lead test results that were falsely low” in June 2013 while seeking regulatory clearance to sell the product, the DOJ said. But it did not disclose that information and went on to market the tests, according to the settlement.

The agency said 2013 testing indicated the same flaw affected the LeadCare II device. A 2021 recall included most of all three types of test kits distributed since October 27, 2020.

The company said in a  announcing the resolution that “the underlying issues that affected the results of some of Magellan’s products from 2013 to 2018 have been fully and effectively remediated,” and that the tests it currently sells are safe.

What does a falsely low result mean?

Children are often tested during pediatrician visits at age 1 and again at age 2. Elevated lead levels can put kids at risk of developmental delay, lower IQ, and other problems. And symptoms, such as stomachache, poor appetite, or irritability, may not appear until high levels are reached.

Falsely low test results could mean parents and physicians were unaware of the problem.

That’s a concern because treatment for lead poisoning is, initially, mainly preventive. Results showing elevated levels should prompt parents and health officials to determine the sources of lead and take steps to prevent continued lead intake, said Janine Kerr, health educator with the Virginia Department of Health’s .

Children can be exposed to lead in a variety of ways, including by drinking water contaminated with lead from old pipes, such as in Flint and Washington; ingesting lead-based paint flakes often found in older homes; or, as reported recently, eating some 

What should parents do now?

“Parents can contact their child’s pediatrician to determine if their child had a blood lead test with a LeadCare device” and discuss whether a repeat blood lead test is needed, said , a pediatrician and professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.

During an earlier recall of some Magellan devices, in 2017, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention  if they were pregnant, nursing, or children younger than 6 and had a blood lead level of less than 10 micrograms per deciliter as determined by a Magellan device from a venous blood draw.

The 2021 recall of Magellan devices recommended retesting children whose results were less than the current CDC reference level of 3.5 micrograms per deciliter. Many of those tests were of the finger-stick variety.

Kerr, at the Virginia health department, said her agency has not had many calls about that recall.

The finger-stick tests “are not that widely used in Virginia,” said Kerr, adding that “we did get a lot of questions about the applesauce recall.”

In any case, she said, the “best course of action for parents is to talk with a health care provider.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Virginia Mercury maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Samantha Willis for questions: info@virginiamercury.com. Follow Virginia Mercury on and .

Insufficient child care is costing North Carolina about $5.65 billion each year, from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation estimates.

The report, released in partnership with the and , looked at the ways a lack of child care access hurts the state’s economy. Employers lose $4.29 billion a year because of job disruptions and turnover related to child care, and the state loses another $1.36 billion in tax revenue, the report found.

“When we couple the immediate needs of employers with the long-term workforce projections in the state, we simply cannot afford to leave people on the sidelines — and that is where access to affordable, quality child care is so critical,” Meredith Archie, president of the NC Chamber Foundation, said at a news conference Wednesday.

Twenty-five percent of parents recently experienced a job disruption due to child care issues, based on a representative survey of 517 parents with children under 6 years old. Thirty-five percent of those parents reported leaving the workforce.

Fifteen percent of surveyed parents said they expected to leave their jobs in the following year, with 37% of those parents citing insufficient child care as the reason.

“It’s a top issue for our workforce,” said Gary Salamido, president and CEO of the NC Chamber, at the event Wednesday. “It’s a top issue for people. At the end of the day, we can get everything else right and be competitive, and we are, and we’re winning. Now it’s about workforce. Now it’s about people.”

North Carolina the top state for business for two years in a row by CNBC. Yet the labor market is “historically tight,” Archie said.

“We have more job openings than people available to take those jobs, and as we look ahead, we know we have an aging population here in the state, and so labor constraints are only going to get tighter,” she said.

Danielle Stilwell, HR development and recruitment manager at Columbia Forest Products, said she did not find the numbers surprising based on her experience with her company’s employees, in terms of both participation and productivity.

“We have found when our employees’ needs are not met, they are not truly engaged in the workforce,” Stilwell said.

The report is part of a series from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation called ” which studies the economic impacts of insufficient child care at the state level.

“The child care challenge that we have right now is akin to quicksand,” said Aaron Merchen, senior director of policy and programs in early childhood education for the U.S. Chamber Foundation. “If you notice you’re in quicksand right away, you can take a low-level intervention and get out of that situation. The longer you wait, the more serious the situation becomes, the harder it gets to get out of that quicksand.”

“So how can we use this report to look at the situation that we’re in, and how can we use this report for employers, policymakers, providers, and working parents to work together to find a solution that works for North Carolina?” Merchen said.

The report’s release comes less than three weeks before the expiration of federal funds propping up the state’s child care industry. Early childhood advocates are pushing for the state to step in to extend that funding during this legislative session.

Without intervention, predicts the state will lose an estimated 20% of its child care programs within a year, and about a third of its programs at some point after the funds end. Most programs have reported expecting to raise prices for parents to sustain their businesses and retain their teachers.

Cost was the top factor parents in the survey considered when choosing child care arrangements, and the report found high-income parents were more likely to be able to choose based on other factors such as quality and reputation.

“For an infant in center-based care in North Carolina, the cost is nearly as high as the average cost of a mortgage, and when you look at families with two or more children, it often far exceeds that cost,” said Erica Palmer Smith, executive director of NC Child. “And so what we see is an incredible need to address this issue as a state so that parents are able to work and provide for their families.”

The report does not include policy recommendations, but Salamido said the state chamber and its foundation have plans to “reimagine child care” in its delivery, in how parents access it, and in how it’s paid for. He brought up both public and private entities playing a role in taking on the cost of child care.

“It’s a long-term priority for us,” Salamido said. “This is not something that’s going to change overnight. This is not a click, and all of a sudden we solve the problem. It’s multidimensional.”

Workforce participation for parents is only one side of the child care coin, Palmer Smith said. It’s also about children’s learning and long-term well-being.

“Children who have access to early learning opportunities in those first five years of life, we know that they are more likely to read at grade level in school,” she said. “We know that they are more likely to develop strong coping skills, to be able to be resilient to all of the things that life is going to grow at them. We know that they’re more likely to graduate from high school, and even as we look into adulthood, we know that they’re more likely to be employed, to earn a higher wage, and even to be healthier.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

A Texas federal judge blocked the Biden administration’s efforts to extend federal anti-discrimination protections to LGBTQ+ students.

In his ruling Tuesday, Judge Reed O’Connor said the Biden administration lacked the authority to make the changes and accused it of pushing “an agenda wholly divorced from the text, structure, and contemporary context of Title IX.” Title IX is the 1972 law that prohibits discrimination based on sex in educational settings.

“To allow [the Biden administration’s] unlawful action to stand would be to functionally rewrite Title IX in a way that shockingly transforms American education and usurps a major question from Congress,” wrote O’Connor, a President George W. Bush appointee. “That is not how our democratic system functions.”

The Biden administration’s new guidelines, issued in April, expanded Title IX to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. The changes would make schools and universities responsible for investigating a wider range of discrimination complaints. The rule changes came as several states, including Texas, have approved laws in recent years barring transgender student-athletes from participating in sports teams that correspond to their gender identity. The Biden administration hasn’t clarified whether the new guidance would apply in those cases.

Texas and several other states have the Biden administration over the new rule. . A month after the guidelines were released, Gov. called on school districts and universities .

“Threatening to withhold education funding by forcing states to accept ‘transgender’ policies that put women in danger was plainly illegal,” said Texas Attorney General in a statement applauding Tuesday’s ruling. “Texas has prevailed on behalf of the entire Nation.”

An U.S. Education Department said in a statement it stands by its revised guidelines.

“Every student deserves the right to feel safe in school,” the statement reads.

This article originally appeared in at . The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at .

One in four Iowa students was chronically absent from school during the 2021-22 school year, according to a new report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Officials hope a tiered approach to the problem will encourage schoolwide attendance and remove any barriers to attendance. They also hope additional investments in Iowa schools will counter the growing trend.

Executive Director of Student Services at Dubuque Community School District Shirley Horstman said her district uses a three-tiered approach to improve attendance schoolwide.

The first tier is aimed at all students and encourages schools to lay out a clear school schedule, recognize good attendance and establish the benefits of attendance.

The second tier is for students absent for 5% to 10% of the school year. Schools will reach out to the parents of those students and look for ways to remove any obstacles to regular class attendance.

If it’s a transportation issue, the school may help the parents set up a local carpool, teach students how to use city buses or recommend having an older sibling walk them to school, according to Horstman.

The third tier is for chronically absent students who miss more than 10% of school days. For those students, schools will set up a more formal conversation with parents and create an attendance agreement outlining joint efforts to improve attendance.

Missing that much school puts students at an educational disadvantage, said Anne Fischer, executive director of Common Good Iowa, which helped with the report. “Once you get behind, it’s hard to get caught up,” she said.

Fischer said chronic absenteeism rates have grown across the nation since the pandemic. Iowa’s rate of chronic absenteeism of 26% is better than the national average of 30%, but both rates are still higher than the pre-pandemic national average of 16%.

Fourth-grade students who never missed a day of school scored proficient or above proficient in reading 40% of the time compared to 14% for students who missed ten or more days, according to the report.

It’s not just grades that are impacted by constant absences, Fischer said. A 2012 John Hopkins University study tracking Rhode Island students for seven years found that chronically absent students were more than twice as likely to get suspended or repeat a grade.

The increasing absenteeism rates negatively affect those who regularly attend class as well. Students in high-absence classrooms are more likely to have lower test scores, according to the report.

Horstman said when teachers have multiple chronically absent students, they are forced to repeat old material, create make-up assignments and spend more time trying to catch students up.

With more funding, Horstman said districts like hers could do at-home visits to discover any barriers to attendance and remind students of the importance of attendance.

“If we could do home visits to [chronically absent] students at the beginning of the year and welcome them and let them know we want them here, that’s something that I think could really move the needle,” Horstman said. “And that’s a funding issue and it’s also a staffing issue.”

Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, said addressing chronic absenteeism means addressing the causes behind it.

“When kids are not in school it’s usually a sign that something’s going on that we need to address. We need to not blame kids and families, but we need to understand why and then when we understand why, we can come up with solutions,” Chang said.

Students who experience instabilities at home such as divorce, domestic violence or substance abuse are more likely to be chronically absent, according to the report. Students facing such issues are also more likely to repeat a grade and be indifferent to succeeding academically.

Chang praised the Iowa Department of Education for making school-absence data available for all Iowa school districts as it allows them to keep better track of student attendance numbers across the state.

The state agency also provides grants to schools to help them address chronic absenteeism, according to Heather Doe, spokesperson for the Iowa Department of Education.

Fischer said greater investments in Iowa schools are needed to counteract the growing tide of chronic absenteeism.

“At a time when costs have been rising faster and when students’ needs have been rising faster, we’re not prioritizing our schools in ways that we used to and so maybe it’s not surprising that we’re starting to see a little sign of erosion,” Fischer said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Iowa Capital Dispatch maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kathie Obradovich for questions: info@iowacapitaldispatch.com. Follow Iowa Capital Dispatch on and .

Michigan’s public schools have billions of dollars in emergency COVID-19 federal funding to spend — but they may be in danger of losing some of it if it goes unallocated by the end of September.

In 2021, President Joe Biden signed a stimulus bill that pushed funding into communities to help address economic challenges posed by COVID-19. The American Rescue Plan included funding for schools and education agencies.

Michigan in Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding in 2021, on top of previous, smaller stimulus checks. In total, the state has over $5.6 billion in federal funds to spend on education projects. The 2021 money must be allocated to schools or state education agencies for a specific project by Sept. 30.

But some Michigan districts and agencies may be in danger of not meeting that deadline and losing the funding, according to .

A (DOE) indicates there is $740.4 million remaining for schools to reimburse. While some schools may have already spent their allocated money without receiving reimbursements, there are probably millions of dollars left available for claiming in the next few months.

Local educational institutions, or public and charter schools, were allocated a bulk of this money. Public schools that received the federal funding ” caused by the pandemic, in addition to addressing inequalities that were exacerbated during this period. This could look like additional after school or summer programs for students, something educational advocates have .

Additional ESSER money can be used for other health and education-related projects, including work-from-home or classroom technology, additional staff, improved air quality and mental health services.

Addressing long-term challenges

The one time payments may be difficult for schools to find projects for because they will only receive the funding once, according to Anne Kuhnen, the Kids Count policy director for the Michigan League for Public Policy. For example, if a district hired a mental health professional and paid their first year salary using the stimulus check, the district would have to use its own budget going forward, since the federal funds are not recurring.

“Expiration of the funding will be especially difficult for those districts that felt as if they had no other choice than to use some of the funds for recurring expenditures—and didn’t plan or plan well for this moment,” Michigan State Superintendent, Michael Rice said in a .

Michigan children were not exempt from learning challenges during the pandemic. Grade schoolers are less proficient in key subjects like math and reading than they were in 2019, before the pandemic, according to from the Annie E. Casey Foundation. In the same report, Michigan received its lowest education ranking in 35 years. Michigan ranked 41 out of 50 states for education in the 2021-22 school year.

Biden’s stimulus plan hopes to address some of these academic challenges, especially as the economy could struggle with a new workforce that is not equipped with academic proficiencies.

For example, students in the United States enrolled in K-12 education during the pandemic could collectively lose $900 billion in income if math proficiencies continue to be low, according to a study from the . This is attributed to the correlation between increased earnings and rising math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in the thirty years prior to the pandemic.

Additionally, predicts Michigan students will make roughly 5.4% less than if there had not been a pandemic due to learning loss. This could contribute to a loss in overall gross domestic product, the dollar amount of goods and services produced, of around $300 billion for Michigan.

The researchers of the study from Hoover Institution, Eric A. Hanushek and Bradley Strauss, write that much of the ESSER funding has been used for additional tutoring or education time for students to combat learning losses, but the best way to attack the problem would be through incentives for teachers to “take on more demanding classroom tasks.”

Rice said Michigan’s last two helped with pandemic and pre-pandemic era issues in the state, like the teacher shortage. He said recurring funding from the state budget will help address challenges like lack of literacy, transportation and teachers long-term.

“That’s not to say that we are where we need to be from a funding perspective,” Rice said. “It’s simply to say that we’ve made huge strides in the last two years, in the last two budgets, and I anticipate that this budget, we are going to make significant strides as well.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Susan J. Demas for questions: info@michiganadvance.com. Follow Michigan Advance on and .

As North Carolina celebrates the for K-3 teachers and literacy gains for young students, nearly half of of early-grade students are still below grade-level benchmarks.

Part of the solution, told the State Board of Education last week, is high-dosage tutoring, an evidence-based intervention for learning loss. Ed Corps was launched in 2020 at the start of the pandemic and during remote learning and is aligned with state-level standards for literacy.

“You’ve heard the phrase that it takes a village — we are working to equip the village beyond educators, specifically as high-impact tutors,” NC Ed Corps Executive Director John-Paul Smith told the Board. “For students who are starting behind coming into school, what they need is not only strong core instruction, but they also need some additional intervention, supplemental support. So that’s what the high-impact tutors are helping to provide.”

Since 2021-22, Ed Corps has placed and supported nearly 1,300 corps members who have tutored more than 22,000 K-5 graders across 32 counties. This was supported through a mix of Covid-relief and private funds.

Ed Corps is important, Smith said, because it is difficult for districts to implement high-dosage tutoring at scale alone. Finding high-impact tutors, training coaching paraprofessionals, tracking sessions, and identifying funds to pay for the tutoring all present a challenge.

“With your support, NC Education Corps is addressing these challenges, in alignment with high-impact tutoring best practices and the MTSS framework,” Smith’s presentation to the Board said.

Ed Corps started as an initiative of the Board, along with the Office of the Governor, in September 2020. Today, it operates as a 501(c)(3).

Here’s a look at some of the main components of Ed Corps’ model.

• Frequency: Tutors meet with students for at least three sessions each week, 30 minutes per session.
• Measurement: Schools use data to tailor instruction and ensure consistency.
• Small groups: Tutors work with 1-4 students to provide structured, targeted instruction and relationship-based support.
• Curriculum: Tutors use curriculum to reinforce foundational skills.
• Trained personnel: Tutors gain knowledge and skills needed to improve student outcomes, and receive professional development and coaching support.

Dr. Paula Wilkins, chief academic officer at , spoke about the impact of the program in the district. During the 2023-24 school year, 432 students from 10 schools were served by 23 tutors in literacy skills.

“This is only one piece in a bigger, larger puzzle for our district, but we need more,” Wilkins said. “We need more help, and we need more funding to help… This work takes funding and support and intention.”

In addition to the , Smith said the expansion of private school vouchers and the upcoming election also increase financial uncertainty for districts.

In light of the reality that many districts will have less money to fund high-dosage tutoring, Smith said Ed Corps will be working to secure more funding from the state.

According to Smith’s presentation, the program costs roughly $1,200 per student to implement. Schools pay about $650 per student, primarily to pay for the tutoring wages. Ed Corps pays about $550 per student, which covers recruitment, training, coaching, and evaluation.

“We need your help in communicating that high-impact tutoring is not just ‘a nice to have.’ It’s really ‘a need to have’ if we truly do want all students to have the support that they need, starting early on, to succeed,” Smith said. “We need to continue to communicate that it’s going to take a while to see gains. Students are starting pretty far behind, and the gains that they’re making take a little while to show up on the academic assessment — we need to be patient.”

More on high-dosage tutoring model

According to Ed Corps’ website, high-impact tutoring “has been proven to provide significant learning gains for students in need.”

Ed Corps tutors work in Title I and/or low-performing schools, with students scoring below grade-level in reading and/or math. Based on served by tutors in 2022-23, 70.3% of students were identified as socioeconomically disadvantaged,
38.9% Black, 30.6% white, 20.8% Hispanic, 7.7% mixed race, and 0.3% American Indian.

“Tutors are working with high-need students in high-need schools to help them establish foundational literacy and math skills that are so critical to student success in school and future careers,” .

Literacy tutors are recruited, trained, and coached by Ed Corps. The tutors then work as part-time employees at partnering school districts, who pay for tutor time. Most tutors work 15 hours per week, but tutors can work up to 30 hours a week.

Tutors work with students during the school day — either joining them in the classroom or pulling them out of class for a session, depending on the school’s preference.

The vast majority of tutors are retired educators, Smith said, along with parents, community college students, and other retirees.

“High-dosage tutors are not simply providing homework help or reading aloud to students on an irregular basis,” the . “They provide personalized instructional support to students as extensions of school instructional teams in alignment with multi-tiered systems of student support and as a supplement to core instruction.”

During the 2023-24 school year, Ed Corps launched K-5 math tutoring in Ashe, Chatham, Orange, and New Hanover counties.

Moving forward, Smith said they want to expand high-dosage tutoring to more schools, including math tutoring, based on school demand and funding availability.

Next school year, Ed Corps will partner with , a national organization that supports various tutoring models that improve student outcomes. Accelerate is also “supporting promising tutoring initiatives in Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Louisiana, and Ohio,” according

They are also working to strengthen data collection and accountability measures, Smith said, “to assess more precisely tutor impact on skills tutored.”

N.C. State University’s Friday Institute and the Duke Social Science Research Institute started conducting a three-year mixed-methods evaluation of Ed Corps in spring 2021. You can read more about that evaluation on page 11 of the organization’s

Finally, the team is also working to deepen and diversify its funding. Ed Corps is asking North Carolina lawmakers to convert non-recurring state funding to recurring funds in order to secure the continuation of tutoring sessions into the 2025-26 school year.

“We appreciate the state’s support for our partnership with NC Education Corps and need it to fund in-person high-impact tutoring on a recurring basis to close opportunity gaps and set up all students for success in school and life,” New Hanover County Schools Superintendent Dr. Charles Foust said, as quoted in Ed Corps’ presentation.

To learn more about partnering or tutoring with NC Education Corps, you can visit

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

As school districts across Texas – including El Paso – prepare to set their budgets for the 2024-25 school year, many are expecting their expenses to outweigh their revenue, leaving them with a deficit.

Despite the state’s multi-billion dollar surplus, lawmakers failed to increase school funding during the 2023 legislative session after Gov. Greg Abbott tied public education dollars to a controversial voucher program that would have allowed parents to pay for private school using state funds.

Now with pandemic-era relief set to expire in September, districts are scrambling to address a budget crisis by cutting staff, closing schools and eliminating programs.

Some like the have opted to ask voters to increase taxes through a bond measure, in the hopes of increasing enrollment and bringing in more revenue.

Others like the and independent school districts are tightening their belts by eliminating vacant positions and exploring ways to save money. The is looking into closing schools to avoid any future budgetary woes.

Most are unlikely to give raises to teachers or staff in the coming school year.

Most El Paso school districts are expected to approve their budgets for the 2024-25 school year in mid- to late June.

To find out more about how Texas school districts got into this situation, El Paso Matters spoke to two school finance experts: Tiffany Dunne-Oldfield, deputy executive director of the Texas Association of School Boards, and Bob Popinski, senior director of policy for Raise Your Hand Texas.

TASB is a nonprofit organization that provides assistance and training to school boards, and Raise Your Hand Texas is a statewide nonprofit focused on policy reform to improve public education.

El Paso Matters: Why are so many Texas schools expecting a budget deficit next school year?

Dunne-Oldfield: “Several factors are contributing to the rise in school district budget shortfalls as districts are preparing their budgets for next year. The Texas Legislature has not increased the basic allotment — the main component of student funding — since 2019, despite inflationary double-digit price increases.

In fact, legislators left almost $4 billion in additional funding on the table because they could not agree on a school voucher bill. That stagnant per-pupil funding coupled with new mandates, such as the requirement to have a commissioned peace officer on every campus, and ongoing funding shortages, like the statewide $2.3 billion gap in special education funding, are exacerbating school district budget woes.”

Popinski: “The legislature had the ability to change the funding structure of how much flowed to school districts last legislative session. They had $33 billion in surplus funds and another $24 billion in the rainy day fund. The legislature did not act on funding our schools up to the level that it needs to be.

Currently, we are ranked in the bottom 10 in the country in per student funding. That’s about $4,000 below the national average. We pay our teachers about $8,500 below the national average. … So all of that wrapped up is really the perfect storm for districts facing these big budget shortfalls. They’re having to adopt deficit budgets. They’re having to cut programs and in some cases, they’re having to shutter schools. While it’s different in every district it’s reaching almost everyone in the state.”

El Paso Matters: Why might a district with declining enrollment be expecting a deficit?

Dunne-Oldfield: “The state funds schools based on student average daily attendance. Fewer students means less funding. Districts seeing a decline in enrollment will be hit particularly hard by the state’s failure to help schools keep up with inflation, improve student safety measures, or adequately provide for students receiving special education services.

“Consider that school districts still need to keep the lights on, buses running, and their buildings clean and safe. There are certain operational and instructional expenses that don’t simply decrease because a district has fewer students.”

Popinski: “When districts are shaping their budgets like they are right now they have to staff their teachers and paraprofessionals based on how many students they think are going to attend. So they’re going to try to project what that enrollment is going to be and if that enrollment is off, they get less funding.

On average, it’s about $10,000 per student that our foundation school program funds. So if you lose 10 kids, if you’re a small district that’s $100,000 that your school district isn’t receiving in funding. That can be one or two teachers that you won’t be able to afford.”

El Paso Matters: How is the COVID-19 funding cliff affecting school district budgets?

Dunne-Oldfield: “Budget planning generally has been more difficult for school districts because of pandemic-related data anomalies connected to enrollment, attendance and the availability of time-limited (Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief) funding. The state also passed costly mandates for accelerated instruction as we came out of the pandemic, which has led to recurring costs even as the federal support for that instruction is expiring.”

Popinski: “School districts knew they needed to use (COVID-19) money for one-time expenses. A lot used it on HVAC upgrades or staffing for accelerated instruction. That funding goes away at the end of the school year, but it doesn’t mean the problems from the pandemic era go away as well.”

El Paso Matters: What can school districts do to reduce their deficits?

Dunne-Oldfield: “Because staff account for up to 85% of a district’s budget, it’s nearly impossible to navigate a challenging budget situation without reviewing staffing levels. They will likely balance staffing needs with instructional needs and generally work first to eliminate positions that have not been filled or will soon be vacant.”

Popinski: “There’s only a handful of ways that a school district can earn additional revenue through our funding system: that is to increase enrollment and average daily attendance, or it’s to increase the tax rate. To increase your tax rate you have to go out for an election, and some school districts don’t have any of that tax rate available to them. So there are very limited ways a school district can fix this budget shortfall issue.

“Some school districts are adopting that deficit budget and cutting programs at the same time. What impact is that going to have on academics and instruction for our kids as we go into next school year remains to be seen.”

El Paso Matters: What should lawmakers be doing to help?

Dunne-Oldfield: “It would be helpful for legislators to study how much it costs to educate a student, set the basic allotment at that number, and then set funding to increase automatically as inflation rises.”

Popinski: “The legislature can do a handful of things, including what they were called on to do last legislative session and increase the basic allotment. That basic allotment of $6,160 (per student) has not been increased since 2019. It would need to be a little north of $7,500 to keep up with that 22% inflationary increase since 2019.

“In addition to that, you can make sure that inflationary pressures never really get back to school districts by adding automatic inflationary adjustments so that when inflation does go up, that basic allotment goes up automatically as well.”

El Paso Matters: Can citizens do anything to help?

Dunne-Oldfield: “We’d encourage parents and families to talk with their elected officials about why fully funding our Texas public schools is so important to their local community and to the state as well.

Popinski: “Community members need to stay informed on why they are having to do these budget cuts at the school district level. Make sure that you understand what’s going on in the Texas Capitol come January 2025 because that’s where the funding will flow for our kids. Until that point, school districts are constrained.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

One-third of LGBTQ youth outed to their families were more likely to report major symptoms of depression than those who weren’t, according to the University of Connecticut research. Transgender and nonbinary youth who were outed to their parents reported both the highest levels of depression symptoms and lowest amount of family support. 

The first research to link teens’ nonconsensual disclosure of sexual orientation or gender identity to poor mental health, the report also found 69% said the experience was extremely stressful. Forcibly outed youth also reported low levels of family support. 

Since 2022, requiring schools to out transgender students to their families, potentially affecting more than 17,000 young people: Idaho, North Dakota, Iowa, Indiana, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina and Alabama. Proponents say the measures are necessary to uphold parents’ right to information about their kids. LGBTQ and mental health advocates counter that the laws violate students’ privacy rights and can put them in danger of being abused or thrown out of their homes. 

Forced outing “is a relatively common experience, and we need to understand more about it,” says Peter McCauley, a doctoral candidate at UConn. “People should be coming out under their own terms.” 

The data, McCauley says, bolsters research on why queer students who are victimized in school often don’t seek help. According to cited in the new report, 44% of LGBTQ youth say they have not reported harassment to an adult at school out of fear their parents would learn their identity. A majority of sexual-minority teen boys were threatened with outing by peers.

The new report used data from ages 13 to 17 collected in 2017 by the Human Rights Campaign and the university’s Department of Human Development and Family Sciences. Two-thirds of respondents identified as cisgender, and 70% said their LGBTQ status was not involuntarily disclosed to their families. Of those not outed, 36% said their parents did not know they were not heterosexual. Nearly half of gender-nonconforming students said they were not out to their families. 

The survey found no significant racial differences in the stress of being outed. Youth whose parents had postgraduate degrees reported few depressive symptoms and high family support. 

Previous surveys by The Trevor Project, GLSEN and other advocacy groups consistently find that nearly all LGBTQ youth say they are harassed at school — which many nonetheless say is a more supportive environment than home. Fewer than four in 10 queer youth say their homes are LGBTQ-affirming.

There is evidence that people who disclose their sexual and gender identities in adolescence experience less depression and greater life satisfaction in adulthood. But not all teens who come out do so to their families. Some share with friends or trusted adults other than their parents. Youth are often reluctant to come out because they have heard their caregivers talk negatively about LGBTQ people or issues.

In addition to the eight states that mandate outing, Florida, Arizona, Utah, Montana and Kentucky — which collectively are home to a quarter-million LGBTQ youth — have new laws that critics say encourage involuntary disclosure of students’ sexual orientation or gender identity. These measures mandate discipline for educators who “encourage or coerce” children to withhold information from their families, stop schools from “discouraging or prohibiting” parental notification about pupils’ well-being and grant caregivers broad access to mental health and other records. 

Fights over forced outing are also playing out at a local level throughout the country. In at least six states, families who believe student privacy protections violate their parental rights . So far, none of the suits has succeeded.  

A Houston Landing investigation found that during the first two months after mandatory parental notification went into effect in August 2023 in Texas’ Katy Independent School District, . After the story was published, the U.S. Department of Education opened a Title IX investigation into the district’s actions, which local discriminated on the basis of gender. 

At least six California districts require schools to disclose a range of information. In January, California Attorney General Rob Bonta that parental notification policies violate the state’s constitution and education laws. The admonition came after a judge’s October 2023 order temporarily halting the enforcement of an outing rule in Chino. 

As legislation seeking to restrict LGBTQ students’ rights has swept statehouses in recent years, the number of states fully administering the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System — the nation’s chief survey of young people’s welfare — . Some states, , stopped participating altogether, while others refuse to ask questions about sexual orientation, gender identity, mental health and suicidality.

Officials are dipping into reserves to cover an $88 million deficit. They’re continuing afterschool enrichment programs, like STEM and basketball, and promising to protect teaching, counseling and school leadership positions even though the COVID relief funds that paid for many of them have nearly dried up.

In talks with staff and the public, the district heard that the extra support “dramatically moved the needle academically and should be continued,” said district spokeswoman Christina Clark. Philadelphia, she added, aims to become “the fastest improving, large urban school district in the nation.”

But for now, the budget doesn’t reflect what some experts call “right-sizing” — reducing staffing levels to reflect an enrollment decline that is expected to for another decade. 

“You’re making a big gamble,” said Daniel DiSalvo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. “You’re either flatlining or increasing your school spending while the number of students is falling.” 

But Philadelphia, which is projected to run out of reserves in two years, is far from the only urban district in that spot. In a new paper released Thursday, DiSalvo and Reade Ben, an economic policy analyst at the institute, take stock of similar issues in the nation’s largest school districts. They show that while enrollment nationally fell 2% between 2013 and 2023, the number of teachers rose 11% and per-pupil spending continued to climb.

Prior to the pandemic, population and enrollment declines tended to hit certain pockets of the country, experts say; even Philadelphia closed more than 20 schools . But district and state leaders have no experience dealing with enrollment loss of this magnitude, which is exacerbated by expiring relief funds.

“Historically, when we’ve seen districts go through these things it’s been like a few of them at a time — not like all of the big districts at once,” said Marguerite Roza, director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab. Those districts, she added, have “such a big impact on our country’s perception of what’s going on with public education.”

Feeling the ‘brunt of it’

The amount districts spend per student increased in all nine of the cities the authors examined — New York City, Houston, San Diego, Dallas, Austin, Philadelphia, Chicago, San Antonio and Los Angeles. Houston, for example, spent $8,011 per student in 2013 and in 2022, spent $14,183.

Total staff increased over that time period in four cities — New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Dallas. The number of staff members in New York City increased from 11,202 to over 12,700.

“It is evident that school districts have yet to adjust their staffing and budgeting to the reality of fewer students,” they wrote.

Their data, however, doesn’t reflect more recent actions in some districts. New York City Mayor Eric Adams $700 million from the district’s budget since November, but canceled a third round of cuts in February.

The story plays out a bit differently from state to state.

Philadelphia is looking for relief from the legislature, which is under a 2023 court order to remedy past school funding disparities. currently pending would close an annual $1.4 billion gap for the district over the next seven years and significantly reduce future deficits, Clark said.

The authors also focus on Texas, which, unlike Pennsylvania, is growing and is California as the state with the most students in public school by this fall.

But that growth is more in the and in “,” said Brian Eschbacher, an enrollment consultant who works with many districts in the state. He noted that school boards don’t get a lot of say in whether a charter opens in their district because the state education agency authorizes of them.

“If 5,000 students enroll in charters instead of district schools, then the district feels the entire brunt of it,” Eschbacher said.

Confronting that reality, the Plano district is , while leaders in Fort Worth have delayed for now. The Fort Worth district did, however, eliminate more than that were mostly paid for with relief funds, including “success coaches” who worked with high school freshmen, instructional specialists and assessment staff. Another victim of enrollment loss: Full-time , which some schools are cutting.

“Hopefully, kids will be selecting the right book because there’s not going to be anybody there to guide them,” said Trenace Dorsey-Hollins, who leads Parent Shield Fort Worth, an advocacy group. She doesn’t have a problem with the district closing schools, but understands why some community members pushed back. “Schools are like landmarks where parents and grandparents and older children have gone.” 

The outlook is more dire in California, which is another 660,000 students by the 2032-33 school year.

The reaction to those forecasts has varied. Some districts, like San Diego Unified, announced — and then — layoff notices this spring, while others, including , issued pink slips. Some plan to not replace staff members who leave or retire.

“It’s a mixed bag,” said Michael Fine, CEO of California’s Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, which monitors districts in financial distress. The number of districts on his watch list actually dropped from 37 to 23 between December and March. “What that tells me is that school boards did what they needed to do, given the data about where they were headed.”

The greatest loss — 278,600 students — is expected in Los Angeles County, where some districts, like Inglewood Unified, began years before the pandemic. Home to massive new pro sports and entertainment venues that are pushing up the , Inglewood is closing at the end of next school year. 

The Los Angeles Unified School District, the largest in the county, is currently from firms that will “attract and retain students.” But the district is also closing one under-enrolled school this summer, and Superintendent Alberto Carvalho has that more are to come.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has from a shortfall in state revenues so they can adjust more gradually to the loss of federal aid. But school board members and the say the plan, which includes borrowing from reserves, is risky and could end up costing districts more in the future. 

To DiSalvo and Ben, that pushback shows that unions will push for a “new normal” of lower staff-student ratios and higher spending.

“This will put policymakers in a bind,” they wrote. To avoid cuts, they’ll have to either “increase taxes or find other ways to pay for schools with more teachers and staff but fewer students.”

Asking voters to approve a tax hike is also a risk, Roza said. In Vermont, for example, where residents vote on school budgets, many are their district’s proposals.  

“Vermont has had steady enrollment declines for decades,” she said. “So communities are like, ‘Why do the costs keep going up?’ ”

Almost three-fourths of and nearly two-thirds of Ohio fourth graders were not proficient in reading in 2022, according to a new study.

Seventy-one percent of Ohio eighth graders were not proficient in math — a number that has only gotten worse over time, according to the latest Annie E. Casey Foundation Kids Count Data Book. Back in 2019, 62% of Ohio eighth graders were not proficient in math.

“It’s super important to reach those benchmarks because it’s what’s at least been shown to be where we want our students to be that helps set them up to be successful in later grades and later in life,” said Matthew Tippit, policy associate at Children’s Defense Fund-Ohio.

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Ohio fared slightly better than the rest of the country — 74% of American eighth graders were not proficient in math, according to the report.

Sixty-five percent of Ohio fourth graders were not proficient in reading in 2022, a percent point worse when compared to 2019. Nationally, 68% of fourth graders were not proficient in reading.

Ohio public schools are preparing to implement the science of reading which of research that shows how the human brain learns to read and incorporates phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension.

The state’s two-year budget, which was signed into law last year, included .

A little more than half (57%) of Ohioans three and four-year-olds were not in school during 2018-2022, according to the report.

Thirty percent of all students nationally (14.7 million) were chronically absent from school, which typically means missing at least 10% of school days in a year.

“The COVID-19 pandemic wrought serious academic damage as it closed schools and separated students from their physical learning environment,” Annie E. Casey Foundation President and CEO Lisa Hamilton said in the report. “Unprecedented drops in fourth grade reading and eighth grade math proficiency among students in the United States between 2019 and 2022 amounted to decades of lost progress.”

The stakes for catching up on the COVID-19 learning loss are high. Up to is dependent on addressing unfinished pandemic-era backsliding, according to a February report from the Hoover Institution, a public policy think tank at Stanford University.

Students who don’t go , according to a 2013 report published in the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland’s Economic Commentary.

Overall, Ohio ranked 28th in the nation based on 16 indicators and ranked 18th in the education category.

Poverty

Almost half a million Ohio children were living in poverty in 2022, according to the report. The 446,000 children living in poverty made up 18% of Ohio’s kids. 10% of Ohio children representing 264,000 kids lived in high-poverty areas in 2022.

Sixteen percent of American children totaling 11,583,000 kids were living in poverty in 2022, according to the study.

“That’s so concerning to me just because of what we know that living in poverty can do to all other factors of life,” Tippit said. “We know that health indicators tend to be lower. We know that education outcomes are worse. We know that long term, you’re more likely to stay at that level of income as your family.”

About 40% of Ohio children have experienced one or more adverse childhood experience such as family economic hardships, their parents being divorced or a parent spending time in jail, according to the report.

would create the 26-member Adverse Childhood Experiences Study Commission which would recommend legislative strategies to the General Assembly.

State Reps. Rachel B. Baker, D-Cincinnati, and Sara Carruthers, R-Hamilton, introduced the bipartisan bill which passed last month in the House.

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That bothered Jacqueline Kronk, CEO of the clubs in St. Joseph County, so she leapt at a chance to add students this summer as part of statewide expansion of a promising Indianapolis effort.

Started in 2021 to help students catch up after the pandemic, the Indy Summer Learning Labs will receive more than $5 million from Indiana to expand into the Gary and South Bend areas, along with more rural Salem and Wabash. The five-week mix of academic work and fun activities for first through ninth graders has grown each year and is credited by the state with giving students strong gains in both math and English. 

The “Expanding What Works” grants let Kronk grow her program from 1,500 students last year to 2,500 in five counties around South Bend. She has also hired more teachers from local schools and upgraded the program’s curriculum.

“We’d be foolish to not address the fact that COVID and the implications of that are still here and rampant amongst our young students…and their ability to learn and thrive,” Kronk said. “We should be really, really scared about that reality and realize that we need to be throwing all but the kitchen sink at this issue.”

The nonprofit The Mind Trust and the United Way of Central Indiana created the Indy Learning Labs in 2021 for 3,000 students at 35 sites around the city, allowing students a chance to catch up on lost school time. The labs also offer field trips and other activities students in more affluent students can afford.

The labs have grown each year and The Mind Trust expects to have up to 5,500 students at 49 sites in the city — schools, churches, youth centers, or nonprofits — this summer. Though there are no income limits, nearly 90 percent of children qualify for free or reduced school lunches, a common measure of low family income, allowing the labs to reach families eight times less likely to enroll in summer programs than affluent ones.

Summer programs like the labs have been a widespread strategy for cities and school districts to catch students up after the pandemic. A found more than 70 percent of school districts have added or expanded summer programs since the pandemic, making them the most common use of federal COVID relief dollars.

Results are usually low on math and reading gains, but a new study this week found large gains last year from the Summer Boost program funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies in eight cities, including Indianapolis.

Researchers have found the small reading and math improvements in summer programs are often because programs don’t offer enough academic work.

Results from both the Bloomberg study and last summer’s Learning Labs are more promising because the programs offered more academic work — about three hours a day devoted to math and English instruction.

Bloomberg based Boost on the Indy Summer Learning Labs and sponsored the labs last summer. The study did not include any lab programs.

The Bloomberg study found 22 days of summer learning helped students make, on average, three to four weeks of reading gains and about four to five weeks in math gains.

That let students make up 22 percent of COVID losses in reading and 31 percent of math, researchers estimated.

The Learning Labs had previously released data from tests given to students at the start and end of the program. Last year, those tests showed proficiency rates in both math and English increased more than 20 percent during the program.

Organizers credit time spent on learning, hiring teachers from local schools to teach some of the sessions and using a curriculum carefully chosen to align with state learning standards for the gains.

Those results, along with the ability to add more students and upgrade the curriculum were all appealing in South Bend, Kronk said.

“The impact that we saw that it had down in Indianapolis for the last several years and for us to be able to scale and replicate that and bring that to counties that we’re serving up here…that really excited us,” she said.

Indianapolis parent Chavana Oliver said the labs were a huge help last year for her son Leanno, 7, who was about to enter first grade but has issues with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and needed extra help.

“He saw a lot of improvement,” Oliver said. She signed him up again this year, as well as her older son Kaden, 8. “ Now he’s very excited, because it will help even more for the second grade.”

Deborah Hendricks Black, a former teacher who helped the Urban League and others apply for the state grant to bring the labs to Gary, said the test score gains and reports from parents in Indianapolis like Oliver caught her eye. The grants will allow 750 students from high-poverty Gary and surrounding communities including East Chicago to avoid summer learning loss and catch up when behind.

“Now we’ll have a chance to at least affect a small amount of students,” she said. “But we know they will be supported effectively with a proven curriculum that provides gains in a short amount of time and we’re looking forward to that.”

Cassandra Summers-Corp, executive director of the Creating Avenues for Student Transformation (CAST) nonprofit in Salem said her rural area about 100 miles south of Indianapolis has a lack of tutors to help students who have fallen behind. Her organization has offered summer programs focused on reading lessons to about 40 students in surrounding counties the last few years. The new grant will let her add math classes and grow to 75 students, along with increasing from three days a week to five.

“We really wanted a partner to help us to expand,” Summers said. “Even though a lot of COVID learning loss money is sunsetting, we know that the crisis of COVID learning loss is not over.”

Disclosure: The Mind Trust provides financial support to ���˶���.

When outreach worker Leah Marks shows up at homes in Sanford, Maine — a small manufacturing city 18 miles inland and a world away from tony Kennebunkport — the kids know it’s time to walk with her to the school bus.

Her walks often involve snow and ice this time of year. But what they really involve is connection.

Marks, outreach coordinator for the Sanford schools, said a boy she walked in the morning went from missing 45 days last school year to missing just one so far this school year. Marks said his single mom is raising him and two siblings, one with a disability, and the family was struggling to get him to the bus on time.

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But with the walking support, he chats up his friends and looks forward to greeting the assistant principal at school. “Chris is just so proud of his improvement, and so is his mother,” Marks said of the child.

She said having their children walked to school is reassuring for parents. It means “being able to tell a parent who is seeing their kid off to school that ‘we’ve got them’ and we will see that they get breakfast.”

Experts say students’ lack of connection to school is one of the biggest factors leading to high absenteeism across the country. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, regular school attendance has plummeted.

One-on-one connection is key to bringing the kids back, education workers say, but it’s painstaking and requires funds and commitment. Some states, including Maine, are spending more money or implementing programs to tackle absenteeism.

Nearly 30% of public school students were chronically absent nationwide in the 2021-2022 school year, compared with about 16% in 2017-2018 before the pandemic, Attendance Works, a nonprofit that addresses chronic absences, and the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University School of Education. Chronic absenteeism is defined as a student missing a tenth or more of the school year for any reason.

Research has shown that student absences can harm and a higher dropout rate.

In Maine, the number of students considered chronically absent fell slightly last school year, from 31% in 2021-22 to 27% in 2022-23, according to the Maine Department of Education. Department spokesperson Marcus Mrowka said while state officials are “encouraged” by the drop, the numbers are still too high.

He noted that the COVID-19 pandemic has led to parents keeping kids home at “the first sign” of illness, and cited other factors including “increased stress, mental health and other well-being issues” for students feeling less engaged in school.

Maine is using $10 million in federal emergency funds to implement programs for attendance, Mrowka said.

For attendance to rise, schools must be safe and academically engaging, and students must feel a sense of belonging and that adults care about their well-being, according to Attendance Works.

“Relationships are absolutely essential to every piece of this,” said Hedy Chang, founder and executive director of Attendance Works.

“The pandemic eroded these conditions for a huge number of students. When we closed schools … we said it’s not healthy to be at school. Now, we are saying, ‘You can be back at school, it’s healthy.’”

Connecticut had an almost 22% chronic absenteeism rate in 2022, up from 9% in 2017, according to Attendance Works and the Everyone Graduates Center. The state in 2021 launched the home-visiting Learner Engagement and Attendance Program, known as LEAP, which came out of the governor’s office and serves students who feel disconnected from school.

Initially, the program was not intended to be directed primarily at absenteeism, but as absenteeism escalated, the program pivoted, according to Mike Meyer, director of family and community engagement in Stamford public schools.

Sometimes, Meyer said, the program pays teachers extra to do home visits with students and their families after school or on weekends. But the program has begun hiring outreach workers to intervene with families who are “really struggling, having challenges getting their kids to school.”

Stamford schools have partnered with the Stamford Youth Services Bureau, a city agency, to address absenteeism. Lily Villanueva, a family outreach worker contracted by the school district from the nonprofit Domus Kids, set up a study group for high schoolers who were chronically absent. Since then, the failing grades of students in the group have turned into passing grades and two are headed to college, she said.

One student, the son of a Haitian immigrant, also connected with an after-school video game program at his school. “They looked forward to going to school that day so they could go to their after-school program,” she said.

“I try to build a relationship with the family,” Villanueva, 26, said in an interview. “It’s all about trust and getting the families to open up to you. We have even gone so far as picking up students from their home and transporting them directly. We do that so we can help them build their routine.”

Kari Sullivan-Custer, director of the Connecticut LEAP program, which initially used $10.7 million in federal pandemic funds for the absenteeism program in 2021, said the program is targeting 15 school districts. In 2023, the state legislature appropriated $7 million in federal funds to carry the program through 2026.

She said the program targets districts with free lunch programs, or multi-language learners. “They tended to have high levels of chronic absence,” she said.

The District of Columbia found that career-focused programs help high school students connect to skills they enjoy, which keeps them coming back to school, said Clifton Martin, state director of career and technical education for D.C. schools. The program, which began last year, includes cybersecurity/IT training and general nursing.

“We found that those students are more engaged; they are more excited to be in this environment around other young people with similar interests.” He said the students who participate in the career programs “have about a 5 to 7% increase in attendance compared to those who don’t participate.” Absenteeism, he said “is going in the right direction,” partially due to the career programs.

Attendance Works numbers for D.C. show the chronic absentee rate in 2022 was about 44%, up from almost 27% in 2017.

Some school districts are hiring private companies to help address chronic absenteeism. In Maryland, several districts have hired Concentric Educational Solutions, a Baltimore-based tutoring and outreach company, to help with student engagement, according to David Heiber, founder and CEO of the company. The company is now working in 12 states, he said.

Heiber said he can relate to the problems his company tries to address. “I started Concentric because I was one of those students,” he said in an interview. “I was kicked out of five high schools, my parents died and I went to prison.”

But he went back to school, became a teacher, got a Ph.D. and then became an administrator, before founding the firm.

Heiber said that knocking on doors is an effective way to connect with students and families, but that many districts don’t have the personnel for it. He says his company can do that, at a cost of about $70 a visit and a general total of about $175 to $350 per student for several visits, depending on how many visits are made.

The company, he said, addresses “what I experienced and what I saw.” Before he was kicked out of school, he was an all-state athlete in cross country, he said. But even that wasn’t enough to keep him engaged.

“If I was an all-state athlete and I managed to fade, imagine what’s happening to students who [don’t have] that,” Heiber said.

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confirms that high school students who complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) are more likely to attend college than those who do not. This, of course, is the whole purpose of the federal financial aid program — to help lower- and middle-income students pursue higher education.

Despite the recent unfortunate — to put it mildly — rollout of the simplified FAFSA, the country would still be better off if all high school students completed the form. But even before the current fiasco, on the number of high schoolers filing the FAFSA was worrying. Access to federal aid is contingent on the FAFSA, and if students do not fill it out, they cannot access a major source of financial support for college.

Several states have moved in the right direction in requiring completion. One of the first, Louisiana, saw a 20% increase in FAFSA completions in one year after requiring high school seniors to complete the form to graduate. But the state is its universal FAFSA mandate over concerns about sharing financial information with the federal government, “invading” families’ privacy and jeopardizing their “liberty.” 

Worries about privacy seem misguided, as families share financial information with the government every year by filing tax returns, and much of the data in the FAFSA comes directly from these. Dropping a statewide mandate will not only hurt those students and families who might not learn about available financial aid; if fewer students go on to postsecondary education, it will make it more difficult for states to meet their higher education attainment goals.  This, in turn, will jeopardize the economic benefits to the state that accrue from having a more educated workforce.  

Hopefully, more states will require high school graduates to fill out the form. But beyond hoping, there is a way to make sure this happens: All colleges and universities could require the FAFSA as part of their application for admissions, whether students are applying for financial aid or not. 

This would create much stronger incentives for more states to mandate that high schools take on the responsibility of mandating FAFSA for their graduates. Even students who don’t require need-based financial aid receive large subsidies from both public and private nonprofit colleges and universities, because the full sticker price does not cover the actual cost of the education received. The difference can be quite large — in many cases greater than the value of a Pell Grant — both at public flagships and more selective private schools. The more selective the university, the larger the subsidies, since selectivity is closely related to the resources that colleges have available to spend on students. These are covered in a variety of ways that are supported by federal and state policies: direct government subsidies to colleges and universities; contributions from donors who receive tax benefits; exemptions from income tax on earnings on endowments; and local property taxes. 

If the FAFSA became a routine part of the college application process for all, it would level the playing field for all students in terms of required submissions and make it more likely that more high school students would receive the financial aid they need. Families that pay full freight might object, but the checks they write don’t cover the full cost of their children’s education any more than the small contributions asked of students who receive large scholarships. Why should the wealthiest families be treated differently than those applying for Pell Grants? Both are receiving public financial benefits, just in different forms. The burden on these families would be minimal since most of the information would come directly from the IRS.

Requiring the FAFSA from all applicants would also offer more information to policymakers on the income distribution of students attending college. Since both the federal and state governments heavily subsidize higher education, understanding how those subsidies are distributed across the population is important for making good public policy. These subsidies are, in part, justified on the basis of supporting economic and social mobility. Without knowing who is receiving them, it is impossible to evaluate their effectiveness.  

Having all families fill out the FAFSA whether they are applying for need-based financial aid or not would make possible better federal and state policies in support of the country’s higher education goals.

In a recent robotics shop class the teacher was hard to spot among a sea of students working in small teams designing, coding and tinkering with their mechanical creations. Every student had a role, from shop foreman to time manager to cleanup crew. Allyson Ordonez, an 11th-grader, was a class ambassador, welcoming guests and showing them around the classroom.

“Your normal classes — English, math, science — you learn fundamentals, but this class takes those subjects and combines them,” Ordonez said. “Math and science make up robotics and we use everything we learn from these normal academic classes and apply them to what we learn here.” 

Ordonez sounded more like a seasoned engineer than a high school student as she showed off a small drone she was building and described the equipment. 

Edison attracts teens from all over the city thanks to its 13 career tracks — the most of any New York City public school. Students can earn college credits through a partnership with the City University of New York, take part in internships and work-based learning with companies like Apple and Google, and receive industry certifications. If students pass those industry-recognized exams, they can start working in technical jobs right out of high school — while also pursuing associate’s and bachelor’s degrees.  

In some ways, Edison’s offerings are similar to other innovative CTE models across the country that are applying the excitement and engagement of career classes to rigorous academics. But Edison is taking that a step further by giving students tremendous power in its redesign. 

Shifting to Career- and College-Readiness

Edison opened in the 1950s as an all-boys trade school. Today, it serves a diverse population of nearly 2,335 students. Principal Moses Ojeda is about as close to an Edison lifer as it gets: he graduated in 1993, later returning as a teacher before becoming an assistant principal and then principal in 2012. He transformed the school from the days of typewriter and copier repair programs to state-of-the-art offerings including robotics, automotive technology, graphic arts and cybersecurity. 

All of this stemmed from Ojeda’s early days as principal when a student asked him a question that would change the trajectory of Edison’s teaching.  

“We know we’re here for CTE,” Ojeda remembered the student saying. “But why do we need the academics?”

Ojeda asked the student, who was in the automotive track, if he had learned about Pascal’s law in his physics class. “And the kid was like, ‘Yeah, I remember that.’ I said, ‘OK, well, that’s your brake system.’ And I went across the room and made a connection to each academic area.”  

Ojeda then turned to social studies teachers Phil Baker and Danielle Ragavanis to help students see the relevance of academic classes to their careers. 

“For them, CTE felt useful while academics too often left them wondering, ‘Why are we learning this?’” Baker said.

Ojeda supported Baker and Ragavannis in creating a Research and Development department to engage students in design thinking, including articulating what makes learning meaningful for them. The R&D department has grown to include teachers from every department working with students to figure out how to integrate essential skills into core academic classes. In this way, they’re applying one of the ’s crucial for innovative high schools: .

“In order to take on a project, teachers have to partner with one of the kids,” Ragavanis said. “Students are fully at the table, and they have to be our equals, and in some cases, our bosses.”

Edison was later selected for Imagine NYC — a dynamic partnership between New York City Public Schools and XQto design innovative, high-quality schools with equity and excellence at their core. Faculty members said brought additional support and resources to scale their ideas for making the academic courses feel as relevant to students as the CTE classes.

Mastering Essential Skills 

Driven by employer demand for “soft skills,” Baker and Ragavanis worked with student designers and teachers in the R&D department to establish “five essential skills”: communication, collaboration, giving and receiving feedback, design thinking and professionalism. These skills reflect XQ’s and now guide the learning objectives in many of Edison’s academic classes. Research shows these outcomes, or goals, can help students succeed in college, career and life. 

English Language Arts teacher Jason Fischedick, for example, created a student-run community theater, which he called “the most ambitious thing I’ve ever tried to do in the classroom.” Apart from selecting the four student directors, Fischedick ceded almost complete control of the process. Students were responsible for hiring a crew, casting actors and organizing and running rehearsals.  

“We’re on a time crunch and we need to figure out how to manage that time effectively to ultimately get a good product to show off,” said 12th grader Colin Zaug, one of the student directors.“It’s all about teaching independence and preparing students for the real world. I don’t know how many of these kids will ultimately be actors, but it teaches time management and how to stay on task.” 

Baker said this is how the R&D department is modernizing Edison. 

“We’re trying to make a link between academic classes and CTE classes, and bridge the gap that existed between the two, and make sure that academic classes have a career-centered application to them,” he said.

Baker said ninth graders in the R&D department designed the essential skills rubric for their grade so that regardless of what content classes students take, they all get the same immersion into critical career skills. Student voice is now so integrated into Edison’s core that teachers work with student designers to plan their units. And he said teachers are becoming comfortable with the language of career-centered learning and essential skills while students appreciate the engagement and develop a new level of confidence. 

Yordani Rodriguez, a 12th-grader, employed the essential skills in a number of leadership positions, from his work on Model UN to serving as editor-in-chief of the school’s literary magazine. And those are abilities that will serve him long after he leaves Edison. 

“When you lead somebody and they look to you, you have to be sharp,” Rodriguez said, noting these skills are always in the back of his mind now. “I have to communicate, I have to take feedback and most importantly, I have to be professional.”  

Rodriguez will be a first-generation college student when he enters Columbia University in the fall. Baker emphasized, however, that the essential skills will serve students wherever they go next. 

“This is the kind of thing that all of our students should be able to use no matter what they do in college or in a career,” he said. 

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Making Time for Innovation

The R&D Department’s work touches students in every grade. Nearly 40% of 9th graders are involved in classes taught by R&D members, with plans to expand. In addition to essential skills, students also participated in using a . Thanks to word of mouth, as well as student showcases to exhibit their work, Baker and Ragavanis have grown their R&D department to include 18 faculty in ELA, math, and science, including new recruit  Fischedick.

“They’ve been letting me innovate every year and that’s why I joined this team because I’m someone who likes to try new things,” he said. If something doesn’t work, he added, “That’s OK. I’ve become more open with my classroom and what I can do in the classroom because I feel supported to do so.” 

Edison’s lessons are now influencing broader change in New York City high schools. It is an anchor school among the 100-plus city high schools participating in , a bold new vision for career-connected learning. 

Edison students are also applying their essential skills off campus. Once a week, a group of them visit PS 175 in Queens. They lead 10-week cycles for students in kindergarten through 5th grade in more than 25 different courses, from cooking to robotics and Model UN. 

As with the other opportunities at Edison, Baker said students are getting a much deeper understanding of learning and careers by applying the essential skills outside of the classroom.  

“It’s been an incredible experience for our students,” Baker said of the teaching opportunity. “They gain so much in terms of professionalism, confidence, and the ability to explain complicated processes to people, which is a really difficult skill.”

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Now, policymakers and education leaders are beginning a pivot to math, where drops in scores on both the PISA and NAEP exams have been far more acute.

What’s the plan?

One strategy states will assuredly consider is to focus on the continued adoption of High Quality Instructional Materials — curriculum aligned to college- and career-ready standards. The trend toward these materials in both reading and math accelerated when troubling that disadvantaged students were not getting equitable access to high-quality teaching. Federal recovery dollars then helped to adoption across the country.

These materials have been a major step forward for teachers who, for decades, were provided with low-quality textbooks or online resources that didn’t reflect high standards or research-based teaching practices. Introducing an objective quality rating into the textbook adoption process disrupted the K-12 publishing industry for the better and helped to ensure that all students had access to educational programs rooted in high expectations.

But before going all-in on HQIM in math, state and district leaders should consider the implications of an important nuance in how instructional materials are evaluated by EdReports and other ratings agencies: to qualify for an acceptable rating, the materials must focus on grade-level work.

In reading, most students can benefit from grade-level instruction so long as they have passed the . They become better readers when they build knowledge and vocabulary, learn to navigate more complex texts and exercise critical thinking — all of which can happen regardless of the students’ starting point. A seventh-grader at a fifth-grade reading level can grapple with seventh-grade content and become a better reader. The struggle can be productive.

But in math, specific topics that are taught during one school year are foundational for what’s taught in the next. If students fall behind, , making it harder to catch back up. A student who didn’t quite grasp enough about the concept of decimals in elementary school can struggle to understand percents in sixth grade and then to apply them in seventh. Teachers can have a hard time addressing unfinished learning when their materials are focused largely on grade-level content. Math is cumulative — a fact that doesn’t change when a student happens to move on to the next grade level.   

Each day, we see a clear relationship between foundational concepts and grade-level mastery in the data we gather within our supplemental math program, . For example, when students attempt to learn the Pythagorean Theorem having already understood concepts such as estimating square roots and classifying triangles, they have a 72% chance of achieving mastery. When they don’t know these predecessor concepts, that success rate drops to 32%. Similar rates exist for nearly all the topics in the program. 

The importance of addressing unfinished learning in math proficiency is also consistent with learning science. Among the most foundational principles of cognition is that students have , which can be overwhelmed by tasks that are too cognitively demanding. Once students memorize information and master skills, their brain is free to use their working memory on other, higher-order tasks. But if they don’t master those lower-order skills, their working memory strains and their understanding of new ideas is impeded. 

Does this mean that students should instead spend all their time addressing every learning gap from previous grades? Of course not — instructional time is too limited. If students spend an entire school year working only on unfinished learning, they finish the school year behind again, having missed out on grade-level content that’s foundational to the next year. The cycle continues, year after year, making it nearly impossible for them to ever catch back up.

But it also doesn’t mean that instruction can ignore those gaps. As Dan Weisberg and I argued in 2019, teachers need strategies to both maintain high expectations and address unfinished learning from prior years. Advances in technology, and especially in artificial intelligence, make both objectives more achievable than ever. However, a curriculum that does both would have a hard time qualifying as High Quality Instructional Materials, since it would not focus on the major work of the grade.

Teachers clearly that students are behind. So do advocates for HQIM, many of whom guide schools to access that help teachers better understand predecessor relationships. But guidance documents aren’t the same as instructional materials that could actually help teachers address foundational learning gaps. And since those materials don’t fit a grade-level-only definition, teachers often need to source their own materials to diagnose and address foundational learning gaps and then somehow integrate it into their classroom workflow. Not only is this difficult to do, but it’s what HQIM was supposed to avoid.

What can be done to ensure students have access to both grade-level content and pathways to proficiency?

Some states are broadening their definition of HQIM to allow for more than just grade-level content. Texas recently launched a in math that allows publishers to include both on- and off-grade material so long as the grade-level standards are fully covered. California seems to be on a similar path, as its new is now more focused on grade bands (i.e. grades 6-8), as opposed to individual grade levels. (Most states use grade-level bands in their science standards.)

Others who prefer to hold tight to grade-based core instruction can consider changing the definition of HQIM when it comes to evaluating supplemental resources. Rather than simply applying the same grade-level-only filter, evaluation criteria for intervention solutions can focus on the ability to accurately diagnose relevant skill gaps (no matter how far back), embed rigorous content and assessments, develop custom learning pathways, activate student engagement and integrate with core instruction.  

High-quality instructional materials help to ensure students have access to an academic trajectory that’s aligned to college and career-readiness. But access alone is not enough to unlock social mobility — mastery is what matters. For as long as the nation’s schools have taught math, they have to serve students who, for whatever reason, are not performing at grade level. That’s been true regardless of the quality of the curriculum or the training of the teacher. 

Instructional materials are the most important tool an educator can put to use in the classroom.  But as with any tool, quality should reflect both an aspirational vision for what it can do and the science to make sure it can deliver. 

The current definition of HQIM sets an appropriately high aspirational vision. But for students to meet that bar in math, their teachers need more than what HQIM — as currently defined — can offer.

The creation of — highly realistic but artificial images, audio and video — used to require high-powered equipment and considerable skill. Now, with in generative artificial intelligence, any kid with a smartphone can make one. 

Adolescents, mostly teenage boys, are exploiting readily accessible deepfake tools to create graphic images and videos of female classmates, causing profound distress and disruption in across the country, from , California, to , New Jersey. High school students outside Seattle were photographed by a classmate at a school dance who then “undressed” them on his phone and circulated supposedly .

The impact could be significant. Experts that so-called deepnudes can hurt victims’ mental health, physical and emotional safety, as well as college and job opportunities. Comprehensive data is lacking, but documented incidents indicate that this is a troubling trend that demands immediate attention. 

While anti-child pornography statutes, Title IX regulations regarding online harassment and revenge-porn laws already exist, these measures were not designed to handle the unique challenges posed by deepfake technology. 

Schools, educators and law enforcement are scrambling to respond to this new phenomenon. In some cases, students have been harshly disciplined, but 13- and 14 year-old boys for engaging in impulsive behavior on phones their parents have handed them is not an appropriate, just or sustainable solution. It is incumbent upon adults to make the technological world safe for children.

The Biden administration has rightly technology companies, financial institutions and other businesses to limit websites and mobile apps whose primary business is to create, facilitate, monetize or disseminate image-based sexual abuse. But these steps are largely symbolic and will result in voluntary commitments that are likely unenforceable. 

The U.S. Department of Education is to release guidance on this matter, but its track record of issuing timely — and, frankly, practical — information is underwhelming. 

It’s also impractical to rely on slow-moving legislative processes that get caught up in arguments about for offending images when students’ well-being is at stake. As any school leader can tell you, laws only go so far in , and the ambling through Congress don’t address how K-12 institutions should respond to these incidents. 

So, where does that leave us?

Educators need support and guidance. Schools have a critical role to play, but to expect them to invent policies and educational programs that combat the malicious use of deepfakes and protect students from this emerging threat — absent significant training, resources and expertise — is not only a fool’s errand, but an unfair burden to place on educators. 

Communities, districts and schools need statewide strategies to prevent and deter deepfakes. States must use this summer to bring together school administrators, educators, law enforcement, families, students, local technology companies, researchers, community groups and other nonprofit organizations to deliver comprehensive policies and implementation plans by Labor Day. These should, among other things:

• Recommend curriculum, instruction and training programs for school leaders and teachers about the potential misuses of artificial intelligence and deepfakes in school settings;

• Update school-based cyber harassment policies and codes of conduct to include deepfakes;
  
• Establish discipline policies to clarify accountability for students who create, solicit or distribute nonconsensual, sexual deepfake images of their peers;
  
• Update procurement policies to ensure that any technology provider has a plan to interrupt or handle a deepfake incident;
  
• Build or purchase education, curriculum and instruction for students and families on digital citizenship and the safe use of technology, including AI literacy and deepfakes;
  
• Issue guidance for community institutions, including religious programs, small businesses, libraries and youth sports leagues, to promote prevention by addressing this issue head-on with teens who need to understand the damage deepfakes cause;
  
• Issue detailed guidance about how schools must enforce, the federal law that bans sex discrimination, including sexual harassment, in schools.

Is this too ambitious for state government? Maybe. But there is no choice. As the grown-ups, and as citizens of a democracy, we have a collective responsibility to decide what kind of world we want our children to live in, and to take action, before it’s too late.

“I stopped maybe a couple of weeks ago,” Juarez said last month. “I see the stuff that’s happening. I do see the news and I see what happens on the bus and then around here as well. So I don’t feel it’s safe for them to go by themselves, walking or on the bus.”

Before the increasing reports of violence and drug abuse on LAUSD campuses, she would allow her two older children in 9th and 10th grade to regularly ride the bus to and from the 32nd Street School near University Park in East Los Angeles.

Juarez’s concerns were not out of the ordinary. In February, shootings occurred overnight near a LA school campus, resulting in the deaths of two teenagers. Last month were arrested for bringing guns to school.

An LA Unified spokesperson declined to be interviewed, instead referring a reporter to  from the recent school board meeting where the issue was discussed during the Safe School Task Force annual update.

The presentation, delivered by Andres Chait, LAUSD Chief of School Operations, outlined 14 recommendations, including installing vape and weapons detection systems, developing and implementing peer counseling, and installing gates and security cameras in all schools. 

The increasing violence around the district has made some parents question whether LA Unified schools are safe — and if the school board made the right decision to after the murder of George Floyd. 

“They cut it without really thinking through who it was going to impact and without inclusion of the parent voice,” said Evelyn Aleman, Founder of a parents group.” They had activists, because activists are able to mobilize and come to the school board meetings and ways that Latino and indigenous immigrant parents cannot…that’s a significant voice, which is 74% of the student population was left out of that conversation.” 

The funding was reallocated towards programs in schools with the highest number of Black students, including the hiring of more social workers, and counselors, targeting schools with high rates of suspension, chronic absenteeism and low academic student achievement.  ���˶��� previously did a story on the impact of the programs.

Pedro Noguera, Dean of the USC Rossier School of Educations said while police presence can deter some incidents, more cops are not a long term solution. 

“Campus Police are most effective at deterring individuals who don’t belong on campus from coming on campus. If that’s an issue…, they should consider deploying police to schools,” said Noguera. “But if the issue is preventing fights, they need trusted adults who kids will talk to…  you just have to be really careful because once you bring the police into the picture you significantly increase the likelihood of arrest.”  

LAUSD school police carry guns and handcuffs and have the authority to make arrests, a district spokesman said.

LAUSD district 7 board member Tanya Ortiz Franklin, an advocate for restorative measures, believes the best way to keep students safe starts by  teaching young children social-emotional skills to navigate conflict and  de-escalating potentially violent situations.

“I know that… (there is a) sort of myth or misconception that we swing from punitive to permissive.” Franklin said. “I’m not going to let kids run all over the place…we still have to keep our hands to ourselves, we still have to be safe and use our words. But I’m going to show you how to do that, teach you and give you a second chance.”

For Aleman and other parents the progress is too slow. According to an LAUSD published in September 2023, incidents of fighting and physical aggression increased by over 40% between the 2021-22 and 2022-23 school years. More  than  600 fights and other physical aggression incidents were reported just 30 days into the 2023-24 school year. 

“I think it’s wishful thinking, and it doesn’t address the urgency of the situation, which is safety,” Aleman said in response to the district’s restorative plan to ensure safe schools. “This requires an immediate response, and it’s not just the school police…—But from LAUSD, everybody has to step up…. This is unacceptable. outside the school. That shouldn’t be happening.”

Increasing numbers of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) are acting as incubators for innovation in the teaching profession, and helping to grow the nation’s Black teacher pipeline.

���˶��� recently partnered with the Progressive Policy Institute for an online panel examining how HBCUs are key contributors to bolstering Black educators.

In the replay below, you’ll hear from experts Katherine Norris of Howard University’s College of Education, Dr. Artesius Miller of Morehouse College and Utopian Academy for the Arts Charter School, Sharif El-Mekki from the Center for Black Teacher Development and ���˶���’s Marianna McMurdock. Watch the full conversation:

Go Deeper: ���˶��� our recent coverage of the teacher workforce below.

• How Black Educators in America’s Fastest-Shrinking City Are Reimagining Teacher Pipelines

• Teacher Prep Programs See ‘Encouraging’ Growth, New Federal Data Reveal

• Breaking Down the Walls to Teaching: Alternative Pipelines Boom

• Preserving Black History Starts with Ensuring There Are Black Teachers

Partial scores from the state’s standardized test released Friday show high school students are still struggling with algebra, once again raising concerns about young Texans’ readiness to enter high-paying careers in STEM-related fields.

The State of Texas Assessments of Academic Readiness end-of-course tests evaluate high-schoolers in five subjects: Algebra I, Biology, English I, English II and U.S. History. The exams gauge and if they need additional help to catch up.

The percentage of students who took the test this spring and met grade level for Algebra I was 45%, the same as last year. Since the pandemic, students’ academic performance in the subject has remained mostly unchanged. The latest results are still 17 percentage points below students’ scores in spring 2019.

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“The data is clear, Texas students continue to struggle with math recovery,” said Gabe Grantham, policy advisor at public policy think tank Texas 2036. “We run the risk of leaving students ill-equipped to enter the future workforce without the basic math skills needed to be successful.”

Education policy analysts closely observe Algebra I results because a wealth of research links the subject to students’ future success in their careers after high school. Kate Greer, the managing director of policy at The Commit Partnership, said STAAR test scores allow researchers to delve into districts that performed better than the state average and form concrete policy proposals to help improve math scores.

“We are still underperforming compared to where we were pre-pandemic, so it is incumbent on us as a state to collectively focus on what we know works,” Greer said. “The value of assessments is it can focus adult behavior, shine a flashlight on opportunities where we can improve more and highlight best practices when we’re seeing impressive growth.”

However, in the past few years, high schoolers have consistently scored better on their English tests since the pandemic. Emergent bilingual students, or students who are learning English as a second language, have steadily performed better on the English I and II tests. The percentage of emergent bilingual students who met grade level went from 12% in 2019 to 30% this spring.

Test results for U.S. history and biology still lag behind pre-pandemic levels, but they are much closer to catching up than in math.

Across all five subjects, low-income students graded lower than students who were not economically disadvantaged. For example, 35% of low-income students met grade level in Algebra I, compared to 61% of all other students.
In a push to improve math skills, the Texas Legislature last year passed , which automatically puts middle schoolers into a higher math class if they do well in previous courses. Lt. Gov. included reading and math readiness on his , suggesting that lawmakers will revisit the issue during next year’s legislative session.

Disclosure: Commit Partnership and Texas 2036 have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete .

This article originally appeared in at .

The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

A philanthropic initiative launched in 2022 to get students back on track from COVID learning loss is returning promising results, a new study suggests: just four weeks spent in the program last year helped students regain nearly one-fourth of their reading skills and one-third of math skills, compared to students who didn’t participate in the program.

The initiative, underwritten by and other funders, serves charter school students about to enter grades 1 through 9.  

Researchers at Arizona State University examined over 35,000 Summer Boost students in eight cities, finding that in just 22 days of programming, on average, students saw about three to four weeks of reading progress and about four to five weeks in math. In reading, that works out to making up about 22% of COVID learning losses; in math, it’s about 31%.

While students across all demographic groups got a boost, English Language Learners saw the strongest growth, achieving about seven to eight weeks worth of learning in just over four weeks. Researchers said students moving into grades 4-8 saw particularly accelerated growth.  

Students took part in the study in Baltimore, Birmingham, Indianapolis, Memphis, Nashville, New York City, San Antonio and Washington, D.C. 

Schools participating in Summer Boost are free to use either a provided curriculum or a high-quality one of their choice, but researchers found that about a third of schools used a “balanced kind of curricular approach” that reserved time for both academics and engaging enrichment activities, said ASU’s Geoffrey Borman, who led the research.

Schools that struck that balance, he said, had “the most positive impacts for kids.” 

In summer school more broadly, Borman noted, the biggest challenges are getting kids to show up and stay engaged across the summer — and attracting high-quality teachers at a time when “both teachers and kids would probably rather be on summer break.”

To that end, schools in the program are encouraged to use as much of their budget as possible to pay teachers, said Sunny Larson, K-12 Education Program Lead at Bloomberg. The incentive, she added, “really got those veteran educators back into the classroom.”

Many prioritized hiring teachers who had already worked with these students during the school year. That allowed a continuity “that I also think was beneficial,” said Borman. 

Previous research suggests that pandemic recovery has essentially stalled for most students, with many needing the equivalent of about four more months in school to catch up to pre-pandemic levels. Ninth-graders need a full year of extra school to catch up, according to 2023 findings from the assessment provider NWEA.

Morgan Polikoff, a professor of education at the University of Southern California, said the findings were promising, but that he’d like to know whether the effects persist throughout the school year.

“While I think many have the perception that summer school is rarely effective, these results show that well designed summer programs can indeed be a helpful tool to help catch children up or accelerate their growth,” he said. The results suggest the impact of Summer Boost is “very promising — on par with regular school-year learning rates.”

‘Effective guardrails’ in place

The program includes at least 90 minutes each of English Language Arts and math instruction daily with a 25:1 student-teacher ratio. Summer programs must maintain an average daily attendance rate of 70% to get full funding — “effective guardrails” that ensure high quality, Borman said.

While they have flexibility in how they recruit, they’re encouraged to seek out students who can most benefit. 

Summer Boost originated in 2022, when Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor and a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, likened stalled academic progress from the pandemic to “the educational equivalent of long COVID.”

“Summer is the most underused — and unequal — time of year educationally,” said Harvard University researcher Thomas Kane, who served as an adviser to the research. “With so many students far behind, I hope this study inspires more school districts to expand their summer learning options.”

Kane noted that to expand the school year beyond 180 days incentivizes districts “to replace what students lost during the pandemic, which was instructional time.” 

Kristen Huff, vice president of assessment and research at Curriculum Associates, whose helped gauge the program’s effectiveness, said she was glad to see its positive impact. 

“There is real urgency to use summer programs to provide specific, personalized support for struggling students so that they can return to school ready for grade-level work,” she said. “Assessing students relative to grade level standards is the most accurate way to understand where they are and what support they need.”

Huff noted that Curriculum Associates will soon release research showing student academic growth “still has a way to go” to recover to pre-pandemic levels, especially for the youngest students. “The Summer Boost program results underscore this, and show that when given the right supports, students can accelerate their learning.”

In the new ASU study, researchers noted a few caveats. For instance, they admitted that the findings are based on only one year of data and can’t provide evidence of impact over time. It’s possible, they said, that the findings may change as more years of data are added and the sample size increases. 

They also noted that many student records in the sample were incomplete, missing either math or reading pre- or post-test scores.   

Also missing: key student demographic data, meaning that researchers couldn’t analyze all of the students’ scores in relation to indicators such as race, gender and socioeconomic status. And the data don’t include how students ended up in the program, limiting researchers’ ability to compare it to other types of summer learning programs that may have different enrollment requirements. 

But Borman noted that research on such large groups rarely yields such strong results, “And the fact that these outcomes are seen pretty consistently across thousands of kids and multiple cities, I think that lends even more power to these results.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified Michael Bloomberg’s party affiliation when he ran for president in 2020.

“If you love the Lord and you are excited about teaching …  we would love to talk to you,” Misty Smith, principal of St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, says in to prospective educators.

But with the school’s future still tied up in court, and legal disputes likely to continue, it’s unclear whether taxpayers will be picking up the cost this fall. Church leaders are having an “ongoing conversation” about whether to launch the online program as a private school if a court blocks it from receiving state funds, said Brett Farley, executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, a public policy organization.

Opponents argue that the charter, approved a year ago by a state board, violates both Oklahoma and federal laws against the government funding of religion. As the principal said in another video, the school plans to provide education through “a Catholic lens.” With rulings in two separate cases against the school pending, however, families are still stuck in limbo. Of the 218 applications the school received as of last week, over 160 have enrolled and another 35 are deciding whether to accept a seat in the school’s inaugural class.

“There are so many things up in the air,” said Joy Stevens, whose daughter Chloe secured a spot through the application lottery. As a contingency plan, Stevens registered her daughter in the Velma-Alma public schools, near their small farm south of Oklahoma City. “I don’t know if we can afford private.”

The state Supreme Court has yet to rule on a lawsuit by Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond it heard in April. It’s unclear whether that decision will come down before state funds are set to be distributed to the school in August — an estimated $1.2 million, according to the virtual charter school board that approved the application. 

In the second case, an Oklahoma County district court on July 24 will hear from a coalition of parents and advocates seeking an injunction to block the school from opening and receiving those funds. They argue that the school will discriminate against LGBTQ students and those with disabilities as well as families and staff who don’t follow Catholic teachings. 

They celebrated last week when the judge in the case ruled can move forward. 

Judge Richard Ogden denied most of the claims made by defendants who wanted him to dismiss the case. The defendants, including Republican state Superintendent Ryan Walters and the state board of education, assert that the school has promised not to discriminate. 

They argue that the school doesn’t violate laws against the government establishing a religion because St. Isidore is a private organization that will exist with or without the charter.  In addition, parents don’t have to enroll their children.

“No student is required to attend St. Isidore or adopt its beliefs,” they wrote in their motion. “St. Isidore is thus not forcing anyone to ‘submit’ to religious instruction or conditioning education on any ‘religious test.’”

‘A slippery slope’

The state, however, wants to make sure that all public school students receive religious instruction during the school day if their parents wish, as long as they’re not missing core classes. Gov. Kevin Stitt last week clarifying that districts can allow students to take up to three religious-related classes each week — and receive elective credit.

Ohio-based Christian nonprofit Lifewise Academy, for example, provides “evangelical Bible education” and of the Oklahoma law. The organization will expand to offer classes in 23 states this fall, but some opponents say allowing students to leave school during the day is disruptive and puts them further behind academically. 

Walters, however, quickly warned the , which plans to make its available to students, that it is not welcome. In 2019, the IRS granted the temple , just like other churches. But Walters doesn’t consider satanism a religion.

“I know that you guys like lying, and that’s the central part of your belief system,” Walters addressed the organization in . “But you will not be participating with our schools.”

Interest from the Satanic Temple shouldn’t necessarily come as a surprise to Walters or Stitt. Drummond predicted that state leaders would open the door to non-Christian organizations if they pushed for more religious freedom in public schools.

In an opinion last year, he said a religious charter could “create a slippery slope” and obligate the state to spend public dollars on charter schools “whose tenets are diametrically opposed” to the beliefs of many Oklahomans.

St. Isidore, meanwhile, is preparing to open and is “ordering what is needed for students and staff to be successful,” said Lara Schuler, senior director of Catholic education for the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, which applied for the charter along with the Diocese of Tulsa. 

Teacher contracts won’t start until Aug. 1, and according to the school’s website, leaders are still looking for a fourth grade teacher and high school math, physics and chemistry teachers. At this point, the school is still well under its first-year capacity of 500 students. 

Stevens said she’s been in touch with staff to ask how her daughter can meet other incoming students and “study partners” over the summer. The school is planning two “all-school masses” during the year, according to its , and will form local parish hubs for additional worship and in-person gatherings, like field trips, for students. 

Stevens said Chloe, who has been attending public school, is worried about whether St. Isidore will be academically tougher than what she’s used to.

“Her only concern has been how rigorous the education looks. She’s worried she’s not going to be third in her class or second in her class,” Stevens said. 

Some involved in the litigation, however, think the school should delay its opening until the legal matters are settled.

“I think it’s unsettling to enroll and start students in a school, which is under court review — just seems impractical,” said Robert Franklin, chair of the Oklahoma Virtual Charter School Board. Though a defendant in the case before the state Supreme Court because of his position, he voted against the charter application. “Using students and families as chess board pieces seems unnecessary.”

A six-week bench trial over Wyoming’s school funding formula is underway in a Cheyenne courtroom. 

The heart of the case — whether the state is meeting its constitutional obligation to fund education — is dense and complicated. A parade of witnesses is anticipated to testify on topics ranging from major maintenance projects to school lunches, campus security and staffing. 

The outcome could have a bearing on the mechanisms by which Wyoming funds everything from teacher salaries to deferred maintenance in its 48 school districts. With nearly two years elapsed since the lawsuit was filed, WyoFile offers this refresher on Wyoming’s school funding model and what’s in the current lawsuit.

How we got here

The Wyoming Education Association, an educator advocacy group with 6,000 members, filed the 71-page lawsuit in August 2022. Eight school districts joined the lawsuit as intervenors to challenge the state. 

The suit claims the state of Wyoming has violated its constitution by failing to adequately fund public schools and has withheld appropriate funding at the expense of educational excellence, safety and security. That has left districts to fend for themselves and divert funds from other crucial educational activities, which causes further systemic erosion, the suit contends. 

Article 7 of the Wyoming Constitution states that the Legislature “shall provide for the establishment and maintenance of a complete and uniform system of public instruction.” Landmark court cases further delineated the state’s obligations in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

The more recent of those, the Campbell cases, set the stage for Wyoming’s current school funding obligations. Those cases culminated in 1995 when the  to determine the cost of a high-quality education, fund public schools, adjust funding at least every two years for inflation and review the components of the school funding model every five years to ensure resources are keeping pace with needs and costs. 

The court required the Legislature “to consider education as a paramount priority over all other considerations.” Its determination gave rise to a funding framework defined by two key ideas: the “basket of goods” — the skills and subjects students are required to learn, as well as “recalibration” — the process by which the Legislature reviews and adjusts its funding model. 

The Wyoming Education Association was an intervening party to that suit. 

What’s in the current suit

The 2022 complaint essentially contends that in the years following the Campbell cases, the state has failed to meet its school funding obligations. It’s done so by not granting periodic external cost adjustments and allocating insufficient funds to match necessary funding levels, the suit alleges. 

That includes teacher, administrator and support personnel salaries.

“In 2010, that teacher salary advantage was approximately 25% above the average of surrounding states and Wyoming districts competed well for the best teachers,” the suit reads. “Due to the failure to keep the model adjusted for inflation, that advantage has disappeared, and Wyoming districts not only cannot compete for high-quality teachers, but in a number of instances, Wyoming districts cannot compete to hire anyone for some positions.”

Wyoming districts have also been unable to “provide necessary support services for students; have delayed purchase of new textbooks, equipment, technology and other essentials; have cut back on activities and opportunities for students; and, in some cases, even eliminated programs,” the suit reads. 

Along with impacting the state’s stable of teachers, the underfunding has led to deteriorating levels of safety and security as well as the continued use of unsuitable facilities with unmet maintenance needs, according to the suit.

Moreover, the suit alleges, the failure to fund schools is not based on inability — “rather, it is ultimately a result of the lack of political will to follow the clear constitutional mandate.”

The suit also alleged that Wyoming has used several consultants to conduct its “recalibration” studies, but “ in turn when the consultants’ recommendations included increased funding.

“The level of funding for the model currently being provided is actually far below the funding level recommendations of the Legislature’s own consultants when the model was studied as part of ‘recalibration,’” the suit reads. “In reality, even those studies seriously understated the actual cost of education.”

Intervening school districts in the current case include Albany County School District No. 1; Campbell County School District No. 1; Carbon County School District No. 1; Laramie County School District No. 1; Lincoln County School District No. 1; Sweetwater County School District No. 1; Sweetwater County School District No. 2; and Uinta County School District No. 1.

Current spending

State education spending has increased from $443 million, or $4,372 per student in 1985, to $1.5 billion, or $16,751 per student, in 2022, according to the Legislative Service Office. 

Increases can be tied to many factors, including a growing number of students requiring special education services, increasing technology needs and rising inflation. 

Wyoming’s low population and rural nature also contribute to it having some of the highest per-pupil spending in the nation. 

Legal moves 

In December 2022, the Laramie County District Court denied the state’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit.  

Then in 2023, Wyoming asked the Wyoming Supreme Court to intervene in the case regarding the level of scrutiny appropriate for determining the outcome. The Supreme Court upheld the district court’s decision that “strict scrutiny” shall be applied, denying the state’s petition for a lesser standard. 

On May 1, Laramie County District Court Judge Peter Froelicher denied the state’s motion for partial summary, sending the case to trial. 

Six weeks 

The trial kicked off Monday in Laramie County District Court with opening arguments and plaintiff testimony. Over the first two days, plaintiffs’ witnesses provided testimony regarding unfilled district positions, salary adjustments, how schools qualify for major construction projects and curricula. Witnesses included WEA President Grady Hutcherson, who spent 24 years teaching in a classroom, as well as district employees like superintendents and human resource managers. 

One of the outcomes plaintiffs seek is that the court grant “retroactive relief” to districts for “a reasonable amount of the funding that should have been delivered to them to date.”

The court is broadcasting the trial live, find the stream 

The was originally published on .

“Perhaps it’s the cell phones?” we wonder. “And the TikTok?” 

Sure, screens — and how kids engage with them — are part of this story. And yet, and especially, America tolerates levels of child poverty compared to peer nations. because of their families’ low incomes. And yet, as has become custom, Congress recently missed a bipartisan opportunity to do something about this shameful, persistent American problem. 

To explain this latest congressional stumble, we need some history. In 2021, the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan cut U.S. child poverty rates by significantly expanding the . Critically, the expanded credit was administered in , giving families a steady stream of new resources instead of a once-annually infusion at tax time. As Dr. Shantel Meek and I put it in , “[M]easured against its goal, the expansion of the child tax credit is one of the great policy successes in recent memory. Few other big federal ideas have so suddenly achieved precisely what they intended.” 

But the measure expired after one year, and to reinstate it have floundered in Congress. 

Then, this year, a bipartisan group of House representatives drafted a giving progressives a partial reinstatement of the expanded credit in return for a handful of corporate tax breaks prized by conservatives. The bill passed with in the House, but — at least partly because of conservative concerns that it might help President Biden in an election year. “I think passing a tax bill that makes the president look good — may allow checks before the election — means that he can be reelected and then we won’t extend the 2017 tax cuts,” . 

Whatever else you think is causing young Americans’ pessimism these days, it pales in comparison with the impact of this sort of cynicism. Put aside the hand wringing about culture wars and polarization and “woke” indoctrination embedded into K–12 history curricula. U.S. kids don’t distrust Congress because their schools tell them an honest account of America’s complicated past. They Congress because, when confronted with a tested policy solution to that affects their lives, elected representatives dither and find politically expedient excuses. 

Make no mistake: the case for providing cash support for families with young children is empirically airtight. Researchers have known since at least that families’ socioeconomic resources significantly shape children’s educational performance and outcomes. that increases in family income produce better developmental, academic and life outcomes for children. As a policy matter, regular cash transfers to families like the Biden Administration’s expanded child tax credit —known as “child allowances” — a to . 

At this point in the waves of evidence, conservatives sometimes argue that, sure, perhaps there’s a case for investing more funding in low-income families, but only if we apply conditions and require that it be spent on particular things. Won’t families “waste” new resources unproductively? But this, too, is cynical and baseless political posturing: analysis showed that families .

And yet, here we are, stuck. Legislative failures like these are the operational definition of a failing democracy. When democracies struggle to do simple things that we know would improve citizens’ — especially children’s — lives, they’re undermining their main institutional selling point. If representative government cannot accurately represent the public’s interest by identifying and addressing its problems, why bother with the messiness of organizing our political lives this way?
U.S. kids are not alright. But it’s not just because they’re living in an information sphere increasingly shaped by technology. Without a shift to a more pragmatic approach to these problems, that trust will only continue dropping — however well legislative sclerosis serves conservatives’ short-term political needs.

That’s because personalized, competency-based learning offers a promising alternative to traditional instruction and has been shown to help accelerate academic gains. Teachers can design personalized learning experiences that target instruction to address specific skills while ensuring that students meet the same academic standards and learning objectives that they would in a traditional classroom.

By better understanding each student’s level of understanding and need, educators can minimize the potential for compounding gaps in essential knowledge and skills. This is critically important, because if students haven’t firmly grasped foundational concepts from years before, their path to proficiency is obstructed, and they are bound to struggle.

In mathematics, for instance, students must first understand how to multiply decimals, which is taught in fifth grade, before they can confidently calculate percentages in seventh.

Miami-Dade Public Schools recognized this early in the COVID-19 pandemic and implemented a that utilized need-driven decision-making to ensure that resources reached individual students at the appropriate levels.

Rather than following rigid timelines and lesson plans, Miami-Dade dedicated extra time to foundational competence. The district developed and implemented strategies to evaluate students based on their level of academic achievement in meeting essential standards in both their current and previous grades.

As a result, while other school districts have struggled to recover from pandemic-related learning loss, has returned to pre-pandemic proficiency with minimal disruption. On the 2023 statewide accountability assessments, which are designed to measure progress toward critical learning benchmarks, Miami-Dade surpassed the state in the proportion of students scoring at grade level or higher in both English and math.

This highlights the importance of utilizing innovative educational strategies to meet students where they are. When young people succeed in school, they become more motivated to explore new topics — and that’s important. A new report from Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation surveyed over 1,000 students, ages 12 to 18, and found that less than half felt motivated to attend school.

Too often, traditional education falls short in helping students see relevance to their everyday lives. Project-based learning is an example of a competency-based learning experience that integrates knowledge with practical applications. This strategy cultivates critical thinking skills that are essential for success beyond the classroom, while helping students deepen their understanding of core concepts by using what they know to solve real-world problems.

For example, a study of a middle school project-based showed, on average, that students performed higher than a matched comparison group on state English Language Arts assessments by 8 percentage points in year two and 10 percentage points in year three. By aligning competencies with academic standards, educators can ensure that students receive a rigorous education that prepares them for academic achievement.

The effectiveness of competency-based methods is evident in performance-based schools like the . Lindsey Unified ranked No. 1 in English Language Arts growth on the 2019 Smarter Balance Assessment Consortium achievement test when compared with 63 similar districts, rising from the 33rd to the 87th percentile. By coupling core content with skills like communication, teamwork and adaptability, Lindsey Unified equips its students with both the knowledge and skills they need to thrive in a rapidly changing world.

Lindsay Unified is not alone. A RAND study of that participated in a personalized learning intervention found that after two years, students who started in the bottom quartile demonstrated greater gains than peers with similar demographics, prior academic performance and socioeconomic status that were not part of the intervention groups. The 32 schools were located predominantly in urban areas and served large numbers of minority students from low-income families.

Personalized learning cannot improve student outcomes without a major shift in mindset and significant changes in teaching methods. There is no quick fix or simple solution. Education must be reimagined in a way that celebrates each student’s individuality and considers how factors outside of school influence what happens within them. By implementing systems that provide tailored, differentiated support, learning can be made relevant and engaging for students.

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation funded the RAND study and provides financial support to ���˶���. Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to ���˶���.