During the 2023-24 school year, 169 of the state’s 210 charter schools reported having a waitlist, according .

Together, the waitlist totals more than 85,000 students. However, that number could include duplicate students on multiple waitlists, Ashley Baquero, DPI’s director of the Office of Charter Schools, told the State Board of Education during its May meeting.

“We report on the current status in the past academic year of charter schools every year at this time,” Baquero told the Board during on DPI’s annual charter school report. “For the 2022-23 school year, 10% of enrollment was in North Carolina charter schools, serving over 145,000 students.”

DPI collects waitlist data from charter schools across the state every year, she said.

This year’s waitlist increased by more than 8,000 students from the year before — up from 77,000 students.

Nearly one in five charter schools (37) had a waitlist of 700 students or more. Nearly 40% (83 schools) had a waitlist of 200 students or more.

Gov. Roy Cooper announced this week as National Charter School Week in North Carolina, saying that “charter schools are public schools that increase learning opportunities for all students and provide parents and students with expanded opportunities within the public school system.”

From 2019 to 2022, charter school enrollment in North Carolina  — the fifth highest growth rate in the nation, according to DPI’s 2022 report to the General Assembly.

At the same time, North Carolina Republican lawmakers have recently expanded school choice, through both private schools and charters, which are public schools with more flexibility than traditional public schools. While charter schools demonstrate some of the choice already available in the public school system, traditional public schools  for most of the state’s students.

During her report, Baquero noted the impact of recent legislation on charter schools in North Carolina.

“Since last year’s report, the charter sector has experience significant legislative changes,” she said.

First, Baquero noted legislation that created the Charter School Review Board (CSRB) — granting the review board sole authority to approve or deny charter applications, renewals, and material changes.

Before that law was passed, charter school applications were reviewed by the Charter School Advisory Board (CSAB), which recommended to the State Board of Education which applications should be approved or denied. The CSAB no longer exists.

“This action will make the application process more efficient, more cost-effective, and much more streamlined for all stakeholders involved,” , a primary sponsor of the bill, previously said of .

Other legislation passed last year impacting charter schools includes:

• The review Board no longer considers impact statements from school districts regarding the impact of a charter school opening in the area.
• Charter schools that are not low-performing can now set their enrollment each year. Previously, this cap had to be approved by the State Board of Education if it exceeded a 30% growth rate. Low-performing charter schools can now ask the state Board to grow more than 20%.
• The 2023 budget also laid out a process for charter schools to offer remote academies, which you can view .

There are three new charters scheduled to open in fall 2024, Baquero said — down from 12 schools originally approved to open. Since then, many schools have asked for delays. There are 16 charter schools scheduled to open in 2025, she said.

This year’s charter school application period opened on Jan. 26 and closed on April 26. DPI received 14 applications during the cycle, Baquero told the Board.

Charter school attendance and performance

Historically, some critics of charter schools have said that  than traditional public schools.

North Carolina charter schools are more white than traditional public schools, the report shows — 47% versus 43%.

“You can see that over the years, we’ve seen the (local education agency’s) ethnic and racial data fairly aligned to charter schools,” Baquero told the Board last June. “The biggest difference we always see is with the Hispanic population.”

A new published by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA found that North Carolina public schools are becoming increasingly segregated by race — and at a larger rate in charter schools. In North Carolina, charter schools had the largest share of public schools where students of color make up 99% or more of the student body, according to the report.

“North Carolina’s public school enrollment is increasingly multiracial, and the expansion of school choice means that a growing share of students attend charters and private schools, both of which tend to be more segregated than traditional public schools,” the report says.

According to DPI’s presentation, charters enrolled a larger share of Asian, Black, and white students in 2023 compared to all public schools, but fewer Hispanic students.

DPI data also show that traditional public schools consistently enroll a larger share of students with disabilities, English learners, and economically disadvantaged students. Traditional public schools enroll twice the amount of English learners that charter schools do.

There has been an increase in the number of economically disadvantaged students at charters in the state, Baquero said, but there is still a gap. In 2023, 51% of all public school students were economically disadvantaged, compared to 38% of all charter schools.

Several factors play into this gap, including transportation, the National School Lunch Program, federal Medicaid direct certification, and charter reporting.

In North Carolina, state statute  that charter schools are supposed to develop a plan to ensure “that transportation is not a barrier to any student.” However, unlike traditional public schools, charters are not required to offer formal transportation and busing services for students. Charters are also not required to provide free and reduced school lunches, though the number that do has risen in North Carolina in recent years.

“The state legislature should strengthen its charter school regulation by holding charter schools accountable for diverse student enrollment practices and require that charter schools offer transportation and free or reduced-price lunch to qualifying students,” the UCLA report says.

Baquero said more than 70 charter schools have been approved to offer weighted lotteries, “give additional weight to individual students who are identified as part of a specified set of students falling under the educationally disadvantaged definition.” This could include students who are economically disadvantaged, students with disabilities, migrant students, immigrant students, English learners, and homeless or unaccompanied youth.

As charter schools increase services to provide access, Baquero said schools must make sure parents and students know about such services.

“Charters are driven by demand and choice, so school leaders and boards must understand how everything from how you market and communicate to parents to communicating admissions procedures and school services are critical for parents to understand accessibility,” she said.

DPI data also show that charter schools and traditional public schools , based on school performance grades and school growth.

Here’s a look at comparison data of low-performing (LP) and continually low-performing (CLP) schools, at the charter and district level. You can see the percentage for both markers was similar in 2023 among charters and traditional public schools (27% LP & 25% CLP in charters, compared to 29% LP & 26% in traditional public schools).

You can view DPI’s full 2023 report on charter schools .

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

COLUMBIA — The state will award taxpayer-funded scholarships to 2,880 K-12 students for 2024-25, meaning just under half of the available slots could go unused for the program’s inaugural year, according to data the state Department of Education provided Wednesday to the SC Daily Gazette.

The total of awarded scholarships means 64% of the 7,907 students whose parents applied by the March deadline were denied. Most of those applications were rejected because they either came in after the deadline or they weren’t completely filled out, according to the agency.

In the inaugural year, students had to qualify for Medicaid to be eligible. One of every 10 applications was rejected because the parents’ income was too high.

The law creating the private school choice program provided $6,000 scholarships for a maximum of 5,000 students for the coming year — to be awarded on a first-come, first-served basis to all eligible parents.

In in the House touted the high number of applicants as a reason to greatly expand the program before it even starts. But the final numbers suggest that was unnecessary. (The Senate never took up the bill.)

What’s in the budget?

Both the House and Senate set aside $30 million in their spending plans for the fiscal year starting July 1, assuming that all 5,000 slots would be taken. An agreement between the chambers’ budget plans won’t be worked out until next month. Regardless, that money is locked in, since it’s the same amount in both versions.

The 2,880 approved students will require less than 60% of that allocation.

By law, all awards had to be decided by mid-April, 30 days after the application deadline.

But denied parents can still correct errors or typos in their applications, which could result in a slight increase in approvals, according to the agency. However, the data it provided shows zero applications still in process.

Legislators may approve a clause in the budget overriding that deadline and allowing the state department to continue accepting applications and awarding eligible parents throughout the year.

Parents already notified can start accessing their $6,000 scholarships in July through an online portal that allows them to direct the money toward , mostly private schools and tutors.

That is, unless the South Carolina Supreme Court decides before then that the law violates the state constitution’s ban on public money directly benefiting private schools, as opponents in March. That lawsuit did not block the law’s implementation pending a ruling.

Advocates and critics respond

Supporters pointed to the 7,907 applications as proof that families are interested in the program. They suggested fewer students will be denied in the coming years as the agency works out the kinks, eligibility expands, and parents become more familiar with the application process.

The , which has been lobbying for the school choice program for years, said it’s not discouraged by the rejected applications.

“They prove what we have been saying for months: South Carolinians crave flexibility and customization in their children’s education,” the conservative think tank said in a statement to the Gazette.

For critics, however, the fact that the department approved less than 40% of the applicants suggests demand was exaggerated, particularly among poor families eligible for this first round.

“To me, this is indicative that South Carolinians are already happy with either their public schools or the choices we have available,” such as public charter schools, said Patrick Kelly, a lobbyist with the Palmetto State Teachers Association and a high school teacher.

House Education Chairwoman Shannon Erickson said the large number of denials could be explained by parents not understanding the process or not knowing about it in time to complete it. The two-month window for applications started in mid-January. The process could have been too confusing, she said.

“I understand a learning curve,” said the Beaufort Republican. “Perhaps we need to put a little more IT assistance into the process.”

Erickson proposed the budget clause allowing the empty slots to continue to be filled.

“That would stop the department from not letting students in because of an arbitrary date,” she said.

Kelly countered the date isn’t arbitrary: The March 15 deadline was put in the law to ensure public schools had enough time to create class schedules, he said.

If students decide to use the money to transfer to private schools during the school year, schools could end up scrambling, he said.

“I understand and appreciate the heartbeat behind the rolling window, but it could cause logistical issues,” said Kelly, a teacher at Blythewood High School.

The Palmetto Promise Institute, on the other hand, lauded Erickson’s proposed budget clause as a way of filling the remaining slots and ensuring the full $30 million set aside for the program goes to students. Even if it doesn’t, the state should celebrate the fact that many students got financial help, said the think tank formerly led by state Superintendent Ellen Weaver.

“We should not lose sight of the victory: Two thousand, eight hundred, and eighty South Carolina students are now able to choose the education that best fits them, an opportunity they likely could never have afforded otherwise,” the institute’s statement read. “That alone is worth celebrating.”

Eligibility and denials

For the coming school year, eligibility was limited to families making 200% of the federal poverty level, or $62,400 for a family of four.

Students also either had to be currently attending a public school or just starting kindergarten. The latter accounts for one of every five students approved for the program.

Under the law, the income and participation caps increase over the following two years. By the 2026-2027 school year, up to 15,000 students from families making up to 400% of the poverty level will be eligible.

The so-called passed by the House would’ve allowed students already in private and home schools to get scholarships and removed income eligibility rules by 2026. It called for the yearly cap on the number of participating students to be set by legislators through the budget process.

But less than 11% of the denials were due to parents’ incomes being above the limit.

In about 8% of cases, the students were either not yet old enough for kindergarten or too old for high school. Two students were denied because they don’t live in South Carolina.

Because the pool of eligible students was smaller this year, it made sense that fewer families would receive money, Erickson said.

“It was the least possible people” who could receive the money, she said.

An expansion, she said, would help families who earn just above the income limits but are still struggling. She pointed to the 539 students whose application were denied because their parents earned too much.

But Kelly pointed out that advocates for the program have touted it for decades as a way to help poor families stuck in failing schools afford another option for their children.

The fact that fewer of those families took advantage of the program than expected suggests that, even if numbers increase in coming years, it will be difficult to know how many disadvantaged students are using the money, he said.

“I think it paints a really compelling argument that there is no need for something like (universal school choice) in the near future,” Kelly said.

Editor’s note: The percentage of applications rejected due to deadlines has been corrected to 79%. 

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. SC Daily Gazette maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Seanna Adcox for questions: info@scdailygazette.com. Follow SC Daily Gazette on and .

Family members and NAACP President Derrick Johnson spoke of the violent threats endured for years following the decision, which outlawed separating children into schools by their race. 

President Joe Biden met with the delegation of two original plaintiffs, about 20 descendants and NAACP leadership “critical in fighting for these and other hard-won freedoms for Black Americans,” according to a White House official. 

Several family members reiterated the struggle to make good on �����Ƿɲ�’s promise of quality education for all is far from over. 

“We have a lot of work to do,” said Cheryl Brown Henderson, youngest daughter of namesake plaintiff Oliver Brown, just after leaving the Oval Office. “… We’re still fighting the battle over whose children we invest in.”

In the private meeting, family members said they urged the President to continue that fight and support HBCUs. President Biden thanked them for taking on the risks required to push back on Jim Crow and segregation, including risking “your life, your livelihood, your home,” said Brown Henderson.

At least one litigating family’s home was burned to the ground in South Carolina. Many others lost jobs, compounding the challenges Black families faced in trying to build economic wealth less than a century after the fall of slavery. 

One descendant urged the President to consider a national holiday commemorating the landmark court decision so that its significance and history would not be lost.

“We have yet to fulfill the promise of Brown,” said NAACP President Derrick Johnson, adding that teaching “adequate” history is being threatened in multiple states. Last month, the organization for its “anti-indoctrination” law and alleged discrimination against Advanced Placement African American Studies courses.

“So the fight continues,” Johnson said. “It is a political fight. It is a legal fight. It is a moral fight, to ensure that we have a future that’s reflective of the demographics of this country today and not the demographics of 1950.” 

Earlier this week, scholars at Stanford University and University of Southern California unveiled troubling research that school segregation steadily increased in the last three decades. Experts say there’s an urgent need to reform how students are sorted into schools – four states require, and nearly all allow, districts to enforce attendance zones, which often mirror racist housing or sundown town boundaries from nearly a century ago. 

Family members called out the press’s failure to accurately document challenges to �����Ƿɲ�’s implementation and racial educational inequities being played out in schools today. They also voiced criticism for the administration’s military and war spending in comparison to education priorities. This week and late last month signed a for aid to Ukraine, Taiwan and other countries. 

“The truth about education in America? Are the kids from the Indian reservations … in West Virginia, or my mother’s hometown in South Carolina [getting quality education]? I say no. Tell me I’m wrong,” said Nathaniel Briggs, son of the namesake plaintiff in . “We’ll spend millions of dollars to buy an airplane and a bomb, but not on education.” 

Thursday’s event was the first of several NAACP and White House engagements commemorating the anniversary. Tomorrow, seven decades to the day since the court issued the Brown decision, the President will share remarks at the African American Smithsonian. 

State officials are looking to hire workers — teachers and non-teachers alike — to teach elementary and middle school students how to read this summer.

The New Mexico Summer Reading Program will provide reading instruction in small group, four-hour classes of children ranging in age from those becoming kindergarteners to ninth graders.

People hired to help children read will start the program in June and continue for four to six weeks through July, according to a news release.

Help fund stories like this.

The deadline to apply is May 24; however, the state is encouraging people to apply by May 17 so they can start in June.

More information and the application can be found at . The program’s website shows 42 summer reading locations across New Mexico.

Three state agencies, the New Mexico Public Education Department, the Higher Education Department and the Early Childhood Education and Care Department said Monday they need “hundreds of additional instructors” for the program, which has a goal to serve 10,000 students.

“You do not need to be a licensed teacher to become a literacy instructor, but we encourage retired educators and educators on summer break to consider joining this historic statewide literacy effort,” said Public Education Secretary Arsenio Romero.

Summer reading instructors would make $35 per hour, according to the news release. That’s significantly higher than the in New Mexico of $20 per hour.

People would have to commit to working for at least 25 hours per week.

The weeklong training will be paid at the same rate $35 per hour rate.The specialized training will be done by literacy experts prior to the program, at the end of May or the beginning of June.

New Mexico ranks 50th in literacy with 79% of fourth grade students reading below grade level, to the children’s literacy nonprofit Reading is Fundamental.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Source New Mexico maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Shaun Griswold for questions: info@sourcenm.com. Follow Source New Mexico on and .

A year after the state Legislature’s budget committee rebuffed demands for a major cash infusion to sustain Wisconsin’s child care sector, providers say they’re struggling to survive and child care resources remain stretched thin.

“We are hearing just an endless story about child care programs that cannot hire and cannot retain staff, more classroom closures, increased rates of pay for parents,” said Ruth Schmidt, executive director of the Wisconsin Early Childhood  Association (WECA).

None of those have improved in the last year, Schmidt added in an interview. “I would say it has gotten slightly worse” — and will get worse still, she contended, without a state budget that includes substantial child care support.

Help fund stories like this.

On Monday, providers, parents and advocates gathered across the state to call attention to the continued challenges child care providers and families face. The events, part of a nationwide campaign called “A Day Without Child Care,” were held to rally support for expanding access and improving affordability for working families who need child care.

At one of those events, held in New Glarus, speakers emphasized that the early education trained child care workers provide helps children’s brains develop and helps them gain social and emotional skills that allow them to thrive throughout their school years.

“Kids who get high quality early care and educational opportunities, they do better in school, they’re more likely to graduate,” said Jeff Pertl, deputy secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families (DCF). “They earn more in their lifetime. They’re less involved in criminal activity. They need fewer special education supports and interventions. They grow and thrive because caring, stable adults are there to take care of them.”

Sarah Kazell, a child care worker and volunteer advocate, argued that early education is a public good that merits public investment along with K-12 education.

“This is the reality of a lack of public investment in early education,” Kazell said. “Women like me are earning a poverty wage to do it. And we are effectively subsidizing the ability for any middle class family to afford care at all. That’s the subsidy program that America has right now — it’s exploitative labor of the people who provide the care.”

Child care workers should be “acknowledged and paid as professionals that they are, professionals who are providing an essential public good to their communities,” she added. “And I want to stop the trend of child care becoming exclusively available to affluent families — that’s wrong.”

The New Glarus event was organized by Corrine Hendrickson and Brooke Legler, who operate child care centers in the community. The pair founded Wisconsin Early Childhood Action Needed (WECAN), an advocacy group, to marshal support for providers and families.

Along with other advocates, they reminded their listeners that 2024 is an election year. They offered materials to help people contact their legislators and make an appeal for robust state support for child care.

“In November, we need to think about and research who we are voting for and make sure that they align with our own values,” Legler told the crowd.

A workforce necessity

Child care makes it possible for more people to enter the job market, advocates said. State Rep. Mike Bare (D-Verona), whose district included New Glarus until the legislative maps were redrawn this year, said in an interview that the community’s largest employers have cited housing for workers along with child care as their top concerns when it comes to hiring and keeping employees.

The same is true of Wisconsin’ teacher workforce, state schools Superintendent Jill Underly told the rally.

In a recent Department of Public Instruction (DPI) report, “teachers tell us that the lack of access to affordable, high quality child care is a barrier for them to return to the classroom after having kids of their own,” Underly said. “We cannot afford to continue to lose amazing teachers because they cannot afford child care. And of course these effects are similar for lots of other families across Wisconsin.”

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed and exacerbated challenges that providers faced for years. Keeping fees affordable for families kept providers from raising wages, which made hiring workers more difficult, according to advocates.

The number of regulated child care providers in Wisconsin has declined over the last decade. From 2014, when there were nearly 6,000, the number dropped by about 25% to less than 4,600 by February 2020, according to DCF, which maintains a child care data dashboard.

During the same period the number of licensed family care providers — who care for up to eight children in their homes — also fell by about 25%, from just under 2,000 to less than 1,600. The number of certified family providers — who care for three or fewer children and who are certified typically by counties rather than licensed — has fallen even more dramatically, from nearly 1,400 to just over 500 — a 60% drop.

The loss of family providers “really disadvantages rural populations in significant ways,” according to Schmidt, the WECA director, because those communities cannot support larger centers the way urban communities can.

Providers stabilize — but strain persists

With the pandemic, the strain increased. Providers lost workers due to illness or fear of illness. Some parents working at home decided to forgo the cost of care. Others, unable to get care, decided to cut back their jobs.

At the same time, though, because of the pandemic the state and federal governments offered greater support to providers. In Wisconsin that came in the form of Child Care Counts — a $20 million-per-month subsidy to child care providers funded by the 2021 American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA).

Over the subsidy program’s nearly four-year span, some centers have opened and others closed, but the number of providers has held relatively steady, in the range of 4,600.

The capacity of those providers is about 177,500 children, according to DCF. That might overstate the actual number of openings, however. DCF’s child care dashboard lists capacity based on a provider’s license, according to the department’s communications director, Gina Paige.

If a provider can’t hire enough staff and limits enrollment below the licensed capacity as a result, that doesn’t show up in the state numbers. Schmidt of WECA said she doesn’t have concrete data, but based on her conversations with providers and others in the field, she believes as many as half of Wisconsin providers could be operating below their official capacity.

Gov. Tony Evers proposed continuing the Child Care Counts program with $340 million — first  in the 2023-25 state budget, and when the Legislature’s Republican majority declined, in a special session bill later in 2023 that also was rejected by the GOP majority.

The Evers administration has since been able to extend Child Care Counts, but at about half its original size, $170 million in ARPA funds that were not spent elsewhere. That has continued the program into mid-2025.

At the New Glarus rally, Kazell criticized the lawmakers who ignored those proposals despite a vigorous campaign by child care providers and families.

“When we meet with them and ask for state investments to stabilize our workforce — because we are the workforce behind the broader workforce — we are told that we should just be doing it for the children, not for the money,” Kazell said. “And we are treated as though the broken child care market is our fault for running our businesses badly, instead of the natural consequence of letting a public good languish in the private market.”

Advocates now are focusing on a federal proposal for a $16 billion, Hendrickson told the New Glarus audience. At the same time, they’re starting to prepare for the 2025-27 budget.

Pertl, the DCF deputy secretary, told the rally that the current Child Care Counts extension would “give us one more chance to go back to the Legislature and build a sustainable future for child care.”

Schmidt told the Wisconsin Examiner that she expects Evers to include “a big ticket item for child care” in his proposal for next year’s budget.

“The state did some really cool, wonderful, great work to help stand up child care during this time,” Schmidt said of the last three years. “And it was still hard for families to find. And it was still hard for families to pay for. And so when you roll back the growth and the benefits of what we’ve done in the past couple of years with all this investment of our funds — I don’t know how we think we’re going to retain a workforce in child care.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Wisconsin Examiner maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Ruth Conniff for questions: info@wisconsinexaminer.com. Follow Wisconsin Examiner on and .

Democratic lawmakers in Harrisburg took the first steps last week to provide $5.1 billion in new funding for Pennsylvania public schools to close a gap between the wealthiest and poorest districts that a court last year declared unconstitutional.

The legislation in the state House, proposed by Rep. Mike Sturla (D-Lancaster), follows the recommendation of a bipartisan commission on education funding to comply with a Commonwealth Court judge’s order to fix the education funding system.

The General Assembly has a constitutional imperative to end the funding disparity starting with the 2024-25 budget, Democratic lawmakers say.

Help fund stories like this.

“The judiciary has spoken and we have a responsibility to address the unconstitutional nature of our education system,” House Appropriations Committee Chairperson Jordan Harris (D-Philadelphia) told the Capital-Star on Monday. “For me, I don’t know how we can deal with anything else without dealing with that.”

But Harris’ Republican counterpart on the Appropriations Committee, Rep. Seth Grove (R-York), criticized the proposed legislation for not including revenue to pay for the plan. Grove said he also believes resetting the system through zero-based budgeting is the answer.

“Nothing in the Commonwealth Court ruling says we need more money,” Grove said.

House Democrats have a narrow one-vote majority and are likely to pass a budget that reflects their legislative priorities. But Republicans who control the state Senate fired an opening shot in budget negotiations last week clearly signaling their intention to slash Gov. Josh Shapiro’s $48.8 billion spending plan.

On May 7, the upper chamber passed a bipartisan reduction in the personal income tax and eliminated the tax on electricity that would add up to an estimated in revenue.

The Senate also took steps to to provide tax dollars of up to $10,000 for private school tuition. An impasse over the Pennsylvania Award for Student Success (PASS) program stalled budget negotiations for nearly six months last year.

Senate Majority Leader Joe Pittman (R-Indiana) in a statement Monday noted that the General Assembly has provided record increases in funding in the last two budgets. In 2022, the Legislature approved a $525 million increase, but less than the $1.25 billion Gov. Tom Wolf proposed in his final budget. Last year, lawmakers agreed on a $567 million increase; Shapiro had proposed a $900 million in his first budget.

“There are 500 school districts across the commonwealth, and each have their own definition of what fair funding means. Both the majority and minority Basic Education Funding Commission reports did reach agreement on formula modifications to provide predictability and stability to school districts,” Pittman said, adding, “we will continue to look for ways to reach common ground and respect taxpayers as part of this year’s budget.”

The fair funding proposal in Sturla’s forthcoming legislation is the product of more than a decade of litigation and days of hearings by the Basic Education Funding Commission, which include lawmakers from both parties in the House and Senate and members of Shapiro’s cabinet.

“Nothing in this piece of legislation should come as a surprise to anybody,” House Education Committee Chairperson Peter Schweyer (D-Lehigh) said. “It is the work that the legislature has been doing ever since the fair funding decision came down.”

Commonwealth Court President Judge Renee Cohn Jubelirer said in a that the General Assembly has not fulfilled its legal mandate and has deprived students in school districts with low property values and incomes of the same resources and opportunities as children in wealthier ones.

The funding commission found that 371 of Pennsylvania’s 500 school districts have an adequacy gap, meaning they spend less than $13,704 per pupil. That’s the median per pupil spending by the districts that meet the state’s academic performance standards.

The decision, which lawmakers chose not to appeal, followed a four-month trial in a lawsuit filed in 2014 by a group of parents and school districts who claimed the state had failed the state Constitution’s mandate to provide a thorough and efficient system of public education.

Cohn Jubelirer, a conservative judge, did not instruct the General Assembly on how to fix the system, leaving the solution for the Legislature and executive branch to determine.

Last year, the Basic Education Funding Commission held dozens of hearings across the state where students, parents, educators, and administrators spoke about the challenges and deprivation they faced in the state’s neediest districts, both urban and rural.

In January, the commission voted 8-7, largely along party lines, to adopt a report that determined there is a $5.4 billion gap between what schools receive now and adequate funding as determined by the spending of the state’s most academically successful schools.

The $5.4 billion figure includes $291 million that is the responsibility of school districts that have lower taxes despite less-than-adequate funding. The remaining $5.1 billion is the state’s responsibility.

Sturla’s bill would also include $1 billion in tax relief over the next seven years for districts that have hiked taxes in an effort to generate adequate funding, money to reset the baseline funding that all school districts receive, and it would reform to provide several hundred million in savings for school districts.

“This is a very comprehensive piece of legislation,” Schweyer said.

Republican budget maven Grove said the proposal doesn’t include the property tax increase and fails to provide a revenue source other than the state’s reserves. Shapiro’s office has projected that the state’s surplus and rainy day fund will total $14 billion at the end of this fiscal year on June 30.

“I’d actually like to thank them for being honest … on how much they want to spend over the next seven years,” Grove said of the Democratic plan. “If they want to spend the money over the next seven years it needs to come with a tax increase.”

Dan Urevick-Ackelsberg, senior attorney at the Education Law Center, said Grove’s assertion that the Commonwealth Court order doesn’t require the state to spend more is incorrect.

“What they’re hanging that on is this line [from the decision] that the remedy doesn’t need to be entirely financial,” Urevick-Ackelsberg said, adding that the ruling identified deficiencies in funding that affected the ability of districts to provide sufficient staff, instruments of learning and safe and modern schools.

Harris, the House Democrats’ chief budget negotiator, said he is open to proposals from House and Senate Republicans.

“If there is another proposal that they have to address the Commonwealth Court ruling, we would love to see it. We can talk about that,” he said.

But faced with an obligation to Pennsylvania’s students and the possibility of additional litigation if the Legislature fails to act, Harris said doing nothing is not an option.

“This is not a nice-to-have. This is a must-do,” Harris said.

(This article was updated at 2:30 p.m., Tuesday, May 14, 2024, to include a statement from Sen. Majority Leader Joe Pittman.)

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Kim Lyons for questions: info@penncapital-star.com. Follow Pennsylvania Capital-Star on and .

The Alabama State Board of Education Thursday adopted a new literacy coursework for Science of Reading for teacher preparation programs in the state.

The , approved on a unanimous vote, comes after years of a state focus on literacy scores, especially in the lower grades.

State Superintendent Eric Mackey said the standards would apply to elementary teachers, collaborative special education teachers and “could be applied to some other areas also.”

Help fund stories like this.

“Mostly, they are focused again on early childhood and elementary teachers,” he said.

The Science of Reading is an interdisciplinary body of research about reading and issues of reading and writing. definition, cited in the standards, includes phonemic awareness and letter instruction as instructional practices but not emphases on larger units of speech, such as syllables.

The new standards also outlaw the “three-cueing” system in institutions of higher education and K-12 schools. The rule change defines three cueing as a “model of teaching students to read based on meaning, structure, and syntax, and visual cues.”

Three-cueing is a teaching strategy that is affiliated with “balanced literacy,” a compromise between whole language and phonics-based instruction that became prominent in the 1990s, Three-cueing encourages students to guess and look for clues, such as at pictures, when facing an unfamiliar word.

The skills associated with the Science of Reading were not taught in schools for many years, as reported by As of May 2023, 15 states had outlawed the use of three-cueing after Hanford’s reporting, with some lawmakers and policy makers citing the podcast, .

sponsored by Rep. Leigh Hulsey, R-Helena, would have banned the use of three-cueing, with some exceptions. The legislation passed the House of Representatives on March 5 but was among the many bills that died in the .

“This prohibition is specific to the teaching of foundational reading skills and should not be construed to impact the teaching of background knowledge and vocabulary as connected to the language comprehension side of Scarborough’s Reading Rope,” the reads.

Scarborugh’s Reading Rope is a visual representation of establishing proficient reading, according to the

Hulsey said Tuesday that her bill was “complementary” with the standards adopted by the board, and that she expected to bring it back next year.

“Ultimately, kids need to learn how to actually read, and that is done through the science of reading, learning how to decode sound out letters, and figuring out how to put those things together to actually decode the word and be able to be lifelong readers, versus someone who is just looking at words and guessing,” she said, “We’re not setting kids up for success if we’re not actually teaching them how to read.”

She said the exceptions in the bill were mainly for older learners and those with learning disabilities.

members of the Literacy Task Force cited teacher training and implementation as a hurdle in implementing literacy instruction.

Mackey said they had received comments earlier. They received no additional public comments on the current version, which they voted on the intent to approve months ago.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alabama Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Brian Lyman for questions: info@alabamareflector.com. Follow Alabama Reflector on and .

For years now, it’s been conventional wisdom that the legacy of Brown is, at best, complicated and possibly even an outright failure. On the one hand, it ended the evil practice of sorting kids into schools by race. By citing the Constitution in seeking to end this once-common policy, the justices reimagined the American social contract and marked a hugely important milestone for the country. On the other hand, despite optimistic predictions, the public schools .

Read now, and you can see that the contradiction was there right from the beginning. The court lamented the impact that racially isolated schools can have on children of color, but the ruling itself didn’t outlaw racial imbalances. It simply made it illegal to assign kids to school based on their race. In later cases, the court explicitly declined to outlaw the racial imbalances that arise indirectly from policies that do not mention race.

This was the right call. Had the court done so, school districts would have been empowered to engage in social engineering on a revolutionary scale. Kids would have been reassigned to schools with the singular goal of eliminating any racial disparities in enrollment, leading districts to ignore all the other factors that might determine which school is the best fit for which child: size of the school, convenience of location, values, curricular focus, pedagogical approach, etc. This would have been a disaster for the country, and low-income kids of all races would have become pawns in a radical social experiment.

However, by defining the constitutional violation so narrowly, the court limited its jurisdiction to those districts that had a history of explicit racial segregation. Only they would be forced to end racial imbalances in their schools. And even in these cases, the courts’ scrutiny would end as soon as a district was found to have atoned for the sins of its past.

In effect, the court boxed itself into a corner that keeps getting smaller. Even as districts have stricken any mention of race from their school assignment policies, racial divisions have persisted or even worsened. Why? Because children are primarily assigned to schools based on their address, and American cities are largely divided along lines of race and income level, even within the same neighborhood. So schools come to mirror those imbalances. What’s more, the bundling of housing and education has driven up the cost of homes near elite, coveted public schools, further exacerbating these longstanding inequalities.

Today, Linda Brown, the little girl who gave her name to the landmark 1954 case, wouldn’t be turned away from a public school because of her race. Instead, she’d likely be rejected because of her address. I fear that’s no great improvement.

Take a look at elite, coveted public schools across the country, like Lincoln Elementary in Chicago. Or Mary Lin Elementary in Atlanta. Or Mount Washington Elementary in Los Angeles. The attendance zones of such schools often mirror of their neighborhoods from the New Deal era. In effect, the zones are doing the same work that redlining did back in the 1930s and 1940s, boxing out low-income families of all races. Call it .

The courts have decided that they are powerless to deal with these issues, even though these policies violate the clear language of Chief Justice Earl Warren’s 1954 opinion, which declared that public schools “must be made available to all on equal terms.” This is the forgotten promise of Brown.

My organization, Available to All, has just released a 50-state report titled “.” Looking at the laws that govern public school admissions, our report found that American families have very weak legal protections governing access to public schools. Legal discrimination based on geography or income is common, while neutral enrollment policies like lotteries are required only in rare cases, for example in charter school admissions. 

This leaves schools free to use a home address or family income level to turn a child away. Lack of oversight means school staff can and admit one family over another. Finally, the laws are riddled with inconsistencies and loopholes, meaning parents have to navigate a system in which the rules vary from school to school. Some public schools are required to have lotteries; others are not. Some are required to use exclusionary school zones to turn kids away; others are forbidden to do so.

We call on policymakers and the courts to bring much-needed oversight to public school enrollment. That means providing procedural protections for American families applying to public schools, including a right to apply to any public school, regardless of their address, and an appeals process for challenging schools that deny a child enrollment. State law should require schools to collect and publish data like acceptance and denial rates. And — perhaps most importantly — there need to be legal reforms that reduce the importance of exclusionary maps, by, for example, requiring that public schools reserve 15% of their seats for children who live outside their zone or district.

It’s time to take action and finally, after 70 years, fulfill the promise that Brown made.

Piney Woods is a co-educational, Christian college preparatory high school. With over 2,000 acres of land, it has a 250-acre farm that its 100 students tend to daily while caring for the animals and learning about crops. Tuition is $45,000, though every current student receives at least some financial assistance. William Crossley, the school’s fifth president and the first to be an alumnus, spoke to ��������ͼ’s Sierra Lyons about Piney Woods’s survival and its parallels to his personal education journey.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Before Brown v. Board of Education, there were about 100 Black boarding schools across the country. What does it mean to you to be leading one of the last four that remain?

It’s an interesting thing that many of these institutions have sort of gone by the wayside. But in our case, we recognize that the challenge [of] providing high-quality educational opportunity for young people, particularly low-income young people and people of color — that challenge still exists for us as a nation. 

Piney Woods has a 250-acre farm and over 1,000 acres of wildlife. What opportunities does the land allow for students to learn hands-on? What’s a typical student’s day like?

We say ,”The campus is our classroom, the land is our lab.” Yesterday, we had students down on the farm caring for the animals. We’ve got eight horses, 60 to 65 head of cattle, roosters, chickens, goats, sheep and some farm dogs. There’s something about caring for animals, and there’s something about working with one’s hands, that connects to one’s brain.

We’re starting a farmer’s market here. The kids are helping to grow that, and we will teach them entrepreneurship. The kids have to sit down and do business and marketing plans. Those become part of how we decide what to sell in the market, which is on our campus. It’s not just for our young people, but it’s for our community, too. 

We do study things in the history books, but we also go to the site of Emmett Till’s death here in Mississippi. We go to the Civil Rights Museum here, and we go to the preserved slave cabins on plantation land in Natchez. We go to Memphis and we see the hotel where Dr. Martin Luther King was shot and we go to the founding site of this institution and see where Lawrence C. Jones was brave enough to find a way to start this enterprise, and we’re all here because of what he did. 

And so we literally live that history and we do it in science because we have five ponds on our campus. And so when we’re testing for bacteria, we’ll get the water out of the faucet, and then we’ll get the rainwater that made its way into the pond and our students will do comparative analysis on what’s in the water. 

Historically, you will have seen pictures of a classroom in 1920 with the desks all lined up and the teacher in front of a blackboard. Then people show a similar classroom today with desks all lined up, with the teacher in front of the whiteboard. One of the things we try to do is break out of that to help our young people understand that to live is to learn and to learn is to live. We don’t make this distinction that you’re in school so you have to sit at this desk a certain way. Our students field calls at our switchboard, our students call our donors and thank them for supporting us with scholarship funds. They call admitted students and say, “Hey, I understand you’ve been admitted to Piney Woods. Well, I’m a 10th-grade student and we’ll both be together next year, and I wanted to see if you had any questions.” Our students go out and carry the message of this institution all over this state and nation, and so it really is learning practiced through living.

How did Piney Wood survive as all those other schools were closing?

One of the things is that we understood our mission, and we try to situate our mission and our vision in the period in which we live. Prior to Brown, Piney Woods issued associate degrees. Once the junior college/community college systems began to allow Black people to come, we recognized that the need was not as great. And so our program adjusted, and we stopped issuing associate degrees. It did not mean that the mission was not still viable. It’s no secret that you can pretty much track an individual’s educational progress by the income levels of their families. If you come from a family with a higher income, you’re that much more likely to succeed and have access to higher-quality education. Part of what we wanted to do was to ensure that we’re still addressing that challenge. You have to adjust to what’s happening in the world but still question what’s the relevance of your mission.

Piney Woods has had an alumni community that’s come forward to support its work and that sacrifices to make sure Piney Woods can still exist and do this work. Piney Woods has an independent board of directors. Sometimes these schools were run by churches, and they sort of went the way of the congregation or denomination and didn’t have as much control over how it advanced. Particularly during days of segregation, there were a number of these institutions that received state support because states didn’t want integration, so they would send some money to the Black boarding schools, which would essentially allow them to avoid integration. When the money left, these institutions couldn’t operate. Piney Woods operated independently of that for most of our existence. I think leadership matters. Piney Woods had strong leadership from our founder, but then we’ve had strong leadership from other folks who preceded me, and our goal from the start has been about building next-generation leadership in all that we do.

This month marks 70 years since the Brown v. Board ruling. Following the decision, many Black teachers and principals were dismissed. What generational impact do you believe this has had on Black students?

You know the old saying, “if you can see it, you can be it.” When Black males have one Black male teacher in elementary grades, their chances of success increase exponentially in school. To some extent, that was true for myself. I grew up on the south side of Chicago and I had teachers who were white, who were Black, but for the most part, they were female. I can remember one male teacher that I had along the way, but who was white, and then the folks in charge were typically white. We didn’t have Black models in leadership at the classroom level, or even at the local school level, and so we are pioneers. Piney Woods is by no means an all-Black staff. We have a diverse leadership structure here that I hope sets a standard for our young people to see.

Laurence Clifton Jones founded the school to educate the children of impoverished Black sharecroppers. With that history in mind, how has Piney Woods remained a safe haven for students who may have financial hardships or face other forms of marginalization?

This is near and dear to me because I will confess that there were moments when this institution faced financial challenges and some thought the answer would be to pursue more exclusively — essentially, people who could pay tuition. Lawrence Jones founded Piney Woods with $1.65. The ability to pay tuition has never been how we [decided] who would get this kind of an opportunity. Our board has worked diligently to ensure that we stay true to that from a mission standpoint. If you can afford to contribute more, we ask you to make a bigger contribution. But if a family doesn’t have the funds, no child is turned away for an inability to pay his or her way. Every young person who is here today has a scholarship. If there are folks who want to come and don’t want a scholarship, we welcome them, too.

The reason we can do that is that members of our community … we have something called the Circle of Faith that they sometimes will recommend a student and they will send contributions to help support that student’s education. Across this nation, the community of supporters makes this kind of work possible.

What does it cost to attend?

About $45,000 per student per year. That’s with room and board and really all their expenses. We don’t say if you want to be on the basketball team, you have to pay an extra fee. Once you’re here, you’ll be part of whatever’s happening, The National Association of Independent Schools pegs the cost of attending a boarding program like ours … we are 50% less than the average boarding school costs in this nation, and we successfully get all of our young people admitted to postsecondary options: community, college, college, military, etc.

You are the first principal to be a former student. How did your time as a student impact your view of education and opportunity in rural Mississippi?

My experience before coming here to Piney Woods was not a good one. I grew up in difficult neighborhoods on the south side of Chicago. My life changed when I came to this institution, and it took me some time to realize that. I was having leadership opportunities that I don’t know I would have ever had, had I stayed back in a public school at home. My grades and my GPA were well beyond where I would have been had I stayed home.

I got a chance to go to the University of Chicago as an undergraduate. We lived with my grandmother, and she lived about a 15-minute drive from the university. Nobody from our neighborhood went to the University of Chicago. I had driven by it my whole life but I didn’t even know it was a university. Nobody in my family had gone to college. Maybe my last year in high school at Piney Woods and my first year in college at the University of Chicago, it dawned on me that the people I grew up with didn’t have the opportunities that I had. I knew my cousins and folks at church. I also knew that I wasn’t as smart as some, I just had had an opportunity that they didn’t, because Piney Woods had given me that opportunity. I had really at that point in my life said, “This is unfair. It’s unfair for me to be at the University of Chicago and for my cousin to be in Joliet federal prison. That sort of ignited my passion to ensure that we were making educational opportunities available despite the accident of one’s birth, and that’s what this place has done for 115 years. And when I spend my life doing that, that’s the most fulfilling thing I can imagine.

Before returning to Piney Woods, you worked as senior adviser in the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education. What was your experience with returning to Piney Woods after having such an aerial view of education in the country?

I actually started my career in the classroom. I was teaching in Chicago Public Schools and was volunteering for a first-time-ever candidate for Illinois state Senate from our little district in South Side Chicago named Barack Obama, who went on to do some other things after he got into the Illinois legislature. So I started there and I became really frustrated with the bureaucracy. I wanted to find a path that I could make change on. I didn’t think I could do that with the 26 kids I had in my class, I went to law school, I ended up in a senior position working in government trying to change educational disparity, and Piney Woods sort of came along. 

So I went from this space of working on policy to working directly with people. That was life-changing. I was no longer just putting a policy on the table — I was sitting across the table from a young person who was making a decision about whether to go to college or which college to go to. Or the young person who was sometimes making adult decisions about whether to even remain in school. In many ways, I went from a kind of work that felt very transactional in Washington, D.C., to work that I know is transformational in nature here on the ground. It’s been really a thrill and a delight, because I literally get to touch and sit and really know the people whose lives are being changed by the work we’re doing.

Piney Woods is 20 miles south of Jackson, in the state with the nation’s largest Black population. When policymakers and education leaders are discussing school choice, what specific needs for Black parents and students in the rural South do you believe should be considered?

When I was in D.C., my daughter was on a soccer team, and they lost every game. Sometimes they just lost because the other team had superior skills. But many times they lost 1 to 0, and the one goal the other team made sometimes had gone in accidentally. The reason the ball was able to go in accidentally is because it consistently was on my daughter’s team’s side of the field, which meant that they were always on defense. Another person could, just by sheer luck, put points on the board.

I think that Black kids growing up in America often live their lives on defense. The expectations of them are low. When a Black child fails in school, nobody’s surprised, and that’s a problem. This place changes that. We say this is where you belong, that we expect you to excel and to achieve, and you’re not going to live life on defense. Quite the contrary. We expect you to put points on the board.

One of the things we offer is an atmosphere that says you’re a part of this community. You’re a part of, dare I say, this family. Just as my two daughters aren’t allowed to say, “I can’t do it,” neither are you. There’s a whole field of scholarship from Tocqueville on the impact of community and advancing and turning around its members. The solutions often live on the ground in the community. I think we can choose whether to subject our kids to a mass-production factory model, one-size-fits-all notion of learning, or a personalized, culturally supportive environment in which every single young person is expected to achieve in their own right. I think we do the latter, and we’ve had success, certainly for my 10 years, but for 115 years. I hope that serves as a lesson for us as a nation about the kinds of spaces we should make for the best learning outcomes for young people.

When the time comes, how do you hope to leave the school better than how you found it?

This place was started in the middle of nowhere with almost nothing but a burning desire and passion to have an impact on the lives of others. People invested in that and it came to fruition. Lawrence C. Jones, our founder, described it as “a resistless urge to help people build better lives for themselves and their communities.” I got to be here because people who didn’t know my name, and long before I ever got [here], invested in this space on the belief that someday somebody like me might come through.

I tell our students it so deeply humbles me to think that our enslaved fought for freedom that they never would personally realize, but they fought for those freedoms for future generations and people invested in me in ways that I can’t fully measure. I hope that someone will say, “He did his absolute best to pay it forward, that he did his absolute best to ensure that this institution would become a regenerative community that gives more to the world than it ever takes from it.” If we can position this work to go out and have that kind of an impact, then I think we will have done our work well.

A U.S.-based tutoring company on Tuesday pushed back against a conservative campaign to “destroy” it due to security fears over its Chinese owner.

In a posted online, said the parents’ rights group in recent months has misrepresented its operations, falsely claiming it has ties to the Chinese government. The company, based in New York, said the parents’ group is trying to persuade lawmakers and others that Tutor.com “is somehow a puppet of the Chinese government and a threat to national security,” according to the letter. 

Founded two decades ago, Tutor.com was acquired in 2022 by , a Beijing-based investment firm in Hong Kong, Singapore and Palo Alto, Calif. In the letter to attorneys representing Parents Defending Education, the company said the parents’ group has chosen to portray Tutor.com “as a stalking horse to advance the advocacy group’s broader political agenda.”

The effort by Parents Defending Education both echoes and influences a larger one by lawmakers nationwide to raise security concerns about companies linked to China, including fears that they could be compelled to share student data with the Chinese government.

But John Calvello, Tutor.com’s spokesperson and chief institutional officer, said the fears are misplaced.

“First and foremost, it’s important to say: We are an American company,” he said in an interview. “I want to be very clear about that. And again, as an American company, you have to abide by all U.S laws and regulations.”

Tutor.com, Calvello said, “cannot be compelled to share data” with anyone.

He noted that it had recently undergone a voluntary review by the federal , which found, in his words, “no unresolved national security concerns.”

He also said the company has a designated security officer approved by the U.S. government to ensure data security compliance. And he said all of Tutor.com’s data is housed in the United States. 

According to the watchdog site , states, school districts, colleges and even the Pentagon have spent more than $35 million on contracts with Tutor.com over the past decade. Among the largest: nearly $1.6 million in 2015 for online homework tutoring for the U.S. Defense Department and $1.1 million in 2022 for tutoring at California State East Bay.

Following the pandemic, state and school district spending on Tutor.com, as with other tutoring providers, skyrocketed. In December, the New Hampshire Department of Education said it would through Tutor.com to every student in fourth- through twelfth grades, as well as to those prepping for GED exams. 

But many lawmakers have also sought to minimize China’s influence in both K-12 and higher education.

After Congress in 2018 targeted the nearly 100 Confucius Institutes on U.S. college campuses, restricting federal funding at schools with programs, their number dropped to fewer than five, according to a 2023 U.S. Government Accountability Office . 

In 2024, lawmakers are seeking to ban TikTok due to the social media application’s Chinese ownership. Primavera is a minority investor in ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company. ByteDance also owns the AI-powered homework helper .

But Tutor.com has been the subject of much of the scrutiny around student data. In February, U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas, Lloyd Austin, saying the Pentagon’s relationship with Tutor.com is “ill-advised, reckless, and a danger to U.S. national security.”

Cotton said the Pentagon should end its dealings with the company, suggesting that students’ personal data, such as location, IP addresses and the contents of tutoring sessions, could be released to the Chinese government. He said the U.S. is “paying to expose our military and their children’s private information to the Chinese Communist Party.”

In March, Manny Diaz, Jr., Florida’s commissioner of education, to public K-12 and higher education leaders statewide, saying Tutor.com’s ties to “foreign countries of concern” may compromise student data privacy. Diaz said the State Board of Education had adopted rules to protect student data “to keep it out of the hands of bad actors,” adding that school districts, charter schools and state colleges “must take the necessary steps to protect their students from nefarious foreign actors such as the Chinese Communist Party.”

And last month, 13 lawmakers, led by U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Michigan, to U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona, saying Tutor.com “poses a significant national security threat.” They asked what measures the department had taken to assess “the potential national security risks associated with Tutor.com’s relationship.”

A spokesperson for Cardona did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Neily recently that Tutor.com’s Chinese ties are “something that just seemed to have slipped past the goalies.”

During a segment on the company, the show’s host alleged that providers like Tutor.com can gather data from even the youngest students and “adapt what they need to teach these kids to make sure they’re good, functional little robots.” He asked Neily, “Is that the plan?” 

She replied, “That very much seems to be the plan,” adding, “Let’s be honest, this data is not being secured by America’s best and brightest.”

Neily did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Tutor.com’s Calvello said much of the alarm around the company’s Chinese ties stems from the parents’ group, which he said has been “promoting falsehoods” that lawmakers and others have amplified. As a result, he said, a few school districts have been under pressure to drop the service, with critics quoting the parents’ group’s materials. 

“We’re prepared to pursue legal avenues to protect our reputation and operations from false claims,” he said.

It’s graduation weekend for North Dakota’s public colleges, with the University of North Dakota and North Dakota State University accounting for more than half of the degrees and certificates to be handed out.

Which of the nine remaining schools would be next in line? If you guessed Bismarck State College, you get an A.

UND accounts for about 33% of the graduates and NDSU 28%, according to 2023 figures. Bismarck State accounts for 9.6% of program completions.

Help fund stories like this.

Not all the program completions mean a two-year or four-year degree.

Bismarck State offers a list of certificate programs that are less than one year, such as mobile app development, as well as  two-year programs such as nursing and a few four-year programs.

She said that in the last year alone, out of the 210 academic programs that came through the North Dakota University System office and were approved by the State Board of Higher Education, 142 out of those were certificate programs.

“Some of that is just campuses looking at programs, for example, an associate degree, and thinking about how to bundle, how to repackage existing programs into smaller sort of increments that students might complete as a certificate, possibly even as a student in high school,” Johnson said.

While the number of graduates from North Dakota colleges and universities has declined almost 6% in the past five years, the number of program completions is down only about 3%, with some students completing multiple degrees or certificates.

Johnson looked at data from 2019 through 2023, the last year of complete data on program completions that includes fall, spring and summer graduates.

While the 11 public colleges are having their graduations either Friday or Saturday this weekend, Johnson said the data for the 2024 class isn’t finalized just yet.

She said the graduation trend aligns with the enrollment trend.

A factor in recruiting students is the strong job market. The unemployment rate in North Dakota was at just 2% as of March.

The number of graduates for the spring semester, as compiled by the NDUS office, are:

• North Dakota State University – 1,988
• University of North Dakota – 1,896
• Bismarck State College – 903
• North Dakota State College of Science – 660
• Minot State University – 385
• Dickinson State University – 224
• Dakota College at Bottineau – 179
• Lake Region State College – 145
• Mayville State University –  138
• Williston State College – 136
• Valley City State University – 119

Many of the certificate programs are aimed at filling specific needs in the workforce, such as meat cutting at North Dakota State College of Science and Dickinson State University.

Some are designed to help professionals acquire or maintain a license.

“Sometimes teachers will come back and get a certificate, for example, working with individuals on the autism spectrum, because that was something they didn’t have when they went through college,” Johnson said. “But maybe they’ve changed jobs, or they’re trying to have some additional job responsibilities, so these certificates nicely complement those without having to return to get an entire two year or four year degree in these very specific areas.”

Other certifications may be for personal enjoyment or a side business.

“You’ll see photography and digital design, and those two meet the needs of the community from a different angle,” Johnson said.

Like so many of the microschool founders I visit across the U.S. and interview on my semiweekly LiberatED , Hayes never expected to run a school. She had been a mathematics professor at Montana State University for more than a decade, fully intending to stay in that role until retirement. “I couldn’t imagine doing anything else,” said Hayes. 

Covid was the catalyst. When her children’s schools shut down in the spring of 2020, and her college classes went online, Hayes began hearing from parents who wanted tutoring services. She also wanted to help her own three children stay on track academically, and find a way for them to have small, safe social interactions. 

In fall 2020, Hayes leased a gym downtown with large garage doors that opened wide, providing for maximum ventilation. She spaced children six feet apart, enabling them to meet in person while working through their remote public school curriculum. In addition, Hayes offered all kinds of enrichment activities, focused on project-based learning and frequent outside expeditions. 

Parents and learners loved it. So did Hayes, who connected with some experienced educators who were also passionate about outdoor, experiential learning mixed with core academics. “Covid offered a moment to reflect on what was important to me and how I spent my days,” said Hayes, who realized that the abundant time outside in nature working on meaningful educational projects was just as important for her as an educator as it was for the children in her program—including her own kids. 

In early 2021, several parents approached Hayes, saying that if she created a full-time school, they would pull their kids out of public school and send them there. Hayes was in. She resigned from the university and established Peak Academy as a nonprofit private school. 

“Teaching at the university was a great experience, but my world opened up when I started this school,” Hayes told me when I visited Peak Academy earlier this week as part of my trip to survey the growth of Montana microschools, or small schools and spaces that are typically less expensive and more individualized than traditional private schools. Located in a pastel green-painted home on a quiet residential corner just a couple of blocks from Bozeman’s quaint downtown, Peak Academy currently serves 16 middle school students who spend their days learning academics, doing projects, and enjoying frequent field study with two full-time teachers, in addition to Hayes and other part-time instructors from the community.

For high school, many of Peak’s students attend the nearby , one of the area’s first schools to focus on project-based, outside experiential learning along with high-quality academic instruction. It launched in 2017 and has become an inspiration for new Bozeman-area microschool founders who share a similar educational vision. 

In the nearby town of Belgrade, Lindsey Vose also plans to recommend the Bozeman Field School as a high school option for her microschool students. Vose worked as a California public school teacher for eight years before leaving that job in 2018 to be an instructor for a secular hybrid homeschool program. It was her first exposure to homeschooling and alternative education, as well as the hybrid homeschool model in which homeschooled children attend a full-day, drop-off program several days a week for academics and enrichment while working through the program’s curriculum at home with their families on the remaining days. 

She pulled her kindergartener out of public elementary school and enrolled her in the hybrid homeschool as well, appreciating its smaller, more personalized learning model. Her preschooler also came along. 

During Covid, the Vose family moved to Montana seeking a different, more farm-based lifestyle. Her husband worked remotely for his California-based engineering firm, and Vose began to search for hybrid homeschool programs. “When we came here, I knew we weren’t going to go to public school, and there were no outdoor, nature-based, academic-focused, secular hybrid homeschools here. It didn’t exist, so I had to do it,” said Vose, who began running her program, , out of her garage in 2022 with four children, including her two children.

Today, Wild Wonders is located on a leased, five-acre farmstead property near Vose’s home. It has 22 K-6 students who attend the mixed-age, drop-off program Monday through Thursday, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Vose currently employs two full-time teachers, but with 35 students registered for this fall, and a future middle school expansion in the works, she will be hiring additional staff. Vose says the local demand for her program has been enormous. 

“I get inquiries every day. I can’t keep up with the growth,” she said, adding that she plans to retain the “micro” aspect of her microschool. “Staying small is really important to me. I value the small classes and the strong sense of community here. Everybody knows each other. I’m not willing to give that up,” she said. 

Another former public school teacher, Rusty Bowers, was also attracted to the microschooling model and its focus on individualized learning. A high school math teacher and principal in Montana public schools for over 10 years, Bowers launched , a K-8 Acton Academy affiliate, in fall 2023. Acton Academy is a fast-growing microschool network focused on learner-driven education. Founded in 2009, the Acton network now includes over 300 independently-operated schools, serving thousands of learners. “I started an Acton Academy because I left the public education sector as a discouraged educator. After being out, I kept asking myself what the best education environment would look like if I could truly inspire each student to become the best they could be. In that search, I found Acton and fell in love with their model and high standards of excellence,” said Bowers, whose two children, ages 10 and 5, attend his school.

East of Bozeman, Emily Post has a similar commitment to high standards and student-empowered learning. She launched as a recognized K-8 private school in fall 2020 in a storefront location in downtown Livingston. It currently enrolls about 20 students, including Post’s two children. Access is a key priority for Post, who told me that the school’s $10,000 annual tuition is financially out-of-reach for many local families. She used part of the grant she received from , an education philanthropic nonprofit and entrepreneur network, to fund scholarships for students, and is also a partner with ACE Scholarships that offers partial scholarships for low-income students to attend a private school of their choice.

These scholarships help but they are not enough to meet the overall demand she sees from local parents who want new and different educational options. Last year, Post applied to open a tuition-free public charter school, Yellowstone Experiential School, under Montana’s new charter school legislation. Of 26 applicants, she was the only one who wasn’t a public school district and the only one who was because she didn’t receive local school district permission before applying to the state to be a provider, as the charter law requires. “I tried to get local approval first but I could never get on the local school board agenda,” said Post, frustrated by the bureaucratic barriers. 

She plans to try again, but is also hoping that Montana expands its new education savings account (ESA) program to include more students. Currently, this limited school choice program applies only to special needs students in the state. Since 2021, 11 states have passed universal or near-universal education choice policies that enable all or most K-12 students to access a portion of state-allocated education funding to use on a variety of approved learning options, including innovative schools like Educatio.   

“It absolutely makes sense for funding to follow students,” said Post. 

TOPEKA — Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Park interpreter Jeff Tully says Kansas entered the union as an anti-slavery state in 1861, but in less than two decades the Kansas Legislature passed a law allowing cities of more than 15,000 residents to segregate elementary schools.

The law applicable to Topeka’s youngest, most impressionable children stayed on the books from 1879 until the 1950s.

“This was the state that wrote in our Constitution, ‘We forbid slavery,’ ” Tully said on the Kansas Reflector podcast. “Yet, 20 years later, we’ll start segregating African American kids in primary schools.”

Help fund stories like this.

Lawson Nwakudo, another National Park Service interpreter at the national historical site in the Monroe Elementary School, said that peculiar state law and the excellent Black-only schools in Topeka drew the interest of the NAACP, which was forming a legal strategy that sought to demonstrate to justices of the U.S. Supreme Court the harm inherent in a system of “separate but equal” schools and the necessity of disassembling segregated classrooms across the nation.

“Not only were these educators incredible, but they’re actually more educated than their white counterparts,” Nwakudo said of Topeka’s Black elementary school teachers. “The reason why the NAACP wanted to focus on Kansas, on Topeka, was because there was that level of equality. If they could prove there’s something inherently wrong with a place like Kansas … that would mean that there’s something inherently wrong with everywhere else.”

The consolidated court case, known as Brown v. Board of Education, resulted in the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision May 17, 1954, that declared state-sanctioned segregation of public schools to be a violation of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

To celebrate the 70th anniversary of one of the century’s most significant court decisions, Washburn University in Topeka will present the play “Now Let Me Fly” at 7 p.m. May 17 in White Concert Hall. It examines the journey of heroes and heroines in the legal fight for equality in education. Admission is free with online ticket registration at or by calling 785-506-7768.

“There are many characters, many people who were involved with the Brown decision,” Nwakudo said. “This play gives you basically a feeling as to what that was like, and what their lives are like moving through and a little bit after the Brown case.”

The parents in Kansas, Delaware, Virginia, South Carolina and Washington, D.C., who signed on as plaintiffs in what evolved into the Brown v. Board case placed themselves and their children in harm’s way, he said. The lead plaintiff was Oliver Brown, who had a daughter eager to enroll in the Topeka school closest to her home. She was denied access and was required to attend a segregated Black school further from home.

Nwakudo said the stakes were higher for other plaintiffs than they were in Topeka.

“There are some people who are being threatened and other people had their houses burned down. Whereas in Kansas, there still was possibly of an economic threat where your jobs can be threatened. That’s partially why 12 of the 13 complainants were housewives,” Nwakudo said.

Tully said the Brown v. Board of Education National Historical Site organized a homecoming celebration for former students, staff and teachers at Topeka’s historically Black elementary schools from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. May 18 at the park’s headquarters in the former Monroe Elementary School. The invitees include those with ties to Monroe, but also to Buchanan, McKinley and Washington elementary schools in Topeka.

“At 12:52 p.m. on May 17, 1954, nine Supreme Court judges unanimously said ‘separate but equal’ was inherently unequal,” he said. “We thought Monroe would be the natural place to have this homecoming of sorts.”

The day’s program will include a roundtable discussion among former students from all four schools, followed by a sit-down lunch (registration for the meal is closed), musical entertainment and the taking of class pictures on the front porch of Monroe Elementary. There will be family and group activities on the north lawn. At any point during the day, visitors can contribute their stories and memories to an oral history project and the Kansas State Historical Society will be available to take digital images of documents and memorabilia related to the Topeka schools.

Nwakudo said the transition to integrated schools produced violence and all sorts of maneuvering to delay implementation of the Supreme Court’s orders.

“That is a major uplift for a lot of places, especially in the South, where these children could step away from these one-room shacks that were their schools. No electricity and no indoor plumbing,” he said. “There was a quite a bit of resistance. Places like Tennessee put forth a 12-year plan to desegregate their schools. Virginia tried to resist in any way they could, and actually ended up closing down a lot of their schools across the state.”

He said his message to visitors to the National Historical Park, especially school children, was that they had “power to make a positive change in our lives, just like their predecessors did. We can draw knowledge and strength from those past experiences, to galvanize ourselves to do more to do better.”

Tully said the National Park Service site south of the Kansas Capitol was among 428 National Park units in the United States. The site in Topeka measured barely 1 acre — a far cry from the 2.2 million acres of the Yellowstone National Park and the 1.2 million acres of the Grand Canyon National Park.

“But what happened in a building in Topeka, Kansas, along with four other court cases around the United States, was probably, in many scholars’ opinion, the single most important 20th century Supreme Court decision,” he said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com. Follow Kansas Reflector on and .

The trend is unsurprising to lawyers and researchers familiar with the challenges of �����Ƿɲ�’s implementation, who’ve sounded the alarm that the widespread practice of tying school assignment to childrens’ home addresses has  perpetuated segregation.

But one civil rights and education law expert maintains a sense of optimism, offering new ideas for how courts and state legislatures can take on integration efforts.

“There’s a whole lot that they could do if they wanted to,” said University of North Carolina law professor Erika Wilson, “but often states lack the political will.” 

For years, Wilson, who teaches on and explores the intersections of race in education, has tracked how segregation has persisted. Across the country, modern school district boundaries mirror the boundaries of , where violence and threat of bodily harm against Black families maintained all-white areas. Modern day school district lines today are legally allowed to mirror the historically racist boundaries. 

Among other recommendations, she argues courts can and should take districts’ historical context into consideration when determining whether lines are discriminatory and infringing on student rights. States could also shift who is responsible for drawing lines, or use regional or county lines for districts, which would encompass more racially and economically diverse areas. 

In an interview with ��������ͼ, Wilson explores some ways segregation has taken on new forms, what states could take up today, and why abandoning integration to “just fix schools” for everyone won’t work in a vacuum. 

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

��������ͼ: What do you think is missing in the current conversation around desegregating schools? Especially as many districts around the country are about to consider closures or consolidations and might be looking at attendance zone lines? 

It’s a tough question, but I’ve thought about this. One thing I wish that people would consider about not just school desegregation issues, but education in general, is the importance of public education to a healthy and thriving democracy, especially a multiracial democracy.

We really didn’t have a robust system of public schools nationwide until after the Civil War and Reconstruction, and that is in large part because the formerly enslaved and emancipated Africans made education a cornerstone of their efforts to become full citizens …. They understood, and I wish we understood as well, how important that is to cultivating citizenship on equal terms and allowing us all to live together harmoniously. 

It’s kind of a pie in the sky answer – but I do think it’s an important one. We’re seeing the rollbacks on public education, the push towards forms of privatization, at the same time as we’re seeing a complete erosion of democratic norms and commitment to democracy – I don’t think those are a coincidence.

Part of your work is explaining how violence maintained all-white areas and how district maps are now maintaining that exclusion. Can you talk about the ways that you’ve seen that violence shift over time to maintain these areas? Are there more quiet ways that you’ve seen play out?

One of the things I talk about is the way that violence becomes ensconced within geography. And how, at least with respect to schools, we think of geography as race-neutral, unattached from that history of violence against Black bodies in particular.

When you think about modern ways that this manifests itself, the rigid maintenance of school district boundary lines around areas that we know are formerly whites-only sundown towns are an example. 

A less obvious example might be the way that we see zoning laws in these areas… they’re not going to build the kind of multifamily housing or high higher density housing that would attract people who are not predominantly white and/or affluent.

Those are certainly examples of the ways the violence that was used to create these all-white areas continues unabated, in a way that’s completely lawful, and in a way that people are hesitant to associate with forms of violence. Because it would implicate themselves in terms of their desire to move to the whitest areas with the best school districts.

I don’t know that you would use this exact term, but you’ve also written about new forms of segregation, like  school districts in the south seceding from more integrated districts, which used county lines, under the guise of local control. Can you talk about the scale of these kinds of efforts and what sort of protections would have to exist to curb them?

It’s hard to quantify from what I’ve seen, particularly with the secessions. Around 2000 to 2014, there was a ramp up in efforts and then a scaling back as it got a little bit more attention. 

I do think that the scale is larger or at least increasing in the South as these particular school systems are released from desegregation orders. Even if they’re still under existing desegregation orders, the people charged with enforcing them aren’t paying attention. Suggested changes may go uncontested.

One of the things I wrote about was what was happening in Baton Rouge and St. George – just the other day St. George found a workaround. .

The next step will undoubtedly be to try and create their own school district.

So this is the other danger, and part of the reason why it’s difficult to quantify scale. Even when there are protections put in place to stop things like secessions, there’s immediately an attempted workaround. Whether it’s what they did in St. George or attempted to do in North Carolina, where they tried to create these charter school enclaves that were essentially charter districts that would have the same effect as a public school district secession.

What I’ve tried to do is identify where it is happening, because usually what you see is copycat attempts. I wouldn’t be surprised if what St. George did ultimately gets replicated in other places. Honestly, creating their own city is even worse than creating their own school district – that has even broader implications.

For tax revenues, policing, everything. The St. George example also gets at an idea you explore in your work, that high quality schools are scarce partially by design. In this current context, how do you see state legislatures taking desegregation up?

I like to remind people that states have plenary authority over public education. There’s a whole lot that they could do if they wanted to, but often states lack the political will. We worry about campaigns, reelections, perceptions, all of those things. But in a perfect world where we could muster the political will, then there are a number of things that state legislatures could do.

The first I would suggest is rethinking the amount of authority given to school districts, particularly drawing school district boundary lines around municipal boundary lines. We take for granted that’s the way it has to be, but it doesn’t have to be like that.

Many of us don’t live our lives confined to one municipality, particularly when you’re in a metropolitan area with many neighboring municipalities. For example, I live in Durham but I work in Chapel Hill, I often drive [outside] for my son’s sports. We don’t live just confined to Durham, but the way that schools tend to work is that we confine [entry] based on these arbitrary boundary lines that don’t make sense, to reinforce segregation and inequality.

States could decide, for example, that their primary way of distributing public education would be around regional boundary lines. They might take a group of municipalities and lump them together for the purposes of creating a school district unit. Those municipalities might share local revenues, they might assign children across municipal boundary lines, that sort of thing.

They could also read the right to education clauses in state constitutions differently to require more robust forms of funding, to suggest that any kind of secession, for example, would violate that right to education clause.

I’ve also heard this critique that it’s difficult to challenge these systems that are dependent on geography because of the limitations of the equal protection clause and the , which states the neighborhood is the appropriate basis for determining school assignment. Could you walk through the new legal framework you put forth in your work, and what might be required to get there?

The framework I set forth is to really challenge this connection between racialized geography and school assignment.

When you look at a seminal case like Milliken v. Bradley, where the Supreme Court said that you could not bring in the suburban school districts to help desegregate the Detroit public schools because those suburban school districts didn’t do anything wrong. 

Well, that’s just not true. As I note in the article, something like two thirds of the suburbs surrounding the Detroit public schools were sundown towns. They were quite complicit then in the segregated patterns that ended up happening with Detroit public schools.

The problem I’m suggesting is that from an equal protection perspective, there’s no doctrinal mechanism to unearth that kind of connection between race and geography that would create a racially segregated pattern.

I suggest borrowing from the Voting Rights Act, which has this sensitive test of factors that it uses to suss out whether or not boundary lines should exist or persist. And I suggest that we borrow some of that framework to look and see when we should abrogate boundary lines for purposes of an equal protection challenge.

Similarly, I suggest that that framework could also be useful to legislators in deciding whether or not they want to maintain certain boundary lines if they want to, as I alluded to earlier, use their plenary power to rethink and redraw district boundary lines in ways that would be more racially and economically inclusive.

I wonder if we could spend just a moment with charter schools because they do have some parts of their enrollment policies that people have pointed to as promising, like, as you know, requiring a lottery once they’re full or perhaps requiring some geographic quotas. Do you see charters more often being used as the example you shared before, to create exclusionary districts of their own?

It really depends. 

We have a large contingent of parents of color who are flocking to charter schools. It says something about what the feeling is around some of the deficiencies of public schools. That being said charters were never meant to supplant a system of public education. Where we go wrong, I think, is having charters be the primary [school option] rather than supplementing public schools.

Their original intention was to be places of innovation where you could have some relaxed regulations and you would reach a smaller cohort of students. Well, that’s being turned on its head so that charters … seek to be a primary vehicle of educating children.Some of the benefits of relaxed regulations, innovation, all of those things become detrimental when charter schools are the main thing in town, because charters can be places of exclusion. 

For example, a charter school can basically lawfully exclude poor children, children with disabilities, children of color by using race neutral mechanisms to do so. Some charter schools may say we’re not gonna offer free and reduced lunch. Well, that’s going to cut out a swath of children who would depend on free and reduced lunch. Other charters might say we’re not gonna offer transportation. Well, that’s gonna cut out a large swath of children who need transportation. 

A more sneaky way of doing it is that we have the specialized charter schools, let’s say, a Latin charter school, a Montessori, an Afrocentric charter school, some of the theme charter schools are going to attract a certain cohort of students.

And if you have a combination of a special charter school like that and they don’t offer free and reduced lunch and they don’t offer transportation, then what you’re going to get is a very specific kind of student who attends.

From that perspective, they can be exclusionary. 

If we think about public education as a gateway to cultivating citizens for democracy, the exclusionary aspects of charter schools are very bad, in ways that are even more dangerous than private schools because people tend to believe that because charters are quasi public that they’re doing the right thing. It’s just not always true. Some of these charter schools operate as exclusionary as private schools depending on some of the rules that are put in place. 

It’s great that charter schools do things like a lottery to ensure equity in terms of enrollment. Even those processes can be skewed in terms of information and symmetry to even sign up to be a part of the lottery. Some schools have requirements that you have to, for example, stand in line to put your kid’s name on the list. Parents have camped out in order to do that, and what kind of parents can do that?

The saddest part to me is that we are resulting to a lottery to distribute forms of public education. The kind of education you get shouldn’t be subject to the whims of a lottery.

Are there any efforts that you’ve seen successfully disrupt the significance of geography in school opportunity?

A while back in Nebraska, they made attempts at a regional school district. There was a voluntary component to it though, that didn’t make it ideal. I sadly can’t point to any area and say this is a model of how it should be done.

The one area I would say used to be a model is actually in Wake County, North Carolina. They have county based boundary lines, which means that all municipalities within the county are part of the school district. They used to have this really great socio-economic diversity school assignment plan that ultimately got shot down, because parents were upset and didn’t like it.

Would you say that’s usually where the efforts end? With failure of political will or the parent outrage, white parent outrage particularly?

Yeah, I think the parents are a huge driver of what ultimately ends up happening … there’s this idea that their child is being denied something … It’s a mix of parents and special interests that pump up certain kinds of parents and use them to advance ideas that are meant to decimate public education. I’ve seen those explode in recent years.

Anything on your mind that I haven’t asked you explicitly, or any areas you feel the media has ignored or misconstrued?

The question I get often is, given the reluctance of parents, particularly white parents, and the lack of political will, aren’t we better off just trying to abandon notions of integrating schools and just fixing schools so that they are great schools for all children? Even if they end up being racially and economically segregated schools?

I think that’s a fair question. But my response is that it’s important that we not abandon the project of trying to get racially and economically integrated schools.

Throughout our very brief history in the United States, we have not seen a successful model of racially and economically segregated schools that really advances everyone because of the way that race operates in America. Segregation by design is going to end up connoting forms of inferiority. It’s going to preclude necessary intergroup contact that we need to buttress a really flailing democracy.

The one time period in America where we can say that we actually try to have racially integrated schools, it worked. If you look at about 1968 to 1984, where we actually took seriously the legal mandate to integrate schools, what we saw happening is better cross-racial relationships. Reduction of the achievement gap score between Black and white. These are things that I think we lose sight of.

It might seem like there’s some pathway to just fix schools even if they end up being predominantly white or predominantly Black or Latino or nonwhite schools. It doesn’t work. A lot of focus goes on how it doesn’t work for students of color, but it really doesn’t work for white students either.

In the seminal Brown v. Board of Education, everyone’s heard of the doll test that the court relied on to suggest that segregated schools make black students feel inferior. What people don’t know is that the court was also presented with social science evidence regarding the harms of segregation for white students.

One of [the harms] that’s important at this moment is that white segregation creates feelings of superiority, but moral conflict as well. 

Having a group of inferior people – they struggle to reconcile that in ways that makes them more susceptible to authoritarianism and less likely to embrace democratic norms and ideals, which have the potential to disrupt their so-called superiority.

Almost everything that was in that social science research brief about the harms of white segregation is arguably coming to fruition today in terms of the way that democracy is unraveling.

Jametrice Powell McAdams, a parent of a charter school student from Hueytown, Alabama, says, “Raising my voice for all charter schools starts with me raising my voice for my son’s charter school. Raising my voice means standing up for my son’s future. Raising my voice means being an active fighter against the school-to prison-pipeline statistics. Raising my voice means my son gets a fair shot at a quality education.”

Julia Rivera-Tapia, charter school parent and administrator from Las Cruces, New Mexico, says, “Advocating for charter schools has become one of the most important responsibilities I have. I believe that every family deserves the freedom to choose the best school for their children, and charter schools offer that option. As a parent myself, I have seen the transformative effect that charter schools can have on children’s academic and personal growth. My three children have been studying in charter schools since the beginning of their academic journey, and I have personally witnessed the positive impact it has had on their lives, enabling them to achieve great success in their studies while retaining their bilingualism and becoming amazing individuals.”

“Raising my voice for charter schools means making sure all families have a choice to send their students to a school that best represents them. When I raise my voice for charter schools, I am doing so for our community and our students, who deserve the opportunities we provide and the ability to navigate and make informed choices about their child’s future. More people need to be aware of the power of community and culturally grounded education,” says Zak Domingello, executive director at Ricardo Flores Magon Academy in Denver.

Former Washington State lawmaker Eric Pettigrew says, “As a member of our state House, I became an advocate for charter public schools — which I believe provide a great complement to traditional public schools, especially for students of color. This past legislative session, as our lawmakers considered what policies to advance, I continued to advocate for these unique public schools and urged my former colleagues to ensure that all students across Washington state have access to a public school that meets their needs.”

Cheryl Stahle, academic administrator at West Virginia Virtual Academy in Parkersburg, says, “My ‘why’ as an advocate for charter schools is deeply rooted in the belief that every child deserves the opportunity to succeed and reach their full potential. Charter schools teach children that anything is possible when they embrace the unknown without fear. I am passionate about empowering young people to shape their own destinies and showing them the unlimited possibilities that are only constrained by their imagination. Through my work in charter schools, I strive to be a quiet disrupter and leave a legacy of transformative change in the lives of students and families.”

“Public charter schools such as the Hmong American Peace Academy are transformational,” says Dr. Chris Her-Xiong, founder and executive director of the Milwaukee school. “The scholars are transformed from at-risk to ambitious, independent thinkers and prepared to succeed in college and in life. The families are transformed through the children taking strides toward success, opting out of the cycle of poverty and lack of opportunity. The communities served by the schools are transformed through shared ambitions and experiences. The cities are transformed through the proof that turnarounds are possible and that education can deliver on its promise of prosperity. To transform a life is to transform our world, and that is why I advocate for charter schools.” 

Daniyal Hussain, a high school senior at Cottonwood Classical Preparatory Academy in Albuquerque, New Mexico, says, “Something that makes me most excited about the future of public education is the aspect of student advocacy. I originally thought that because I was a high school student, no one would want to listen to what I had to say. That was far from the truth. In fact, I was able to attend recent legislative meetings where I could say what I truly thought was important. I am excited for the future where we will have more students speaking out and more people wanting to listen to students about what is truly needed for public education.”

When we raise our voices, more people hear us. That’s why we raise our voices to advocate for charter schools. We need everyone to hear us screaming from the rooftops: Every student deserves a high-quality public education.

This Friday, May 17, marks the 70th anniversary — the landmark United States Supreme Court ruling that ordered an end to racial segregation in American public schools. And while resistance to desegregation never went away, there was a window of time – particularly in the late 20th and early 21st Century — in which many states and localities, including North Carolina and several of its counties, made enormous headway in building much more diverse and better integrated public school systems.

As a new report from researchers at NC State makes clear, however, that momentum in our state has waned and now things are trending strongly in the opposite direction.

The report is entitled . It was published earlier this month by the , and recently NC Newsline interviewed one of the authors, NC State professor of education, Jennifer Ayscue.

Help fund stories like this.

According to Ayscue, the gist of what she and her colleagues, Victor Cadilla, Mary Kathryn Oyaga, and Cassandra Rubinstein found is that while overall public school enrollment in North Carolina has steadily become more diverse, patterns of segregation in individual schools have greatly intensified.

And this, she says, is worrisome news since, as was noted in the release accompanying the report, “…segregated schools are systematically linked to unequal educational opportunities and outcomes, while desegregated schools are associated with numerous short-term, long-term, academic, and nonacademic outcomes for individuals and society.”

In addition to chronicling the resegregation of North Carolina schools, the report points to several potential tools and tactics for policymakers to employ in combating this trend – though almost all would buck recent trends at the state legislature and in the Department of Public Instruction. These include:

• School districts should design voluntary school desegregation policies that could include student reassignment, controlled-choice attendance and the development of more magnet schools.
• DPI should provide incentives to districts and schools via grants and technical assistance.
• State lawmakers should enact stronger charter school regulations that require the provision of transportation and free school meals, while also amending the state voucher program to include civil rights protections and greater transparency and accountability.

It should be noted that the report does not address segregation in private schools and that a) private school enrollment in North Carolina has , and b) that private schools are generally more segregated than public schools.

The following numbers are from :

41% – growth in overall North Carolina public school enrollment from 1989-90 to 2021-22 (from 1,074,120 to 1,517,300)

45% White, 25% Black, 20% Hispanic, 5% Multiracial, 4% Asian, and 1% American Indian – racial/ethnic breakdown of students in 2021-22

67% White, 30% Black, 1% Hispanic, 2% all others – racial/ethnic breakdown in 1989-90

13.5% – share of all North Carolina public schools in 2021-22 that were “intensely segregated schools of color” (schools that enroll 90-100% students of color)

3.5% – share that were intensely segregated in 1989-90

0.9% – share of North Carolina public schools in 2021-22 that were “hyper-segregated schools of color” (schools that enroll 99-100% students of color)

0.7% – share that were hyper-segregated in 1989-90

23.5% – share of charter schools in 2021-22 that were intensely segregated

6.0% – share of charter schools in 2021-22 that were hyper-segregated

1 out of 4 – share of Black student who attend intensely segregated schools

1 out of 5 – share of Hispanic students

82.6% – of the students attending intensely segregated schools of color, the share who were recipients of free or reduced-price lunch, indicating a double segregation of students by race and poverty

61.3% and 55.3%, respectively – percentage of low-income students in schools attended by typical Black and Hispanic students

38.0% and 29.4%, respectively – percentage of low-income students in schools attended by typical White and Asian students

58.9% ­– the typical White student attended a school where 58.9% of the students were White, even though White students only comprised 45% of the total state enrollment

41.2% – the typical Black student attended a school where 41.2% of the students were Black, even though Black students accounted for 25% of the state’s enrollment

28.3% – the percentage of White students at a school attended by the typical Black student

68.6% – despite accounting for less than half of the state’s enrollment in 2021-22, 68.6% of White students attended majority White schools

to explore the report.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. NC Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Rob Schofield for questions: info@ncnewsline.com. Follow NC Newsline on and .

Kids like her daughter Clara, a second grader, glommed on to its rich characters; she’s especially fond of Lily, who wears her black hair in a short bob and has a collection of plush toy lions. Fellow teachers, meanwhile, like that it “hits everything” students need to be strong readers.

“It slowly builds, introducing more and more sounds, and then it jumps right into blending those sounds into little words,” Morrison said. At least two independent link the program to “significant positive” results.

But that winning combo initially wasn’t enough for ���󾱴�’s education department to put Superkids on its list of approved . Morrison homed in on a likely culprit: , a nonprofit that for nine years has operated as a kind of “Consumer Reports” for the K-12 publishing industry. At the time, Ohio leaders approved only programs that won the organization’s coveted green rating. Superkids earned a more modest yellow.

“How EdReports can be the sole basis of this process is astounding,” Morrison, also a local school board member, wrote to the state. Ohio trains teachers in the , she said, but “this list takes us three steps backward.”

Ohio ultimately relented after Zaner-Bloser, which publishes Superkids, appealed. Temporary as it was, the episode demonstrated the outsize power of EdReports in the world of high-stakes curriculum decisions — a power that has come under increasing scrutiny as more parents embrace the phonics-laden science of reading. Critics of the nonprofit say it has continued to award green ratings to reading programs that might still accommodate balanced literacy — a discredited philosophy in which teachers encourage kids to learn to read by surrounding them with books— and has slapped effective programs with yellow ratings.

In interviews with ��������ͼ, EdReports officials say they’ve gotten the message.

Starting in June, its reviews of early reading materials will reflect a fuller embrace of the science of reading. “Phonics and fluency are now non-negotiables” for a green rating, said Janna Chan, EdReports’ chief external affairs officer.  

Reviewers will also no longer use “three-cueing” — a practice associated with balanced literacy that encourages students to identify unfamiliar words by picking up clues from text or pictures. Since 2021, at least 10 states have .

An internal memo sent to EdReports staff in February and obtained by ��������ͼ acknowledged growing doubts about the organization’s credibility as states pass new reading laws. CEO Eric Hirsch wrote that the organization is “most vulnerable to criticism around our reviews” of comprehensive English language arts programs called basals or “big box” curricula — programs that some have attacked for being “” and giving lip service to the science of reading. Hirsch wrote the memo in response to a that critiqued the organization and highlighted newer groups providing alternatives to its reviews.

EdReports contracts with a network of over 600 reviewers, many of them current or former teachers who earn up to nearly $3,000 per review. Working in teams of five for an average of four to six months, they if curriculum products meet standards and are easy for teachers and students to use.

Evidence of the organization’s considerable influence isn’t hard to find.  A 74 analysis of , a data service that stores recordings of public meetings, reveals that since January 2021, EdReports has been mentioned over 100 times during school board meetings. District leaders and staff frequently invoke its ratings when making budget recommendations.

The “end-all, be-all for curriculum review” is how Bill Hesford, an assistant superintendent in the Bayfield, Colorado, district described the organization during a January discussion of a new math program.

That same month, T.C. Wall, assistant superintendent of the Bolivar, Missouri, schools, assured her board that all reading programs up for consideration had earned the organization’s highest rating.

“We’re starting with quality stuff,” she said.

Financially, there’s much at stake for both districts and curriculum companies. Fueled by a one-time infusion of federal relief funds, school systems spent roughly on curriculum in the 2021-22 school year alone. Due to the time and expense such reviews require, districts typically wait as long as six years before revamping their offerings.

Pressure to ‘conform’ 

For many publishers, EdReports’s green stamp of approval is a valuable marketing tool they trumpet in .

Others lost trust in its reviews years ago. 

Collaborative Classroom, a curriculum provider, publishes four literacy programs based on the science of reading used by hundreds of districts. One of them underwent four reviews in three years because, in Hirsch’s view, new features warranted a fresh examination. But the process left Kelly Stuart, the publisher’s president and CEO, exhausted and disillusioned.

“We play in this world as a nonprofit,” she said. “But if we were a for-profit company, there would be a tremendous amount of pressure on us to conform and meet all green.”  

In a world so contentious its seminal debates are called “,” critics have been — including those who initially welcomed EdReports. 

Karen Vaites, a literacy expert and advocate, once led marketing efforts for Open Up Resources, a nonprofit that offers free curriculum materials to districts. Declaring that “excellence is now easy to find,” she was among the first to in 2018.

In recent years, her views have taken a 180.

“EdReports is no longer an effective guidepost,” said Vaites, who founded the in January to essentially compete with the organization. One of its first projects is to review , an Open Up Resources program that earned a yellow from EdReports, but has showing effectiveness and won from districts that use it.

Vaites said she no longer has a financial relationship with Open Up Resources. But having once been an EdReports “fangirl,” she said she feels “doubly obliged to let people know that they need to look beyond” the site.

If loving memes about curriculum is wrong, I don’t want to be right.

But seriously, enough with districts adopting pricey curricula that bomb reviews.

— Karen Vaites (@karenvaites)

Hirsch declined to address her specific criticisms, but said he and his team plan to gather feedback from researchers, as well as district and state leaders, to respond to critics’ concerns. By the end of the summer, the organization expects to update guidelines for all three of the content areas it reviews — English language arts, math and science — and apply them to next year’s reports. 

Hirsch told ��������ͼ the pivot is in keeping with its mission as an organization geared toward — and staffed by — teachers.

“You’re not a great teacher if you can’t reflect on practice,” he said.

‘No counterbalance’

With backing from major foundations, Hirsch founded EdReports in 2015 to help guide districts toward materials that satisfied the then-relatively new , a set of guidelines in math and language arts that most states still follow. In an attempt to tap into the booming market, many publishers touted their products as “Common Core-aligned” even when their commitments were tenuous at best. Experts say a third-party reviewer was sorely needed. 

“Some publishers had a vice grip on the whole curriculum thing,” said Kareem Weaver, an Oakland literacy advocate featured in , a documentary about the push to provide low-income and minority students with high-quality reading instruction. “Before EdReports, there was no counterbalance to publishers’ claims of being ‘high-quality.’ ”

Now with an $11.5 million annual budget, Hirsch called the organization “amazingly transparent,” without “taking a dime from publishers.” But Weaver thinks EdReports would have a greater impact if its reviews factored in evidence of effectiveness. 

“Don’t just treat kids like guinea pigs,” he said. “Parents have to know if their kid is actually going to get the things they need in regular classroom instruction.”

Hirsch responded that solid, independent evidence of a specific curriculum’s effectiveness . When it does exist, publishers typically offer it in response to reviews. But he conceded that EdReports could make the information easier to find. 

‘Bloated’ materials

Evidence is also important to state leaders, who increasingly to adopt reading programs based on research. But some experts say publishers are responding to new mandates by “overstuffing” their products — adding structured, phonics-based lessons without removing the older ones.

Vaites points to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s , one of the three programs approved as part of — a two-year effort to overhaul literacy instruction in the nation’s largest school district. EdReports gave it a green rating, despite complaints about its overabundance of units, lessons and worksheets. 

“As a novice teacher, you’re going to get overwhelmed when you see four pages that go along with one lesson,” said April Rose, an instructional coach at P.S. 132Q in Queens, who works with the United Federation of Teachers to support staff transitioning to the program.  With such wide offerings, some teachers struggle to find assignments for students that match the standards they’re trying to teach, she said, or hop from one skill to the next without giving students deep practice.

Jim O’Neill, a general manager at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, said Into Reading is designed to let teachers “grow while teaching with the program.” The broad range of lessons and activities, he added, is also intended to support students at multiple levels in one classroom.   

“Coming out of the pandemic, there are two things we have — students with different needs, but also new teachers who are just beginning to teach reading,” he said. “Having carefully crafted lesson plans can help them get up and going with the right resources for the right students at the right time.” 

Hirsch acknowledged bloat is a problem, but said publishers are reluctant to remove features some teachers prefer. 

He suggested that districts adopting a new curriculum view EdReports as just a starting point — and follow up with adequate training and support for teachers. 

Timothy Shanahan, an emeritus professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, agreed. “School districts rely too much on these external reviews without a clear understanding of what they tell you and what they do not,” he said. “They need to give a close look at the programs themselves.”

Disclosure: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies, the Overdeck Family Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation provide financial support to and to ��������ͼ.

Education thrives on innovation. While core practices in education have slowly and incrementally changed over time, the innovation and creativity of teachers and administrators have facilitated improvements by modifying the organization and delivery of education. In calling for solutions, A Nation at Risk (ANAR) repeatedly called on local “political and educational  leaders to search for solutions” and to use the “ingenuity of our policymakers, scientists, State and local educators, and scholars in formulating solutions.” Indeed, ANAR lauded the “local laboratory” model that decentralized schooling affords to test new models that could scale and disseminate throughout the country. This chapter takes aim at understanding how innovation in the organization and delivery of education both within and outside the classroom has affected the quality of education.  

I start by looking at large-scale initiatives that sought to modify the ways school districts orga nized themselves. For example, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation provided significant funding for the small schools or the “school-within-a-school” initiative. The initiative sought to divide large high schools into smaller sub–high schools that might provide a greater cohort experience and allow for greater interaction between teachers and groups of students. After reviewing small schools and other out-of-the-classroom innovations, I turn my attention to innovation within the classroom. Since ANAR, major evidence on class size and the timing of schooling, among other innovations, has influenced policy and practice. This has affected how states and local districts organize and deliver education to students inside schools and classrooms. I review evidence on these and other innovative practices. 

It is impossible to really track forty years of innovation across thousands of school districts. Many innovations were never disseminated, scaled, or evaluated. Other innovations became so popular and widespread that the editors of this series chose to dedicate entire chapters to them. For example, the rapid changes in technology with computers and the integration of standards and accountability systems are two innovations that have altered every classroom across the United States. In this series, Tom Vander Ark’s chapter on technological innovations and Michael J. Petrilli’s chapter on standards and accountability review these innovations and how they have shaped school organization, classroom practice, and teacher and principal accountability. This chapter provides a useful companion to those chapters. 

In this chapter, I focus on four sources of system innovation and two sources of classroom innovation. For system innovation, I review evidence on small schools, magnet schools, superstar superintendents, and innovation zones. For classroom innovation, I discuss evidence on class size and the duration of schooling. In choosing the specific innovations, I have conveniently sampled practices that have expanded beyond a single district or school and have thereby shaped and influenced education policy and practice. I also try to focus on innovations where rigorous research has provided some hint as to the causal impacts of these policies.  

While many of the innovations seem to have strong evidentiary bases, they remain seemingly underutilized. In some cases, the costs of the interventions remain prohibitively large. In other cases, the modifications needed to establish the interventions at scale compromise the capacity of the interventions to affect outcomes. I discuss other impediments to expansion, and more generally I discuss obstacles that inhibit the use of the “school laboratory” model.

Systems innovations

“Systems innovation” refers to new policies and practices that modify governance and the structure of school systems. The specific innovations upon which I focus are those in school organization, creation of specialized schools, school leadership, and innovation zones, which provide schools and districts latitude to implement new practices and policies.

School size and organization

Perhaps the most notable of the systemwide changes was the small schools movement. In the early 2000s, nearly twenty-six hundred small schools were created nationwide. One of the major forces behind this investment was the Gates Foundation, which began in the early 2000s to fund the decomposition of large high schools. Based on its interpretation of existing literature, the Gates Foundation encouraged schools to maintain a size of four hundred students. As Tom Vander Ark, who at that time was executive director of education at the Gates Foundation, said, “Young people who attend smaller schools that provide a rigorous, personalized education and enable close relationships with adults are more likely to graduate and continue their education.” The basic theory was that personalized education and deeper relationships with teachers would improve the quality of education and provide better role models and coaching as students began considering and then pursued subsequent education. 

Unfortunately, the short-term results did not generate the anticipated results. Over nine years, the Gates Foundation invested more than $2 billion in creating small schools, and in 2009, it “refined” its strategy. As Bill Gates wrote: “[M]any schools had higher attendance and graduation rates than their peers. While we were pleased with these improvements, we are trying to raise college-ready graduation rates, and in most cases, we fell short.”

Indeed, the short-term evidence on small schools was a bit pessimistic. At the time that Gates was making allocative decisions, the evidence was not strong. However, the tide of positive evidence was soon to come. Studies by Bloom et al., Schwartz et al., Barrow et al., and Abdulkadiroğlu et al. found positive, long-run impacts. The study by Abdulkadiroğlu et al., the only one that took advantage of randomized admis sion lotteries, reported that college attendance rates in New York improved by seven per centage points, with additional improvements in math and English scores on the state’s High School Regents Examinations. Additional work by Schwartz et al. argued that small schools improved the performance of most New York high schools, including schools that were not small schools. 

Yet despite the positive, long-run evidence on small schools, they are no longer receiving the same public and philanthropic support they did in the past. Strong evidence has not revitalized the initiative or the funding streams. While existing small schools have remained, few additional small schools have been added. Why the lack of continued or renewed support? 

First, there was a perception that lessons could be applied and scaled up in other settings that did not require small schools. For example, one theory as to the success of small schools relied on the notion that students developed rich, meaningful, personalized relationships with faculty and counselors. However, such relationships may be possible in other settings as well. As Robert Hughes, director of K–12 Education at the Gates Foundation, explained, “[W]ith some work, you can really build structures that enable kids to be known and to get the kind of support they need to be successful [even] in larger schools.” Also, small schools cost more per student than traditional schools. If traditional schools can replicate the counseling and other relationship-based mechanisms, then expanding small schools, a far more expensive and involved intervention, may not be necessary. Indeed, the fact that all schools in a school district, including large schools, benefit from the presence of small schools suggests that small schools increase the visibility of some mechanisms that can be transferred to larger schools.  

Second, there have been concerns about the capacity of institutions to scale small schools. One concern is that the cost of staffing might be prohibitively large. Another concern is that small schools raise the demand for both teachers and principals, and it is unclear that the supply of new teachers and qualified principals can satisfy the demand.  

While small schools remain somewhat stalled, there are several aspects of the small schools movement that have had a lasting impact. For example, it was one of the largest, highest-profile experiments in innovating the structure and design of schools. This gave some momentum to districtwide interventions and experimentation, expanding the scope of the laboratories envisioned in ANAR. Also, as mentioned above, it provided significant information about reforming underperforming schools that could be applied in other settings. And there was also important heterogeneity in the impacts that provided additional policy lessons about the implications of certain types of schools — namely charter schools, which generated significant impacts. For example, the KIPP schools were cited by Gates in the 2009 announcement that the Gates Foundation was refining its investment strategy. Subsequent work such as Abdulkadiroğlu et al. demonstrated that there were specific strategies (e.g., high accountability) employed by charter schools that may have led to the greater impacts observed in some small schools as opposed to others. Each of these lessons reinforced the notion that school districts could be local laboratories for innovation.

Specialized schools

A second strategy that altered the ways districts organized schools had to do with school choice and the underlying supply of schools. In this series, the chapter by John D. Singleton focuses extensively on school choice, so I defer any discussion of charter schools and vouchers to that chapter. My discussion here centers on magnet schools. While many charter schools behave like magnet schools and vice versa, the administration of magnet schools typically continues under the direction of school district offices, whereas the administration of charter schools often moves outside the district’s purview.  

Magnet schools existed long before ANAR. As districts grappled with how to desegregate schools, many created specialist or alternative schools to give parents additional options. The first magnet schools began in the late 1960s. The first large-scale experiment occurred in 1970 in Minneapolis, and the first specialized high school, focused on career themes, opened in Dallas in 1971.  

As of 2016, there were 4,340 magnet schools across the United States, with the most common theming centered on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM); fine and performing arts; international baccalaureate; career and technical education; and world languages. Whereas before ANAR, magnet schools were often considered as a way to encourage desegregation, the major expansion and specialization of magnet schools took place after ANAR with greater emphasis on school choice.  

The magnet school expansion happened for a variety of reasons. Some of it was driven by parents as they tried to find ways to improve their children’s educational performance by building on specific skills. Some of it came as magnet schools, particularly vocation-oriented magnet schools, demonstrated that they could have positive impacts on students who were struggling in mainstream classrooms. 

To date, the evidence on magnet schools is largely positive. Gamoran (1996) uses the National Education Longitudinal Study to compare test scores of students at magnet, public, and private schools. Gamoran found that students at magnet schools score higher in science, reading, and social sciences. Crain et al. (1998) use oversubscription lotteries to measure the impact of career-oriented magnet schools. The researchers provide mixed evidence. On the one hand, career magnet schools had lower graduation rates than comprehensive schools.  

This was the result of greater emphasis on career and vocational curricula. On the other hand, students who attended magnet schools reported fewer “reckless adolescence behavior” at age twenty. Kemple and Snipes provide evidence that career magnet schools are an effective way to reduce dropout rates among those at the highest risk not to graduate. A synthesis of the literature suggests that impacts are “generally positive.” 

Magnet schools were refined in the laboratory of public schooling, and new iterations of magnet schools build upon the principles of school choice discussed by Singleton and on principles of innovation. Career education in particular has become much more central to education policy. As the returns to high school education have stagnated, emphasis on employability and skills has fueled much of the advance in career education. This concern not only has been present in the United States but also has become increasingly popular as a policy tool in developing countries. The evidence from magnet schools provided significant lessons that shaped early attempts to strengthen vocational education.  

Magnet schools also raise the question as to whether education should be similar across students. In many ways, the traditional school model presents very little variety across the types of skills that students develop; however, magnets exist to allow some students to specialize beyond what a traditional school might allow. Heterogeneous students might need more heterogeneous offerings than traditional schools can provide. Magnet schools might be a way to improve the efficacy of education for a subset of students, and there may be limits to the degree of differentiation among students and schools that are possible. Hence, the gains could be large but diminishing as differentiation expands. 

In the short run, magnet schools’ enrollment and presence will continue to expand. Whereas they were at one point an answer to desegregation and integration of schools, they are increasingly a means for parents to express their preferences in terms of students’ education opportunities. Their growth continues, and while charter school enrollment remains larger, magnet schools remain a viable way to provide differentiated education opportunities. Moreover, as charter schools become more specialized (e.g., STEM or vocation focused), the line dividing magnet and charter schools will continue to blur. 

School leadership

Another trend that has taken place since ANAR is the increased emphasis on high-profile school district superintendents. In many large school districts, superintendents have become chief executive officers with greater power and salaries. For example, Barbara Byrd-Bennett served as the CEO of both Cleveland Public Schools and, later, Chicago Public Schools. She previously served in a leadership capacity for New York City schools. Her compensation in both Cleveland and Chicago was controversial, given the size of the packages. Other CEOs grabbed headlines and made national news as well, such as Michelle Rhee in Washington, DC, and Arne Duncan in Chicago Public Schools. In districts with more than twenty-five thousand students enrolled, superintendent compensation ranges from $140,000 to almost $400,000. To put this in perspective, the median base salary for a beginning teacher in districts of the same size is $44,150. 

Prioritizing hiring high-profile CEOs with extensive experience and increasing their compen sation has been a prevailing societal trend. Just as CEOs’ track records were believed to have an impact on a company’s performance, schools sought to enhance their quality by appointing elite superintendents who would bring about substantial improvements and elevate the institutions they served. Hence, an increasing number of school districts applied corporate strategies to superintendents. In the corporate world, there was a perception that the supply of such leaders was finite, leading to bidding wars and large compensation. The emphasis on superstar superintendents faced the same competition and compensation. 

However, as Chingos et al. demonstrated, superintendents who bring about significant, statistically reliable changes in student achievement within their districts, while controlling for other factors that affect academic performance, are indeed rare. They found that superintendents account for only a tiny fraction (0.3 percent) of student differences in achievement, significantly less than other factors such as student characteristics, teachers, schools, and districts. They further indicated that student achievement does not improve with longer superintendent service, and hiring a new superintendent does not lead to immediate gains in student achievement. 

Increased emphasis on superintendents may not directly yield higher test scores, but nevertheless it remains an area of continual research. For instance, Hart et al. proved that encouraging superintendent longevity can support student achievement, as those with more in-state experience possess a comprehensive understanding of the state’s curriculum, testing programs, and the organizational stability required for effective leadership. Mitigating superintendent turnover, as suggested by Grissom and Mitani, could involve considering salary increases, particularly in smaller and rural districts and those with lower student achievement, as this would help retain superintendents who are often lured by higher-paying positions in larger, more urban districts with better academic performance. 

The hiring and reliance on superstar superintendents is very much an experiment in progress. While some districts have moved away from the strategy of hiring CEO-like superintendents in favor of other approaches, there are still districts that continue to explore this path. Ongoing research and the findings regarding superintendent longevity and compensation emphasize the importance of considering contextual circumstances being faced or the necessity of exploring alternative strategies. 

Innovation zones

While the principles of innovation zones may have been part of the policies dating back to the early 1990s, states and school districts began implementing legislation in the mid 2000s. Innovation zones are schools or districts to which states or districts grant greater autonomy over curriculum, budgeting, and staffing. Typically, states and districts grant innovation zones additional relief from other state and local regulations. While schools are free to enact policies and practices that differ from the norm, the schools are held accountable for improvements in student outcomes. After some early experimentation, innovation zones began expanding, and by 2017, they covered more than 108 schools and 63,000 students. 

Innovation zones presuppose that regulation and centralization impair the ability of a district to try new and innovative practices. By providing greater autonomy, schools and districts can explore new practices in finance, governance, curriculum, and staffing. This greater autonomy comes at the cost of higher accountability for student outcomes, and schools and districts can lose the autonomy if student outcomes do not improve. More generally, innovation zones are just one category of school turnaround. Under the Race to the Top (RttT) legislation, the federal government funded school turnaround strategies that included other variants such as school improvement grants or No Child Left Behind (NCLB) waivers. These school turnaround programs also allowed school districts to have more autonomy in some aspects of staffing, management, and curriculum. 

Many studies of innovation zones are emerging. Zimmer et al. (2017), for example, examine the innovation zones established in Memphis, Nashville, and Chattanooga, Tennessee. They showed that innovation zones significantly outperformed other public schools and other alter native methods of changing governance. Math scores, for example, increased by 0.20 standard deviations in innovation zones relative to other schools. Science and reading scores also increased. Zimmer et al. (2017) argue that one of the largest mediating factors in the innovation zone was the retention of experienced, successful teachers. Innovation zones in Tennessee generally offered significant raises for teachers who transferred to innovation zone schools. Teachers who previously had significant value added in the classroom were more likely to shift into these innovation zone schools. While the competition for high-achieving teachers may be a zero-sum game in the short run, the responsiveness to compensation incentives alongside the added autonomy may strengthen the overall workforce by inducing the retention and recruitment of top teachers. 

The use of innovation zones and other strategies aimed at strengthening school autonomy remains a hot topic. In this series, Michael T. Hartney, for example, explores other innovations in governance and how they have played out. While the current scale of innovation zones is low, the case of innovation zones is interesting as the initial results have encouraged continued expansion, with at least twenty-five states having adopted policies encouraging innovation zones in districts that were previously classified as failing and more considering legislation to allow innovation zones.  

The expansion of innovation zones raises questions about teacher supply. If, as Zimmer et al. (2017) argue, the mechanism by which innovation zones improve outcomes is through attracting top teachers at the cost of having other schools lose top teachers, then innovation zones might lead to a continued division between high-value-added teachers and others. If the higher wages and reduced legislation in innovation zones serve to attract more (and better) teachers to the profession, then innovation zones might generate momentum toward improving the overall teaching pool. However, if this does not happen, then the competition for teachers is a zero-sum game in which the available teachers for underprivileged schools will be disadvantaged relative to those who want to attend innovation zone schools.

Finally, the continued expansion of innovation zones has two implications for the future. First, the continued expansion of legislation allowing innovation zones suggests that these zones will become increasingly visible in the future. Second, given that the emphasis on innovation zones is both deregulation and expanded accountability, it also suggests a growing discontent with the existing regulations in traditional school districts. Innovation zones are a means of circumventing some regulations. If innovation zones eventually create momentum around deregulation, then deregulation might displace (or potentially devalue) innovation zones.

Classroom innovation

I next turn to classroom innovation. I focus on two separate innovations — class size and the  timing of schooling. As before, these are only a fraction of the possible innovations that I could use; however, these are two areas where significant experimentation and subsequent policy implementation have happened since ANAR.

Class size

Scholars from all disciplines have long postulated that class size affects student outcomes. The underlying theory suggested that teachers can give more attention to students in smaller classes and that this extra attention might provide a boost in students’ education outcomes. Lazear (1999), for example, uses a model to demonstrate that the probability of classroom disruptions likely increases as class size goes up.  

However, in the mid-1980s, some doubt emerged on the relationship. In a series of papers, Hanushek (e.g., 1986, 1999) showed that estimates of the effects of class size were ambiguous. Perhaps students were not as sensitive to class size as they might have been to other inputs, or perhaps teachers used different technologies as class size changed. Nonetheless, the relationship between class size and academic achievement has been hotly contested in the education literature.  

In 1985, then governor Lamar Alexander sponsored the Tennessee STAR experiment. The experiment created small classes in kindergarten through third grade and implemented the intervention with a school-based randomized controlled trial. The results of the experiment were stunning. Education test scores improved by roughly 0.25 standard deviations, roughly one grade level higher than students in regular classrooms. Subsequent research suggested that the impacts endured through primary, secondary, and tertiary schooling.  

Some criticisms have been made of the Tennessee STAR experiment. For example, Hoxby discusses the possibility that the results are exaggerated. She argues that they may be the result of the Hawthorne effect arising from teachers performing differently than they would have otherwise as a result of participating in a high-profile experiment. Others have refuted this characterization, calling the Tennessee STAR experiment the “Barbary steed” of the class size literature. Nonetheless, Tennessee STAR influenced policymakers. States including California, Florida, and Texas established class size limits. The policy in California in particular provided extensive financial incentives to schools that implemented class size limits. 

While the policy debate has leaned heavily in recent years toward reductions in class size, there have not been significant studies to date documenting whether state policies around class size have generated close to the same effects as observed in Tennessee STAR. In fact, there is some evidence that the emphasis on class size has come at the expense of other inputs. For example, Sims shows that California schools largely achieved class size reductions up to grade three by increasing class sizes in subsequent grades. He shows that the increase in test scores after grade three may have reversed potential positive impacts of class size. 

The class size debates are not over and will likely continue for the foreseeable future. Until evidence can definitely show that the expansion of reduced class size through state policies leads to sustained improvements in student achievement, the debate over class size will continue. Even if Tennessee STAR’s evidence shows improvements in student outcomes as a result of class size reductions, it does not mean that class size reductions can produce impacts in scaled-up policies. In the Tennessee STAR experiment, Tennessee allocated additional funds. In scaled-up versions at the state level, the cost is likely prohibitive. States have to reallocate funds toward increasing the number of teachers and away from other inputs. In the case of California, it allocated funds to increase the number of early elementary school teachers, yet the cost of this was a decrease in the funds to hire teachers in other grades, and hence, higher class sizes resulted in those other grades. This could counteract any positive impacts from class size in early grades. Indeed, there is no evidence to date that California’s aggressive class size policy has led to any improvement in outcomes. The literature on class size largely focuses only on class size, but in a scaled-up policy, the improvements from class size must be weighed against the costs of reduced educational inputs elsewhere. As long as costs remain prohibitive, it is unclear whether any state can produce a class size policy that can replicate the gains from the Tennessee STAR experiment.  

While ANAR did not necessarily take on the issue of class size, its call for local experiments to identify promising solutions resonates with the issue of class size. In considering changes in classroom practice, the debates on class size have led to significant investigations throughout the United States and beyond—not just in primary schooling but also in higher education. However, a limitation of experimentation can be its ability to understand how the impacts would change as scaled-up versions of the policy reverberated throughout the education landscape. The formulation of policy around class size has largely proceeded without finding a solution for the costs of reduced class size, and states have sacrificed other inputs in order to accommodate class size. While innovation is present in the case of class size, pushing innovation forward without considering the costs of scaling may never generate the promised impacts.

Timing of schooling

One input that was specifically mentioned in ANAR was the length of the school day and year. ANAR’s authors lamented that the United States had shorter school days and school years than its competitors. The ANAR authors strongly recommended a seven-hour school day and a school year of two hundred to two hundred twenty days.  

For at least a decade after ANAR, there was very little movement or experimentation with the length of the school day. In 1997, Arizona became the first state to increase the length of the school year, requiring at least two hundred days of instruction rather than one hundred eighty. By 1998, fourteen states were considering changes to the school calendar; however, outside of a few districts in Arizona, few changes were happening at scale. 

Since 2000, though, there have been significant changes in the time allocated for school ing. Some of these have come in response to the charter school movement. For example, from 2000 to 2012, the average length of the school day nationally increased by 0.2 hours; by contrast, the average length of the school day in charter schools increased by 0.4 hours. As Farbman noted, multiple studies of charter schools and other school turnaround efforts have attributed the impacts of charter schools, in part, to the length of the school day.

Additional evidence has come from outside the United States. For example, Germany increased weekly education instruction by two hours, thereby improving outcomes, particularly for high-achieving students. Studies in Chile, Israel, Italy, Brazil, and Latin America more generally have shown similarly positive impacts of increasing instructional time. These other studies have found greater benefits for both low- and high-performing students. 

Within the United States, RttT grants for school improvement often targeted limited exper iments in the length of the school day and evidence to date. Some schools implemented changes in the length of the school day in response to these grants. More generally, the largest policy shifts have been in Chicago and Boston. In 2012, Chicago moved from a 5.75-hour school day to a seven-hour school day, and in 2015, Boston Public Schools approved a forty minute extension of the school day. 

While the length of the school day has been the subject of both policy changes and exper imentation, there are few studies on lengthening the school year. The average number of school days has shown almost no change nationally and remains around one hundred eighty days.  

What does the future hold? The mounting evidence on the impact of increased instructional time will likely increase pressure to consider policy options, particularly for students who are struggling. The continued expansion of charter schools, which have longer school days on average, will continue to put upward pressure on the length of the school day. Not only do they contribute to the increased average school day, but they also put pressure on districts to examine the amount of instruction time they offer. Areas where charter schools provide greater competition to local schools are likely to face greater pressures to increase instruc tion time. In terms of increasing the average length of the school year, there appears to be little momentum. 

Other systemic shifts

While I have highlighted systematic changes that have focused on improving education quality, there are other systemic shifts that have occurred. Many of these have less to do with school inputs and more to do with the changing context of education. I briefly consider three examples.

Learning disabilities

Learning disabilities have become more prevalent over time. Zablotsky et al., for example, report a significant increase from 2009 to 2017 in the percentage of children diagnosed with any developmental disorder, attention deficit disorder, and autism. Special education enrollment rates continue to rise. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic increased attention on issues of mental health among students. 

These changes in health have impacts on classrooms. Students with disabilities have renewed protection and have increased access to accommodations as a result of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the expansion of “504” plans. Students with disabilities are often more expensive to educate, costing as much as thirteen times that of the average student, and the increased incidence of documented disabilities puts financial pressures on schools. While schools receive additional funds for students with disabilities, the marginal cost of educating a student with disabilities is likely higher than the increased allotment. Indeed, Bergman and McFarlin showed that charter schools actively discriminate against students with disabilities in the way that they encourage (or discourage) enrollment. The reason for this discrimination is likely the disparity between the cost and revenue associated with a student with disabilities.  

While the increase in disability diagnosis and treatment will certainly improve education quality for those with disabilities, the additional education expenditure required to teach students with disabilities inevitably leads to reductions in expenditures elsewhere. Increased expansion of charter schools, if indeed charter schools discriminate against students with disabilities, could exacerbate existing inequalities by segregating students by costs. Improvements in our ability to diagnose and treat learning disabilities can reduce the costs of educating students with disabilities and reduce the fiduciary burden. 

School safety

School shootings have become more commonplace, and a frequent motivation for students to pursue charter or private schools is often school safety. Since ANAR, the presence of police, metal detectors, and other security enhancements has shifted the ways schools behave. While the prevalence, particularly in the wake of violent shootings, seems high, in truth there has been a decline in the rate of victimization and threats to teachers from 1994 to 2016.  

School safety, including policies and procedures to ensure safety, continues to be a hot topic in state and federal legislation. Each school must maintain a plan for ensuring safety and for dealing with school violence. As in the case of increased disability rates, a focus on school safety requires resources and attention. Governments have been reluctant to increase funding to fully cover the costs of such expenditures. The resulting policies create more pressure on schools to cut expenditures in other ways. Moreover, to date, there has been little experimentation in ways that can help identify cost-effective strategies for improving school safety. Using schools as laboratories across the United States could provide greater opportunities to learn best practices.

Parental inputs

Education scholars have often posited that parental inputs are a significant part of students’ academic achievement. While the correlation between parental characteristics is extremely strong, particularly in the case of the mother’s education, few papers have established causal relationships between parental inputs and student outcomes. Many localized experiments have attempted to increase parental involvement; however, none of these efforts have scaled in any meaningful way. 

There are a couple of notable exceptions in more recent years. While not occurring in the United States, the Oportunidades conditional cash transfer program was a major randomized controlled experiment in Mexico that targeted parents and students. Parents received a subsidy conditional on student attendance and student health visits. These programs had a demonstrable impact on student attendance and attainment. While parents are clearly involved in the treatment, it is not clear if the effects came because of their vigilance or other factors (attendance, health, or increased family income).  

Recent randomized controlled experiments have aimed at a more novel approach to encouraging parental involvement. With the expansion of texting capabilities, researchers have used text messages to try to engage parents. York and Loeb did this for literacy among low-income parents. Through a series of text messages, York and Loeb coached parents of young children how to teach literacy skills. They found that students arrived at kindergarten with improved literacy as a result of parental engagement. 

Bergman and Bettinger et al. tested interventions that focused on communicating with parents about students’ academic behaviors. Parents received notes about students’ truancy and assignment completion. These notes reshaped parents’ beliefs and led to improvements in attendance and academic achievement. Bettinger et al. demonstrate that the saliency of the messages in informing parents of important behaviors that they should be monitoring was likely the mechanism by which this impacted student achievement. In both cases, the cost of the intervention was small relative to the benefits. 

New and innovative research designs are extending more and more interventions to parents, and this remains fertile ground for the laboratory of public schools. The recent text message interventions are particularly cost-effective and may have more potential to scale. 

Conclusion and discussion

When I was invited to write this chapter, the charge was to document how education systems changed after ANAR. How does one capture forty years of trial and error, of innovation and failure? I have chosen to identify a handful of innovations within districts and within schools. These examples — using small schools, specialized schools, school leadership, and innovation zones as cases of education system innovations and class size and using the time spent in schools as cases of classroom innovation — are just a sampling of innovations that have changed, at least incrementally, the way in which education is delivered. One only needs to browse the research-related web pages of organizations such as the American Institute for Research, MDRC, Mathematica, and RAND Corporation to learn about the breadth of continued experimentation and innovation in schools. 

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of many of these interventions is their failure to be scaled up or to generate impacts when scaled up. The key problem in many cases is the cost of scaling. Oftentimes, scaled versions lack the same features as the original laboratory experiment, and in many cases, funding the scaled version requires sacrifices in other areas. Moreover, in many cases, we lack the supply of personnel or funding to move forward. Perhaps the great challenge of the next forty years will be learning how to create cost effective versions of the innovations that laboratories produce. 

ANAR envisioned an education ecosystem where experimentation and learning from the laboratories of local schooling provided lessons and accelerated the process of change. While one can debate the relative quality of education over time, education systems of experimentation and learning across organizations have greatly increased, especially with the advent of the internet and the role of social media in drawing attention to innovation and to evidence. 

The What Works Clearinghouse and other formal and informal collections of evidence on innovative practice and policy only accelerate the role of education institutions as laboratories in identifying promising practices and moving them to scale. However, finding and scaling the products of these laboratories remains the next challenge to be solved if the vision of schools as laboratories is to yield long-run improvements in the quality of education.

See the full Hoover Institution initiative: .

The rate of Indiana high school seniors who go directly on to college remains stagnant, according to the latest data released by state officials.

New numbers for the Class of 2022 announced Thursday by the Indiana Commission of Higher Education (CHE) indicated — for the — that just 53% of Hoosier graduates furthered their education with certificate training, a two-year program or enrollment at a four-year college.

It’s a 6% drop from the class of 2019, and 12% lower than in 2015.

Help fund stories like this.

Still, because the data further shows that the total number of 2022 high school graduates increased by 3%, that translates to fewer students enrolled in postsecondary education directly after high school.

“Even though the college-going rate held steady at 53%, we actually lost a number of first-time students enrolling from our headcount perspective,” said Brooke Kile, associate commissioner for business intelligence.

CHE staff presented preliminary data during the commission’s bi-monthly meeting on Thursday. Official numbers for 2022 are expected to be released next week.

The rate — called “dismal” by numerous state lawmakers and education officials — continues the . The decline began several years prior, however.

More students going out of state

CHE defines the college-going rate as the percentage of students who enroll in a postsecondary institution within the year following high school graduation.

Per the 2022 data, 47% of students who completed Career and Technical Education (CTE) training while in high school went on to pursue additional postsecondary coursework.

But among those CTE students, Kile noted that Indiana continues to have access gaps among different demographic groups.

About 70% of Asian students and 48% of White students who took CTE classes went on to college, according to the commission’s numbers. Forty-four percent of Black students and 41% of Hispanic and Latino students continued education after graduation.

Kile said, too, that male students are “increasingly choosing” not to participate in postsecondary education.

Indiana’s 21st Century Scholars students are making the jump, though, and have “a very strong college-going rate,” Kile continued. The covers full tuition and fees at Indiana colleges and universities for low-income students, who enroll in the 8th grade.

Eighty-one percent of scholars in the 2022 cohort advanced to postsecondary education, according the the new data. That’s compared to 59% of non-scholar students who continued their studies.

CHE officials also identified a new trend with the Class of 2022 — of the students who are going to college, more are enrolling in out-of-state schools.

Around 27% of graduating seniors enrolled in one of Indiana’s public four-year institutions, followed by 10% who attend a public two-year school and 8% who enrolled at a private college or university.

Another 8% went to a school outside of Indiana, according to the data.

“This is the highest out-of-state percentage that we’ve seen in the last several years,” Kile explained. She said Indiana’s college-going rates only held steady the out-of-state enrollment went up.

“One year is not a trend, so we are not necessarily sounding the alarm,” she continued. “But we are definitely looking at what sort of early indicator data we can get from the 2023 and 2024 cohorts, looking at attendance patterns, to see if we need to do any sort of special initiatives to encourage students to stay in Indiana.”

CHE initiatives continue

Also previewed Thursday was a data update on the Class of 2021.

CHE officials said 51% of the 2021 cohort that enrolled in a postsecondary program within a year after high school graduation met all three early college success benchmarks: ​​they did not need remediation, they completed all courses they attempted during their first year of enrollment, and they persisted to their second year of schooling.

According to the latest numbers, 77% of the 2021 cohort that enrolled in a postsecondary program persisted to the second year, which Kile said is the highest persistence rate in more than a decade.

Still, Kile and other commission officials emphasized ongoing efforts to boost postsecondary enrollment.

Current initiatives include:

Additional support from the Frank O’Bannon grant — a 35% increase to awards took effect beginning with the 2023 cohort.“Pre-admissions letters,” , which indicated to Hoosier students at least three Indiana colleges and universities to which they qualified to attend.Automatic enrollment for eligible 21st Century Scholars — which in the 2027 graduating class from 20,000 to over 40,000.Adding incentives for Indiana campuses to prioritize low-income youth and adult enrollment.

Kile also noted CHE’s continued expansion of the Indiana College Core offerings, given that College Core completion “is the best indicator for college going.”

The curriculum consists of a 30-credit-hour block of general education courses that transfer between all of Indiana’s public institutions and some private colleges.

Adding to the effort, in March will require to be more accessible to high schoolers across the state, and compels Hoosier colleges and universities — minus Ivy Tech Community College and Vincennes University — to offer three-year degree programs by July 2025.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Indiana Capital Chronicle maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Niki Kelly for questions: info@indianacapitalchronicle.com. Follow Indiana Capital Chronicle on and .

This vision encompasses the knowledge and skills needed for success in school and the dispositions that students must have for success beyond the classroom. But despite decades of education reform efforts stemming from the 1983 publication of A Nation at Risk, numerous factors have impeded widespread innovation in schools. Striving to create meaningful learning experiences for all students, Liberty Public Schools, home to approximately 12,500 students from Liberty and Kansas City, Missouri, has taken significant steps in designing a learner-centered ecosystem. This work has evolved through local, regional and state-level collaboration, ensuring that the ideas of students, educators, policymakers and the business community are incorporated.

Strategic planning efforts have defined what it means to be learner-centered so that all children can thrive. These approaches focus on the unique abilities and interests of each student, compared with the traditional, one-size-fits-all model. Through significant community engagement and professional development across all 19 schools in the pre-K-12 system, the district developed a Graduate Profile and Vivid Vision. For over a decade, the district has been working to offer various learning experiences, such as elementary- and secondary-level microschools and the UnSchool Challenge.

Help fund stories like this.

These are rooted in Missouri’s educational standards but designed with students at the center. EPIC elementary — EPIC stands for “Every Person Inspired to Create” — was established in 2014 as an incubator for experimenting with such innovative practices as project-based learning and then implementing them across the district. It is a school of choice — meaning a lottery-based educational option outside their traditional neighborhood elementary school that a student’s family can opt into. At the secondary level, North Nation by Design and EDGE are microschools within traditional high schools that focus on collaboration with peers and professionals, student voice and choice, content-specific seminars, problem-based learning and real-world experiences. The UnSchool Challenge, developed in an effort to rethink alternative education, incorporates reverse internships in which business and community partners mentor students both on projects they are passionate about and areas they desire to pursue beyond high school, whether in the workplace, college or the armed services.

With the support of the community and in collaboration with other innovative districts, Liberty Public Schools has created a learning network that extends beyond its boundaries, allowing for exchanging ideas and best practices. Organizations like Education Reimagined reaffirmed our aim to transition from traditional approaches. Acceptance into Digital Promise’s League of Innovative Schools expanded our partnership with like-minded leaders in innovative districts nationwide to learn from one another. The district’s shift in culture and a growing desire to collaborate across the region resulted in a Business to Education (B2E) partnership with area Chambers of Commerce, civic organizations, philanthropic foundations and higher-education partners to expand real-world learning experiences for all students.

One of its key partnerships has been with area districts that are part of the Kansas City area Real World Learning (RWL) initiative. The network is a collaboration of area Missouri and Kansas school districts that connects students with business, industry and higher education to provide experiences that prepare them for success beyond graduation. Through internships, dual-credit classes, industry-recognized credentials, client-connected projects and entrepreneurial experiences, students develop the knowledge and skills needed to excel in college or the workplace.

In Missouri, the State Board of Education and Department of Elementary and Secondary Education are working to redesign traditional approaches to assessment and accreditation. Creating the Success Ready Students Network and establishing Innovation Zones has laid the groundwork for personalized learning that aligns with the Aurora Institute’s definition of competency-based education. By emphasizing the importance of ensuring that students graduate with at least one market-value asset, Missouri is designing a more personalized and effective approach to education.

As the state faces changes in leadership and governance, it must remain committed to innovation and personalized learning experiences for students. By building upon the successes of the past and embracing new approaches to assessment and accreditation, Missouri can create the learning ecosystems that students need and deserve.

The Liberty Public Schools’s learning ecosystem exemplifies what is possible when educators, policymakers and the community unite to prioritize student success and create a learner-centered approach to education. By continuing to innovate and collaborate, districts in Missouri and across the country can work to scale innovation that truly meets the needs of all learners.

The project brings Los Angeles in line with other large districts around the country, such as New York City, which have  evidence-backed tactics for teaching literacy, amid a national reading crisis.

But LAUSD faces some unique obstacles. A  by the advocacy group Families in Schools detailed gaps in instruction and disconnects between parents and teachers on how to teach reading. 

LAUSD lags in reading scores behind other districts in California, a state with .  

LA Unified’s plan also places California’s largest district at odds with state lawmakers, who  that would require reading instruction based on decoding words using letters and a focus on phonics. 

The proposed law, which was backed by groups including the California State PTA and the NAACP, died in committee after the state teachers union and English learner groups registered their opposition. 

The legislature’s rejection of the bill swung the nation’s most populous state away from a national trend for mandates of science-based reading instruction. 

Dozens of states , including Mississippi, Ohio, Utah, Kansas, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania and the Carolinas. 

The push for a unified, evidence-based approach to literacy instruction faces obstacles in Los Angeles Unified, where  on the most recent assessments. 

The district in June  aimed at boosting reading and math skills for struggling elementary school students that had employed materials based on the science of reading.  

The new approach, known as the Literacy and Numeracy Intervention Model, will cost less and reach middle school students as well, according to district officials.

Carvalho said in a December interview that the district had made “significant progress” in rolling out a unified set of curricular options aligned to the science of reading to elementary schools under the effort, and that by June 2024 it would “achieve systemic adoption for all grade levels.”

Last month he adjusted the timeline, saying in a subsequent interview that all elementary schools would have access to the materials by the start of the upcoming academic year in August. 

The superintendent said the district would use the extra time over the summer to conduct training for teachers on the new instructional approaches and materials.

“I think we’re actually in a good place so far, considering the size of our district,” said Carvalho. “It’s a massive undertaking.” 

Under the district’s new approach, Carvalho said, schools will choose from a menu of curricula that contain approaches to literacy instruction including phonics, phonemic awareness, fluency, comprehension and vocabulary. 

The so-called “science of reading” approach favored by LAUSD and many other districts today stands in contrast to the “whole-language” theory once employed by many schools, which emphasized learning to read by using visual cues and words the student already knows, rather than decoding the sounds of their letters.

“There will be a number of reading series, all meeting the criteria, and then principals and their school councils have the flexibility to adopt for their own school, any one of the ones that meet the criteria,” said Carvalho. 

The adoption of a unified approach to reading instruction will provide consistency across schools and bolster the education of transfer students in a , Carvalho contended.   

Four decades of research show the science of reading works, Carvalho said, with more recent studies showing it can boost literacy rates for struggling students and reverse declines in pandemic learning loss. 

A  found that test scores at 66 of California’s lowest-performing schools jumped after educators adopted approaches in line with the science of reading.  

Students in several other states have already exceeded pre-pandemic literacy levels by employing curriculum with explicit phonics instruction, according to a Brown University analysis of test score data.

Carvalho said Los Angeles schools that have already begun using the district’s approved literacy materials and teaching methods have embraced the changes and begun to show some academic progress.  

Students at Esperanza Elementary School in Westlake have made significant gains on reading assessments following the adoption of phonics-based teaching materials and methods promoted by the district, from Core Knowledge Language Arts, said principal Brad Rumble. 

Less than half of first graders at the school met reading benchmarks before the roll-out of phonics-based lessons began in 2021, according to Rumble, but 65% met standards this year. Likewise, the principal said, second graders reading on grade level rose from 39% to 61%. 

“We start with the sounds, and then we move to more complex skills, like decoding and sight recognition,” Rumble explained. “We don’t just forget what we’ve learned.” 

Students at the school tackle vocabulary development and the understanding of language structure, becoming fluent readers by grade three, Rumble said, “and then, those fluent readers comprehend what they’re reading.”

Core Knowledge Language Arts help teachers at Esperanza Elementary build systematic reading lessons, said Rumble. The gains made by students at his school point the way that Carvalho wants the rest of the district to go.   

With high numbers of students living in poverty, and large populations of homeless children and immigrant families, Los Angeles Unified faces special challenges in reading instruction.     

The Families in Schools report found that just 15% of parents knew what their schools reading curriculum was, while only about half said they had the tools to help their child learn reading. 

Just 40% of Los Angeles students can read at grade level by third grade, the report notes, with just 9% of English learners meeting standards. By eighth grade, less than 1% of English learners met standards.

The report lauded LAUSD’s new efforts to educate teachers in the science of reading and instruct parents to teach literacy at home, but said a “greater, long-term commitment is needed,” to build on recent, slight gains in test scores.  

The group’s CEO Yolie Flores, a former vice president of the LAUSD Board of Education, said the district can do better. 

“Families understand that if their children can’t read, it’s essentially game over,” said Flores. “This is why we urge Superintendent Carvalho and the LAUSD board of education to deepen its efforts.”

Flores said Carvalho’s promise to put the science of reading in every Los Angeles elementary school is a step in the right direction. The district now needs to ensure the new lessons are implemented, she said.   

“We can’t keep kicking the proverbial can down the road,” said Flores.   

Carvalho said that so far he’s heard few complaints with the program, although some concerns have been raised by members of the English-language learning community, he said, with what can been seen as a one-size-fits all approach of uniform curricula. 

The local teachers union, he said, has not registered any opposition to the project. United Teachers Los Angeles did not respond to a request for comment on the matter. 

Although other states have had success in legislative mandates for evidence-based reading instruction, California lawmakers dropped a proposed law after the state’s largest teachers union registered its opposition. 

In a letter opposing the legislation, the California Teachers Association said the bill  would duplicate current literacy programs and limit teachers’ discretion in serving diverse student populations, including English learners. 

Separately, advocates for English learners also sent letters to lawmakers in opposition to the bill, saying the state needs a plan that “centrally addresses” the needs of bilingual students.   

California assemblywoman Blanca Rubio, a Democrat and teacher who authored the bill, said her own time in the classroom informed her belief in phonics-based instruction. 

“For me, it is not one size fits all approach,” said Rubio. “The science of reading takes into account the research on how kids best learn to read. When I was a teacher, we set goals and we used the data to inform our instruction.”  

Carvalho, who supported Rubio’s bill, said results from state reading assessments taken by LA Unified students this spring will help determine whether the district’s roll-out of evidence-based reading instruction is working.   

Regardless, the superintendent is confident in the district’s new approach to literacy instruction. “I’m a true believer that the basics of reading instruction and philosophy, must be rooted in a science of reading,” Carvalho said.

In the first of its kind , researchers unveil troubling laws, loopholes and trends that undermine the legacy of Brown v. Board, in which the supreme court ruled “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and violate the Fourteenth Amendment.

Public schools today are not required to explain or prove why they are denying a student enrollment. Paired with pressure to stack classrooms with “easier to educate” kids, school administrators say this leads to practices of denying Black, brown, low-income students and those with disabilities enrollment to public school, without consequence.

The report argues discrimination has also been made widespread by allowing – and in four states, requiring – districts to use and enforce school attendance zones, which often mirror racist housing maps from the , separating children by home addresses. Schools contract with private investigators, prosecute or fine parents who defy zone lines via address sharing. Only one state, Connecticut, has decriminalized the common practice.

Researchers say the need to reform and undermine the weight home addresses have on educational outcomes is more urgent than ever, as many districts start to weigh closures and consolidations, leaving thousands of children, , hanging in the balance.

“You can’t be turned away from school because of your race, but if all of the Black people live on one side of the line, all the white people live on the other side of the line, it’s OK to draw the line and assign kids to school based on that,” said Tim DeRoche, coauthor of the report and founder of Available to All, a watchdog organization.

In the wake of Brown, courts took charge, taking on dozens of cases and stamping out explicit racial segregation, particularly in the south. 

“But they never came back around to fulfill that promise, that public schools had to be available to all in equal terms,” DeRoche said. “There’s all these other ways that we sort kids into schools that give advantages to people who have money or live in the right part of town. The courts have just neglected to take that up and frankly, the legislatures have failed to take that up as well.”

The report makes the case for better legal protections, like requiring districts to operate open enrollment zones for families within a 3-mile radius, reserve seats for nonresidents, publish data on enrollment application and denials, and, when schools do reach capacity, require lotteries, common practice at public charter schools.

It also provides a legal profile for each state, outlining their stance on laws that govern public school admissions. In 36 states, for instance, families couldn’t appeal their public school assignment even if they wanted to; Arkansas and California are among the few to explicitly protect the right to appeal to a neutral party.

In Tampa, for example, a predominantly Black elementary school closed, its grade level reading proficiency rates at 11%. Instead of sending any of the few hundred students to the coveted school where 80% read at grade level minutes away from their homes, they were bused to poorer performing, majority minority schools further away, citing capacity constraints. 

“When you see school closures, the politics comes out. You can see the exclusion very clearly,” said DeRoche.

Low-income students, students of color and those with disabilities are those most often excluded. “Thereʼs this systemic pressure to sort of stack your school with kids who are easier to educate,” said a former administrator cited in the report.

Certain students — unhoused, migrant, incarcerated students or those with disabilities or in foster care — are supposed to be protected from enrollment discrimination by federal law, allowed to continue attending original schools in the event of moves. 

Still, the vast majority of decisions lay in the hands of administrators, whose admission practices fly under the radar, unrequired to publish data or provide written reasoning. “In some states with strong open enrollment laws, such as Arizona and Wisconsin, districts are allowed to use unverified claims of capacity constraints to keep children with disabilities from enrolling,” the report states.

As one school psychologist with Los Angeles Unified described to ��������ͼ, “I’ve seen [zones] weaponized, too … used more as a tool to get rid of students that are engaging in more problem behavior. ‘Well, their address isn’t even in our residence.’”

The school psychologist, speaking on condition of anonymity, witnessed kids get turned away about 15 times this school year. Some common reasons given to families — always verbally, never written — is that their school is full of capacity, can’t accommodate the student’s IEP, or, in one case, “we don’t enroll in April.”

A few times, students were pushed out after mentioning moves offhand to teachers who said, “well, you cause too much havoc in my classroom. So I’m gonna let somebody know.” Some were able to stay because parents were “more assertive,” in meetings with administrators, who then backed off. 

“A lot of the parents don’t know their rights – some of them are just trying to survive so they don’t have the time to go fight the district and be like, ‘oh, my kid’s not being enrolled.’ These families get taken advantage of more often.”

Such was the case in the four counties around Philadelphia, where a public radio investigation revealed the hundreds of kids kicked out of the districts each year for residency fraud were overwhelmingly . Pennsylvania does not have any law or process set for families who want to appeal admissions decisions.

But changing district attendance zone lines is no easy feat.

In , parents flooded houses within the zone for sought-after Lincoln Elementary. When the district considered withdrawing boundary lines, parents were outraged and plans fizzled. Ultimately the state allocated $20 million for the school to build an annex and add more seats, even though hundreds sat empty at schools in the neighborhood. 

“They’re trying to protect these families who feel like, ‘oh, I’ve already paid for my kids’ school via my mortgage,’” said DeRoche. 

Available to All presents an alternative: even if attendance zones were redrawn, other protections like laws to require 15% of seats be reserved for nonresident families or using a lottery once seats are filled, wouldn’t force middle- or higher- income families out of quality schools they’ve invested in via housing. 

Lines were not redrawn; Lincoln Elementary only became more accessible for the wealthy, predominantly white families who could afford to live in the attendance zone.

“[Educational redlining] is a part of the fabric of our lives and we all kind of take it for granted. We’re just trying to call it out and make people look at it straight in the face.” 

Disclosure: Stand Together provides financial support to Available to All and ��������ͼ. Andy Rotherham co-founded Bellwether Education Partners. He sits on ��������ͼ’s board of directors.

The Alaska Supreme Court hearing the state’s appeal to a court case that struck down key components of its correspondence school program before the end of June.

Oral arguments would be held June 25, five days before the end of on the lower court’s ruling.

Superior Court Judge Adolf Zeman ruled that allowed public funds, in the form of per student allotments, to be spent at private and religious organizations in violation of the state constitution. Attorneys for the state appealed the decision last week.

Help fund stories like this.

The court date comes as lawmakers seek statutory fixes to stabilize correspondence programs for the families that use them.

and take different tacks, however. HB 400 instructs the governor’s appointees on the state’s Board of Education and Early Development to find a constitutional solution and its language leaves the door open to a constitutional amendment. SB 266 repeals the language Zeman found unconstitutional and tightens restrictions on how families spend and districts report state education dollars. It would also make it tougher for parents to opt out of standardized academic testing for their children.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy has signaled that he would not allow a legislative fix to become law before the Supreme Court’s decision. Any decision would come after the end of the regular legislative session on May 15. Dunleavy has suggested a special session of the Alaska Legislature may be necessary to respond.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alaska Beacon maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Andrew Kitchenman for questions: info@alaskabeacon.com. Follow Alaska Beacon on and .

High school graduation rates have been incorrectly calculated for up to a decade due to a legacy code error, the Iowa Department of Education said Friday.

The state’s four- and five-year graduation rates were calculated using a legacy code that did not account for mobile students. Those are students who move school districts on a frequent basis for reasons including being in foster care, experiencing homelessness or moving as part of a military family, who transferred between districts and later dropped out of school.

According to the department’s news release, students in this category had been “inadvertently removed from the student cohort rather than included as non-graduates,” leading to the department reporting higher graduation rates.

Help fund stories like this.

The code causing errors has been used for at least a decade in determining graduation rates, according to the news release. But following the department’s Information and Analysis Services’ identification of the issue, the code has been corrected, and the state has released updated information on graduation rates from previous years that were impacted.

Jay Pennington, the department’s Bureau Chief of Information and Analysis Services, said that in addition to correcting the error, the education department also conducted a review of the underlying code, and plans to review graduation rate data on a student level and hold data comparisons to “ensure data quality in future years.”

“Calculating graduation rates is a complex process that requires examining four years of student-level data and includes taking into account multiple change events, such as when students move between districts or initially drop out but choose to re-enroll at a later date,” Pennington said in the release. “Upon a fresh review of the legacy code that had been used to calculate prior graduation rates, we identified that the code had not properly sequenced certain events. Specifically, students who transferred between districts and later dropped out were removed when they should have been kept in the cohort.”

The announcement was made as the department released the state’s four-year high school graduation rate for the class of 2023 Friday at 87.5%. That number is down 2.5% from initial reported graduation rate for class of 2022 of 89.9% by , but higher than the corrected rate of 87.4%. The graduation rate for 2021 was also corrected from 90.2% to 87.8%.

The five-year graduation rate — data that reflects students who were not able to graduate with their class, but were able to complete high school with another year — was also impacted by the error. While the five-year graduation rate for the class of 2023 will not be available until 2025, the revised rates for previous years was released. The class of 2021 had a 90.1% graduation rate for five years, and the class of 2022 had a rate of 89.7%.

The state’s dropout rate, showing the proportion of students in grades 9 through 12 who drop out in the year, was not impacted by the code error. In the 2022-2023 school year, 4,718 students — 3.02% — dropped out, according to the education department data. This is a lower rate than the previous school year, at 3.04%.

According to the news release, Iowa’s graduation rate in 2023 is “consistent with the national standard and its neighboring states.” The four-year graduation rate of 87.5% is higher than Minnesota at 83.3%, Nebraska at 87.2% and South Dakota at 84.1%. Three neighboring states, Illinois, Wisconsin and Missouri, had higher rates — Illinois at 87.6%, Missouri at 89.9% and Wisconsin with a graduation rate of 90.5%.

Department of Education Director McKenzie Snow said the education department is “committed to empowering Iowans with accurate, actionable information on education outcomes.”

“Focused on transparency, the Department identified, corrected, and communicated the error in the underlying code, which has existed for at least 10 years, and its impact on previously reported graduation rates,” Snow said in the release. “The Department immediately instituted additional quality assurance measures and, moving forward, is modernizing its data verification procedures.”

The data, as well as breakdowns based on school districts and various student groups, such as English learners and students with disabilities, is available on .

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 .

Timed to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education to end legal segregation in public schools, the research offers further evidence that integration hit its peak during the 1980s, only to recede somewhat in the time since. But it also poses questions about the true scale of that backsliding nationally, as well as the solutions that could be reasonably embraced to counter it.

Notably, the trend toward isolation has been underway even as Americans of different races and national origins are living in increasingly close proximity to one another. Ann Owens, a professor at the University of Southern California and one of the co-authors of the analysis, said that public policy was “undoing the decline in residential segregation.”

“While it’s true that school segregation is higher in places where residential segregation is higher, it can’t explain the increase over the last 30 years because residential segregation has not been increasing over that time,” Owens said.

Owens and her co-author, Stanford professor Sean Reardon, have spent years chronicling demographic changes in school through the lenses of both race and class. Their latest study has not yet been made public, though its findings were presented at a conference at Stanford in early May. The duo has also unveiled a new interactive data tool, the , which allows users to investigate patterns of segregation across schools, districts, cities and counties.

Using data from the National Center for Education Statistics, the analysis measures children’s exposure to peers of different racial backgrounds, comparing the average African American student’s proportion of white classmates with the average white student’s proportion of African American classmates in the same district. The difference between the two figures, measured on a 0–1 scale, is deemed the district’s “segregation level.” 

As previous historical studies have shown, after falling dramatically in the wake of federally led integration efforts in the 1960s and ‘70s, school segregation began creeping back up in the late 1980s. Between 1991 and 2019, Owens and Reardon calculated, the segregation level rose by over one-third in the 541 U.S. school districts that enroll at least 2,500 African American students. 

But Owens cautioned that, even accounting for that shift, schools are vastly more racially mixed than in the days before Brown. When examined over the last half-century, the growth in segregation is much harder to perceive. The total increase in segregation levels amounts to less than five percentage points since the presidential administration of George H.W. Bush.

Brian Kisida, an economist at the University of Missouri, said that it was critical to monitor changes in cross-racial exposure over time. In his view, however, existing evidence did not constitute “anything that sets off alarm bells compared with the history of this issue.”

“I think segregation is an incredibly important problem, and one we’ve had terrible trouble with in this country,” Kisida said. “But I don’t know if I would look at the trend from 1990 to 2020 and characterize that as ‘resegregation.’”

The charter factor

Kisida added that the paper’s evidence of charter schools’ role in driving racial isolation made for a “very solid finding” that dovetailed with his own prior work.

In 2019, he examining the same phenomenon, incorporating an even wider swath of data than Owens and Reardon. That study showed that charters exerted a meaningful, if modest, impact on the racial composition of the surrounding districts; eliminating the charter sector entirely would lead to a 5 percent decrease in the segregation of Hispanic and African American students, they found. (Kisida added that the effect was substantially counteracted by charters’ propensity to draw students into more integrated environments than their residentially zoned school, lessening segregation between districts.)

The newer research estimates that total growth in segregation would have fallen between two and three percentage points — from around 19 percent on their exposure index to a little under 17 percent — had charter schools not rapidly expanded after the year 2000. 

Another, smaller factor in pushing back integration, the authors argue, was the gradual eclipse of desegregation orders that began in the 1990s. As federal courts from injunctions requiring them to evenly balance racial groups across schools, campuses became about 1 percentage point more segregated than they otherwise would have been. 

Boston College professor Shep Melnick, who published last year on the halting efforts toward desegregation that began in 1954 with Brown, said that the lifting of injunctions accelerated during the early 2000s, eventually releasing more than half of the districts that had previously been under court oversight. In some instances, though, local enforcement — or even awareness — of the orders was so paltry that their sunsetting would not have made much difference.

“Some of these schools that were formerly under court order didn’t even realize they were under court order,” said Melnick. “So the effects of the orders in those cases probably were not that great.” 

Melnick and Owens agreed that the public needed to be conscious of the differing definitions of racial segregation that underlie research studies. For example, multiple waves of immigration from Asia and Latin America have made the U.S. population significantly more diverse than it was in the middle of the 20th century. Efforts to quantify desegregation simply as the exposure of African American students to white classmates must account for the fact that white students represent a much smaller share of the total student body.

“When you say, ‘Black students attend school with fewer white kids than they did 50 or 60 years ago,’ that’s true,” Owens concluded. “But it’s also true that white kids attend school with fewer white kids — because there are fewer white kids around.”