As a “pink-collar profession” — a nickname given to women-dominated occupations — teaching has historically paid less than comparable fields requiring a higher education degree, and in Philadelphia, the push to close the wage gap could lead to a strike by the end of the month.
Salaries for Philly teachers — roughly 70 percent of whom are women — begin at $54,146. That’s far below the median earnings of Pennsylvania college graduates. Now, concern over pay has become a sticking point between the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT) and the School District of Philadelphia as they negotiate a new contract, with the current collective bargaining agreement expiring August 31.
The PFT in June voted to authorize its executive board to initiate a strike if the union and the district don’t agree on a new contract by then. With the deadline imminent and no deal in sight, schools may open on August 25 only for teachers to appear on picket lines within days. A strike could leave working parents in a lurch, scrambling for childcare — a task moms usually have to complete. Many Philly teachers, however, are also parents and demanding higher salaries to better provide for their families.
PFT President Arthur Steinberg pointed out that even suburban teachers with less education often out-earn Philadelphia’s top-performing educators by up to $22,000.
Amid ongoing negotiations, Steinberg appeared with School District of Philadelphia Superintendent Tony Watlington at a welcome event for new teachers on Wednesday.
“We are optimistic about a successful conclusion by the end-of-the-month deadline, and it’s important to us that all of our employees feel seen, valued and heard,” said Watlington, who called Steinberg a “tough negotiator.”
To reach an agreement, Steinberg said, “There’s significant work that has to be done, but it’s doable.”
“Our schools are not safe, they’re not healthy for anybody to work in or go to school in,” chemistry teacher Kate Sundeen told local news station ABC 6. “We have a hard time with teacher retention and a hard time attracting new talent.”
On Friday, the national bus tour of the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) will arrive in West Philadelphia to support the PFT ahead of a possible strike. The event will be the last of six strike preparation events that have taken place before the teachers head back to work on Monday, a week before the first day of school.
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The U.S. military faced a new threat to national security toward the end of the 20th century. This threat affected the recruitment and retention of our nation’s armed forces, reducing their capacity to defend the denizens of the United States and our interests overseas.
The threat wasn’t the Cold War; it wasn’t tension in the Middle East; and it wasn’t international or domestic terrorism.
The threat was a lack of affordable, accessible, high-quality child care.
The makeup of the armed forces changed following the shift from a national draft to an all-volunteer military after the war in Vietnam. More service members had families in the late 1970s and 1980s — many of them with young children. And many more of those families included two working parents than in previous decades.
The child care crisis faced by the military 40 to 50 years ago was similar to the one civilians face today. More families with working parents increased the demand for child care. Thousands of children languished on waitlists, forcing families to consider forms of supervision that lacked consistent standards for safety, teacher training, student/teacher ratios, and curricula. Teachers were poorly compensated, and turnover was high.
Back then, as now, parents couldn’t afford the fees necessary to cover the costs of addressing these challenges, and limited public investment wasn’t enough to fill the gap.
Graphic by Lanie Sorrow
Because the child care crisis was seen as a threat to the collective future of Americans, elected officials took action. Congress passed the Military Child Care Act of 1989, which put a priority on affordability, accessibility, and quality in child care for service members.
With the end of child care stabilization efforts that were undertaken during the pandemic, North Carolinians now face a similar threat to our own collective future. The military’s approach offers lessons for where we can go from here, in our communities and across our state.
An experiment in universal child care
The Military Child Care Act wasn’t the first time the military had taken the lead on child care. During World War II, women entered the workforce in massive numbers, filling the roles of men who were drafted to serve in the military. This raised the question of who would care for children when both parents were working outside the home to defend American interests.
Congress responded with the Lanham Act of 1940, creating a nationwide, universal child care system to support working families with children through age 12. Federal grants were issued to communities that demonstrated their need for child care related to parents working in the defense industry.
The program distributed $1.4 billion (in 2025 dollars) between 1943 and 1946 to more than 600 communities in 47 states. The grants could be used to build and maintain child care facilities, train and compensate teachers, and provide meals to students.
In his 2017 analysis of the Lanham Act’s outcomes for mothers and children, Chris M. Herbst, of Arizona State University’s School of Public Affairs, found that “the Lanham Act increased maternal employment several years after the program was dismantled.”
An image of Rosie the Riveter from a 1943 issue of the magazine Hygeia (published by the American Medical Association) demonstrating the need for child care.
Herbst also found that “children exposed to the program were more likely to be employed, to have higher earnings, and to be less likely to receive cash assistance as adults.”
One lesson Herbst took from his research was that the Lanham Act was successful because of the broad support it received from parents, advocates for education and women, and employers. He noted: “Each group was committed to its success because something larger was at stake.”
Today’s military-operated child care model
While the Lanham Act was a short-lived national experiment that hasn’t received much study, the military’s child care program since adoption of the Military Child Care Act of 1989 has become a widely acclaimed model for publicly subsidized early care and learning, serving about 200,000 children each year.
Four categories of child care are available through military-operated child care programs: Child Development Centers (CDCs), Family Child Care (FCC), 24/7 Centers, and School Aged Care (SAC). The official military child care website describes each program type:
Child Development Centers (CDCs) — CDCs provide child care services for infants, pretoddlers, toddlers, and preschoolers. They operate Monday through Friday during standard work hours, and depending on the location offer full-day, part-day, and hourly care.
Family Child Care (FCC) — Family child care is provided by qualified child care professionals in their homes. Designed for infants through school agers, each FCC provider determines what care they offer, which may include full-day, part-day, school year, summer camp, 24/7, and extended care.
24/7 Centers — 24/7 Centers provide child care for infants through school age children in a home-like setting during both traditional and non-traditional hours on a regular basis. The program is designed to support watch standers or shift workers who work rotating or non-traditional schedules (i.e., evenings, overnights, and weekends).
School Aged Care (SAC) — School age care is facility-based care for children from the start of kindergarten through the end of the summer after seventh grade. This program type operates Monday through Friday during standard work hours. SAC programs provide both School Year Care and Summer Camp.
Requirements for military-operated child care programs are typically more stringent than state requirements. For one thing, they must be accredited by one of the following: National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC), National Early Childhood Program Accreditation (NECPA), the Council on Accreditation (COA), or the National Accreditation Commission (NAC).
For context, the requirements for licensed child care in North Carolina are relatively stringent compared with other states, but still fall below the requirements for NAEYC accreditation, which is widely recognized as the national standard. Only 110 programs in our state are NAEYC-accredited — many of which are Head Start or military-operated programs — out of about 5,300 total state-licensed programs.
Military-operated child care programs offer families hourly, part-day, full-day, extended, or overnight care, plus afterschool and summer programs.
The maximum rate is on par with the national average for civilian child care in 2023, meaning that almost every family using military-operated child care programs is paying less than the national average for typically higher-quality early care and learning.
The Department of Defense budgeted about $1.8 billion for child care in 2024 — about 0.2% of its $841.4 billion total budget.
Military child care in North Carolina
In addition to military-operated child care programs, service members may be eligible for Military Child Care in Your Neighborhood (MCCYN), a fee assistance program for families who can’t access military-operated child care. MCCYN pays a portion of the cost of enrolling children in early care and learning programs that meet the military’s high-quality standards in their community.
North Carolina is one of 19 locations where military families may be eligible for MCCYN-PLUS, which expands the MCCYN program to child care programs that participate in state or local Quality Rating and Improvement Systems (QRIS) in places where nationally accredited care is not available.
Both programs rely on the availability of high-quality child care in civilian communities. That’s a challenge in North Carolina, which was already facing a child care shortage before the pandemic. Our state has lost almost 6% of licensed child care programs since February 2020, with more expected to close because stabilization grants have ended.
According to the NC Military Affairs Commission, there are 12 military bases and more than 130,000 active-duty military members in North Carolina, giving us the fourth-largest active-duty military population in the nation.
In January 2025, Fayetteville Technical Community College hosted the state’s first N.C. Military Community Childcare Summit, organized by the North Carolina Department of Military and Veteran Affairs (NCDMVA) to discuss the problem that military communities are having with access to community-based child care.
The first N.C. Military Community Childcare Summit in January 2025.( Katie Dukes/EdNC)
The summit culminated in a screening of Take Care, a documentary about North Carolina’s child care crisis produced by the state Department of Health and Human Services and featuring EdNC’s early childhood reporter, Liz Bell.
The issues of spouse resilience and child care are inextricably linked for Angie Mullennix, who works for The Honor Foundation at Fort Bragg, helping members of the U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) transition to careers in the private sector after their military service.
Mullennix served in the U.S. Army for four years after high school and has previously worked for the Department of Public Instruction as the state military liaison. Her husband recently retired from the SOF himself. They have two teenage children.
“If you look at the number of military spouses in North Carolina who have degrees and credentials and could be in the workforce, from nurses to lawyers, lots of them are staying at home,” Mullennix said.
“A big reason why about 40% of (military) spouses do not work is because of child care not being available to them,” Mullennix said, noting that lack of child care is also a barrier to workforce participation among the civilian population.
When Mullennix’s children were under the age of 5, she used hourly child care on base, which was available at no cost when her husband was away on assignment.
“You ask any parent in the world, I don’t care who they are, there’s nothing more important than their child’s safety — then their education,” Mullennix said. “And yet, the two things we think are the most important, we put (their providers) at the lowest pay and ask them to do quality care.”
That’s what sets military child care apart from civilian early care and learning for Mullennix: high quality standards and higher pay for early childhood educators, including benefits. She sees lessons in this for North Carolina.
“You gotta pay them to keep them, there’s no secret behind that,” Mullennix said. “If you pay them high, you can also set the standards really high.”
And because workforce participation — and military readiness — is directly tied to the accessibility and affordability of high-quality child care, not investing in it threatens our collective future.
“North Carolina, or any state that doesn’t offer child care, is shooting itself in the foot,” Mullennix said.
Lessons from military child care
Policymakers at every level who are seeking to end the child care crisis can learn much from the military child care model. One report on the topic offers these lessons:
Do not be daunted by the task. It is possible to take a woefully inadequate child care system and dramatically improve it.
Recognize and acknowledge the seriousness of the child care problem and the consequences of inaction.
Improve quality by establishing and enforcing comprehensive standards, assisting providers in becoming accredited, and enhancing provider compensation and training.
Keep parent fees affordable through subsidies.
Expand the availability of all kinds of care by continually assessing unmet need and taking concrete action steps to address it.
Commit the resources necessary to get the job done.
Both agreed these are the right takeaways for policymakers across North Carolina to consider.
Lesson 1: Do not be daunted by the task
Gale Perry said the top lesson for her is: “Start where you are, know that change is possible, and have a goal post in mind.”
She pointed out that the military’s goal wasn’t a fully publicly funded child care system. It was a system that acknowledged Americans’ values around the role of parents in raising young children — and paying for their care and education. But also that their employers and the government “have a role in offsetting that cost, so that we can ensure that child care is quality, and it is stable, and that the families can actually afford it.”
Smith said there was no “silver bullet” when she and her colleagues were tasked with solving the military’s child care crisis in the 1990s — and there isn’t one for the civilian child care crisis today.
We had to redo the standards, we had to look at the workforce, we had to look at the health and safety issues, we had to look at the fees and how we could bring those fees down. We had to look at the infrastructure of all of it. We’ve got to start thinking about the interconnectedness of all of these things if we’re going to be successful in this country.
Smith said people think that because she worked for the secretary of defense, “I could just tell all the bases what to do, and that would magically happen, which is so not true. It wasn’t just like we could give an order and everybody jumped.”
She said you just have to start where you are, and move up.
Lesson 2: Acknowledge the seriousness of the problem and the consequences of inaction
“The military understood very early the link between people getting to work and child care,” Smith said.
As the military shifted away from relying on conscription and became a more welcoming workplace for women, the need for child care became evident. Smith described working on a base where children were routinely left in cars when their parents were unexpectedly called into work.
“So (military leaders) really got the connection to their guys going to work very quickly, and I think that we still haven’t all understood that in this country,” Smith said, though she notes businesses have started making that connection since the pandemic.
“The other thing the military understood was that a pilot is every bit as important as the mechanic who works on the plane, and so they invest in all of their people,” Smith said.
She and her team had to design a program that worked for everyone, or it wouldn’t work for anyone.
Lesson 3: Improve quality
Smith said quality was of critical importance when she was designing the military’s child care system in the 1990s, especially after child abuse and neglect scandals that came to light in the 1980s.
She and her team studied the child care standards of all 50 states and created a set of military standards that fell squarely in the middle. Then they set about training the 22,000 early childhood educators they already had — most of whom were military spouses — to meet those standards.
That was a six-month training program. Then there was an 18-month training to get them to move beyond those standards toward national accreditation. They hired highly qualified trainers to work with educators at each site.
“And if you didn’t do it, guess what? You’re fired!” Smith said.
There was an incentive to participate in the training, beyond keeping their jobs — higher compensation.
“Maybe some were grumpy about it, but we didn’t have to fire people,” Smith said.
North Carolina already has some tools in place to help educators advance their education and improve their compensation, specifically through the WAGE$ and TEACH programs — both of which were highlighted in the report that identified these lessons.
“(The military) realized they had to get serious about quality and quality standards. And I would say that’s a lesson for us now, particularly in a climate that is deregulatory,” Gale Perry said. “And while I’m for sensible regulatory reform, I think we have to be really thoughtful about not wanting stacks of child deaths in child care sitting on a desk waiting to be investigated.”
Lesson 4: Keep parent fees affordable through subsidies
Smith said that while designing the military’s child care program, she and her team figured out that there was no way parents could afford the actual cost of high-quality child care. So they set up a subsidized system that would provide a 50% match — on average — to parents’ fees, paid directly to child care programs.
“We had to, on average, match parent fees dollar-for-dollar, with the higher-income people paying more and the lower-income paying less,” Smith said. “So a major, for example, would pay two-thirds of the cost, and a private would pay one-third, but the average was 50/50.”
Smith pointed out that we’re already subsidizing child care in ways that are hidden — through the public benefits and social programs that early childhood educators often rely on because of low compensation, and through lack of workforce participation.
Lesson 5: Expand the availability of all kinds of care
Gale Perry said the military’s model really stands out to her for its ability to assess unmet needs and take action to improve.
“In the early 2000s when there were the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there were a lot of deployments of National Guard and Reserve who did not live on post and did not have access to on-post child care,” Gale Perry said. “That is really when the military got in the business of thinking about, how do we help build capacity and make child care accessible for military families off post?”
That’s when the MCCYN came about, subsidizing high-quality early care and learning in a broader array of settings in the communities where service members live.
Smith said that the Military Child Care Act was originally targeted toward child care centers, but she recalls briefing the assistant secretary of defense on the potential effects of that strategy when they were designing the system:
I remember saying we need to apply all of this to family child care, to school-aged care, to part-day preschools, because if we don’t, all the parents are going to have a demand on these centers that we can’t meet, right? Because if you lower the cost in the centers and you improve the quality, why would somebody go to another place when they get it cheaper and better over here?
She made the case for educators in every setting getting the same access to training and the same level of compensation, because that’s what would work best for everyone.
“Everything applies to everybody,” Smith said. “And I think that was one of the smartest policy decisions we made.”
Lesson 6: Commit the resources necessary to get the job done
“There was this perception that we just had a lot of money and we threw it at” child care, Smith said. But that wasn’t the case.
“When they passed the Military Child Care Act, it didn’t come with an appropriation,” Gale Perry said. “So they had to fight equally hard for the funding, and a lot of the funding actually ended up coming from local base commanders making the decision to invest in child care.”
Now the military submits a budget request to Congress each year, and depends on those appropriations.
For state and local policymakers seeking to solve the civilian child care crisis without public investment, the woman credited with solving the military’s own child care crisis 35 years ago has a message.
“It’s gonna cost. There’s no way it doesn’t cost,” Smith said.
The Higher Education Inquirer is calling on student journalists, college students, faculty, and independent writers to speak truth to power about the ongoing genocide in Palestine. At a time when universities, governments, and media outlets are complicit through silence, distortion, or outright propaganda, it is urgent that we create space for honest accounts, rigorous investigations, and unapologetic solidarity.
We are seeking pieces that uncover how campuses are responding—or refusing to respond—to the atrocities, that expose academic and financial ties between U.S. higher education and Israel, that highlight student and faculty resistance, and that reflect on the risks of teaching and speaking openly in an environment of censorship and fear. We are especially interested in writing that challenges media narratives, including the BBC’s deeply biased coverage of Gaza, which research shows privileges Israeli voices and humanizes Israeli deaths while erasing Palestinian suffering.
This is not a moment for neutrality. Higher education is entangled in global systems of power, and its students and workers bear both the weight of silence and the responsibility to resist. We welcome investigative reporting, personal testimony, analytical essays, and critical reflections. Because safety is a real concern, we will publish pieces anonymously if needed.
If you are ready to contribute, send a 2–3 sentence pitch to [email protected]. The Higher Education Inquirer stands in the muckraking tradition: fearless, uncompromising, and committed to amplifying voices that others try to silence.
Arizona State University (left) and the University of California, San Diego, are two HSIs.
Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | InnaPoka and yongyuan/iStock/Getty Images
The country’s roughly 600 Hispanic-serving institutions are in peril of losing hundreds of millions of dollars annually from the federal government, after the Department of Justice said it won’t defend the program against a lawsuit alleging the way HSIs are currently defined is unconstitutional. The suit challenges the requirement that a college or university’s undergraduate population must be at least a quarter Hispanic to receive HSI funding.
U.S. solicitor general D. John Sauer wrote to House Speaker Mike Johnson July 25 that the DOJ “has determined that those provisions violate the equal-protection component of the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause.” Federal law requires DOJ officers to notify Congress when they decide to refrain from defending a law on the grounds that it’s unconstitutional.
Citing the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that banned affirmative action in student admissions, Sauer wrote that “the Supreme Court has explained that ‘[o]utright racial balancing’ is ‘patently unconstitutional’” and said “its precedents make clear that the government lacks any legitimate interest in differentiating among universities based on whether ‘a specified number of seats in each class’ are occupied by ‘individuals from the preferred ethnic groups.’”
The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative outlet, first reported on the letter Friday. The DOJ subsequently provided Inside Higher Ed with the letter but gave no further comment or interviews.
The Free Beacon wrote that “the letter likely spells the end for the HSI grants, which the Trump administration is now taking steps to wind down.” The Education Department wrote in an email, “We can confirm the Free Beacon’s reporting,” but didn’t provide Inside Higher Ed an interview or answer further written questions.
Just because the executive branch has given up defending the program doesn’t necessarily mean it’s over—or that the group Students for Fair Admissions and the state of Tennessee have won the lawsuit they filed in June. The Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities moved to intervene in the case late last month, asking U.S. District Court judge Katherine A. Crytzer to add the group as a defendant. She has yet to rule, but the Education Department and education secretary Linda McMahon, the current defendants, didn’t oppose this intervention.
The legal complaint from Students for Fair Admissions and Tennessee asks Crytzer to declare the program’s ethnicity-based requirements unconstitutional, but not necessarily to end the program altogether. Students for Fair Admissions is the group whose suits against Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill yielded the 2023 Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action in admissions. In the suit over the HSI program, that group and Tennessee’s attorney general, Jonathan Skrmetti, now argue that the admissions ruling means Tennessee colleges and universities can’t use affirmative action to increase Hispanic student enrollments in order to qualify for HSI funding.
Deborah Santiago, co-founder and chief executive officer of Excelencia in Education, which promotes Latino student success, said Friday that the Education Department in June “opened a competition to award grants for this fiscal year for HSIs.”
“There are proposals to the Department of Education right now that they said they were going to allocate,” Santiago said, noting that the program was set to dole out more than $350 million this fiscal year—money that institutions use for faculty development, facilities and other purposes.
“The program doesn’t require that any of the money go to Hispanics at all,” she said. For a college or university to qualify for the program, at least half of the student body must be low-income, in addition to the requirement that a quarter be Hispanic.
“The value of a program like this has really been investing in institutions that have a high concentration of low-income, first generation students,” Santiago said.
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The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights alleged Friday that Virginia’s George Mason University has violated civil rights law by illegally using race and other protected characteristics in its hiring and promotion practices.
Craig Trainor, the office’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, accused George Mason President Gregory Washington of waging a “university-wide campaign to implement unlawful DEI policies that intentionally discriminate on the basis of race.”
Under the Trump administration, Trainor and other officials have set their sights on diversity, equity and inclusion programs and other policies that were designed to help historically disadvantaged groups.
The most recent allegations from the Education Department, announced just six weeks after it opened the probe, said the agency determined that the university violated Title VI.The civil rights law bars federally funded institutions from discriminating based on race, color or national origin.
The agency gave George Mason, which is located near Washington, D.C., 10 days to agree with the Trump administration’s proposal to voluntarily resolve the alleged violations.
Under the proposed agreement, Washington would have to release a statement saying the university’s hiring and promotion practices will comply with Title VI and explaining the steps for submitting a discrimination complaint.
The university would also have to review its employment policies, conduct annual training for all employees involved in hiring and promotion decisions,and maintain and share records with the federal government upon request to prove compliance.
The agreement would also require Washington to apologize to the university community “for promoting unlawful discriminatory practices in hiring, promotion, and tenure processes,” the Education Department said.
In a Friday statement, George Mason’sgoverning board said the Education Department notified it of the violation, and it will review the proposed resolution and fully respond to government inquiries.
“Our sole focus is our fiduciary duty to serve the best interests of the University and the people of the Commonwealth of Virginia,” the board said.
The Education Department said it opened the investigation following a complaint from multiple George Mason professors who alleged that university leadership has implemented policies that give preferential treatment to underrepresented groups since 2020.
In it, Washington said that leaders wanted staff and faculty to reflect the diversity of the student population. “This is not code for establishing a quota system,” he added. “It is a recognition of the reality that our society’s future lies in multicultural inclusion.”
He noted that a majority of George Mason’s students weren’t White, yet only 30% of the university’s faculty were part of a ethnic minority group, were multi-ethnic or came from international communities.To achieve the university’s vision, officials should focus on both professional credentials and lived experiences when recruiting employees, he said.
“If you have two candidates who are both ‘above the bar’ in terms of requirements for a position, but one adds to your diversity and the other does not, then why couldn’t that candidate be better, even if that candidate may not have better credentials than the other candidate?” Washington said at the time.
On Friday, the Education Department also cited several George Mason policies it said violated Title VI, including one it said appeared on the university’s website in 2024. The policy said officials could forgo a competitive search process for faculty members when “there is an opportunity to hire a candidate who strategically advances the institutional commitment to diversity and inclusion,” the agency said.
Washington, George Mason’s first Black president, pushed back on the Education Department’s allegations when it first opened the investigation. In a July 16 statement, he said that the university’s promotion and tenure policies don’t give preferential treatment based on race or other protected characteristics.
He also pointed to a “profound shift in how Title VI is being applied.”
“Longstanding efforts to address inequality — such as mentoring programs, inclusive hiring practices, and support for historically underrepresented groups — are in many cases being reinterpreted as presumptively unlawful,” he said.
The U.S. Department of Justice has also opened several investigations into George Mason, including one over its hiring and promotion practices.
Another DOJ probe is looking into the university’s Faculty Senate after its members approved a resolution supporting Washington and the diversity initiatives following the federal investigations, according to The New York Times.The agency has demanded internal communications from the Faculty Senate as part of its investigation.
Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors slammed the probe shortly after it was announced.
“Let’s call this what it is: a gross misuse of federal power to chill speech, silence faculty members, and undermine shared governance,” he said in a July statement. “It is an attack on academic freedom, plain and simple.”
The Virginia university has been under investigation since early July.
John M. Chase/iStock Unreleased/Getty Images
Gregory Washington, president of Virginia’s George Mason University, must apologize to the university community for “promoting unlawful discriminatory practices” in order to resolve allegations that the institution violated civil rights law, the Department of Education announced Friday.
The department claims that the university has illegally factored race and “other immutable characteristics” into hiring, promotion and tenure practices since at least 2020.
Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor said the unlawful practices began shortly after the murder of George Floyd, when Washington called on faculty and administrators to expunge campus of “racist vestiges” by “intentionally discriminat[ing] on the basis of race.”
“You can’t make this up,” Trainor said in the statement. “Despite this unfortunate chapter in Mason’s history, the university now has the opportunity to come into compliance with federal civil rights laws by entering into a Resolution Agreement with the Office for Civil Rights.”
The Education Department first announced in early July that it would investigate GMU for potentially violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination based on race and national origin. Later that month, the Department of Justice announced it would investigate the institution’s Faculty Senate after the panel passed a resolution in support of Washington, who had been quick to push back on the Trump administration and defend the university’s commitment to addressing social injustice. Many conservatives called for Washington—the institution’s first Black president—to be fired. But the university’s Board of Visitors spared him at a meeting Aug. 1, at least for now, and gave him a raise.
Trainor said in the statement that “the Trump-McMahon Department of Education will not allow racially exclusionary practices—which violate the Civil Rights Act, the Equal Protection Clause, and Supreme Court precedent—to continue corrupting our nation’s educational institutions.”
In addition to an apology, the Education Department is demanding that GMU post that statement “prominently” to the university’s website, remove any contrary statements from the past and revise campus policies to prevent future race-based programming. It also wants the institution to begin an annual training session for all individuals involved in recruitment, hiring, promotion or tenure decisions to emphasize the ban on racial consideration and provide records documenting compliance whenever they are requested moving forward.
George Mason officials have 10 days to respond to the department’s proposed resolution agreement.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In Maryland’s Baltimore City Public Schools, educators are making home visits to determine families’ barriers to school attendance.
In Virginia, a state-level task force is helping pediatricians and school nurses educate parents on the importance of school attendance and when to keep students home if they are truly too sick to attend school.
And several states are prioritizing attendance campaigns through accountability measures, additional funding, data-informed decision-making and elevated attention within governors’ offices.
These are some of the school attendance approaches school system leaders shared during a Thursday event focused on combating chronic absenteeism. The event was hosted by Attendance Works, EdTrust and American Enterprise Institute.
“If we don’t have our students there, we will not see the outcomes that we’re looking for,” said Charlene Russell-Tucker, commissioner of the Connecticut State Department of Education.
Nat Malkus, a senior fellow and deputy director of education policy studies at AEI, said that while data shows the national chronic absenteeism rate is improving, there’s much more work to do to get school attendance back to pre-COVID-19 levels.
In 2024, the national chronic absenteeism rate was 23.5%. That’s an improvement from a high of 28.5% in 2022, but still higher than the 13.4% recorded in 2017 and 15.2% in 2018, Malkus said. Chronic absenteeism is measured as missing 10% or more days in a school year — or about 18 days — for any reason.
In 2022, “almost every district in the nation saw [chronic absenteeism] increases, most of them sizable,” Malkus said. Although overall attendance improved in 2023 and 2024, the increases weren’t as high as the education field had hoped, he said.
“This is a long-haul game” to get schools operating with consistent attendance “for our educational and economic future,” Malkus said.
He commended 16 states and Washington, D.C., for committing to reduce chronic absenteeism by 50% over five years. At an event last year, the three organizations called on all states to make this commitment.
“States and districts have made progress, and we should be happy for that,” said Malkus, adding that improvements in attendance show “progress on this front is doable, and that the goals are achievable.”
Trying different solutions
Stephen Dackin, director of the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce, said that his state has committed to the 50% reduction in chronic absenteeism. Ohio hit a high of 30% in 2021-22 but is now down to 25.6%.
Dackin said what has helped improve attendance is the use of a multi-tiered system of supports that provides increased levels of interventions where needed and an integrated review of students’ academic and behavioral data in developing interventions.
“That is a game-changer, if we do it well in Ohio,” Dackin said.
Emily Anne Gullickson, superintendent of public instruction in Virginia, said the state had a peak chronic absenteeism rate of 20.1%, which a case study by Attendance Works shows occurred in 2021-22. As of spring 2024, the rate was 15.7%. More recent attendance data is expected to be released soon, Gullickson said.
A state-level task force launched the ALL (Attendance, Literacy and Learning) Initiative in September 2023. The state board of education incorporated chronic absenteeism into its accountability system and included it as part of a readiness indicator for elementary, middle and high schools, Gullickson said. Additionally, Virginia is studying model programs and looking at how to scale those practices.
In Connecticut, Russell-Tucker said the chronic absenteeism rate was at a high of 23%, which state data shows occurred in 2021-22. Now, it’s at 17.2%. The state board of education set a goal of 6% by 2028.
To help better understand the problem and to implement solutions, the attendance data is collected at the state level monthly. That data is then disaggregated by student subgroups. That data helps the state work with the districts so they can intervene immediately, Russell-Tucker said. Additionally, the state has a line item in its budget addressing student attendance.
She called the need to improve school attendance an “all hands on deck” moment.
The state’s Learner, Engagement and Attendance Program — or LEAP — supports home visits to strengthen school-family relationships and to reduce school attendance barriers for students, Russell-Tucker said.
Evaluation studies of LEAP show that six months after the first LEAP visit, student attendance rates improved by about 10 percentage points for students in K-8, and nearly 16 percentage points for students in grades 9-12, she said.
Sonja Brookins Santelises, CEO of Baltimore City Public Schools, also touted the benefits of strong relationships between schools and families. “It’s a lot easier to have pointed conversations with a family when you are in a relationship,” Santelises said.
The district, which saw chronic absenteeism rates double from between 20% and 30% during the pandemic, has also targeted interventions to schools and student subgroups most in need of supports.
Partnering with community organizations to reduce absenteeism has also been helpful: “You need a network of people” to support student and family engagement, Santelises said.
Since hitting a record high in 2022, national chronic absenteeism rates have dropped modestly — by about five percentage points — according to the most recent available data, but still remain persistently higher than pre-pandemic levels.
States that joined a national pledge led by three high-profile education advocacy and research groups to cut chronic absenteeism in half over five years fared better. The 16 states and Washington, D.C. posted results “substantially above the average rate” of decline, though exact numbers are not yet available, said Nat Malkus, deputy director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, one of the trio.
The national chronic absenteeism average dropped from 28.5% in 2022 to 25.4% in 2023, and fell an additional two points to 23.5% in 2024. Virginia, which is among the 16 participating states, cut its chronic absenteeism by 4.4 percentage points, year over year, to 15.7%, as of spring 2024.
Speaking of the states collectively, Malkus told The 74, “That’s good but it’s not as good as we need it to be. I think it points to the need for sustained pressure and a sustained campaign to bring absence rates down and to bring more students back to consistent attendance.”
Last July, AEI and EdTrust, right-and left-leaning think tanks, respectively, and the national nonprofit Attendance Works joined forces to launch The 50% Challenge. This week, the organizations hosted an event in Washington, D.C., to report on their progress, re-up the call to action and hear insights from state, district and community partners on how they are improving student attendance and engagement.
With California and Georgia recently joining, the 16 states and D.C. who signed on to the pledge account for more than a third of all students nationally. While Malkus doesn’t necessarily attribute their better results to the pledge itself, he noted that their participation shows a willingness to commit to the cause and be publicly accountable for their results.
“I will hold their feet to the fire on this goal,” he added during his opening remarks in D.C.
While felt most acutely by students of color and those in poorer districts, the spike in chronic absenteeism — students missing more than 10% of school days a year — cut across districts regardless of size, racial breakdown or income. Chronic absenteeism surged from 13.4% in 2017 to 28.5% in 2022 before beginning to drop in 2023.
Only about one-third of students nationally are in districts that are on pace to cut 2022 absenteeism in half by 2027, according to an AEI report, and rates improved more slowly in 2024 than they did in 2023, “raising the very real possibility that absenteeism rates might never return to pre-pandemic levels.
AEI
Research has shown that students with high rates of absenteeism are more likely to fall behind academically and are at a greater risk of dropping out of school. About 8% of all learning loss from the pandemic is attributed just to chronic absenteeism, according to soon-to-be-released AEI research.
The continued disproportionate impacts of chronic absenteeism were confirmed by recent RAND research, which found that in roughly half of urban school districts, more than 30% of students were chronically absent — a far higher share of students than in rural or suburban school districts.
RAND also found that the most commonly reported reason for missing school was sickness and one-quarter of kids did not think that being chronically absent was a problem.
SchoolStatus, a private company that works with districts to reduce chronic absenteeism, also released new numbers this week for some 1.3 million K-12 students across 172 districts in nine states. Districts using proactive interventions, the company reports, drove down chronic absenteeism rates from 21.9% in 2023–24 to 20.9% in 2024–25.
At this week’s event, numerous experts across two panels emphasized the importance of a tiered approach to confronting the issue, which has resisted various remedies. Schools must build enough trust and buy-in with kids and their families that they are willing to share why they are absent in the first place. Once those root causes are identified, it is up to school, district and state leaders to work to remove the barriers.
And while data monitoring must play a significant role, it should be done in a way that is inclusive of families.
“We need to analyze data with families, not at them,” said Augustus Mays, EdTrust’s vice president of partnerships and engagement.
Augustus Mays is the vice president of partnerships and engagement at EdTrust. (EdTrust)
It’s imperative to understand the individual child beyond the number they represent and to design attendance plans and strategies with families so they feel supported rather than chastised.
“It’s around choosing belonging over punitive punishment,” Mays added.
One major and common mistake schools make is “accountability without relationships,” said Sonja Brookins Santelises, the superintendent of Baltimore City Public Schools.
“You can’t ‘pull people up’ if you don’t have enough knowledge of what they’re really going through,” she said.
Panelists were transparent that all this would require immense funding, staff and community partnerships.
Virginia achieved its noteworthy drop in chronic absenteeism after launching a $418 million education initiative in the fall of 2023, in part after seeing their attendance data sink, with about 1 in 5 students chronically missing school. At least 10% of those funds are earmarked to prioritize attendance solutions in particular, according to panelist Emily Anne Gullickson, the superintendent of public instruction for the Virginia Department of Education.
These strategies are far-reaching, she noted: Because parents had been told throughout the pandemic to keep their kids home at the slightest sign of illness, schools partnered with pediatricians and school nurses to help counter the no-longer-necessary “stay home” narrative.
Hedy Chang is the founder and executive director of Attendance Works. (Attendance Works)
Gullickson said she also broke down bureaucratic silos, connecting transportation directors and attendance directors, after realizing the role that transit played in chronic absenteeism. The state now has second chance buses as well as walking and biking “buses,” led by parents or teachers along a fixed route, who pick up students along the way.
And they are “on a mission to move away from seat time and really deliver more flexibility on where, when and how kids are learning,” she said.
“This isn’t one strategy. It’s a set of strategies,” said Attendance Works founder and executive director Hedy Chang, who moderated the panel.
In Connecticut, state leaders have launched the Learning Engagement and Attendance Program, a research-based model that sends trained support staff to families’ homes to build relationships and better understand why their kids are missing school.
Charlene Russell-Tucker is the commissioner of the Connecticut State Department of Education. (Connecticut State Department of Education)
A recent study confirmed that six months after the program’s first home visits, attendance rates improved by approximately 10 percentage points for K-8 students, and nearly 16 percentage points for high schoolers, said Charlene Russell-Tucker, the commissioner of the Connecticut State Department of Education.
Schools must also work to motivate kids to want to show up in the first place, panelists said, making it a meaningful place that students believe will support and help them in the long run. The only way to do this is to start with student and family feedback, said Brookins, the Baltimore schools chief.
During the pandemic many parents saw up-close for the first time what their kids’ classrooms and teacher interactions looked like, “and I don’t think a lot of folks liked what they saw for a variety of different reasons,” Brookins said.
“I think it opened up boxes of questions that we — as the education establishment — were unprepared to answer,” she added. But chronic absenteeism cannot be successfully fought without engaging in those uncomfortable conversations.
Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation provides financial support to EdTrust and The 74.
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Dive Brief:
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday dealt a blow to universities and other research institutions seeking to restore grants cut in mass by the National Institutes of Health.
Researchers, unions and associations sued NIH this spring after the agency abruptly terminated millions of dollars in grants for projects that dealt with diversity, equity and inclusion.
In a 5-4 decision, conservative justices on the Supreme Court paused a June order that would have restored $783 million in funding, ruling that the district court lacked jurisdiction to handle the grant restoration. However, the court declined to block the lower court’s order that deemed NIH’s guidance that led to the cuts illegal.
Dive Insight:
With the Supreme Court decision, those who have seen grant funding cut by NIH could face a longer, more complicated path through another federal court to have their awards restored.
In their April complaint, plaintiffs accused NIH of “launching a reckless and illegal purge to stamp out NIH-funded research that addresses topics and populations that they disfavor.”
They tallied 678 terminated projects resulting in $1.3 billion already spent by the government on projects “stopped midstream” being wasted, and another $1.1 billion that had yet to be spent.
When U.S. District Judge William Young ruled against NIH in June, he blasted the agency for what he saw as discrimination, both racial and against LGBTQ+ communities, in its purge of research funding.
Earlier this month, the watchdog agency U.S. Government Accountability Office also determined that NIH acted illegally in its DEI cuts.
The Supreme Court did not block Young’s ruling that NIH’s guidance that led to the agency cutting DEI research funding was illegal. That ruling is still being litigated in appellate court.
Instead, the ruling majority determined that the U.S. Court of Federal Claims — which hears monetary claims against the federal government — is the venue for handling terminated grants.
Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell, who has been active in fighting the Trump administration’s various moves to cut federal research funding, blasted the Supreme Court’s ruling on Friday.
“The Supreme Court’s decision is wrong and deeply disappointing,” Campbellsaid in a statement. “Even though the Court did not dispute that the Trump Administration’s decision to cut critical medical and public health research is illegal, they ordered the recipients of that funding — hospitals, researchers, and the state — to jump through more hoops to get it back.”
The Supreme Court’s split decision brought internal dissent as well. In a minority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts, who joined the court’s liberal justices, wrote that “if the District Court had jurisdiction to vacate the directives, it also had jurisdiction to vacate the ‘Resulting Grant Terminations.’”
In a separate dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson rebuked the majority’s opinion.
“By today’s order, an evenly divided Court neuters judicial review of grant terminations by sending plaintiffs on a likely futile, multivenue quest for complete relief,” she wrote, adding that the court “lobs this grenade” without considering Congress’ intent or the “profound” consequences of the ruling.
“Stated simply: With potentially life-saving scientific advancements on the line, the Court turns a nearly century-old statute aimed at remedying unreasoned agency decisionmaking into a gauntlet rather than a refuge,” Jackson said in the dissent.
Clarification: This article has been updated to clarify the nature of the Supreme Court decision.
Local government agencies in charge of youth violated the educational and civil rights of students in Los Angeles County’s juvenile justice facilities for decades by punting responsibility and inaction, according to a report released Wednesday.
“Who has the power? Chronicling Los Angeles County’s systemic failures to educate incarcerated youth” blames the disconnected, vast network of local and state agencies — from the board of supervisors to the local probation department to the county office of education and more — that play one role or another in managing the county’s juvenile legal system, for the disruption in the care and education of youth in one of the nation’s largest systems.
“This broken system perpetuates a harmful cycle of ‘finger-pointing,’ often between Probation and Los Angeles County Office of Education, which hinders the resolution of issues that significantly affect the education of incarcerated youth,” wrote the Education Justice Coalition, authors of the report.
The coalition includes representatives from Children’s Defense Fund-California, ACLU of Southern California, Arts for Healing and Justice Network, Disability Rights California, Youth Justice Education Clinic at Loyola Law School, and Public Counsel.
The authors listed three demands for the board of supervisors, including reducing youth incarceration by way of implementing the previously approved Youth Justice Reimagined plan, providing access to high-quality education, and adopting transparency and accountability measures.
Decades of documented rights violations
A timeline outlines repeated student rights violations, some of which have resulted in class-action lawsuits and settlements requiring the county to be monitored by the federal and state departments of justice for years at a time.
Since 2000, the timeline notes that Los Angeles County has faced:
A civil grand jury report calling on the board of supervisors to “improve collaboration” between the probation and education departments in order to address unmet educational needs
An investigation by the federal Department of Justice — and subsequent settlements — found significant teacher shortages, lack of consistency in daily instruction, and issues with support for students with special needs
A class action lawsuit against the county office of education and the probation department
An investigation by the state Department of Justice, followed by settlements, found excessive use of force and inadequate services
Multiple findings by a state agency of L.A. County juvenile facilities being “unsuitable for the confinement of minors”
Most recently, the state attorney general has requested receivership, which would mean full state ownership of the county’s juvenile halls.
The Los Angeles Board of Supervisors, the probation department, and the Office of Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The lasting impact of academic disruptions
Dovontray Farmer experienced the mismanaged system when he entered Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall a second time as a 10th grader. Now 24 and serving as a youth mentor with the Youth Justice Coalition, Farmer said that his time in L.A. County facilities “played a major role in not being able to get properly educated — I felt betrayed, honestly.”
Returning to school after being released was difficult, he said, because he quickly realized he was several grade levels below his classmates at his local high school.
He’d also been part of his school’s football team before his detention at Los Padrinos when he was 17, and said he tried returning to the team once released but wasn’t allowed back.
He said the disruption to his education and participation on the football team, which he saw as a positive influence, affected how he viewed his life.
“There was nothing I really could do, so I was really giving up,” he said. “Like, everything that I really cared for was already gone.”
The environment at the juvenile facilities didn’t help matters.
Los Padrinos recently came under fire after a video published by the Los Angeles Times showed probation officers standing idle as detained youths fought. Thirty officers have been indicted on criminal charges for encouraging or organizing gladiator-style fights among youths.
Farmer said he was put through those same types of fights when he was at Los Padrinos as a teenager.
“A lot of the coverage recently has been about the recent gladiator fights in 2023, but clearly this is a very systemic issue that even when a problem is resolved in the short term, we’re uncovering that it’s really indicative of a larger systemic problem,” said Vivian Wong, an education attorney and director of the Youth Justice Education Clinic at Loyola Law School, whose recent clients have included Los Padrinos students.
Education data across several years backs Farmer’s experiences while detained.
The most recent state data available when Farmer was detained at Los Padrinos is from 2018, when 39% of students were chronically absent, less than 43% graduated, and 12% were suspended at least once.
That same year, the state’s average was 9% for chronic absenteeism, 83.5% for graduation, and 3.5% for suspension.
Ongoing education concerns
The report’s authors note that students across several facilities have lost thousands of instructional minutes, with a “lack of transparency and concrete planning to ensure that the missed services are adequately made up for, leaving students at risk of falling further behind educationally.”
While compensatory education has typically been used to resolve instructional minutes owed, “I am not sure that’s the most realistic way to remedy the injustice that young people face, because they have endured so much abuse in these facilities,” said Wong. “It’s much more than just a loss of instruction.”
A more appropriate response to the loss of instructional time would be a consistent investment in avoiding detention and keeping young people in their communities to maintain school stability, she added.
Past attempts at reform have often been “done without community input or leadership, both in the design and in the implementation of those reforms,” Wong said.
The new report, she added, is meant to be a tool toward implementing Youth Justice Reimagined, or YJR, a model against punitive measures that was largely developed with input from community organizations to restructure the local juvenile legal system.
Three demands
Youth Justice Reimagined, approved by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in November 2020 to reform the local juvenile legal system, would move the county away from punitive approaches, such as detention, and toward rehabilitative support through counseling, family and vocational programming, small residential home placements, and more.
Youth detention results in “severe disconnection from and disruption to their education trajectory,” wrote the report’s authors, as they urged the board to address abysmal educational access and achievement by fully funding and implementing YJR.
The disconnect, they added, is exacerbated by delayed school enrollment when detained and upon release, the constant presence of probation officers, and turnover of educators and classmates.
These common experiences are particularly difficult for students with learning disabilities or a history of trauma, they wrote.
“After more than a decade of incremental reform, it is time for the County to truly reimagine youth justice,” wrote Supervisors Sheila Kuehl and Mark Ridley-Thomas in their November 2020 motion to approve YJR. “In the same way that the Board has embraced a care first, jail last approach to the criminal justice system, it is incumbent upon the Board to embrace a care first youth development approach to youth justice.”
Despite the approval, a report published in August 2024 by the state auditor found that less than half of the YJR recommendations had been implemented by mid-2024.
To address the high rates of chronic absenteeism, poor testing results and instructional minutes owed, the Education Justice Coalition’s second demand is to adapt educational opportunities “to address the unique and significant needs of the court school population.”
They listed 18 actions the county probation and education departments should work together on, including:
Appropriate education support for students with disabilities
Access to A-G approved courses for every student in a juvenile facility
Classrooms led by educators, rather than probation officers
Appropriately credentialed and culturally competent educators
Education access that is not disrupted due to probation staffing issues
The coalition’s third demand centered on transparency and accountability measures by providing families with access to education planning for their children and establishing work groups that include community members.
