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A South Dakota museum takes students on flights to the stars, but future trips are in question because of cuts from the Trump administration cuts
HAYTI, S.D. — “Are we actually in space?”

The kindergartners of South Dakota’s Hamlin County are, in fact, in space. To be specific, they are on planet Earth, near the geographic center of North America, sitting crisscross applesauce inside an 11-foot-high inflatable planetarium set up in their school gym.

The darkness is velvety. Childish whispers skitter around the dome like mice. The kids are returning from a short mission to Jupiter, piloted by Kristine Heinen, a young museum educator with a ponytail who knows how to make her voice BIG AND EXCITED and then inviting and quiet to hold little ones’ attention.

“Now we’re over China!” Heinen says.

“My friend went to China!” a girl calls out.

“The other side is nighttime and this side’s bright,” expounds a boy with a crew cut. “The sun shines here so it can’t shine over there.“

The school is in eastern South Dakota, 34 miles northeast of the settlement where Laura Ingalls Wilder grew up and attended a one-room schoolhouse. The sprawling Hamlin Education Center is a modern-day analogue, serving an entire district in one building, with just under 900 students, pre-K through 12. Notable graduates include U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, the former governor of South Dakota.

The center is roughly equidistant from four tiny towns, surrounded by open fields where cornstalks shine in the sun; 95 percent of students arrive by bus, from up to 20 miles away. Over a third of them qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, said Dustin Blaha, the elementary school’s principal.
Hamlin Elementary students line up for their turn visiting a traveling planetarium sponsored by the South Dakota Discovery Center. Credit: Anya Kamenetz for The Hechinger Report

During the planetarium’s daylong visit to the small community of Hayti, S.D., an educator from the South Dakota Discovery Center wowed 500 elementary school students with a presentation about the planets and stars. Credit: Anya Kamenetz for The Hechinger Report

Many Hamlin Elementary haven’t had a chance to visit the South Dakota Discovery Center in Pierre three hours away, so the museum brings traveling exhibits like a portable planetarium to them. Credit: Anya Kamenetz for The Hechinger Report
Blaha said that most of these children have never been to the South Dakota Discovery Center, a hands-on science museum three hours west in the state capital. But thanks to a federal agency called the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a part of the museum can come to them.

The IMLS was established in 1996, combining previously separate programs. The small agency became the largest source of federal funding for museums and libraries, last year awarding $266.7 million in program grants, research and policy development across all 50 states. IMLS awarded the South Dakota Discovery Center about $45,000 in 2023 to upgrade this traveling planetarium.

But students around the state may be waiting a long time for the next upgrade.

Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order in mid-March calling for the agency to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” Mass firings followed.

On May 1, the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., issued a temporary restraining order to block the agency’s dismantling, followed on May 6 by a second federal judge finding the dismantling of this and two other agencies unconstitutional. On May 20, the American Library Association reported that employees are returning to work and some grants have been restored.

But the administration is continuing its legal battle to all but shutter the IMLS. The latest post on the agency’s Instagram account is captioned, “The era of using your taxpayer dollars to fund DEI grants is OVER,” holding up for criticism grants that were aimed at addressing systemic racism in museums, equitable library practices, and diverse staff development. The IMLS and the Department of Government Efficiency did not respond to requests for comment.

A veteran of the agency who asked to remain anonymous because of fear of reprisal said they first saw DOGE staffers meeting with leadership on March 28. “On the 31st, we were put on administrative leave. We had about two hours to turn in your key cards, your ID, get everything off your laptop you’re ever going to need. We were locked out of our computer systems by 3:30 and told to get out of the building.” A skeleton crew was hastily rehired the next day.

The ex-staffer points out that the Institute of Museum and Library Services spends, or spent, just 7 percent of its budget on its 70 staff, passing the rest along as grants. “We are not a bloated agency.” They have two kids at home, one with special needs and are married to another federal employee whose job is also at risk; but they are almost as worried about their grantees as themselves.

“After 20 years, I didn’t even get to put an out-of-office response up. Is someone emailing me right now and getting nothing, because all of a sudden their grant just ended? I hate that,” the former IMLS employee said.

Almost all grants awarded required a one-to-one cost share out of the local institution’s budget, the staffer said. Plus, typically the grantees pay for activities first and then apply to get reimbursed. “We’re leaving these often small rural museums and libraries on the hook.”

Related: Facing declines in reading proficiency, rural libraries step in

Anne Lewis, executive director of the South Dakota Discovery Center, said that organizations like hers would be “wobbly” without federal funding and would have to scale back on ambitious programs like the planetarium upgrade.

“The new system has much better interaction and control,” said Heinen, the museum educator. An earlier version had a static point of view, but upgraded visual effects means that “now we have spaceship mode,” she said. “We can travel to destinations including planets, and go in a full 360-degree mode around galaxies.”

With a flick of the touchscreen menu, she can also display the constellations of a dozen different cultures including Lakota, a significant benefit especially when she visits tribal schools.

The South Dakota Discovery Center, based in Pierre, has used federal support from the Institute for Museum and Library Services to pay for a traveling planetarium exhibit. Credit: Anya Kamenetz for The Hechinger Report

It’s a lean operation: Heinen drove solo nearly 200 miles from Pierre to Watertown the evening before and spent the night at an Econo Lodge. From there, it was another 20-some miles to Hayti, where she arrived at 7:30 in the morning, set up the dome herself, and ran 30-minute programs all day.

The whole elementary school, about 500 kids in total, saw the planetarium, with each show customized to the children’s interest and grade level; and she also conducted a parent engagement program in the afternoon. Heinen said she never tires of being a “Santa Claus” for science. ”As soon as they see me, they know something fun is going to happen.”

During this visit, the fan favorites were Jupiter, Mars and the sun. “It was cool when we went to Mars,” said Nash Christensen, 6. “And the volcano on that one moon, and the big hurricane on Jupiter. I think Jupiter is a dangerous place to live.”

Grant recipients of the Institute of Museum and Library Services say the support from the federal government has been critical to running their programs. For example, the Boston Children’s Museum, the second-oldest children’s museum in the country, has used federal grant money to improve school readiness. One of the outcomes was a new exhibit in the museum, “Countdown to Kindergarten,” that mimics a kindergarten classroom, complete with a school bus you can sit in out front.

“It’s helpful not only for the kids, but some of our caregivers who came from other countries and may not have gone to a school like this,” said Melissa Higgins, the museum’s vice president of programs and exhibits.

Related: Tracking Trump: His actions to dismantle the Education Department, and more

At the Madison Children’s Museum in Wisconsin, federal funds paid for a multistate partnership that provides climate education for young children and their families. In Fort Lauderdale, Florida, a grant covered five “STEMobiles,” which offer hands-on science activities for children ages 3-5 in low-income parts of Broward County. The Philadelphia School District won a two-year planning grant to try to improve its pipeline of school librarians; they were down to only a handful for a district of 200,000 students.

But the greatest impact may come in rural, often deep-red areas.

“Rural communities have particularly unique challenges,” said Lewis at the South Dakota Discovery Center. “There’s 800,000 people in the state, and they’re dispersed. We don’t have a concentration of funders and donors who can help support these enrichment activities.”

She said the teachers she serves are “passionate, committed and, like every other place in the world, underfunded.” If not for institutions like hers, students would probably go without this kind of hands-on science experience, she said.

Blaha, the elementary school principal, concurred. “The planetarium brings excitement and expertise that we don’t typically have in a community like this,” he said.

For now, the excitement is coming to an end. The class has “landed” on a green lawn, under a deep blue sky. Heinen announces “It’s time to leave.” She’s met with a chorus of, “Noo!”

“You guys, we were in here for a full 30 minutes.”

“It felt like 10!”

“It felt like a second!”

Tonight, many of them will be able to look up at the dark sky over the prairie and show their parents Jupiter, Ursa Major and Mars.

Contact the editor of this story, Christina Samuels, at 212-678-3635 via Signal at cas.37 or [email protected].

This story about South Dakota museums was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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June 2, 2025

My Journey in Alternative Grading: From Curiosity to Clarity – Faculty Focus

I read Susan Blum’s Ungrading as a first-year graduate student and was immediately smitten. At the same time, COVID-19 forced many seasoned instructors to grapple with assessing their students, making alternative assessment more mainstream. My first attempt at alternative assessment didn’t go very well. I failed to appreciate the value of clear expectations and the inescapable necessity that my students needed to walk out of my class with a grade. I struggled to make my system transparent, to emphasize growth over perfection, and to implement a good rubric. For the next four years, I used Kevin Gannon’s grading contract to implement more structure and Barbara Schapiro’s ‘third space’ to reflect on what worked for me and my students. My system improved. Now, as a fifth-year graduate student approaching completion of my degree, I use contract grading. Each assignment has 1-10 points, with a total of 100 points. Each point corresponds to a specific objective and is graded complete/incomplete. In my more recent students’ evaluations, students say they are less stressed, they are more motivated, and they understand assignment expectations at the beginning of the semester.

My Journey in Alternative Grading: From Curiosity to Clarity

The first time I stood in front of 20 bored freshmen, all alone, teaching a course I had designed, also all alone, I was teaching a general education writing and speaking course at the University of Iowa. After using traditional grading the first semester, I turned to alternative assessment in the second. In brief, my students received a complete/incomplete grade for any given assignment and then a cumulative midterm and final grade. I wanted to deemphasize grading entirely, but in retrospect the flaws were glaring. Halfway through the semester, in the middle of class, a student burst out in confusion and frustration, “Where did my grade even come from?” What a good question. My first system failed to appreciate the value of clear expectations and the inescapable necessity that at the end of the day my students needed to walk out of my class with a grade.

As a first-year graduate student, I had read Susan Blum’s Ungrading and was immediately smitten. Blum (2020) argues that grades provide minimal feedback, they deemphasize learning, and what they actually measure is inconsistent (10-14). I came to alternative assessment alongside many other instructors as COVID-19 forced seasoned instructors to grapple with assessment policies. In 2021, a Faculty Learning Community formed at the University of Iowa to address assessment practices and, spurred on by their work, in 2023 the University changed their grading policy page to include alternative assessment (“Grades: Undergraduate Policies”).

During the next four years, I implemented Barbara Schapiro’s (2009) ‘third space,’ which takes into account what benefits both me and my students (423-439). I took a more structured approach, first using Kevin Gannon’s contract and Asao Inoue’s labor-based grading model and eventually designing my own contract. I struggled to make contract grading transparent, to emphasize growth over perfection, and to implement a good rubric. But the system improved. Now, as a fifth-year graduate student approaching completion of my degree, I use a blend of labor-based, or specifications, grading, and contract grading. In specifications grading “the instructor designates bundles of assignments that map to different letter grades” and in contract grading “each student signs a contract indicating what grade they plan to work towards” (“Alternative Approaches to Assessment”). In evaluations, students say they are less stressed, they are more motivated, and they understand assignment expectations better.

Despite the flaws in my first grading system, it taught me that I functioned better in a classroom when I use alternative assessment, and I have maintained some semblance of the complete/incomplete system ever since. Traditional grading felt too subjective, based on a sliding scale of bad, average, or great. As a TA, I even received rubrics with that language. As much as it was my job to teach students to write, I also felt the grading system disadvantaged those students who came in with subpar high school educations and less writing experience. I wanted to design a system that addressed those problems.

Gannon’s Contract Grading: A Transparent Framework

Kevin Gannon’s (2022) grading contract (see Figure 1) heavily influenced my third semester of teaching. In Gannon’s model, students begin with a B- and achieving, or failing to achieve, specific requirements raise or lower their grade. His system was easy to explain and students responded positively. When I introduced Gannon’s system, I used the word ‘labor’ a lot. In Asao Inoue’s (2022) labor-based grading model, he defines labor as “the engine that runs all learning. You can’t learn without laboring” (76). But, on my own, I doubted whether I could evaluate a student’s labor when it mostly took place outside of the classroom. I aimed, therefore, to bring the writing process further into the classroom, including proposals, drafts, and revisions. I especially wanted students to understand that the ‘final’ assignment was anything but. Usually written in one to three weeks (if not one to three days), ‘final’ assignments are first thoughts, or, if we’re lucky, second thoughts. Drafts and revisions help students embrace what Gannon (2020) calls “not-yetness,” the recognition that they are still learning and the goal is not perfection (146).

Figure 1: Gannon’s Contact System

Grade	Number of Non-Participation Days	Number of Late Assignments	Number of Ignored Assignments
B-minus	0-4	0-4	0
C-minus	5-6	5	1
D-minus	more than 6	6 or more	more than 1

Despite the overall success of the system, I had problems. Students were still demotivated by a lack of clear expectations. Because everything was graded complete/incomplete, three-sentence reading responses held the same weight as thousand-word essays, making it unclear how much time I expected them to spend on a given assignment. My assignments also didn’t have detailed enough rubrics and some students felt quality didn’t matter.

My Grading Design and Process

At this point, I started teaching general education in literature, which had different grading expectations. Needing to change my system anyway, I created a contract with 100 points, each assignment assigned 1-10 points (See supplementary materials). I like this system. I’m still using it two years later. But my first go-around had only middling success. The system seemed straightforward to me, but my students were confused, as nearly all of them pointed out in their evaluations. Although students understood what the assignments were, my rubrics were sparse – perceptive readers might notice this as a reoccurring problem.

So, here’s how I fixed it: On the first day of class, I explain my system and give everyone a copy of the contract, which I ask them to fill out with their desired grade. Being in physical contact with the contract helps them understand it better and immediately establish a goal for the semester. I explain the larger purpose of the contract, but I also boiled the system down to some simple numbers: if a student successfully completes all the main assignments and three revisions, they get an A.

And, at long last, I have a functioning rubric. I still grade each point complete/incomplete. For simple assignments like reading responses, where I just want students to get their thoughts down, it’s a simple question of “Did you do the assignment?” For more complicated assignments, I assign each point an objective, and each objective introduces a new skill or concept. For example, in an eight-point paper, I assign four points to close reading (See Figure 2). The objectives build from including close reading consistently in the paper to synthesizing the new skill they’re learning (close reading) with the class content (monster theory). The objectives become more difficult and the final objective requires the most subjective grading. But overall, the system allows the students to see whether they’re meeting requirements even before I’ve given them a grade, and the system highlights what skills or content they are struggling with.

Figure 2: Analysis Rubric

1 point	Close reading throughout the paper that addresses specific, quoted moments from your song
1 point	Close reading that makes an argument about why those specific moments are there throughout the paper
1 point	The paper addresses monstrosity as we have discussed it in class (i.e. have you told us what the monster is a metaphor for?
1 point	Analysis heavily relies throughout on an argument about monstrosity that goes beyond ‘monster as metaphor.’

Conclusion

I find alternative assessment highly effective. Even though I recently received the comment, “Never do contract grading again,” student evaluations are overwhelmingly positive and more often sound like, “So helpful, literally my favorite thing ever.” Stress reduction and increased motivation appear frequently in evaluations. But more than that, alternative assessment taught me how to be a teacher. Improving my grading system required me to create clearer rubrics, state the purpose of my lessons, design assignments that gave my students more agency, and provide more concrete methods of measuring participation. This meant a lot of big changes at once, but alternative assessment can be implemented in much smaller steps, like using it for one assignment or rewriting one rubric. Now that I have a good system, I’m working on those smaller steps, like making assignments more time effective and integrating revisions more effectively. Implementing alternative assessment was really hard, but I hope as more teachers take it up, there will be more resources for those who want to take the plunge.

Sarah Barringer is a graduate student at the University of Iowa. Her dissertation, “Transmasculine Narratives in Medieval Literature,” argues that transmasculine characters in medieval literature allowed medieval audiences to imagine a gender that comprised both feminine and masculine elements. She teaches general education in literature courses at the University of Iowa on monstrosity and identity.

References

“Alternative Approaches to Assessment.” The Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, Harvard University. https://bokcenter.harvard.edu/beyond-the-grade.

Blum, Susan. Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning: And What to Do Instead. West Virginia University Press, 2020.

Gannon, Kevin. Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto. West Virginia University Press, 2020.

Gannon, Kevin. “Some Thoughts on Moving into Labor-Based Grading Contracts.” The Tattooed Professor, 2020, https://thetattooedprof.com/2022/01/04/some-thoughts-on-moving-into-labor-based-grading-contracts/

“Grades: Undergraduate policies.” College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Iowa, 2024, https://policy.clas.uiowa.edu/clas-policies-and-procedures/undergraduate-education/grades-undergraduate-policies.

Inoue, Asoa. Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom. University Press of Colorado, 2022.

Schapiro, Barbara. “Negotiating a Third Space in the Classroom.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 9, no. 3 (2009): 423-439.

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June 2, 2025

What we’ll be talking about at The Festival of Higher Education 2025

We’re not going to lie, we had to think really hard about what we want this year’s Festival of Higher Education to be about.

If you’ve been to the event – returning to the University of London’s iconic Senate House this November – you’ll know by now to expect thoughtful analysis, discussion of the biggest issues facing higher education, and to hear from some key people who are leading and influencing the policy and political landscape. You can also expect to connect with people outside your professional area of work, find out about something new, drink buckets of coffee, and enjoy a jolly good party, if that’s your thing.

None of that’s changing, obviously. Our reflections have been much more about the journey the HE sector has been on in the last year, and the potentially tough road ahead. The Westminster government has promised a package of higher education reform, possibly pegged to an annual inflationary uplift in undergraduate tuition fees, but there will most likely be no major injection of public funds. The straws in the wind from the last few years suggest that the steady trend in recruitment towards growth in home and international students is ebbing.

When will there be good news?

That means that across the UK higher education institutions are having to think hard, perhaps harder than they ever have before, about their core purpose and mission, about securing quality and excellence in education, continuing cutting edge research and scholarship, and deepening their compacts with their communities and regions to make the value of that education and research real to people.

There is both potential and pain in that journey. If the HE sector was going to transform it would rather not be doing it under these circumstances. But with the right ideas and energy higher education should be able not just to cling on but to thrive – with a renewed sense of purpose and new ways of achieving the core mission for the generations to come.

We think that potential can better be achieved through connection – with external perspectives, with the articulation of shared challenges, and with people and ideas who might be able to help. And that’s what we will be focused on as we develop the agenda for this year’s Festival of Higher Education. We can guarantee that this year’s agenda will be packed full of fresh ideas, innovation and inspiration!

The Festival should offer the chance to hear from voices outside the sector who can speak to the wider public policy imperatives and global trends that UK higher education will need to think through. It should create space for deep reflection and new perspectives on the organisational challenges higher education is grappling with. And it should open up new thinking about the connections and relationships inside institutions and how to sustain and enhance academic community during times of change.

Thematic, systematic

Making that concrete, we think there are several really key policy themes that need to be unpacked.

Economic growth and regional/national development – the number one priority of not just the Westminster government but arguably of all governments. Higher education is one of the most important tools available in efforts to create flourishing economic ecosystems but we need a stronger articulation of the role of higher education in developing skilled graduates, how institutions connect up in their regions and nationally, and how the innovation grown in universities is seeded in the wider economy.

The regulatory environment and the relationship between the state and higher education institutions – with a new chair at the Office for Students, Medr implementing a new regulatory framework in Wales and reorganisation of FE/HE sector agencies in Scotland there are wide open questions about how best to find the balance between public accountability for quality, access and governance, and institutional freedom to innovate and offer something distinctive and sustainable – including deciding what not to do.

The future student learning experience – as labour market opportunities for graduates evolve in response to AI, costs of study put increasing pressure on the traditional HE route and on students’ wellbeing, and governments consider how to upskill and reskill to increase opportunity throughout individuals’ lives, higher education institutions will need to think about the kind of educational and personal development experiences future students will need to help them build the lives they want.

Organisational effectiveness of higher education institutions – it doesn’t sound that inspiring when you put it that way, but looking at challenges around effective governance and leadership for the current moment, the drive for efficiency and better use of data to inform decisions, and most importantly how higher education professionals experience their working environment, and are meaningfully engaged in change agendas, you realise just how important a theme this is. Evolution and adaptation might not be enough for many institutions – leadership teams and governing bodies will need to equip themselves to drive transformational change.

Higher education in an increasingly uncertain world – while the Trump administration attacks US universities the shockwaves are being felt in the UK and beyond. The ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine; the growing risk of conflict between China and Taiwan; conflict in Gaza and wider Middle East tensions all have an impact on campuses in the UK. How can UK universities chart a path through this global turmoil?

We’re certainly not claiming that a single event will answer all these challenges in their entirety. But we think these are the issues that are driving higher education change – and for that change to be experienced as renewal rather than decline, there’s still plenty of value in taking the time to talk and think about them outside your normal day to day.

We remain immensely hopeful about the future for UK higher education – and we promise to create an event that you can sign up to now, confident that we’ll be working to build two days of insight, inspiration and fun that will be a highlight of your year. Join us – you won’t be disappointed.

Reduced rate early bird tickets for the Festival of Higher Education are available until Friday 20 June and thereafter at the normal rate – click here for more information and to buy your ticket.

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June 2, 2025
New shadow education minister selected, Sarah Henderson “disappointed” – Campus Review

Former opposition education spokeswoman and senior Liberal party member Sarah Henderson has been replaced by Tasmanian senator Jonathon Duniam.

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June 2, 2025
Australia poised to poach students, academics as Trump “aggressively revokes” Chinese visas – Campus Review

The future of Australians studying at American universities is in limbo after the Trump administration ordered a pause on new student visa approvals and is actively cancelling Chinese student visas.

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June 2, 2025
Former ANU boss comments on bullying, harassment review – Campus Review

The former vice-chancellor of the Australian National University said he acted on every single instance of bullying, harassment, sexism and racism he knew about in the university’s medical college, but didn’t go far enough.

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June 2, 2025
How Oversight Failures in VA-Approved Education Programs Put Thousands at Risk (Michael S. Hainline)

I know this all too well. As a former military police officer who trained as a truck driver in 2016 under a VA-approved program, I was exposed to dangerous, poorly maintained equipment that ultimately caused me to lose the use of my right arm for over a year, a disability I will carry for life.

Despite repeated complaints to the program staff and the assigned State Approving Agency (SAA), the official body responsible for oversight, my concerns were dismissed, and no corrective action was taken until years later — and only after significant evidence surfaced.

Unsafe Equipment Ignored

During my class, veteran student Mike and I, and non-veteran students Dustin & Richard, discovered that the landing gear on the 1977 Stoughton trailer assigned for training was missing an axle and four wheels. I reported this to the staff, who admitted the equipment was faulty but took no timely corrective action. A veteran student later informed me that the school replaced the landing gear on a similar 1987 Great Dane trailer sometime after our class ended, contradicting official reports submitted to the VA and state approving agencies that claimed no issues existed.

To confirm these claims, I located the trailer used in program advertising and compared photos taken during and after our training. The landing gear had indeed been replaced—freshly painted and altered, as confirmed by Great Dane Trailers’ manufacturer.

The trucks used for training showed similar problems. According to Vehicle Identification Numbers, three trucks had modifications—such as frame cutting between tandem axles—that Daimler Trucks North America (the manufacturer) neither recommended nor approved. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration guidelines were not followed, creating additional safety concerns, per conversations with the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration.

Systemic Oversight Failures

These issues highlight a broader problem: the State Approving Agencies, under contract with the VA, are failing to provide adequate oversight and ensure program quality. The VA Office of Inspector General’s 2018 report (OIG Report #16-00862-179) found that 86% of SAAs did not sufficiently oversee educational programs to ensure only eligible, high-quality programs were approved. The report estimated that without reforms, the VA could improperly pay out $2.3 billion over five years to subpar or fraudulent institutions.

Alarmingly, the VA Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) is restricted in its ability to question or audit the reports submitted by SAAs. There is no mechanism for veterans to challenge or appeal SAA findings, effectively leaving veterans powerless within a system that is supposed to protect them.

Veteran Service Organizations’ Silence

I sought help from veteran service organizations but found little interest in addressing these critical problems. The American Legion initially responded to my outreach in 2017, engaging in conversations and phone calls. However, within months, communication ceased without explanation. Attempts to meet with American Legion leadership and their legislative contacts, including Dr. Joe Wescott—an influential consultant on veterans’ education—were unsuccessful. Dr. Wescott dismissed concerns about the integrity of the SAA’s targeted risk-based reviews, citing that schools typically fix problems before SAAs visit, and failed to investigate conflicts of interest between report authors and SAA officials.

At the 2024 American Legion convention, a planned meeting between a fellow veteran and Legion leadership was abruptly canceled. Meanwhile, other veteran groups such as Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), Disabled American Veterans (DAV), and Veterans Education Success (VES) showed engagement, but the American Legion and Student Veterans of America remained unresponsive.

The American Legion’s own 2016 Resolution #304 warned of the exact issues I and countless other veterans have endured: deceptive practices by some education providers, poor accreditation standards, and underfunded and understaffed SAAs unable to enforce proper oversight.

A Cycle of Scandal

Congressional staff admitted privately that veterans’ education legislation rarely progresses without support from key players like Dr. Wescott and the National Association of State Approving Agencies (NASAA), whose leaders have repeatedly declined to meet with veterans raising concerns. These complex relationships between SAAs, VA officials, veteran groups, and legislators perpetuate a “cycle of scandal” that leaves veterans vulnerable and taxpayers footing the bill.

In 2023, a combat veteran attending the same program I did reported similar frustrations: only one of three trucks was roadworthy, severely limiting practical training time for a full class of students. Despite numerous documented complaints, the NASAA president refused to meet or discuss these issues.

The Human Cost

Beyond financial waste and bureaucratic failures, real human harm occurs. My injury, caused by training on unsafe equipment, robbed me of a year of mobility and continues to affect my life. Thousands of veterans have lost their G.I. Bill benefits, incurred debt for worthless or limited degrees, or been misled about their job prospects after completing programs approved by the very agencies meant to protect them.

The internet is rife with investigative reports exposing waste, fraud, and abuse in VA-approved programs. Headlines like “School Scammers Are Robbing Veterans and the Government Blind” and “For-Profit Colleges Exploit Veterans’ G.I. Bill Benefits” are far too common.

A Call for Reform

Despite these glaring failures, meaningful reform remains elusive. The VA OIG report and numerous investigations call for increased accountability, transparency, and cooperation between the VBA, SAAs, veteran service organizations, and Congress. Veterans deserve a system that genuinely safeguards their education and wellbeing.

My fellow former veteran students and I have organized online and turned to media outlets to break the silence. It’s time for the public and policymakers to hear our stories—not just slogans and “catchy” legislative titles that fail to restore lost benefits or improve program quality.

We veterans demand change—because we have earned more than empty promises and a broken system that leaves us behind.

Michael S. Hainline is a veteran and advocate living in Pensacola, Florida. He served in active duty and reserve military components and now works to expose the failures of oversight in VA-approved education and job training programs. He can be reached at [email protected].

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June 1, 2025
Another Casualty of Trump Research Cuts? California Students Who Want To Be Scientists – The 74

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This spring, the National Institutes of Health quietly began terminating programs at scores of colleges that prepared promising undergraduate and graduate students for doctoral degrees in the sciences.

At least 24 University of California and California State University campuses lost training grants that provided their students with annual stipends of approximately $12,000 or more, as well as partial tuition waivers and travel funds to present research at science conferences. The number of affected programs is likely higher, as the NIH would not provide CalMatters a list of all the cancelled grants.

Cal State San Marcos, a campus in north San Diego County with a high number of low-income learners, is losing four training grants worth about $1.8 million per year. One of the grants, now called U-RISE, had been awarded to San Marcos annually since 2001. San Marcos students with U-RISE stipends were often able to forgo part-time jobs, which allowed them to concentrate on research and building the skills needed for a doctoral degree.

The cuts add to the hundreds of millions of dollars of grants the agency has cancelled since President Donald Trump took office for a second term.

To find California campuses that lost training grants, CalMatters looked up known training grants in the NIH search tool to see if those grants were still active. If the grant’s award number leads to a broken link, that grant is dead, a notice on another NIH webpage says.

The NIH web pages for the grants CalMatters looked up, including U-RISE, are no longer accessible. Some campuses, including San Marcos, Cal State Long Beach, Cal State Los Angeles and UC Davis, have updated their own websites to state that the NIH has ended doctoral pathway grants.

“We’re losing an entire generation of scholars who wouldn’t have otherwise gone down these pathways without these types of programs,” said Richard Armenta, a professor of kinesiology at San Marcos and the associate director of the campus’s Center for Training, Research, and Educational Excellence that operates the training grants.

At San Marcos, 60 students who were admitted into the center lost grants with stipends, partial tuition waivers and money to travel to scientific conferences to present their findings.

From loving biology to wanting a doctoral degree

Before the NIH terminations, Marisa Mendoza, a San Marcos undergraduate, received two training grants. As far back as middle school, Mendoza’s favorite subjects were biology and chemistry.

To save money, she attended Palomar College, a nearby community college where she began to train as a nurse. She chose that major because it would allow her to focus on the science subjects she loved. But soon Mendoza realized she wanted to do research rather than treat patients.

At Palomar, an anatomy professor introduced her to the NIH-funded Bridges to the Baccalaureate, a training grant for community college students to earn a bachelor’s and pursue advanced degrees in science and medicine.

“I didn’t even know what grad school was at the time,” she said. Neither of her parents finished college.

The Bridges program connected her to Cal State San Marcos, where she toured different labs to find the right fit. At the time she was in a microbiology course and found a lab focused on bacteria populations in the nearby coastal enclaves. The lab was putting into practice what she was learning in the abstract. She was hooked.

“It just clicked, like me being able to do this, it came very easily to me, and it was just something that I came to be very passionate about as I was getting more responsibility in the lab,” Mendoza said.

Marisa Mendoza, right, and Camila Valderrama-Martínez, left, get ready to demonstrate how they use lab equipment for their research work at Cal State San Marcos on May 6, 2025. Photo by Adriana Heldiz, CalMatters

From Palomar she was admitted as a transfer student to San Marcos and more selective campuses, including UCLA and UC San Diego. She chose San Marcos, partly to live at home but also because she loved her lab and wanted to continue her research.

She enrolled at San Marcos last fall and furthered her doctoral journey by receiving the U-RISE grant. It was supposed to fund her for two years. The NIH terminated the grant March 31, stripping funds from 20 students.

For a school like San Marcos, where more than 40% of students are low-income enough to receive federal financial aid called Pell grants, the loss of the NIH training awards is a particular blow to the aspiring scientists.

The current climate of doctoral admissions is “definitely at a point where one needs prior research experience to be able to be competitive for Ph.D. programs,” said Elinne Becket, a professor of biological sciences at Cal State San Marcos who runs the microbial ecology lab where Mendoza and other students hone their research for about 15 hours a week.

San Marcos doesn’t have much money to replace its lost grants, which means current and future San Marcos students will “100%” have a harder time entering a doctoral program, Becket added. “It keeps me up at night.”

Research is ‘a missing piece’

In a typical week in Becket’s lab, Mendoza will drive to a nearby wetland or cove to retrieve water samples — part of an ongoing experiment to investigate how microbial changes in the ecosystem are indications of increased pollution in sea life and plants. Sometimes she’ll wear a wetsuit and wade into waters a meter deep.

The next day she’ll extract the DNA from bacteria in her samples and load those into a sequencing machine. The sequencer, which resembles a small dishwasher, packs millions or billions of pieces of DNA onto a single chip that’s then run through a supercomputer a former graduate student built.

“Once I found research, it was like a missing piece,” Mendoza, a Pell grant recipient, said through tears during an interview at Cal State Marcos. Research brought her joy and consumed her life “in the best way,” she added. “It’s really unfortunate that people who are so deserving of these opportunities don’t get to have these opportunities.”

Student Marisa Mendoza gets emotional while she speaks about her research at Cal State San Marcos on May 6, 2025. Photo by Adriana Heldiz, CalMatters

The origins of the San Marcos training center date back to 2002. Through it, more than 160 students have either earned or are currently pursuing doctoral degrees at a U.S. university.

The grant terminations have been emotionally wrenching. “There had been so many tears in my household that my husband got me a puppy,” said Denise Garcia, the director of the center and a professor of biological sciences.

Garcia recalls that in March she was checking a digital chat group on Slack with many other directors of U-RISE grants when suddenly the message board lit up with updates that their grants were gone. At least 63 schools across the country lost their grants, NIH data show.

In the past four years of its U-RISE grant the center has reported to the NIH that 83% of its students entered a doctoral program. That exceeds the campus’s grant goal, which was 65% entering doctoral programs.

Mendoza is grateful: She was one of two students to win a campus scholarship that’ll defray much, but not all, of the costs of attending school after losing her NIH award. That, plus a job at a pharmacy on weekends, may provide enough money to complete her bachelor’s next year.

Others are unsure how they’ll afford college while maintaining a focus on research in the next school year.

Student Camila Valderrama-Martínez in a lab at Cal State San Marcos on May 6, 2025. Photo by Adriana Heldiz, CalMatters

“You work so hard to put yourself in a position where you don’t have to worry, and then that’s taken away from you,” said Camila Valderrama-Martínez, a first-year graduate student at San Marcos who also earned her bachelor’s there and works in the same lab as Mendoza. She was in her first year of receiving the Bridges to the Doctorate grant meant for students in master’s programs who want to pursue a biomedical-focused doctoral degree. The grant came with a stipend of $26,000 annually for two years plus a tuition waiver of 60% and money to attend conferences.

She can get a job, but that “takes away time from my research and my time in lab and focusing on my studies and my thesis.” She relies solely on federal financial aid to pay for school and a place to live. Getting loans, often anathema for students, seems like her only recourse. “It’s either that or not finish my degree,” she said.

Terminated NIH grants in detail

These grant cancellations are separate from other cuts at the NIH since Trump took office in January, including multi-million-dollar grants for vaccine and disease research. They’re also on top of an NIH plan to dramatically reduce how much universities receive from the agency to pay for maintaining labs, other infrastructure and labor costs that are essential for campus research. California’s attorney general has joined other states led by Democrats in suing the Trump administration to halt and reverse those cuts.

In San Marcos’ case, the latest U-RISE grant lasted all five years, but it wasn’t renewed for funding, even though the application received a high score from an NIH grant committee.

Armenta, the associate director at the Cal State San Marcos training center, recalled that his NIH program officer said that though nothing is certain, he and his team should be “cautiously optimistic that you would be funded again given your score.” That was in January. Weeks later, NIH discontinued the program.

He and Garcia shared the cancellation letters they received from NIH. Most made vague references to changes in NIH’s priorities. However, one letter for a specific grant program cited a common reason why the agency has been cancelling funding: “It is the policy of NIH not to prioritize research programs related to Diversity (sic), equity, and inclusion.”

That’s a departure from the agency’s emphasis on developing a diverse national cadre of scientists. As recently as February, the application page for that grant said “there are many benefits that flow from a diverse scientific workforce.”

Future of doctoral programs unclear

Josue Navarrete graduated this spring from Cal State San Marcos with a degree in computer science. Unlike the other students interviewed for this story, Navarrete, who uses they/them pronouns, was able to complete both years of their NIH training grant and worked in Becket’s lab.

But because of the uncertain climate as the Trump administration attempts to slash funding, Vanderbilt University, which placed Navarrete on a waitlist for a doctoral program, ultimately denied them admission because the university program had to shrink its incoming class, they said. Later, Navarrete met a professor from Vanderbilt at a conference who agreed to review their application. The professor said in any other year, Navarrete would have been admitted.

The setback was heartbreaking.

Josue Navarrete at the Cal State San Marcos campus on May 6, 2025. Photo by Adriana Heldiz, CalMatters

“I’m gripping so hard to stay in research,” Navarrete said. With doctoral plans delayed, they received a job offer from Epic, a large medical software company, but turned it down. “They wanted me to be handling website design and mobile applications, and that’s cool. It’s not for me.”

Valderrama-Martinez cited Navarrete’s story as she wondered whether doctoral programs at universities will have space for her next year. “I doubt in a year things are going to be better,” she said.

She still looks forward to submitting her applications.

So does Mendoza. She wants to study microbiology — the research bug that bit her initially and brought her to San Marcos. Eventually she hopes to land at a private biotech firm and work in drug development.

“Of course I’m gonna get a Ph.D., because that just means I get to do research,” she said.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

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June 1, 2025
Trump cuts could expose student data to cyber threats

When hackers hit a school district, they can expose Social Security numbers, home addresses, and even disability and disciplinary records. Now, cybersecurity advocates warn that the Trump administration’s budget and personnel cuts, along with rule changes, are stripping away key defenses that schools need.

“Cyberattacks on schools are escalating and just when we need federal support the most, it’s being pulled away,” said Keith Krueger, chief executive officer of the Consortium for School Networking, an association of technology officials in K-12 schools.

Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.

The stakes are high. Schools are a top target in ransomware attacks, and cyber criminals have sometimes succeeded in shutting down whole school districts. The largest such incident occurred in December, when hackers stole personal student and teacher data from PowerSchool, a company that runs student information systems and stores report cards. The theft included data from more than 60 million students and almost 10 million teachers. PowerSchool paid an undisclosed ransom, but the criminals didn’t stop. Now, in a second round of extortion, the same cyber criminals are demanding ransoms from school districts.

The federal government has been stepping up efforts to help schools, particularly since a 2022 cyberattack on the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest. Now this urgently needed assistance is under threat.

Warning service

Of chief concern is a cybersecurity service known as MS-ISAC, which stands for Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center. It warns more than 5,700 schools around the country that have signed up for the service about malware and other threats and recommends security patches. This technical service is free to schools, but is funded by an annual congressional appropriation of $27 million through the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), an agency within the Department of Homeland Security.

On March 6, the Trump administration announced a $10 million funding cut as part of broader budget and staffing cuts throughout CISA. That was ultimately negotiated down to $8.3 million, but the service still lost more than half of its remaining $15.7 budget for the year. The non-profit organization that runs it, the Center for Internet Services, is digging into its reserves to keep it operating. But those funds are expected to run out in the coming weeks, and it is unclear how the service will continue operating without charging user fees to schools.

“Many districts don’t have the budget or resources to do this themselves, so not having access to the no cost services we offer is a big issue,” said Kelly Lynch Wyland, a spokeswoman for the Center for Internet Services.

Sharing threat information

Another concern is the effective disbanding of the Government Coordinating Council, which helps schools address ransomware attacks and other threats through policy advice, including how to respond to ransom requests, whom to inform when an attack happens and good practices for preventing attacks. This coordinating council was formed only a year ago by the Department of Education and CISA. It brings together 13 nonprofit school organizations representing superintendents, state education leaders, technology officers and others. The council met frequently after the PowerSchool data breach to share information.

Now, amid the second round of extortions, school leaders have not been able to meet because of a change in rules governing open meetings. The group was originally exempt from meeting publicly because it was discussing critical infrastructure threats. But the Department of Homeland Security, under the Trump administration, reinstated open meeting rules for certain advisory committees, including this one. That makes it difficult to speak frankly about efforts to thwart criminal activity.

Non-governmental organizations are working to resurrect the council, but it would be in a diminished form without government participation.

“The FBI really comes in when there’s been an incident to find out who did it, and they have advice on whether you should pay or not pay your ransom,” said Krueger of the school network consortium.

A federal role

A third concern is the elimination in March of the education Department’s Office of Educational Technology. This seven-person office dealt with education technology policies — including cybersecurity. It issued cybersecurity guidance to schools and held webinars and meetings to explain how schools could improve and shore up their defenses. It also ran a biweekly meeting to talk about K-12 cybersecurity across the Education Department, including offices that serve students with disabilities and English learners.

Eliminating this office has hampered efforts to decide which security controls, such as encryption or multi-factor authentication, should be in educational software and student information systems.

Many educators worry that without this federal coordination, student privacy is at risk. “My biggest concern is all the data that’s up in the cloud,” said Steve Smith, the founder of the Student Data Privacy Consortium and the former chief information officer for Cambridge Public Schools in Massachusetts. “Probably 80 to 90 percent of student data isn’t on school-district controlled services. It’s being shared with ed tech providers and hosted on their information systems.”

Security controls

“How do we ensure that those third-party providers are providing adequate security against breaches and cyber attacks?” said Smith. “The office of ed tech was trying to bring people together to move toward an agreed upon national standard. They weren’t going to mandate a data standard, but there were efforts to bring people together and start having conversations about the expected minimum controls.”

That federal effort ended, Smith said, with the new administration. But his consortium is still working on it.

In an era when policymakers are seeking to decrease the federal government’s involvement in education, arguing for a centralized, federal role may not be popular. But there’s long been a federal role for student data privacy, including making sure that school employees don’t mishandle and accidentally expose students’ personal information. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, commonly known as FERPA, protects student data. The Education Department continues to provide technical assistance to schools to comply with this law. Advocates for school cybersecurity say that the same assistance is needed to help schools prevent and defend against cyber crimes.

“We don’t expect every town to stand up their own army to protect themselves against China or Russia,” said Michael Klein, senior director for preparedness and response at the Institute for Security and Technology, a nonpartisan think tank. Klein was a senior advisor for cybersecurity in the Education Department during the previous administration. “In the same way, I don’t think we should expect every school district to stand up their own cyber-defense army to protect themselves against ransomware attacks from major criminal groups.”

And it’s not financially practical. According to the school network consortium only a third of school districts have a full-time employee or the equivalent dedicated to cybersecurity.

Budget storms ahead

Some federal programs to help schools with cybersecurity are still running. The Federal Communications Commission launched a $200 million pilot program to support cybersecurity efforts by schools and libraries. FEMA funds cybersecurity for state and local governments, which includes public schools. Through these funds, schools can obtain phishing training and malware detection. But with budget battles ahead, many educators fear these programs could also be cut.

Perhaps the biggest risk is the end to the entire E-Rate program that helps schools pay for the internet access. The Supreme Court is slated to decide this term on whether the funding structure is an unconstitutional tax.

“If that money goes away, they’re going to have to pull money from somewhere,” said Smith of the Student Data Privacy Consortium. “They’re going to try to preserve teaching and learning, as they should. Cybersecurity budgets are things that are probably more likely to get cut.

“It’s taken a long time to get to the point where we see privacy and cybersecurity as critical pieces,” Smith said. “I would hate for us to go back a few years and not be giving them the attention they should.”

Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or [email protected].

This story about student cybersecurity was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.

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June 1, 2025
Many States Picked Diploma Pathways Over HS Exit Exams. Did Students Benefit? – The 74

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This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters

When 18-year-old Edgar Brito thinks about what he’ll do in the future, mechanical engineering is high on the list.

The senior at Washington state’s Toppenish High School first considered the career after he joined a STEM group in middle school. In a ninth grade class, he researched the earning potential for a STEM degree (“so much more money”) and the demand for mechanical engineers (“exploding”).

So Brito took some engineering classes at his high school, became president of his state’s Technology Student Association, and is starting at the University of Washington this fall on a pre-science track.

Brito’s experience is what state education leaders hoped for when they replaced the high school exit exam with multiple pathways to graduation. When he graduates in June, Brito will have completed several diploma pathways, including ones aimed at preparing for college and building career skills.

But his experience isn’t necessarily typical. He has friends who have no idea what pathway they’re on — or if they’re on one at all. The requirements could be clearer and advisers could spend more time talking about them with students, he said.

“Making sure that we know exactly what our pathway is and what it means to be on a pathway would have definitely helped out a lot more students,” Brito said.

Five years after Washington rolled out its pathways, they appear to have helped more students who aren’t college-bound to graduate, which was part of the goal. But the system has also created new issues and replicated some old ones.

For the Class of 2023 — the most recent year with available data — around 1 in 5 seniors didn’t have a pathway. That meant they weren’t on track to graduate within four years and at risk of dropping out. Some students relied on pandemic-era waivers that don’t exist anymore. That’s similar to the share of students who didn’t graduate on time in 2019, the final year of the exit exam.

Asian and white students are much more likely to complete one of the math and English pathways, considered the college-prep route, while Native students, English learners, and students with disabilities are more likely to have no graduation pathway.

“The implementation of graduation pathways has reinforced that the student groups who are the furthest from educational justice are completing the requirement at lower rates,” state education officials wrote in a 2023 report.

Across the state, students don’t have equal access to the pathways. Many schools, especially smaller and rural ones, struggle to offer more than a handful of career and technical education classes. Some career pathways train students for low-paying jobs with little opportunity for advancement. Some students get funneled to the military pathway, despite having no aspirations to serve, because the aptitude test is easier to pass. Many teens, like Brito’s friends, find the pathways confusing.

Washington is not alone. Nearly half of states offer multiple diploma options or graduation pathways. And some, like Indiana, have already taken a second pass at their pathways. Many have struggled to address the same big questions, including what exactly high school is for, and what students should need to do to earn a diploma.

Now the state board of education is poised to overhaul its graduation requirements again.

Piling on more ways for students to graduate is not the answer, said Brian Jeffries, the policy director at the Partnership for Learning, an education foundation affiliated with the Washington Roundtable, which is made up of executives from across the state.

“Let’s better prepare our students to meet the pathways, [rather] than keep creating a smorgasbord or a cafeteria of options, which too often turn into trapdoors,” said Jeffries, who sits on the state task force that’s looking at graduation requirements. Until disadvantaged kids have access to better instruction and more support, he said, “we’re going to keep spinning this wheel.”

The path to 100 high school graduation pathways

Back in the early 2000s, many states raised the bar to graduate from high school with the hope it would get more kids to college. As a result, by 2012, half of all states required an exit exam, including Washington state.

But as student debt soared and some questioned the value of higher education, schools abandoned that college-for-all mentality. Critics of exit exams argued that they blocked too many disadvantaged students from graduating.

In Washington state’s final year of the exit exam, around 1 in 10 high school seniors didn’t pass the English language arts portion, and 1 in 5 didn’t pass the math test, the Seattle Times reported. The law that nixed the exit exam had broad support from the Washington teachers union, state education officials, and parents. Lawmakers passed it unanimously.

Just six states require an exit exam now, with New York and Massachusetts dropping their tests this school year.

But absent an exit exam, states haven’t really reached a consensus on what students should have to do to prove they’re ready to graduate.

Nationwide, there are now more than 100 ways to graduate from high school, according to a recent report from the Education Strategy Group, a K-12 consulting firm. The myriad options provide flexibility, but “also contribute to the lack of clarity about what it means to earn a diploma,” the report found.

When the nation’s main K-12 education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, passed 10 years ago, it tasked schools with getting students ready for college and career. But many states and schools are still trying to figure out how to do the career part well.

“Part of the challenge, frankly, is that schools are going through a bit of a post-high-stakes-test-based accountability identity crisis,” said Shaun Dougherty, a professor of education and policy at Boston College.

Michael Petrilli, the president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank, says that’s partly because for all the talk about changing high schools, graduation policies are still fairly restrictive. One reason Washington is revisiting its policies now is because some educators worry the state’s 24-credit requirement fills up students’ schedules, leaving little time for apprenticeships and other hands-on learning.

Many kids are still “sleepwalking through six or seven class periods a day, mostly through college-prep courses,” Petrilli said, with “maybe a few career-tech electives on the side.”

“We haven’t really unleashed high schools to do things very differently,” Petrilli said. “If we actually think that career tech is valuable, if we think that college-for-all was a mistake, then we need to be willing to act on it.”

Diploma pathways can bolster teens’ interest in school

What’s happening in the Toppenish School District illustrates the potential of the pathways model.

The district, which serves around 3,700 students in south-central Washington, is able to offer a wide range of career and technical courses, including in growing industries, like health care and agriculture. The career-oriented pathway has helped increase some students’ interest in school.

“It is very hands-on, and so it’s definitely more engaging,” said Monica Saldivar, Toppenish’s director of career and technical education. The old one-size-fits-all approach had “a negative impact for our students with diverse learning needs, academic challenges, and also language barriers.”

Just before the state overhauled its graduation requirements, over 81% of Toppenish students graduated within four years. Now over 89% do.

The improvements have been especially pronounced for English learners and Native students, many of whom live on the Yakama Nation. Since the state introduced pathways, Native student graduation rates have risen from 67% to 88%.

Since pathways launched, the district has added several career-technical education courses, including advanced welding and classes that prepare students to work as medical transcriptionists or home health care aides. That can require some careful career counseling with students, as those jobs are in high demand but don’t pay well unless students get additional training or schooling and move up the career ladder.

Still, the expanded offerings have helped some students tailor their post-high school plans.

Frances Tilley, a Toppenish senior who’s headed to Gonzaga University in the fall, will graduate in June after completing both college-prep and career-oriented pathways.

The 18-year-old took two of the new sports medicine classes and liked learning about what to do if you have a concussion. (Don’t try to stay awake. “We learned that’s not true,” Tilley said.)

She followed that up with another health care class that touched on different disciplines. She gravitated toward psychology and now plans to get a master’s in counseling and become a mental health worker.

Pathways can also help schools expose students to career options earlier.

Three years ago, Toppenish started offering middle schoolers two-week labs to test drive careers such as marketing, nursing, or culinary arts. By the end of eighth grade, they’ve learned about 10 different careers. Now school counselors use students’ interests to help plot their high school schedules.

Kaylee Celestino, 16, had long considered becoming a teacher. The Toppenish sophomore often gets “education” as an answer when she takes career quizzes. But the career-exploration labs also piqued her interest in science, and now she could also envision becoming a pediatric nurse. So her course schedule reflects that with advanced biology and college-level chemistry.

“I just want to help people out,” she said, “like my teachers have helped out me.”

Staffing, standards, data gaps make pathways challenging

Staffing career and technical classes is one of the biggest hurdles to doing pathways well.

Washington makes it easier than other states for professionals to put their work experience toward a teaching license. But many schools still struggle to attract and retain teachers for attractive fields like health services and welding when the private sector beckons.

“These are lucrative fields,” said Dougherty, who has researched career education programs in several states, including Washington. “It’s hard to convince people to give up that salary to become full-time educators.”

That creates extra work for schools. Saldivar, for example, meets regularly with regional employers to learn about their workforce needs. That helps inform whether Toppenish should drop or add certain classes, and which teachers to recruit. Saldivar is constantly networking and following up on “so and so may know someone” tips.

Figuring out how to hold all students to a high standard when they are meeting different criteria to graduate is a challenge, too. Some worry Washington’s pathways are too flexible.

The state rolled out a new pathway this year that allows students to graduate by completing a project, work-related experience, or community service. Lawmakers wanted to give students a way to show what they know besides taking a class or a test. But students don’t have to work with a teacher at their school, and if they choose to work with an outside mentor, there’s no clear rules for how they should be vetted.

“Where are they finding these people?” said Jeffries of the Partnership for Learning. “Is their opinion an expert opinion that we could trust, or is this based on vibes?”

Experts say it’s also important for students to understand what their likely earnings and other outcomes will be depending on which career pathway they follow.

“We should not be talking about CTE in a very generic way,” said Dan Goldhaber, a professor at the University of Washington who has researched career and technical education teacher preparation in the state. “What the concentration is matters.”

But Washington state doesn’t yet know how students’ outcomes may vary depending on which career and technical education concentration they chose, Katie Hannig, a spokesperson for Washington’s state education agency, wrote in an email. This is a common problem nationwide.

The state also doesn’t yet know whether the pathway, or pathways, students completed were connected to their post-high school plan, which they must create to graduate. That hasn’t assuaged concerns that students are completing pathways disconnected from their college and career goals.

The state expects to get that data in the future, Hannig wrote. Analyzing how diploma pathways affect graduation trends and postsecondary outcomes could help schools target resources and support.

“Any new policy is a work in progress, but the fundamental core value of this policy is preparing students for their next step after high school graduation,” Hannig wrote. “Washington is proud to be one of those states that have established and continue to refine those pathways.”

For now, districts like Toppenish are scrambling to coordinate weekly college presentations, field trips to work sites, and military recruiter visits — “a little of everything,” Saldivar said — to hedge their bets.

Kalyn Belsha is a senior national education reporter based in Chicago. Contact her at [email protected].

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

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June 1, 2025