by Nosakhere Griffin-EL, The Hechinger Report January 5, 2026
Across the U.S., public school districts are panicking over test scores.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress, or the Nation’s Report Card, as it is known, revealed that students are underperforming in reading, with the most recent scores being the lowest overall since the test was first given in 1992.
The latest scores for Black children have been especially low. In Pittsburgh, for example, only 26 percent of Black third- through fifth-grade public school students are reading at advanced or proficient levels compared to 67 percent of white children.
This opportunity gap should challenge us to think differently about how we educate Black children. Too often, Black children are labeled as needing “skills development.” The problem is that such labels lead to educational practices that dim their curiosity and enthusiasm for school — and overlook their capacity to actually enjoy learning.
As a result, without that enjoyment and the encouragement that often accompanies it, too many Black students grow up never feeling supported in the pursuit of their dreams.
Narrowly defining children based on their test scores is a big mistake. We, as educators, must see children as advanced dreamers who have the potential to overcome any academic barrier with our support and encouragement.
As a co-founder of a bookstore, I believe there are many ways we can do better. I often use books and personal experiences to illustrate some of the pressing problems impacting Black children and families.
One of my favorites is “Abdul’s Story” by Jamilah Thompkins-Bigelow.
It tells the tale of a gifted young Black boy who is embarrassed by his messy handwriting and frequent misspellings, so much so that, in erasing his mistakes, he gouges a hole in his paper.
He tries to hide it under his desk. Instead of chastening him, his teacher, Mr. Muhammad, does something powerful: He sits beside Abdul under the desk.
Mr. Muhammad shows his own messy notebook to Abdul, who realizes “He’s messy just like me.”
In that moment, Abdul learns that his dream of becoming a writer is possible; he just has to work in a way that suits his learning style. But he also needs an educator who supports him along the way.
It is something I understand: In my own life, I have been both Abdul and Mr. Muhammad, and it was a teacher named Mrs. Lee who changed my life.
One day after I got into a fight, she pulled me out of the classroom and said, “I am not going to let you fail.” At that point, I was consistently performing at or below basic in reading and writing, but she didn’t define me by my test scores.
Instead, she asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“Because he’s smart and he always interviews famous people and presidents,” I said.
Mrs. Lee explained that Mr. Gumbel was a journalist and encouraged me to start a school newspaper.
So I did. I interviewed people and wrote articles, revising them until they were ready for publication. I did it because Mrs. Lee believed in me and saw me for who I wanted to be — not just my test scores.
If more teachers across the country were like Mrs. Lee and Mr. Muhammad, more Black children would develop the confidence to pursue their dreams. Black children would realize that even if they have to work harder to acquire certain skills, doing so can help them accomplish their dreams.
Years ago, I organized a reading tour in four libraries across the city of Pittsburgh. At that time, I was a volunteer at the Carnegie Library, connecting book reading to children’s dreams.
I remember working with a young Black boy who was playing video games on the computer with his friends. I asked him if he wanted to read, and he shook his head no.
So I asked, “Who wants to build the city of the future?” and he raised his hand.
He and I walked over to a table and began building with magnetic tiles. As we began building, I asked the same question Mrs. Lee had asked me: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“An architect,” he replied.
I jumped up and grabbed a picture book about Frank Lloyd Wright. We began reading the book, and I noticed that he struggled to pronounce many of the words. I supported him, and we got through it. I later wrote about it.
Each week after that experience, this young man would come up to me ready to read about his dream. He did so because I saw him just as Mr. Muhammad saw Abdul, and just like Mrs. Lee saw me — as an advanced dreamer.
Consider that when inventor Lonnie Johnson was a kid, he took a test and the results declared that he could not be an engineer. Imagine if he’d accepted that fate. Kids around the world would not have the joy of playing with the Super Soaker water gun.
When illustrator Jerry Pinkney was a kid, he struggled with reading just like Freelon. If he had defined himself as “basic” and “below average,” children across America would not have been inspired by his powerful picture book illustrations.
Narrowly defining children based on their test scores is a big mistake.
Each child is a solution to a problem in the world, whether it is big or small. So let us create conditions that inspire Black children to walk boldly in the pursuit of their dreams.
Nosakhere Griffin-EL is the co-founder of The Young Dreamers’ Bookstore. He is a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project in partnership with the National Black Child Development Institute.
This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/opinion-instead-of-defining-black-children-by-their-test-scores-we-should-help-them-overcome-academic-barriers-and-pursue-their-dreams/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>
by Meredith Kolodner, The Hechinger Report December 19, 2025
LUBBOCK, Texas — The meeting of the local NAACP chapter began with a prayer — and then the litany of injustices came pouring out.
A Black high school football player was called a “b—h-ass” n-word during a game by white players in September with no consequence, his mom said. A Black 12-year-old boy, falsely accused last December of touching a white girl’s breast, was threatened and interrogated by a police officer at school without his parents and sentenced to a disciplinary alternative school for a month, his grandfather recounted. A Black honors student was wrongly accused by a white teacher of having a vape (it was a pencil sharpener) and sentenced to the alternative school for a month this fall, her mom said.
“They’re breaking people,” said Phyllis Gant, a longtime leader of the NAACP chapter in this northwest Texas city, referring to local schools’ treatment of Black children. “It’s just open season on our students.”
Just last year, there was hope that the racial climate at Lubbock-area schools might improve. The federal government had launched civil rights investigations after several alleged incidents of racial bullying shocked the community and made nationalheadlines. In fall 2024, a resolution seemed to be in sight: An investigator from the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights was planning to visit the area, community members said, for what they hoped would be a final round of interviews before the agency put in place a set of protections negotiated with the Lubbock-Cooper school district.
Then the 2024 presidential election happened — and the visit didn’t. In March, the Trump administration closed seven of the Education Department’s 12 regional civil rights enforcement offices, including the one in Dallas, which had been investigating complaints about Lubbock. Emails from the lawyer representing the families to the federal investigator bounced back — like hundreds of other OCR employees, she had been terminated.
Since then, race relations in school districts in and around Lubbock have taken a turn for the worse, many parents and educators say. Black residents — who make up about 8 percent of Lubbock County — didn’t expect the federal government to bring a halt to racist incidents, but the possibility of an agreement between the government and school districts provided a sense of accountability. Now, parents and students say racial epithets are more common in public, and Black teachers fear drawing attention to themselves. Gant says the NAACP chapter fields frequent calls from parents seeking help in addressing racial incidents they no longer bother to report to the Education Department.
Since President Donald Trump took office, the agency has not publicly announced a single investigation into racial discrimination against Black students, instead prioritizing investigations into allegedanti-whitediscrimination, antisemitism complaints and policies regarding transgender students.
All told this year, the Education Department under Trump has dismissed thousands of civil rights investigations. During the first six months of this year, OCR required schools to make changes and agree to federal monitoring in just 59 cases, compared with 336 during the same period last year, a Washington Post analysis found.
“In many of our communities where people feel isolated and like they didn’t have anyone to turn to, OCR mattered and gave people a sense of hope,” said Paige Duggins-Clay, a lawyer at the Intercultural Development Research Association, an education policy and legal advocacy group that helped file some of the OCR complaints against Lubbock schools. “And it matters that they’ve essentially destroyed it.”
In an email, Julie Hartman, press secretary for legal affairs for the Department of Education, wrote, “These complaints of racial bullying were filed in 2022 and 2023, meaning that the Biden Administration had more time to investigate this than the Trump Administration has even been in office. The Trump Administration’s OCR will continue vigorously enforcing the law to uphold all Americans’ civil rights.” She did not respond to a question about whether the agency had opened any investigations into discrimination against Black students.
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Some white residents have noticed the change too. Lubbock County, located at the bottom of the Panhandle, is home to more than a quarter million people. It is the urban seat for a sprawling county that encompasses several suburban and rural school districts and hosts Texas Tech University at its center.
Tracey Benefield — who has two children in Hutchinson Middle School in the Lubbock Independent School District, which borders the Lubbock-Cooper district — is from a family that has lived in the area for generations. She says her son has witnessed multiple incidents of racial bullying over the past year.
“My son was walking down the hall with his friend who’s Black, and some kid shoulder-checked him and called him the n-word. That’s been one of many,” she said. “Things have absolutely gotten worse. The attitudes have always been there, but people acting on their attitudes is completely different.” Lubbock district officials did not directly respond to questions about Benefield’s assertions.
She thinks OCR’s retreat, among other changes within the federal government, has had an impact. “People are more emboldened,” she said. “People have always had racist ideas, but now there’s no consequences for being racist.”
Prior to Trump’s election, the concerns of parents and civil rights groups were quite different: Many were frustrated that Office for Civil Rights cases could linger for years as overworked investigators tracked down details and testimonies. Some were starting to advocate for more OCR staff and speedier resolutions. The outcry from residents, along with the media attention, prompted the Lubbock-Cooper and nearby Slaton school districts — where Black students make up about 3 percent and 5 percent of the student bodies, respectively — to adopt policies of mandatory in-school suspension for students caught making racial slurs and spurred training for staff.
But for many, the changes weren’t coming quickly enough.
In 2022, Tracy Kemp’s eldest son, Brady, then an eighth grader, was one of nine Black students whose pictures were put on an Instagram page called “LBMS Monkeys,” which stood for “Laura Bush Middle School Monkeys.” (Brady is being referred to by his nickname and his last name is being withheld to protect his privacy.) Kemp was part of a group of parents in the Lubbock-Cooper school district who filed OCR complaints that August over what they said was a toxic racial atmosphere that subjected their children to repeated racial bullying. White students would sometimes play whipping noises on their phones when Black students walked through the halls, according to the complaints. Despite a school district investigation that included reaching out to the FBI, those responsible were never caught.
Lubbock-Cooper officials said via email that they “responded swiftly and appropriately” to the 2022 incident at Laura Bush Middle School. “Efforts of the district to ensure all students feel valued, supported, and a sense of belonging have contributed to the positive, nurturing environment our campuses strive to maintain,” wrote Sadie Alderson, the district’s executive director of public information.
Kemp stayed in the Lubbock-Cooper district for another year, but even though the page was taken down, the taunting and bullying didn’t let up, she says. Her middle son was in sixth grade at LBMS that year and was called racial epithets on the school bus and in the hallways. (His name is being withheld to protect his privacy.) When Brady, who had graduated from the middle school and started at Lubbock-Cooper High School, tried to start a Black Student Union there, she says, a white student ripped the page with signatures from his notebook. Kemp says the principal told her there was nothing he could do. The final straw came one day when the ninth grader didn’t stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. The teacher told him he was a criminal who was breaking the law, Kemp says, and the harassment started up again, this time on Snapchat, with the same language as the “monkeys” Instagram page.
In July 2023, Kemp moved with her family to New Mexico and commuted 75 miles each way until she found a job closer to her new home. Leaving Lubbock-Cooper, she said, was life-changing for her kids’ mental health.
“In eighth grade, you’re going through puberty, you’re learning about yourself, you’re growing and you have all these different feelings. And now you add into the mix, ‘These people don’t like me because of my color’ — that’s a whole different type of aspect to have to deal with,” said Kemp. “And on the flip side of that, I also have to encourage my child that not every white person feels this way, because I don’t want to teach my child hate either.”
Brady, now a 12th grader, also says he’s happy the family moved. “Honestly, it’s a lot easier,” he said. “There’s no arguments, there’s nothing to worry about, really. I just focus on school more than anything.”
Others who have stayed say they’ve paid a price. Last December, Ja’Maury, a then-12-year-old whose last name is being withheld to protect his privacy, learned of rumors that he’d touched a white girl’s breast during school. He went straight to administrators at the school, Commander William C. McCool Academy, to tell them the truth. But the assistant principal believed the girl’s story and radioed a police officer, who interrogated him and threatened him with jail unless he confessed, according to Ja’Maury and his grandfather, Mike Anzley. Alone in a room of adults, Ja’Maury broke down and admitted to something he says never happened.
“He was yelling and threatening to send me to juvie if I didn’t say I did it. I was scared,” Ja’Maury recalled in an interview. “It was a white person’s word against a Black person’s word.”
Ja’Maury was assigned 30 days at Priority Intervention Academy, Lubbock Independent School District’s detention school, where children are sent for offenses determined to be too severe for in-school suspension. Constantly anxious, he reverted to sleeping in his grandfather’s bed like he did as a toddler. At the detention school, he said, he was so afraid of defying adults that he twice wet his pants rather than challenge a teacher who said he couldn’t leave class to use the bathroom.
“He had never been in trouble before,” said Anzley. He’d always taught Ja’Maury to trust adults, and said he was devastated by the adults at McCool betraying that trust. “I had to make him distinguish right from wrong in a whole new way.”
Anzley filed a formal grievance with the district and, according to a copy of the findings shared with The Hechinger Report, administrators agreed to wipe the incident from his discipline file, issue a formal apology and provide training in discipline and due process to both McCool administrators and the officer who interrogated him.
McCool administrators did not respond to requests for comment. Amanda Castro-Crist, executive director of communications and community relations for Lubbock ISD, wrote in an email that the district could not discuss individual students because of federal laws protecting student privacy, but that it “is proud to serve a diverse student body.”
Gant, the 62-year-old NAACP leader, says that growing up in Lubbock she never experienced the kind of racism she sees now. An accountant who runs her own business, she got involved in community activism about 20 years ago after enduring identity theft and a costly, time-consuming effort to clear her name. “I’m a strong, faith-based woman,” said Gant. “Who else will someone call? Who will go to their meetings for free, come with the facts and the research and not make them feel like they owe anything?”
Gant noted changes the districts have made in the wake of the OCR investigation and parent activism, including the new suspension policies. Administrators in Lubbock-Cooper sometimes even proactively contact her about a parent concern, she said. In Lubbock ISD, Gant credits the director of student and parent resolution, Brian Ellyson, with listening to parents and helping them resolve conflicts in a principled manner.
Ellyson was one of two Lubbock school officials at the September NAACP meeting, held in an independent living center on the south side of town equidistant between Laura Bush Middle School and McCool Academy. Parent after parent described their children’s mistreatment.
Leshai Whitfield said her son was sent to a detention school after a teacher complained that he’d pushed her; she said her son was only trying to leave the classroom because of a fight between two other students. Naquelia Edwards said her son has been repeatedly called the n-word and disciplined for fights while white students went unpunished. Jessika Ogden, mother of the 11th grade honors student who was wrongly accused of having a vape, said she believes her daughter was racially profiled. She filed a grievance against Lubbock Independent School District’s Coronado High School to keep her daughter from being sent to the district’s detention school, which she says she eventually won. But her daughter missed school while the case was being resolved, Ogden said, as she refused to send her to the detention school. “Had I not fought for my daughter, she would have suffered that punishment, missing more class, more credits,” Ogden said.
In interviews, more than a dozen Black high school students in Lubbock said they regularly heard other students use the n-word. “Slurs happen all the time – it don’t matter what time of day it is,” said a 10th grader from Coronado High School, whose name is being withheld to protect her privacy.
Gant says the absence of an actual agreement between the federal government and any of the districts means the environment in schools hasn’t fundamentally changed. Those agreements come with teacher training, data collection and penalties for failing to comply. In-school suspension for racist behavior may keep some of it in check, but the changes are cosmetic, she and parents say.
Emails obtained by The Hechinger Report through public records requests show that Kulsoom Naqvi, the OCR investigator based in the Dallas office, conducted staff surveys, data requests and several rounds of interviews throughout much of 2024, but the work came to a halt that fall. Naqvi, who is not technically separated from the Education Department because of ongoing litigation over the mass firings at the Education Department, said she could not comment on the case.
“Given the pace that things were moving, I felt confident that we were going to get a resolution before the end of the year,” said Duggins-Clay, the lawyer who helped file some of the complaints. “Had the election not happened, we would have gotten to a negotiated resolution.”
Alderson, the spokesperson for Lubbock-Cooper, said that the investigation is still open, but the current superintendent, hired in June, was not aware of any communication from an OCR investigator. She said the district had sought mediation with OCR in spring 2024, but Naqvi had denied that request and had not given Lubbock-Cooper a timeline for resolving the complaints.
Just over 20 miles away from downtown Lubbock, in the neighboring town of Slaton, which had its own series of racist incidents and ensuing complaints to OCR, residents say the racial atmosphere has deteriorated even further this year and the school administration has been completely unresponsive. School officials promised to work with local authorities to paint over part of a mural in the center of town that depicts Black men picking cotton under the watch of a white farmer, teachers say. But that never happened. Parents say the n-word is used regularly by white students without consequence in the district, where just 5 percent of students are Black.
“I’ve witnessed kids on my campus calling Black kids ‘monkeys,’” said a Slaton teacher who grew up in the town and spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear for her job. “I’m sorry to say that it’s gotten worse. I feel like more of the extremists have come out.”
Parents say their children continued to be bullied because of their race even after Slaton administrators pledged in 2022 to discipline students for slurs. One mom said her second grader was called an “African monkey” the next year by other kids in his class at Cathelene Thomas Elementary. She says she told the principal, who said, “‘Would you be offended if they called him a cat or something different?’” the mother recalled. “I got up and left. I didn’t even know what to say.”
After that she started homeschooling her kids. She asked to remain anonymous because her children still participate in community events and she is worried they will face retribution.
Cathelene Thomas Principal Margaret Francis did not respond to requests for comment. Superintendent Shelli Conkin said in an email that federal law prevented the district from discussing student-related matters and did not respond to additional questions. “Since I became superintendent in 2023, Slaton ISD has experienced many positive developments that highlight our commitment to students and staff,” she wrote, including facility upgrades, a district fundraising effort and a four-day school week.
Anzley, meanwhile, is still fighting for justice for his grandson. After the district declined to discipline the girl for making the accusation, he said, and with OCR no longer seeming like an option for redress, he’s hoping to find a lawyer to file a civil rights lawsuit on behalf of his grandson.
The district’s apology and commitment to better train administrators did not undo the damage to Ja’Maury, he and his grandfather said. “People kept on messing with me about it, saying I was a pedophile, saying I was a pervert,” said the middle schooler. “After that I almost hated life, I didn’t even want to live no more after that. That was horrible.”
Last spring, four months after Ja’Maury had been back at McCool, he got into a fight with a boy who called him the n-word on the school bus, he said. This fall, Anzley decided to transfer Ja’Maury from the top-rated school he once loved — which is 9 percent Black — to Dunbar College Preparatory Academy, which is 45 percent Black and received an F rating this year from the Texas Education Agency. Ja’Maury says he feels safer there; Anzley says the move was necessary for his grandson’s mental health but that he preferred the learning opportunities at McCool.
“None of this is new, because the very name Lubbock is the name of a Confederate soldier,” said Gant. “It’s heartbreaking, but it doesn’t surprise me. The aggression of it has been heightened under the Trump administration.”
She added, “The districts know that OCR has been dismantled so there’s no urgency to fix these issues. It’s on the community, and it’s on the parents to be factual, vocal and not quit.”
This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/probes-into-racism-in-schools-stall-under-trump/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>
by John Katzman, The Hechinger Report November 19, 2025
The Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Department of Education this week provides a rare opportunity to rethink our current top-down approach to school governance.
We should jump on it. It’s not sexy to talk about governance, but we can’t fix K-12 education until we do so, no matter how we feel about the latest changes.
Since the Department of Education opened in 1980, we’ve doubled per-pupil spending, and now spend about twice as much per student as does the average country in the European Union. Yet despite that funding — and the reforms, reports and technologies introduced over the past 45 years — U.S. students consistently underperform on international benchmarks. And people are opting out: 22 percent of U.S. district students are now chronically absent, while record numbers of families are opting out of those schools, choosing charters, private schools and homeschooling.
Most federal and state reform approaches have been focused on curricular standards and have accomplished little. The many billions spent on the Common Core standards coincided with — or triggered — a 13-year decline in academic performance. The underlying principles of the standards movement — that every student should learn the same things at the same time, that we know what those things are and that they don’t change over time — have made our schools even less compelling while narrowing instruction to what gets tested.
We need to address the real problem: how federal, state and district rules combine to create a dense fog of regulations and directives that often conflict or constrain one another. Educators are losing a rigged game: It’s not that they’re doing the wrong things, it’s that governance makes them unresponsive, bureaucratic, ineffective and paralyzed — can you name an industry that spends less on research and development?
Fixing governance won’t be simple, but it shouldn’t take more than 13 years to do it: three years to design a better system of state governance and 10 more to thoroughly test and debug it.
I would start by bringing together experts from a variety of disciplines, ideally at a new “Center for K-12 Governance” at a university’s school of education or school of public policy, and give them three years to think through a comprehensive set of state laws and regulations to manage schools.
The center would convene experts from inside and outside of education, in small groups focused on topics including labor, funding, data, evaluation, transportation, construction, athletics, counseling, technology, curricula and connections to higher education and the workforce. Its frameworks would address various educational and funding alternatives currently in use, including independent, charter and parochial schools, home schooling and Education Savings Accounts, all of which speak to the role of parents in making choices about their children’s education.
Each group would start with the questions and not the answers, and there are hundreds of really interesting questions to be considered: What are the various goals of our K-12 schools and how do we authentically measure schools against them? What choices do we give parents, and what information might help them make the right decisions for their kids? How do we allow for new approaches to attract, support and pay great teachers and administrators? How does money follow each student? What data do we collect and how do we use it?
After careful consideration, the center would hand its proposed statutes to a governor committed to running a long-term pilot to fully test the model. He or she would create a small alternative department of education, which would oversee a few hundred volunteer schools matched to a control group of similar schools running under the state’s legacy regime; both groups would include schools with a range of demographic and performance profiles. The two systems could run side by side for up to a decade.
Each year, the state would assess the two departments’ performance against metrics like graduation and college-completion rates, teacher retention, income trajectories, civic participation, student and parent satisfaction, and, yes, NAEP scores. Under intense scrutiny by interested parties, both groups would be free to tweak their playbooks and evaluate solutions against a range of real-world outcomes. Once definitive longitudinal data comes in, the state would shutter one department and move the governance of its schools over to the other, perhaps launching a new test with an even better system.
This all may seem like a lot of work, but it’s a patient approach to a root problem. Schools remain the nation’s most local public square; they determine income mobility, civic health and democratic resilience. If we fail to rewire the system now to support them properly, we guarantee their continued decline, to the detriment of students and society. Instead of celebrating students, teachers and principals who succeed despite the odds, we should address why we made those odds so steep.
That’s why we should use this moment to draft and test something audacious, and give the next Supreme Court a happier education case to decide: how to retire a legacy system that finally lost a fair fight.
John Katzman has founded and run three large ed tech companies: The Princeton Review, 2U and Noodle. He has worked closely with many large school districts and has served on the boards of NAPCS and NAIS.
This story about fixing K-12 education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’sweekly newsletter.
This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/opinion-it-will-take-patience-and-courage-to-fix-k-12-education-without-the-department-of-education/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>
What if improving children’s mental health — and life outcomes — could be done by teaching kids how their brains work?
That’s a key idea behind the approach of teachers at Momentous School in Dallas, a private elementary school that serves 225 students, most of whom come from low-income families. Each day, educators present lessons on neuroscience and mindfulness, from the youngest learners all the way up to fifth graders.
Preschoolers in the school’s 3-year-old classroom learn about the brain by singing “The Brain Song” to the tune of “Bingo” (“I have a brain in my head/And it’s for thinking”). They practice mindfulness by lying down with stuffed animals on their stomachs and watching them move up and down as they breathe.
Older students learn calming strategies like slowly counting each finger on their hands while breathing in and out. Classrooms offer tactile models of the brain to help students learn about different parts such as the prefrontal cortex, which controls such processes as executive function and problem solving, and the brain stem, which regulates breathing and blood pressure.
This focus on mindfulness is happening in schools across the country, according to the Child Mind Institute, a nonprofit focused on children’s mental health. Experts say the goal is teaching self-awareness and regulation.
“Once the kids feel they can calm themselves, even just through breathing it’s like the ‘wow’ moment,” said Rick Kinder, creator of a mindfulness program called “Wellness Works in Schools,” in an article by the Child Mind Institute.
At Momentous School, conversations about the brain continue throughout the day, as teachers can be heard encouraging students to identify their emotions or asking, “What’s your amygdala saying to you in this moment?” according to Jessica Gomez, a psychologist and executive director of Momentous Institute, the Dallas-based mental health nonprofit that operates the school. (The amygdala processes emotions in the brain.)
Through these frequent discussions and additional lessons on mental health and healthy relationships, teachers are “trying to normalize these things as part of the human condition versus something that is stigmatizing,” Gomez said. The school also holds regular parent nights to educate families on how the brain works and teach emotional regulation strategies that families can practice together at home.
Momentous School, which launched in 1997 and is funded by philanthropic donations, was developed to put into practice mental health and brain science research from Momentous Institute*. A recent study by Momentous Institute and the Center for BrainHealth at the University of Texas at Dallas found this approach may be contributing to positive outcomes for graduates of the school. Of the 73 Momentous School students who went on to graduate from high school in 2016 through 2018, 97 percent earned a high school diploma and 48 percent earned a college degree.
These findings come at a time when lessons on emotions, relationships and social awareness, often referred to as social and emotional learning, have become a flashpoint in education and culture wars. Studies show such lessons can improve academic performance: Other researchers unaffiliated with Momentous School have also found that teaching about the brain can provide motivation for students and improve academic and social development.
As teachers and students head back to school and face new routines and social situations, now is a good time to build relationships and introduce even young students to ideas about how their brain works, Gomez said. Although many students at Momentous deal with challenges such as poverty, she believes that the school’s emphasis on mental health and brain science has helped families to better cope with those pressures.
“The point isn’t to never have stress in your life, it’s to know what to do with it,” Gomez said. “Children and parents having agency and tools helps them know how to navigate life stressors, which has a buffering effect on their brain.”
*Clarification: This story has been updated toclarify that Momentous School was developed based on research by Momentous Institute.
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IRVING, Texas — Crowded around a workshop table, four girls at de Zavala Middle School puzzled over a Lego machine they had built. As they flashed a purple card in front of a light sensor, nothing happened.
The teacher at the Dallas-area school had emphasized that in the building process, there are no such thing as mistakes. Only iterations. So the girls dug back into the box of blocks and pulled out an orange card. They held it over the sensor and the machine kicked into motion.
“Oh! Oh, it reacts differently to different colors,” said sixth grader Sofia Cruz.
In de Zavala’s first year as a choice school focused on science, technology, engineering and math, the school recruited a sixth grade class that’s half girls. School leaders are hoping the girls will stick with STEM fields. In de Zavala’s higher grades — whose students joined before it was a STEM school — some elective STEM classes have just one girl enrolled.
Efforts to close the gap between boys and girls in STEM classes are picking up after losing steam nationwide during the chaos of the Covid pandemic. Schools have extensive work ahead to make up for the ground girls lost, in both interest and performance.
In the years leading up to the pandemic, the gender gap nearly closed. But within a few years, girls lost all the ground they had gained in math test scores over the previous decade, according to an Associated Press analysis. While boys’ scores also suffered during Covid, they have recovered faster than girls, widening the gender gap.
As learning went online, special programs to engage girls lapsed — and schools were slow to restart them. Zoom school also emphasized rote learning, a technique based on repetition that some experts believe may favor boys, instead of teaching students to solve problems in different ways, which may benefit girls.
Old practices and biases likely reemerged during the pandemic, said Michelle Stie, a vice president at the National Math and Science Initiative.
“Let’s just call it what it is,” Stie said. “When society is disrupted, you fall back into bad patterns.”
In most school districts in the 2008-09 school year, boys had higher average math scores on standardized tests than girls, according to AP’s analysis, which looked at scores across 15 years in over 5,000 school districts. It was based on average test scores for third through eighth graders in 33 states, compiled by the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University.
A decade later, girls had not only caught up, they were ahead: Slightly more than half of districts had higher math averages for girls.
Within a few years of the pandemic, the parity disappeared. In 2023-24, boys on average outscored girls in math in nearly 9 out of 10 districts.
A separate study by NWEA, an education research company, found gaps between boys and girls in science and math on national assessments went from being practically non-existent in 2019 to favoring boys around 2022.
Studies have indicated girls reported higher levels of anxiety and depression during the pandemic, plus more caretaking burdens than boys, but the dip in academic performance did not appear outside STEM. Girls outperformed boys in reading in nearly every district nationwide before the pandemic and continued to do so afterward.
“It wasn’t something like Covid happened and girls just fell apart,” said Megan Kuhfeld, one of the authors of the NWEA study.
In the years leading up to the pandemic, teaching practices shifted to deemphasize speed, competition and rote memorization. Through new curriculum standards, schools moved toward research-backed methods that emphasized how to think flexibly to solve problems and how to tackle numeric problems conceptually.
Educators also promoted participation in STEM subjects and programs that boosted girls’ confidence, including extracurriculars that emphasized hands-on learning and connected abstract concepts to real-life applications.
When STEM courses had large male enrollment, Superintendent Kenny Rodrequez noticed girls losing interest as boys dominated classroom discussions at his schools in Grandview C-4 District outside Kansas City. Girls were significantly more engaged after the district moved some of its introductory hands-on STEM curriculum to the lower grade levels and balanced classes by gender, he said.
When schools closed for the pandemic, the district had to focus on making remote learning work. When in-person classes resumed, some of the teachers had left, and new ones had to be trained in the curriculum, Rodrequez said.
“Whenever there’s crisis, we go back to what we knew,” Rodrequez said.
Despite shifts in societal perceptions, a bias against girls persists in science and math subjects, according to teachers, administrators and advocates. It becomes a message girls can internalize about their own abilities, they say, even at a very young age.
In his third grade classroom in Washington, D.C., teacher Raphael Bonhomme starts the year with an exercise where students break down what makes up their identity. Rarely do the girls describe themselves as good at math. Already, some say they are “not a math person.”
“I’m like, you’re 8 years old,” he said. “What are you talking about, ‘I’m not a math person?’”
Girls also may have been more sensitive to changes in instructional methods spurred by the pandemic, said Janine Remillard, a math education professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Research has found girls tend to prefer learning things that are connected to real-life examples, while boys generally do better in a competitive environment.
“What teachers told me during Covid is the first thing to go were all of these sense-making processes,” she said.
At de Zavala Middle School in Irving, the STEM program is part of a push that aims to build curiosity, resilience and problem-solving across subjects.
Coming out of the pandemic, Irving schools had to make a renewed investment in training for teachers, said Erin O’Connor, a STEM and innovation specialist there.
The district last year also piloted a new science curriculum from Lego Education. The lesson involving the machine at de Zavala, for example, had students learn about kinetic energy. Fifth graders learned about genetics by building dinosaurs and their offspring with Lego blocks, identifying shared traits.
“It is just rebuilding the culture of, we want to build critical thinkers and problem solvers,” O’Connor said.
Teacher Tenisha Willis recently led second graders at Irving’s Townley Elementary School through building a machine that would push blocks into a container. She knelt next to three girls who were struggling.
They tried to add a plank to the wheeled body of the machine, but the blocks didn’t move enough. One girl grew frustrated, but Willis was patient. She asked what else they could try, whether they could flip some parts around. The girls ran the machine again. This time, it worked.
“Sometimes we can’t give up,” Willis said. “Sometimes we already have a solution. We just have to adjust it a little bit.”
Lurye reported from Philadelphia. Todd Feathers contributed reporting from New York.
The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.
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Rigorous research rarely shows that any teaching approach produces large and consistent benefits for students. But tutoring seemed to be a rare exception. Before the pandemic, almost 100 studies pointed to impressive math or reading gains for students who were paired with a tutor at least three times a week and used a proven curriculum or set of lesson plans.
Some students gained an extra year’s worth of learning — far greater than the benefit of smaller classes, summer school or a fantastic teacher. These were rigorous randomized controlled trials, akin to the way that drugs or vaccines are tested, comparing test scores of tutored students against those who weren’t. The expense, sometimes surpassing $4,000 a year per student, seemed worth it for what researchers called high-dosage tutoring.
On the strength of that evidence, the Biden administration urged schools to invest their pandemic recovery funds in intensive tutoring to help students catch up academically. Forty-six percent of public schools heeded that call, according to a 2024 federal survey, though it’s unclear exactly how much of the $190 billion in pandemic recovery funds have been spent on high-dosage tutoring and how many students received it.
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Even with ample money, schools immediately reported problems in ramping up high-quality tutoring for so many students. In 2024, researchers documented either tiny or no academic benefits from large-scale tutoring efforts in Nashville, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C.
New evidence from the 2023-24 school year reinforces those results.Researchers are rigorously studying large-scale tutoring efforts around the nation and testing whether effective tutoring can be done more cheaply. A dozen researchers studied more than 20,000 students in Miami; Chicago; Atlanta; Winston-Salem and Greensboro, North Carolina; Greenville, South Carolina; schools throughout New Mexico, and a California charter school network. This was also a randomized controlled study in which 9,000 students were randomly assigned to get tutoring and compared with 11,000 students who didn’t get that extra help.
Their preliminary results were “sobering,” according to a June report by the University of Chicago Education Lab and MDRC, a research organization.
The researchers found that tutoring during the 2023-24 school year produced only one or two months’ worth of extra learning in reading or math — a tiny fraction of what the pre-pandemic research had produced. Each minute of tutoring that students received appeared to be as effective as in the pre-pandemic research, but students weren’t getting enough minutes of tutoring altogether. “Overall we still see that the dosage students are getting falls far short of what would be needed to fully realize the promise of high-dosage tutoring,” the report said.
Monica Bhatt, a researcher at the University of Chicago Education Lab and one of the report’s authors, said schools struggled to set up large tutoring programs. “The problem is the logistics of getting it delivered,” said Bhatt. Effective high-dosage tutoring involves big changes to bell schedules and classroom space, along with the challenge of hiring and training tutors. Educators need to make it a priority for it to happen, Bhatt said.
Some of the earlier, pre-pandemic tutoring studies involved large numbers of students, too, but those tutoring programs were carefully designed and implemented, often with researchers involved. In most cases, they were ideal setups. There was much greater variability in the quality of post-pandemic programs.
“For those of us that run experiments, one of the deep sources of frustration is that what you end up with is not what you tested and wanted to see,” said Philip Oreopoulos, an economist at the University of Toronto, whose 2020 review of tutoring evidence influenced policymakers. Oreopoulos was also an author of the June report.
“After you spend lots of people’s money and lots of time and effort, things don’t always go the way you hope. There’s a lot of fires to put out at the beginning or throughout because teachers or tutors aren’t doing what you want, or the hiring isn’t going well,” Oreopoulos said.
Another reason for the lackluster results could be that schools offered a lot of extra help to everyone after the pandemic, even to students who didn’t receive tutoring. In the pre-pandemic research, students in the “business as usual” control group often received no extra help at all, making the difference between tutoring and no tutoring far more stark. After the pandemic, students — tutored and non-tutored alike — had extra math and reading periods, sometimes called “labs” for review and practice work. More than three-quarters of the 20,000 students in this June analysis had access to computer-assisted instruction in math or reading, possibly muting the effects of tutoring.
The report did find that cheaper tutoring programs appeared to be just as effective (or ineffective) as the more expensive ones, an indication that the cheaper models are worth further testing. The cheaper models averaged $1,200 per student and had tutors working with eight students at a time, similar to small group instruction, often combining online practice work with human attention. The more expensive models averaged $2,000 per student and had tutors working with three to four students at once. By contrast, many of the pre-pandemic tutoring programs involved smaller 1-to-1 or 2-to-1 student-to-tutor ratios.
Despite the disappointing results, researchers said that educators shouldn’t give up. “High-dosage tutoring is still a district or state’s best bet to improve student learning, given that the learning impact per minute of tutoring is largely robust,” the report concludes. The task now is to figure out how to improve implementation and increase the hours that students are receiving. “Our recommendation for the field is to focus on increasing dosage — and, thereby learning gains,” Bhatt said.
That doesn’t mean that schools need to invest more in tutoring and saturate schools with effective tutors. That’s not realistic with the end of federal pandemic recovery funds.
Instead of tutoring for the masses, Bhatt said researchers are turning their attention to targeting a limited amount of tutoring to the right students. “We are focused on understanding which tutoring models work for which kinds of students.”
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CLEVELAND — In a public school cafeteria here, 6- and 7-year olds were taking turns sketching their ideas for a building made of toothpicks and gummy bears. Their task: to design a structure strong enough to support a single subject notebook.
It was a challenge meant to test their abilities to plan ahead, work as a team and overcome setbacks. But first, they had to resist the urge to eat the building materials.
Zayden Barnes, a first grader at Clara E. Westropp School of the Arts, picked up a blue gummy bear and sniffed it. “That smells good,” he said, licking his lips.
Mia Navarro, another first grader, held a green gummy bear to her nose and inhaled deeply. “I can’t stop smelling them!” she exclaimed. “I just want to eat it, but I can’t!”
The lesson in engineering and self-control was part of an after-school program run by the nonprofit Horizon Education Centers. It’s one of a dwindling number of after-school options in a city with one of the highest child poverty rates of any large urban area in the country.
Last year, Horizon and other nonprofit after-school providers reached more than 7,000 students in Cleveland public schools, buoyed by $17 million in pandemic recovery aid. But when the money ran out at the end of that school year, nonprofits here had to drop sites, shed staff and shrink enrollment. Horizon, which was in five public schools last year, is now in just one.
Similar setbacks can be seen across the country, as after-school programs struggle to replace billions in federal relief money. While a few states are helping to fill the gap, Ohio isn’t among them. And many providers fear more cuts are coming, as the Trump administration continues its campaign to slash government spending and end “equity-related” grants and contracts.
The after-school sector plays a critical role in the nation’s economy, providing close to 8 million students, or nearly 14 percent of all school-aged children, with a safe place to go while their parents work. It offers homework help, enriching activities, healthy snacks and physical exercise — often for a fee, but sometimes for free.
Done well, after-school programs can strengthen students’ social and emotional skills, increase their engagement with and attendance in school, and reduce their risk of substance abuse or criminal activity. In some cases, they can help improve grades and test scores, too.
Yet the sector, which has existed for more than 100 years, has long been hobbled by inadequate funding, staffing shortages and uneven quality. There are long waitlists for many programs, and low-income families often struggle to find affordable options.
In a recent survey by the nonprofit Afterschool Alliance, more than 80 percent of program leaders said they were concerned about their program’s future, and more than 40 percent said they worried they’d have to close permanently.
“The state of afterschool in America feels very grim,” said Alison Black, executive director of the Cleveland affiliate of America Scores, a nonprofit that teaches soccer and poetry to students in 13 cities across North America.
Students build a gummy bear structure in an after-school program run by Horizon Education Centers, in Cleveland. Credit: Grace McConnell for The Hechinger Report
After-school programs emerged in the second half of the 19th century, in philanthropic settlement houses that provided English courses and health care to the children of immigrants, according to a Rand Corporation report. They multiplied after Congress passed child labor laws in the 1930s, and again during World War II, when women entered the workforce in large numbers.
In those early days, the programs functioned mostly as child care, offering a solution to the problem of the “latchkey kid.” But they began to take on a broader role in the 1960s, when the programs started to be seen as a way to both reduce youth crime and provide kids with positive role models, according to Rand.
In the 1980s and 1990s, policymakers and funders began demanding that after-school programs play a part in closing the academic gaps between wealthier and poorer kids. High-poverty schools began setting aside some of their Title I funds to provide after-school programs.
But it wasn’t until 1998 that the federal government offered targeted support to after-school programs, in the form of competitive grants awarded by the states through the newly created 21st Century Community Learning Centers Program. The first year, Congress appropriated $40 million for the program; by 2002, that number had swelled to $1 billion.
Today, the after-school sector is made up of a mix of programs providing academic support, enrichment (sports, theater and the like) or some combination. Their goals and funding streams vary, from public dollars to philanthropic and corporate gifts. Many survive by stitching together multiple sources of funding.
The 21st Century program remains the only dedicated federal funding stream for after-school and summer learning, providing $1.3 billion in support to 10,000 centers serving close to a fifth of students in 2023.
After-school programs are popular among parents, and demand for slots far exceeds the supply. For every child in an after-school program, there are three more who would participate if an affordable, accessible option was available to their families, according to surveys by the Afterschool Alliance.
Gina Warner, CEO of the National Afterschool Association, says afterschool is a space where kids can try new things and take risks they wouldn’t take at school, where the stakes are higher. “Afterschool is still a place where kids can fail” without consequence, she said.
The programs also connect students with positive adult role models who aren’t their teachers or caregivers, said Jodi Grant, executive director of the Afterschool Alliance. “Our biggest strength, when it gets down to it, is relationships,” Grant said.
But sustaining those connections can be difficult in a sector with low pay and limited opportunities for advancement. Turnover rates are high, and when staff don’t stick around, “You’re missing one of the best benefits of afterschool,” said Warner.
Students practice a dance routine at the Downtown Boxing Gym, in Detroit. Credit: Kelly Field for The Hechinger Report
For a sector accustomed to scraping by, the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 was like a winning lottery ticket.
Over three years, after-school programs received roughly $10 billion in ARPA aid — money they used to add staff, improve pay and benefits and expand enrollment, according to the Afterschool Alliance. It estimates that programs were able to serve 5 million more kids as a result.
But the money has mostly been spent, and late last month, Education Secretary Linda McMahon told districts that their time to use any remaining funds was over. In Cleveland, which spent almost $28 million on out-of-school time programs between fiscal 2022 and 2024, Horizon and other nonprofits formed a coalition to try to convince the district to continue at least a portion of the aid. They held rallies, secured media coverage and brought parents to testify before the school board. But the district wouldn’t budge, said David Smith, Horizon’s executive director.
“There’s no opportunity to go back to the scale we were at during the pandemic, and we still have the same problems,” said Smith. “Kids are getting in trouble after school, and they still need the extra academic help.”
The Cleveland Metropolitan School District made significant gains under its last CEO, Eric Gordon, whose Cleveland Plan was credited with improved student outcomes, including a 25 percentage point increase in the high school graduation rate. But the pandemic erased some of those gains and Cleveland, like many districts, is still recovering.
The district’s new CEO, Warren Morgan, has defended his decision not to fund the nonprofit providers, noting that the district offers after-school sports and an arts program. But those extracurriculars vary by day and by school, and after-school advocates say many schools have been left without the consistent, comprehensive care working parents depend on.
“Our city is focused on workforce development without thinking about who cutting this care hurts,” said Black, of America Scores Cleveland.
Without continued support from the district, Black’s organization has had to dip into its rainy-day fund and drop fall soccer for middle schoolers. Serving elementary students feels more essential, she explained, since younger kids can’t stay home alone.
Other nonprofits have been harder hit. The Greater Cleveland Neighborhood Centers Association, or NCA, has closed half of its locations in the district, leaving programs in seven schools. The Boys and Girls Clubs of Northeast Ohio, which lost $3 million in pandemic relief dollars and other federal support this academic year, has shuttered 17 sites.
Dorothy Moulthrop, chief executive officer of Open Doors Academy, another nonprofit, thinks the losses might have been less severe if the after-school coalition had been able to show strong results for the federal money. Though individual programs handed over reams of data to the district, Moulthrop wasn’t able to get its leaders to share the data in a form that would allow providers to study their collective impact.
“We needed to be able to demonstrate our return on investment and we were not able to,” she said.
Students in a poetry class run by America Scores Cleveland. Credit: Grace McConnell for The Hechinger Report
Questions about whether after-school programs are a good investment of public dollars have dogged the sector since the early 2000s, when Mathematica Policy Research began publishing the results of an evaluation that found the 21st Century program had little impact on student outcomes.
The study, which is often cited by politicians seeking to gut after-school spending, was controversial at the time, and remains so. Defenders of afterschool argue the evaluation was methodologically flawed and point to other research that found that students who regularly attended high-quality programs saw significant gains. But one of the study’s two authors, Susanne James-Burdumy, said in an interview that it was the most rigorous of its time.
In the 20 years since the Mathematica reports were published, hundreds of dissertations and program evaluations have added to the evidence base for both sides of the debate. But large-scale, rigorous evaluations of after-school programs remain rare, and their findings are mixed, James-Burdumy and other researchers say.
Though some analyses have found after-school programs can boost reading and math achievement, promote positive social behaviors and reduce negative ones, other studies have shown little growth in those and other areas.
Some of that inconsistency likely stems from differences in the quality of programs, researchers and advocates say. When funding is tight, after-school programs tend to focus their dollars on services, rather than professional development or program evaluation.
“Quality often feels like an extra,” said Jessie Kerr-Vanderslice, a consultant at the American Institutes for Research who focuses on out-of-school time programs.
Advocates also note a misalignment between program goals and outcome measures: While after-school programs often prioritize relationships and social and emotional skill-building, their funders frequently focus on academic gains.
One variable that seems to matter in student outcomes is attendance: Studies have found that students who attend regularly reap greater benefits than those who show up sporadically.
Yet more than half of students who participated in programs paid for with 21st Century grants in 2022-23 attended for less than 90 hours, a program evaluation shows. That works out to just 30 days for a three-hour program.
At Clara E. Westropp Elementary in Cleveland, where Horizon Education Centers has been able to continue its after-school program with a 21st Century grant, 73 students are enrolled, but average daily attendance is less than half that.
Students descend the stairs during an after-school program run by America Scores Cleveland. Credit: Grace McConnell for The Hechinger Report
On the other side of Lake Erie, at Detroit’s Downtown Boxing Gym, students are required to attend at least three days a week. To keep them coming, the program offers a huge range of activities, from cooking to coding (but ironically, not boxing).
Inside the large building that houses the program, there’s a lab with a flight simulator and 3D printer, and a music studio paid for and built by one of Eminem’s former producers.
Outside, on a turf field where the program plans to build an addition that will enable it to double enrollment, a group of middle school majorettes was preparing for an upcoming dance performance.
Debra Beal, who became the caregiver to her niece’s two young sons when she was in her 50s, says the program saved her life — and theirs. It kept the boys, now 19 and 20, off the streets while she worked, provided them with exercise and tutoring, and even served them dinner. The staff became like family, supporting her when she struggled as a parent and offering to pay for counseling when one son lost his father and uncle from fentanyl overdoses on the same day.
“What they’re doing is life-changing,” said Beal, whose long denim coat had the word “Blessed” written in sequins on the back.
Financially, the Downtown Boxing Gym is on surer footing than its counterparts in Cleveland. The Michigan Legislature has provided $50 million in funding for after-school programs in each of the last two years, and the program recently received $3 million in funds from the state.
That doesn’t mean the program isn’t being pinched by the Trump administration’s cost-cutting campaign and purge of diversity, equity and inclusion programs, said Jessica Hauser, its executive director. Corporations the program was counting on for seven-figure gifts for the addition and program expansion are reconsidering their pledges, and a promised federal earmark now seems unlikely.
Hauser is also worried about potential cuts to federal child nutrition programs and student aid, which the program depends on for meals and college student tutors.
Back in Cleveland, the coalition Smith formed to fight for after-school funding has expanded to include the city, the county and a local foundation, which hired a consultant to come up with the cost to deliver quality after-school programming. To longtime advocates like Smith and Allison Wallace, executive director of the NCA, it feels like the sector is having to prove itself, yet again.
“They’re revisiting conversations we had 15 years ago, around best practices and identifying quality,” Wallace said. “We keep going over the same things, and we’re not getting any traction.”
Things could get even tougher in the next couple years, as the district shifts the costs of providing security and custodial services for after-school programs onto the nonprofit providers. Wallace estimates that the change will cost providers tens of thousands per site.
And future federal funding is far from guaranteed. Though the 21st Century program enjoys bipartisan support in Congress, Trump sought to eliminate it in every budget proposal he issued in his first term and is expected to do so again.
For now, though, after-school programs are still providing kids in Cleveland with caring staff, a safe place to spend the hours after school, and engaging activities like gummy bear construction.
The teams had 10 minutes to build structures that could support a notebook. When the timer went off, the structure built by Zayden and Mia’s group resembled a two-story house with a caved-in roof. Zayden wasn’t feeling optimistic.
“I think it’s going to fall,” he said.
“Think positive,” said Kathy Thome, a program administrator who is helping the group.
Ian Welch, the program’s site coordinator for Clara E. Westropp, picked up a notebook and approached the table. He reminded the teams that failure is part of the scientific method. If their structures collapse, they can try again, he said.
“It’s going to squish down,” Mia predicted.
She was right. But the flattened structure still held the notebook aloft. The kids jumped up and down, and Zayden did a little boogie.
“We’re so happy — we did it!” he said.
Welch rewarded their effort with some fresh gummy bears, and the kids, proud and hopped up on sugar, waited for their parents to pick them up.
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, on Signal at CarolineP.83 or via email at [email protected].
This story was produced with support from the Education Writers Association Reporting Fellowship program.
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.
Hancy Maxis spent 17 years incarcerated in New York prisons. He knew that he needed to have a plan for when he got out.
“Once I am back in New York City, once I am back in the economy, how will I be marketable?” he said. “For me, math was that pathway.”
In 2015, Maxis completed a bachelor’s degree in math through the Bard Prison Initiative, an accredited college-in-prison program. He wrote his senior project about how to use game theory to advance health care equity, after observing the disjointed care his mom received when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. (She’s now recovered.)
When he was released in 2018, Maxis immediately applied for a master’s program at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. He graduated and now works as the assistant director of operations at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. He helped guide the hospital’s response to Covid.
Maxis is one of many people I’ve spoken to in recent years while reporting on the role that learning math can play in the lives of those who are incarcerated. Math literacy often contributes to economic success: A 2021 study of more than 5,500 adults found that participants made $4,062 more per year for each correct answer on an eight-question math test.
While there don’t appear to be any studies specifically on the effect of math education for people in prison, a pile of research shows that prison education programs lower recidivism rates among participants and increase their chances of employment after they’re released.
Hancy Maxis spent 17 years incarcerated in New York prisons. He now works as the assistant director of operations at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx. Credit: Yunuen Bonaparte for The Hechinger Report
Plus, math — and education in general — can be empowering. A 2022 study found that women in prison education programs reported higher self-esteem, a greater sense of belonging and more hope for the future than women who had never been incarcerated and had not completed post-secondary education.
Yet many people who enter prison have limited math skills and have had poor relationships with math in school. More than half (52 percent) of those incarcerated in U.S. prisons lack basic numeracy skills, such as the ability to do multiplication with larger numbers, long division or interpret simple graphs, according to the most recent numbers from the National Center for Educational Statistics. The absence of these basic skills is even more pronounced among Black and Hispanic people in prison, who make up more than half of those incarcerated in federal prisons.
In my reporting, I discovered that there are few programs offering math instruction in prison, and those that do exist typically include few participants. Bard’s highly competitive program, for example, is supported primarily through private donations, and is limited to seven of New York’s 42 prisons. The recent expansion of federal Pell Grants to individuals who are incarcerated presents an opportunity for more people in prison to get these basic skills and better their chances for employment after release.
Alyssa Knight, executive director of the Freedom Education Project Puget Sound, which she co-founded while incarcerated, said that for years, educational opportunities in prison were created primarily by people who were incarcerated, who wrote to professors and educators to ask if they might send materials or teach inside the prison. But public recognition of the value of prison education, including math, is rising, and the Pell Grant expansion and state-level legislationhave made it easier for colleges to set up programs for people serving time. Now, Knight said, “Colleges are seeking prisons.”
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Jeffrey Abramowitz understands firsthand how math can help someone after prison. After completing a five-year stint in a federal prison, his first post-prison job was teaching math to adults who were preparing to take the GED exam.
Fast forward nearly a decade, and Abramowitz is now the CEO of The Petey Greene Program, an organization that provides one-on-one tutoring, educational supports and programs in reading, writing and now math, to help people in prison and who have left prison receive the necessary education requirements for a high school diploma, college acceptance or career credentials.
The average Petey Greene student’s math skills are at a fourth- or fifth-grade level, according to Abramowitz, which is in line with the average for “justice-impacted” learners; the students tend to struggle with basic math such as addition and multiplication.
“You can’t be successful within most industries without being able to read, write and do basic math,” Abramowitz said. “We’re starting to see more blended programs that help people find a career pathway when they come home — and the center of all this is math and reading.”
Abramowitz and his team noticed this lack of math skills particularly among students in vocational training programs, such as carpentry, heating and cooling and commercial driving. To qualify to work in these fields, these students often need to pass a licensing test, requiring math and reading knowledge.
The nonprofit offers “integrated education training” to help students learn the relevant math for their professions. For instance, a carpentry teacher will teach students how to use a saw in or near a classroom where a math teacher explains fractions and how they relate to the measurements needed to cut a piece of wood.
“They may be able to do the task fine, but they can’t pass the test because they don’t know the math,” Abramowitz said.
Math helped Paul Morton after he left prison, he told me. When he began his 10.5 years in prison, he only could do GED-level math. After coming across an introductory physics book in the third year of his time in prison, he realized he didn’t have the math skills needed for the science described in it.
He asked his family to send him math textbooks and, over the seven years until his release, taught himself algebra and calculus.
The recent expansion of federal Pell Grants to individuals who are incarcerated presents an opportunity for more people in prison to get these basic skills and better their chances for employment after release. Credit: Helen H. Richardson/The Denver Post via Getty Images
“I relentlessly spent six hours on one problem one day,” he said. “I was determined to do it, to get it right.”
I met Morton through the organization the Prison Mathematics Project, which helped him develop his math knowledge inside prison by connecting him with an outside mathematician. After his release from a New York prison in 2023, he moved to Rochester, New York, and is hoping to take the actuarial exam, which requires a lot of math. He continues to study differential equations on his own.
The Prison Mathematics Project delivers math materials and programs to people in prison, and connects them with mathematicians as mentors. (It also brings math professors, educators and enthusiasts to meet program participants through “Pi Day” events; I attended one such event in 2023 when I produced a podcast episode about the program, and the organization paid for my travel and accommodations.)
The organization was started in 2015 by Christopher Havens, who was then incarcerated at Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. Havens’ interest in math puzzles, and then in algebra, calculus and other areas of mathematics, was ignited early in his 25-year- term when a prison volunteer slid some sudoku puzzles under his door.
“I had noticed all these changes happening inside of me,” Havens told me. “My whole life, I was searching for that beauty through drugs and social acceptance … When I found real beauty [in math], it got me to practice introspection.”
As he fell in love with math, he started corresponding with mathematicians to help him solve problems, and talking to other men at the prison to get them interested too. He created a network of math resources for people in prisons, which became the Prison Mathematics Project.
The group’s website says it helps people in prison use math to help with “rebuilding their lives both during and after their incarceration.”
But Ben Jeffers, its executive director, has noticed that the message doesn’t connect with everyone in prison. Among the 299 Prison Mathematics Project participants on whom the program has data, the majority — 56 percent — are white, he told me, while 25 percent are Black, 10 percent are Hispanic, 2 percent are Asian and 6 percent are another race or identity. Ninety-three percent of project participants are male.
Yet just 30 percent of the U.S. prison population is white, while 35 percent of those incarcerated are Black, 31 percent are Hispanic and 4 percent are of other races, according to the United State Sentencing Commission. (The racial makeup of the program’s 18 female participants at women’s facilities is much more in line with that of the prison population at large.)
“[It’s] the same issues that you have like in any classroom in higher education,” said Jeffers, who is finishing his master’s in math in Italy. “At the university level and beyond, every single class is majority white male.”
He noted that anxiety about math tends to be more acute among women and people of any gender who are Black, Hispanic, or from other underrepresented groups, and may keep them from signing up for the program.
Sherry Smith understands that kind of anxiety. She didn’t even want to step foot into a math class. When she arrived at Southern Maine Women’s Reentry Center in December 2021, she was 51, had left high school when she was 16, and had only attended two weeks of a ninth grade math class.
“I was embarrassed that I had dropped out,” she said. “I hated to disclose that to people.”
Smith decided to enroll in the prison’s GED program because she could do the classes one-on-one with a friendly and patient teacher. “It was my time,” she said. “Nobody else was listening, I could ask any question I needed.”
In just five months, Smith completed her GED math class. She said she cried on her last day. Since 2022, she’s been pursuing an associate’s degree in human services — from prison — through a remote program with Washington County Community College.
In Washington, Prison Mathematics Project founder Havens is finishing his sentence and continuing to study math. (Havens has been granted a clemency hearing and may be released as early as this year.) Since 2020, he has published four academic papers: three in math and one in sociology. He works remotely from prison as a staff research associate in cryptography at the University of California, Los Angeles, and wrote a math textbook about continued fractions.
Havens is still involved in the Prison Mathematics Project, but handed leadership of the program over to Jeffers in October 2023. Now run from outside the prison, it is easier for the program to bring resources and mentorship to incarcerated students.
“For 25 years of my life, I can learn something that I wouldn’t have the opportunity to learn in any other circumstances,” Havens said. “So I decided that I would, for the rest of my life, study mathematics.”
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965 or [email protected].
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.
This story was produced by the Associated Press and reprinted with permission.
Math is the subject sixth grader Harmoni Knight finds hardest, but that’s changing.
In-class tutors and “data chats” at her middle school in Compton, California, have made a dramatic difference, the 11-year-old said. She proudly pulled up a performance tracker at a tutoring session last week, displaying a column of perfect 100 percent scores on all her weekly quizzes from January.
Since the pandemic first shuttered American classrooms, schools have poured federal and local relief money into interventions like the ones in Harmoni’s classroom, hoping to help students catch up academically following COVID-19 disruptions.
But a new analysis of state and national test scores shows the average student remains half a grade level behind pre-pandemic achievement in both reading and math. In reading, especially, students are even further behind than they were in 2022, the analysis shows.
Compton is an outlier, making some of the biggest two-year gains in both subjects among large districts. And there are other bright spots, along with evidence that interventions like tutoring and summer programs are working.
Students interact in a fourth grade classroom at William Jefferson Clinton Elementary in Compton, Calif., Thursday, Feb. 6, 2025. Credit: Eric Thayer/Associated Press
The Education Recovery Scorecard analysis by researchers at Harvard, Stanford and Dartmouth allows year-to-year comparisons across states and districts, providing the most comprehensive picture yet of how American students are performing since COVID-19 first disrupted learning.
The most recent data is based on tests taken by students in spring 2024. By then, the worst of the pandemic was long past, but schools were dealing still with a mental health crisis and high rates of absenteeism — not to mention students who’d had crucial learning disrupted.
“The losses are not just due to what happened during the 2020 to 2021 school year, but the aftershocks that have hit schools in the years since the pandemic,” said Tom Kane, a Harvard economist who worked on the scorecard.
In some cases, the analysis shows school districts are struggling when their students may have posted decent results on their state tests. That’s because each state adopts its own assessments, and those aren’t comparable to each other. Those differences can make it impossible to tell whether students are performing better because of their progress, or whether those shifts are because the tests themselves are changing, or the state has lowered its standards for proficiency.
The Scorecard accounts for differing state tests and provides one national standard.
Higher-income districts have made significantly more progress than lower-income districts, with the top 10 percent of high-income districts four times more likely to have recovered in both math and reading compared with the poorest 10 percent. And recovery within districts remains divided by race and class, especially in math scores. Test score gaps grew by both race and income.
A student works in a classroom at Benjamin O. Davis Middle School in Compton, Calif., Thursday, Feb. 6, 2025. Credit: Eric Thayer/Associated Press
“The pandemic has not only driven test scores down, but that decline masks a pernicious inequality that has grown during the pandemic,” said Sean Reardon, a Stanford sociologist who worked on the scorecard. “Not only are districts serving more Black and Hispanic students falling further behind, but even within those districts, Black and Hispanic students are falling further behind their white district mates.”
Still, many of the districts that outperformed the country serve predominantly low-income students or students of color, and their interventions offer best practices for other districts.
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In Compton, the district responded to the pandemic by hiring over 250 tutors that specialize in math, reading and students learning English. Certain classes are staffed with multiple tutors to assist teachers. And schools offer tutoring before, during and after school, plus “Saturday School” and summer programs for the district’s 17,000 students, said Superintendent Darin Brawley.
To identify younger students needing targeted support, the district now conducts dyslexia screenings in all elementary schools.
The low-income school district near downtown Los Angeles, with a student body that is 84 percent Latino and 14 percent Black, now has a graduation rate of 93 percent, compared with 58 percent when Brawley took the job in 2012.
Harmoni, the sixth-grader, said that one-on-one tutoring has helped her grasp concepts and given her more confidence in math. She gets separate “data chats” with her math specialist that are part performance review, part pep talk.
“Looking at my data, it kind of disappoints me” when the numbers are low, said Harmoni. “But it makes me realize I can do better in the future, and also now.”
Brawley said he’s proud of the district’s latest test scores, but not content.
“Truth be told, I wasn’t happy,” he said. “Even though we gained, and we celebrate the gains, at the end of the day we all know that we can do better.”
A tutor helps students at Benjamin O. Davis Middle School in Compton, Calif., Thursday, Feb. 6, 2025. Credit: Eric Thayer/Associated Press
As federal pandemic relief money for schools winds down, states and school districts will have limited resources and must prioritize interventions that worked. Districts that spent federal money on increased instructional time, either through tutoring or summer school, saw a return on that investment.
Reading levels have continued to decline, despite a movement in many states to emphasize phonics and the “science of reading.” So Reardon and Kane called for an evaluation of the mixed results for insights into the best ways to teach kids to read.
The researchers emphasized the need to extend state and local money to support pandemic recovery programs that showed strong academic results. Schools also must engage parents and tell them when their kids are behind, the researchers said.
And schools must continue to work with community groups to improve students’ attendance. The scorecard identified a relationship between high absenteeism and learning struggles.
In the District of Columbia, an intensive tutoring program helped with both academics and attendance, said D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Lewis Ferebee. In the scorecard analysis, the District of Columbia ranked first among states for gains in both math and reading between 2022 and 2024, after its math recovery had fallen toward the bottom of the list.
Pandemic-relief money funded the tutoring, along with a system of identifying and targeting support at students in greatest need. The district also hired program managers who helped maximize time for tutoring within the school day, Ferebee said.
Students who received tutoring were more likely to be engaged with school, Ferebee said, both from increased confidence over the subject matter and because they had a relationship with another trusted adult.
Students expressed that “I’m more confident in math because I’m being validated by another adult,” Ferebee said. “That validation goes a long way, not only with attendance, but a student feeling like they are ready to learn and are capable, and as a result, they show up differently.”
Federal pandemic relief money has ended, but Ferebee said many of the investments the district made will have lasting impact, including the money spent on teacher training and curriculum development in literacy.
Students walk through a hallway at Benjamin O. Davis Middle School in Compton, Calif., Thursday, Feb. 6, 2025. Credit: Eric Thayer/Associated Press
Christina Grant, who served as the District of Columbia’s state superintendent of education until 2024, said she’s hopeful to see the evidence emerging on what’s made a difference in student achievement.
“We cannot afford to not have hope. These are our students. They did not cause the pandemic,” Grant said. “The growing concern is ensuring that we can … see ourselves to the other side.”
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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.
