The early years are a critical time to teach the foundations of math. That’s when children learn to count, start identifying shapes and gain an early understanding of concepts like size and measurement. These years can also be a time when children are confronted with preconceived notions of their abilities in math, often based on their race, which can negatively affect their math success and contribute to long-standing racial gaps in scores.
These are some of the motivating factors behind the Racial Justice in Early Math project, a collaboration between the Erikson Institute, a private graduate school focused on child development, and the University of Illinois Chicago. The project aims to educate teachers and provide resources including books, teacher tips and classroom activities that help educators combat racial bias in math instruction.
I sat down with Danny Bernard Martin, professor of education and mathematics at the University of Illinois Chicago, project director Priscila Pereira and Jennifer McCray, a research professor at the Erikson Institute, to learn more about their work. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What are some of the key examples of racial injustice that you see in early math education?
Martin: If I say to you, ‘Asians are good at math,’ that’s something that you’ve heard, we know that’s out there. When does that kind of belief start? Well, there’s something called ‘racial-mathematical socialization’ that we take seriously in this project, that we know happens in the home before children come to school. Parents and caregivers are generating messages around math that they transmit to children, and then those messages may get reinforced in schools.
Even at the early math level, there are research projects beginning to construct Black children in particular ways, comparing Black children to white children as the norm. That is a racial justice issue, because that narrative about white children, Black children, Asian American children, Latinx children, then filters out. It becomes part of the accepted truth, and then it impacts what teachers do and what principals and school leaders believe about children.
What does this look like in schools?
McCray: Perhaps the math curriculum doesn’t represent them or their experience. We all know that often schools for children of color are under-resourced. What often happens in under-resourced schools is that the curriculum and the teaching tends to focus on the basics. There might be an overemphasis on drilling or doing timed tests. We also have those situations where people are doing ability grouping in math. And we know what the research says about that, it’s basically ‘good education for you, and poor education for you.’ It’s almost impossible to do any of that without doing harm.
One line of research has been to watch teachers interact with children and videotape or study them. And in diverse classrooms with white teachers … often it is observed that children who are Black or Latina aren’t called on as often, or aren’t listened to as much, or don’t have the same kind of opportunity to be a leader in the classroom.
What should teacher prep programs, administrators and families do to address racial justice issues in early math?
McCray: Maybe the white teacher is reflecting on themselves, on their own biases … trying to connect with families or communities in some way that’s meaningful. We want teachers to have that balance of knowing that sometimes you do want to teach a procedure, but you never want to be shutting down ideas for creative ways to solve a math problem, or culturally distinct ways to solve a math problem that might come from your students.
It might be something like, you’re working on sorting in an early childhood classroom. And what if a child is thinking about a special craft that their parent does that’s like the [papel picado], or papers that get cut in very elaborate designs in Mexico. … If the teacher doesn’t have space to listen, it could be a shutdown moment, instead of a moment of connection, where the child is actually bringing something … that is associated with their own identity.
Pereira: I do feel that sometimes the conversations of racial justice really put the weight on teachers and teachers alone. Teaching is part of a larger structure. Maybe your school will not allow you to do the work that is needed. I’m thinking about [a teacher] who was required to follow a scripted curriculum that did not promote the positive math identity for Black children. It needs to be a whole community effort.
How is your initiative changing this?
Pereira: There are resources in terms of opportunities that we offer to teachers to engage with our content and ideas: webinars, a fellowship and an immersive learning experience in the summer of 2026. These spaces are moments in which educators, researchers and people that are engaged in the education of young learners, can come together … and disrupt mainstream notions of understanding what is racial justice and how one gets that in the classroom.
Right now, research and initiatives zeroing in on race are under scrutiny, especially at the college level. Do you foresee any additional challenges to this work?
Pereira: There was a National Science Foundation grant program focused on racial equity in STEM and we had been planning to apply for funds to do something there. … It’s gone. … The only place we’re welcome is where there’s a governor who is willing to take on Trump. We just have to keep doing the work, because we know what’s right. But it is challenging, for sure.
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.
President Donald Trump wants to collect more admissions data from colleges and universities to make sure they’re complying with a 2023 Supreme Court decision that ended race-conscious affirmative action. And he wants that data now.
But data experts and higher education scholars warn that any new admissions data is likely to be inaccurate, impossible to interpret and ultimately misused by policymakers. That’s because Trump’s own policies have left the statistics agency inside the Education Department with a skeleton staff and not enough money, expertise or time to create this new dataset.
The department already collects data on enrollment from every institution of higher education that participates in the federal student loan program. The results are reported through the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). But in an Aug. 7 memorandum, Trump directed the Education Department, which he sought to close in March, to expand that task andprovide “transparency” into how some 1,700 colleges that do not admit everyone are making their admissions decisions. And he gave Education Secretary Linda McMahon just 120 days to get it done.
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Expanding data collection on applicants is not a new idea. The Biden administration had already ordered colleges to start reporting race and ethnicity data to the department this fall in order to track changes in diversity in postsecondary education. But in a separate memorandum to the head of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), McMahon asked for even more information, including high school grades and college entrance exam scores, all broken down by race and gender.
Bryan Cook, director of higher education policy at the Urban Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C., called the 120-day timeline “preposterous” because of the enormous technical challenges. For example, IPEDS has never collected high school GPAs. Some schools use a weighted 5.0 scale, giving extra points for advanced classes, and others use an unweighted 4.0 scale, which makes comparisons messy. Other issues are equally thorny. Many schools no longer require applicants to report standardized test scores and some no longer ask them about race so the data that Trump wants doesn’t exist for those colleges.
“You’ve got this effort to add these elements without a mechanism with which to vet the new variables, as well as a system for ensuring their proper implementation,” said Cook. “You would almost think that whoever implemented this didn’t know what they were doing.”
Cook has helped advise the Education Department on the IPEDS data collection for 20 years and served on technical review panels, which are normally convened first to recommend changes to the data collection. Those panels were disbanded earlier this year, and there isn’t one set up to vet Trump’s new admissions data proposal.
Cook and other data experts can’t figure out how a decimated education statistics agency could take on this task. All six NCES employees who were involved in IPEDS data collection were fired in March, and there are only three employees left out of 100 at NCES, which is run by an acting commissioner who also has several other jobs.
An Education Department official, who did not want to be named, denied that no one left inside the Education Department has IPEDS experience. The official said that staff inside the office of the chief data officer, which is separate from the statistics agency, have a “deep familiarity with IPEDS data, its collection and use.” Former Education Department employees told me that some of these employees have experience in analyzing the data, but not in collecting it.
In the past, there were as many as a dozen employees who worked closely with RTI International, a scientific research institute, which handles most of the IPEDS data collection work.
Technical review eliminated
Of particular concern is that RTI’s $10 million annual contract to conduct the data collection had been slashed approximately in half by the Department of Government Efficiency, also known as DOGE, according to two former employees, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation. Those severe budget cuts eliminated the technical review panels that vet proposed changes to IPEDS, and ended training for colleges and universities to submit data properly, which helped with data quality. RTI did not respond to my request to confirm the cuts or answer questions about the challenges it will face in expanding its work on a reduced budget and staffing.
The Education Department did not deny that the IPEDS budget had been cut in half. “The RTI contract is focused on the most mission-critical IPEDS activities,” the Education Department official said. “The contract continues to include at least one task under which a technical review panel can be convened.”
Additional elements of the IPEDS data collection have also been reduced, including a contract to check data quality.
Last week, the scope of the new task became more apparent. On Aug. 13, the administration released more details about the new admissions data it wants, describing how the Education Department is attempting to add a whole new survey to IPEDS, called the Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement (ACTS), which will disaggregate all admissions data and most student outcome and financial aid data by race and gender. College will have to report on both undergraduate and graduate school admissions. The public has 60 days to comment, and the administration wants colleges to start reporting this data this fall.
Complex collection
Christine Keller, executive director of theAssociation for Institutional Research, a trade group of higher education officials who collect and analyze data, called the new survey “one of the most complex IPEDS collections ever attempted.”
Traditionally, it has taken years to make much smaller changes to IPEDS, and universities are given a year to start collecting the new data before they are required to submit it. (Roughly 6,000 colleges, universities and vocational schools are required to submit data to IPEDS as a condition for their students to take out federal student loans or receive federal Pell Grants. Failure to comply results in fines and the threat of losing access to federal student aid.)
Normally, the Education Department would reveal screenshots of data fields, showing what colleges would need to enter into the IPEDS computer system. But the department has not done that, and several of the data descriptions are ambiguous. For example, colleges will have to report test scores and GPA by quintile, broken down by race and ethnicity and gender. One interpretation is that a college would have to say how many Black male applicants, for example, scored above the 80th percentile on the SAT or the ACT. Another interpretation is that colleges would need to report the average SAT or ACT score of the top 20 percent of Black male applicants.
The Association for Institutional Research used to train college administrators on how to collect and submit data correctly and sort through confusing details — until DOGE eliminated that training. “The absence of comprehensive, federally funded training will only increase institutional burden and risk to data quality,” Keller said. Keller’s organization is now dipping into its own budget to offer a small amount of free IPEDS training to universities.
The Education Department is also requiring colleges to report five years of historical admissions data, broken down into numerous subcategories. Institutions have never been asked to keep data on applicants who didn’t enroll.
“It’s incredible they’re asking for five years of prior data,” said Jordan Matsudaira, an economist at American University who worked on education policy in the Biden and Obama administrations. “That will be square in the pandemic years when no one was reporting test scores.”
‘Misleading results’
Matsudaira explained that IPEDS had considered asking colleges for more academic data by race and ethnicity in the past and the Education Department ultimately rejected the proposal. One concern is that slicing and dicing the data into smaller and smaller buckets would mean that there would be too few students and the data would have to be suppressed to protect student privacy. For example, if there were two Native American men in the top 20 percent of SAT scores at one college, many people might be able to guess who they were. And a large amount of suppressed data would make the whole collection less useful.
Also, small numbers can lead to wacky results. For example, a small college could have only two Hispanic male applicants with very high SAT scores. If both were accepted, that’s a 100 percent admittance rate. If only 200 white women out of 400 with the same test scores were accepted, that would be only a 50 percent admittance rate. On the surface, that can look like both racial and gender discrimination. But it could have been a fluke. Perhaps both of those Hispanic men were athletes and musicians. The following year, the school might reject two different Hispanic male applicants with high test scores but without such impressive extracurriculars. The admissions rate for Hispanic males with high test scores would drop to zero. “You end up with misleading results,” said Matsudaira.
Reporting average test scores by race is another big worry. “It feels like a trap to me,” said Matsudaira. “That is mechanically going to give the administration the pretense of claiming that there’s lower standards of admission for Black students relative to white students when you know that’s not at all a correct inference.”
The statistical issue is that there are more Asian and white students at the very high end of the SAT score distribution, and all those perfect 1600s will pull the average up for these racial groups. (Just like a very tall person will skew the average height of a group.) Even if a college has a high test score threshold that it applies to all racial groups and no one below a 1400 is admitted, the average SAT score for Black students will still be lower than that of white students. (See graphic below.) The only way to avoid this is to purely admit by test score and take only the students with the highest scores. At some highly selective universities, there are enough applicants with a 1600 SAT to fill the entire class. But no institution fills its student body by test scores alone. That could mean overlooking applicants with the potential to be concert pianists, star soccer players or great writers.
The Average Score Trap
This graphic by Kirabo Jackson, an economist at Northwestern University, depicts the problem of measuring racial discrimination though average test scores. Even for a university that admits all students above a certain cut score, the average score of one racial group (red) will be higher than the average score of the other group (blue). Source: graphic posted on Bluesky Social by Josh Goodman
Admissions data is a highly charged political issue. The Biden administration originally spearheaded the collection of college admissions data by race and ethnicity. Democrats wanted to collect this data to show how the nation’s colleges and universities were becoming less diverse with the end of affirmative action. This data is slated to start this fall, following a full technical and procedural review.
Now the Trump administration is demanding what was already in the works, and adding a host of new data requirements — without following normal processes. And instead of tracking the declining diversity in higher education, Trump wants to use admissions data to threaten colleges and universities. If the new directive produces bad data that is easy to misinterpret, he may get his wish.
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.
Across the country, Black fathers are too often seen as a threat when they speak up and advocate for their children. And it’s not just in courtrooms and on sidewalks — it’s happening in classrooms, daycares and schools.
I’ve spent my career in education and equity leadership, and I know this is part of a larger, troubling pattern. When Black parents — especially men — assert themselves in spaces not designed for them, they are too often perceived as “aggressive.”
Their advocacy is sometimes interpreted as “rude,” and their presence is framed as disruption rather than partnership, something that has played out in my own experience as a proud Black father of three.
This isn’t about one parent or teacher or even one moment. It’s about what happens when systems designed to support children carry embedded racial assumptions.
I’ll never forget picking my kids up from daycare during a lice outbreak. My wife and I had no experience dealing with lice, and I asked a few questions — just trying to understand what to expect. Instead of getting reassurance or guidance, I was met with suspicion, even subtle blame.
Or the time I raised a safety concern about an emotional child in my son’s class who had a pattern of throwing chairs. Rather than treating my concern as legitimate, it was brushed off — as if I were overreacting.
In both cases, my presence and voice weren’t welcomed. They were managed.
In a society in which Black men are still fighting to be seen as full participants in their children’s lives, we cannot ignore the role that bias plays in shaping who gets welcomed, who gets questioned and who gets believed. Daycares, schools, courts and society at large must actively affirm and restore the voices of Black fathers, rather than dismiss them.
Too often, Black men are portrayed as threats or criminals — rather than as nurturers and protectors. These images become mentally entrenched, shaping public attitudes and institutional responses. This persistent framing contributes to a cultural blind spot that brings confusion to the presence of Black fathers and negatively affects how they are treated in schools, courts and communities.
Despite this anti-Black bias, Black fathers defy stereotypes every day. Black dads, on average, are actually more involved in daily caregiving than fathers of other racial backgrounds, the National Health Statistics Reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes. Yet media representation has not caught up with this reality.
As a student pursuing a doctorate in education leadership and policy, I study how identity shapes access to opportunity. And I know that bias against Black men starts early — when we are boys. A 2016 Yale Child Study Center report found that preschool teachers, regardless of race, were more likely to monitor Black boys for misbehavior — even when no misbehavior was apparent.
And in Indiana, studies highlight that nearly four out of every five Black children in the state will be investigated for suspected maltreatment.
These are not just statistical disparities — they’re stories of fractured trust between families and the institutions meant to serve them.
I have explored the concept of “mega-threats” introduced by researchers Angelica Leigh and Shimul Melwani — high-profile, identity-relevant events that trigger lasting psychological stress for people who share that identity. Though typically used to describe major public tragedies, these threats can be individual and personal, too. When a Black father sees himself reduced to a stereotype — his parenting undercut, his words distorted — it becomes an embodied threat, one that lingers and works to fulfill the myth that Black fathers are absent. These corrosive interactions run counter to the heroic influence and legacy that Black men have within their communities as warm demanders — men who emphatically build relationships and uphold high expectations.
If we want to support children, we must support their families. That means ensuring that early childhood professionals are trained not just in child development but in cultural competence and anti-bias practices. It means separating assumptions from observations when writing reports.
And it means reflecting on how language like “rude” or “aggressive” can carry racial undertones that reinforce long-standing stereotypes.
In my work as an educator, leader and former coach, I’ve partnered with countless families across race and class lines. What all parents want — especially those from marginalized communities — is the assurance that when they show up, they’ll be heard, not judged. That their questions will be met with respect, not suspicion.
If we truly believe in family engagement, we must be honest about the ways our systems still punish the very people we say we want more of. Black fathers are showing up.
The question is: are we ready to see them clearly?
Craig Jordan is an educator and doctoral student at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College. A native of Gary, Indiana, he writes about equity, identity and systemic change in education. His work has been featured in IndyStar and Yahoo News.
This story about Black fathers was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.
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.
(Note: This is the second piece in a two-part series on absenteeism in schools. Read the first part, on seven insights from researchers.)
Chronic absenteeism, when students miss 10 percent or more of the school year, is 50 percent higher across the nation than before the pandemic. Researchers say it’s difficult for schools to address the problem because it is both so intense,with students missing huge chunks of the school year, and so extensive, affecting both rich and poor students and even high achievers.And the reasons vary widely, from asthma and bullying to transportation problems and the feeling that school is boring.
“It’s hard to know where and when to target resources,” said Sam Hollon, a data analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, which hosted a symposium on the problem in May. “Who do you help when every student potentially can be a candidate for help?”
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The Trump administration’s immigration enforcement is exacerbating the problem. A June draft paper by Stanford University professor Thomas Dee calculated that recent raids coincided with a 22 percent increase in daily student absences with particularly large increases in absenteeism among the youngest students.
Talking about the problem isn’t enough. Researchers say they want to study more schools that are making headway. It remains unclear if there are broadly applicablefixesor if each school or eveneach student needs individual solutions. Some underlying root causes for skipping school are more complex than others, requiring psychotherapy or housing assistance, which schools can’t provide alone. Here are a few examples of how very different communities are tackling the problem.
Providence: Bus stops and weekend food bags
Principal W. Jackson Reilly of Nathanael Greene Middle School in Providence, Rhode Island, said that when he arrived in April 2023, half of his 900 students in grades six to eight were chronically absent, up from 30 percent of students before the pandemic. Thirty percent of his teachers were also chronically absent. Achievement scores were in the state’s bottom 1 percent.
Reilly managed to slash his chronic absenteeism rate in half to 25 percent this past 2024-25 year. That’s still high. One in four students missed more than 18 days of school a year. But, it’s better.
He began by identifying 150 kids who were just over the threshold for chronic absenteeism, those who missed between 18 and 35 days, hoping that these kids would be easier to lure back to school than those who were more disengaged. Reilly and a group of administrators and guidance counselors each took 10 to 15 students and showed their families how much school they had missed and how low their grades were. His team asked, “What do you need in order for your kid to be coming to school?’”
The two most common replies: transportation and food.
Many students lived only a mile away, too close to school to qualify for bus service. Yet the walk deterred many, especially if it was raining or snowing. Yellow buses often passed these children’s homes as they were transporting children who lived farther out, and Reilly convinced the district to add stops for these chronically absent children.
Ninety percent of his students come from families who are poor enough to qualify for the federal free or reduced-price lunch program and 80 percent are Hispanic. Although many children were fed breakfast and lunch at school, their families admitted that their kids would get so hungry over the weekend that they didn’t want to wake up and come to school on Mondays. Reilly partnered with a food pantry and sent bags of meat and pasta home with students on Fridays.
Individual attention also helped. At the start of each school day, Reilly and his team check in with their assigned students. Kids who show up get five “green bucks” to spend on snacks and prizes. Administrators call the homes of those who didn’t come to school. “If they did not answer the phone, we’d make a home visit,” said Reilly.
The most dramatic overhaul was scheduling. Reilly scrapped individual schedules for students and assigned four teachers to every 104 students. The kids now move in pods of 26 that take all their classes together, rotating through the same four teachers throughout the day. The classrooms are right near each other, creating a smaller community within the school.
“It’s all about relationship building,” said Reilly. When students look forward to seeing their classmates and teachers, he said, they’re more motivated to come to school.
Researchers say fostering relationships is effective. Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, a nonprofit organization that advises schools on how to boost attendance rates, said it’s still a battle to persuade some school leaders (and school board members) that making school a more welcoming place is more productive than punishing kids and families for skipping school.*
Reilly said his school now posts the lowest student and teacher chronic absenteeism rates in Providence. And he said his school is the highest performing middle school in the city and among the highest statewide in reading.
New York City: Catching the butterflies
A cluster of New York City high schools are taking a more data-driven approach, guided by New Visions, a consulting organization that supports 71 city high schools.
After some experimentation, New Visions staff saw strong improvement in attendance in one subgroup of students who were on the cusp of missing 10 percent of school days, but had not yet crossed the chronic absenteeism threshold. These are students who might miss a day or two every week or every other week but were relatively engaged at school. Jonathan Green, a New Visions school improvement coach who is spearheading this effort, calls them “butterflies.” “They would flutter in and out every week,” he said.
Green suggested that someone at school meet weekly with these butterflies and show them their attendance data, set goals for the coming week and explain how their attendance was leading to better grades. The intervention took two to five minutes. “There were marked changes in attendance,” said Green.
New Visions built a website where school administrators could print out two-page documents for each student so the data, including monthly attendance and tardiness, appeared in an easy-to-digest format. The quick meetings took place for eight to 10 weeks during the final grading period for the semester. “That’s when there’s the most opportunity to turn those potentially failing grades into passing grades,” said Green. “We were finding these sweet spots within the school calendar to do this very high resource, high-energy intensive weekly check-in. It’s not something that anyone can easily scale across a school.”
Staff had to figure out the bell schedule for each child and intercept them between classes. One succeeded in holding their entire caseload of students below the chronic absenteeism threshold. Not everyone thought it was a good idea: Some school administrators questioned why so much effort should go into students who weren’t yet chronically absent rather than students in greater trouble.
The dramatic results help answer that question. Among schools in the Bronx that volunteered to participate in the butterfly intervention, chronic absenteeism rates dropped 15 percentage points from 47 percent in 2021 to 32 percent in 2025, still high. But other Bronx high schools in the New Visions network that didn’t try this butterfly intervention still had a chronic absenteeism rate of 46 percent.
Green said this solution wouldn’t work for other high schoolers. Some have trouble organizing their study time, he said, and need more intensive help from teachers. “Two- to five-minute check-ins aren’t going to help them,” said Green.
Indianapolis: Biscuits and gravy
The leader of an Indiana charter school told me he used a system of rewards and punishments that reduced the chronic absenteeism rate among his kindergarten through eighth graders from 64 percent in 2021-22 to 10 percent in 2024-25.
Jordan Habayeb, the chief operating officer of Adelante Schools, said he used federal funds for the school breakfast and lunch program to create a made-from-scratch restaurant-style cafeteria. “Fun fact: On homemade biscuit and gravy days, we saw the lowest rates of tardies,” he said.
Researchers recommend avoiding punishment because it doesn’t bring students back to school. But Habayeb said he adheres strictly to state law that requires schools to report 10 absences to the state Department of Child Services and to file a report with the county prosecutor. Habayeb told me his school accounted for a fifth of truancy referrals to the county prosecutor.
The school created an automated warning system after five absences rather than waiting for the critical 10-day loss. And Habayeb said he dispatched the safety and attendance officer in a van to have “real conversations with families rather than being buried in paperwork.” Meanwhile, students who did show up received a constant stream of rewards, from locker decorations to T-shirts.
Parent education was also important. During mandatory family orientations, the school illustrated how regular attendance matters for even young children. “We shared what a child might miss during a three-day stretch in a unit on ‘Charlotte’s Web’ — showing how easily a student could leave with a completely different understanding of the book,” said Habayeb. “This helped shift perspectives and brought urgency to the issue.”
Kansas City: Candy and notes
School leaders in Kansas City, Kansas, shared some tips that have worked for them during a webinar earlier this month hosted by Attendance Works. One elementary school reduced its chronic absenteeism from 55 percent in 2021 to 38 percent in 2024 by assigning all 300 students to an adult in the building, encouraging them to build an “authentic” relationship. Teachers were given a list of ideas but were free to do what seemed natural. One teacher left candy and notes on their assigned students’ desks. A preschoolerproudly pasted his note, which said he was a “genius,” on the front door of his house. “The smiles kids have on their faces are amazing,” said Zaneta Boles, the principal of Silver City Elementary School.
When students do miss school, Boles said educators try to take a “non-blaming approach” so that families are more likely to divulge what is going on. That helps the school refer them to other community agencies for assistance.
Albuquerque: A shining example regroups
Alamosa Elementary School in Albuquerque, New Mexico, was once a shining example of a school that persuaded more families to send their kids to class. Chronic absenteeism fell as low as 1 in 4 students in 2018, when The Hechinger Report wrote about the school.
But Alamosa has not been immune from the surge of absenteeism that has plagued schools around the nation. Chronic absenteeism spiked to 64 percent of students during the 2021-22 school year, when Covid variants were still circulating. And it remained shockingly high with 38 percent of students missing more than 10 percent of the 2024-25 school year — exactly matching the 50 percent increase in chronic absenteeism across the country since 2019.
“We were on a roll. Then life happened,” said Daphne Strader, Albuquerque Public Schools’ director of coordinated school health, who works to reduce absenteeism.
Strader said Alamosa and other Albuquerque schools have made some successful changes to how they’re tackling the problem. But the volume of absenteeism remains overwhelming. “There’s so many kids who have needs,” Strader said. “We need more staff on board.”
Strader said attendance interventions had been “too siloed” and they’re focusing more on the “whole child.” She’s encouraging schools to integrate attendance efforts with other initiatives to boost academic achievement and improve student behavior. “Students are hungry, they’re dysregulated, they don’t have grit,” said Strader, and all of these issues are contributing to absenteeism. But she also concedes that some students have more severe needs, and it’s unclear who in the system can address them.
Her biggest advice for schools is to focus on relationships. “Relationships drive everything,” said Strader. “One of the major consequences of the pandemic was the isolation. If I feel a sense of belonging, I’m more likely to come to school.”
*Clarification: This sentence was modified to make clear the Attendance Worksexecutive director did not say all school leaders oppose the idea of eliminating punishments for absenteeism.
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.
Selina Likely, a child care director in Columbus, Ohio, understands the desperation that parents feel when they can’t find a good placement for their children with disabilities. When Likely’s daughter was a child, the little girl was abruptly kicked out of her daycare center for biting, leaving her mother with little recourse.
“I was so angry and mad at the time,” said Likely, whose daughter is now an adult. “How are you going to kick out a 1-year-old?”
Thanks to a new state initiative, Likely and other child care providers like her can now receive additional training on how to support children with disabilities, who are far more likely than other children to be expelled from child care programs. Some states have similar programs, with the ultimate goal of creating more child care slots where young children with disabilities and delays can thrive.
How Hechinger inspired a bill
Earlier this year, my colleague Sarah Carr published a piece revealing that in Illinois and other states many families of premature babies are leaving the hospital with no information or guidance on critical therapies they are entitled to. In June, the Illinois Legislature passed a bill that would require hospitals to distribute detailed information on early intervention — those required therapies for babies and toddlers with disabilities and developmental delays — to most families with severely premature infants. The new law was proposed by state Rep. Janet Yang Rohr after Sarah’s story was published.
The bill, which awaits action by the governor, would also require the state’s early childhood systems to prioritize, in a public awareness campaign, the early identification of infants who automatically qualify for the therapies because of their low birth weight.
This story about children with disabilities was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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.
As the first in my family to attend college, I felt a profound commitment to excel academically and gain admission to a top university. Growing up amid the hustle and bustle of Silicon Valley, I always envisioned a bright future ahead, with college at the forefront of my goals since elementary school.
At my Title I elementary and middle schools, student-to-teacher ratios were even higher than those listed online. There was a lack of classroom technology and resources like history textbooks. Our two middle school counselors each managed students by the hundreds, making it nearly impossible for them to keep track of individual academic progress and educational goals. Afterward, I attended a private high school, thanks to support from my family. Our caring teachers made the effort to get to know each student, and dedicated counselors advocated for me when it mattered most.
Yet when conversations about college came around, navigating the complex system was difficult. I had to chart my own path to success through independent research, often looking at data that was scattered and inconsistent. It hindered my ability to educate myself on college-going rates, costs, outcomes and employment prospects post-graduation.
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Limited resources available at many underserved schools across the nation make it a more challenging environment for students to get support and excel, thus limiting their true academic potential.
In my senior year of high school, after gaining newfound confidence while serving as a commissioner at-large in my county’s youth commission, I decided to try to challenge the status quo in higher education through the power of data and find a way to speak up for other first-generation students who find themselves interacting with systems not designed with their experiences in mind. My mentors at a regional food bank where I volunteered shaped me to lead with confidence and heart.
When I received my admission letter from the University of California, Berkeley, I felt deeply honored to earn a place at one of the world’s leading research and teaching institutions.
I am now an advisory board member of the recently formed California Cradle-to-Career Data System, the state’s longitudinal system that connects education and career outcomes data in one central place. I have learned firsthand that the resources available for students to gauge their potential postgraduate earnings often rely on self-submitted data or estimates, rather than on an accurate overview of college and career outcomes.
As part of this work, I am now helping my state’s leaders develop tools like the Student Pathways dashboard, which provides insights on the higher education options available to students after high school.
The tool provides information on a single website for everyone to access at any time. By streamlining access to this data, it allows students and the adults helping them to easily pinpoint which types of degrees or certifications are right for them, which may lead to employment opportunities where they live and which colleges or universities the students’ classmates are headed to.
Students need access that can help them map out their futures — whether they hope to attend college, earn a certificate or enter the workforce directly after high school. Using data in the pathways tool can clarify how others have navigated to and through college and hopefully help students chart their own paths.
As the youngest advisory board member, I have the opportunity to provide proposals and recommendations from a student’s perspective on how the system can engage with communities to make its data more accessible. Community engagement involves ensuring that Californians are aware of the data system, can understand and interpret the available data and have an opportunity to share their feedback.
I often think about how the countless hours I spent trying to find information to help guide my goals and decision-making were both a burden and barrier to attending college. I know firsthand how the power of data can help build a successful future.
Today, many first-generation and low-income college students do not have the opportunity to assess which pathways will yield the most fruit. I’m confident that with accessible facts and data for our decision-making, we can confidently forge the paths that will bring our dreams to life.
Mike Nguyen is a rising junior studying business administration and science, technology, and society at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. This piece was written in collaboration with Alexis Takagi, a basic needs coordinator at Santa Clara University. Both Nguyen and Takagi are advisory board members of the California Cradle-to-Career Data System.
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.
Five years after the start of the pandemic, one of the most surprising ways that school has profoundly, and perhaps permanently, changed is that students aren’t showing up. Here are some insights from a May symposium at the American Enterprise Institute where scholars shared research on the problem of widespread absenteeism.
1. Chronic absenteeism has come down a lot from its peak in 2021-22, but it’s still 50 percent higher than it was before the pandemic.
Roughly speaking, the chronic absenteeism rate nearly doubled after the pandemic, from 15 percent of students in 2018-19 to a peak of almost 29 percent of students in 2021-22. This is the share of students who are missing at least 10 percent, or 18 or more days, of school a year. Chronic absenteeism has dropped by about 2 to 3 percentage points a year since then, but was still at 23.5 percent in 2023-24, according to the most recent AEI data.
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Chronic absenteeism is more than 50 percent higher than it used to be. There are about 48 million public school students, from kindergarten through 12th grade. Almost 1 in 4 of them, or 11 million students, are missing a lot of school.
2. High-income students and high achievers are also skipping school.
Absenteeism cuts across economic lines. Students from both low- and high-income families are often absent as are high-achieving students. Rates are the highest among students in low-income districts, where 30 percent of students are chronically absent, according to AEI data. But even in low-poverty districts, the chronic absenteeism rate has jumped more than 50 percent from about 10 percent of students to more than 15 percent of students. Similarly, more than 15 percent of students in the highest-achieving school districts (the top third) are chronically absent, up from 10 percent in pre-pandemic years.
“Chronic absenteeism affects disadvantaged students more often, but the rise in chronic absenteeism was an unfortunate tide where all boats rose,” said Nat Malkus, deputy director of education policy studies at AEI.
The data show strikingly large differences by race and ethnicity, with 36 percent of Black students, 33 percent of Hispanic students, 22 percent of white students, and 15 percent of Asian students chronically absent. But researchers said once they controlled for income, the racial differences were not so large. In other words, chronic absenteeism rates among Black and white students of the same income are not so disparate.
3. Moderate absenteeism is increasing.
Everyone is missing more school, not just students who are frequently absent. Jacob Kirksey, an associate professor of education policy at Texas Tech University, tracked 8 million students in three states (Texas, North Carolina and Virginia) from 2017 to 2023. Half had “very good” absentee rates under 4 percent in 2019. By 2023, only a third of students were still going to school as regularly. Two-thirds were not.
“A lot of students who used to miss no school are now missing a couple days,” said Ethan Hutt, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who noticed the same phenomenon in the North Carolina data that he studied. “That’s just become the norm.”
4. Many students say they skip because school is ‘boring.’
Researchers are interviewing students and families to try to understand why so many kids are skipping school.
Kevin Gee, a professor of education at the University of California, Davis, analyzed surveys of elementary, middle and high school students in Rhode Island from 2016 to 2024. He found that more students are reporting missing school for traditionally common reasons: not getting enough sleep and illness.
After the pandemic, parents are more likely to keep their kids home from school when they get sick, but that doesn’t explain why absenteeism is this high or why physically healthy kids are also missing so much school.
Gee found two notable post-pandemic differences among students in Rhode Island. Unfinished homework is less of a reason to skip school today than it used to be, while more elementary school students said they skipped school because “it’s boring.”
Researchers at the symposium debated what to do about school being boring. Some thought school lessons need to be more engaging for students who may have shorter attention spans. But others disagreed. “I think it’s OK for school to be boring,” said Liz Cohen, a research fellow at the Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy. “We need to adjust expectations that school should be as exciting as ‘Dora the Explorer’ all the time.”
5. Mental health issues contribute to absenteeism.
Morgan Polikoff, a professor of education at the University of Southern California, has also analyzed surveys and noticed a “strong connection” between mental health struggles and chronic absenteeism. It was unclear if the increase in mental illness was triggered or exacerbated by the pandemic, or if it reflects anxiety and depression issues that began before the pandemic.
He’s interviewing families and teenagers about why they’re absent, and he says he’s seeing high levels of “disengagement” and mental illness. Parents, he said, were often very concerned about their children’s mental health and well-being.
“Reading the transcripts of these parents and kids who are chronically absent is really difficult,” said Polikoff. “A lot of these kids have really severe traumas. Lots of very legitimate reasons for missing school. Really chronic disengagement. The school is not serving them well.”
6. Showing up has become optional.
Several researchers suggested that there have been profound cultural shifts about the importance of in-person anything. Seth Gershenson, an economist and associate professor of public affairs at American University, suggested that in-person school may seem optional to students in the same way that going to the office feels optional for adults.
“Social norms about in-person attendance have changed, whether it’s meeting with the doctor or whatever,” said Gershenson, pointing out that even his graduate students are more likely to skip his classes. “We’re going to be absent now for reasons that would not have caused us to be absent in the past.”
At the same time, technology has made it easier for students to skip school and make up the work. They can download assignments on Google Classroom or another app, and schedule a video meeting with a classmate or even their teacher to go over what they missed.
“It is easier to be absent from school and make up for it,” said USC’s Polikoff. In his interviews, 39 of the 40 families said it was “easy” to make up for being absent. “People like that everything is available online and convenient. And also, there is absolutely no question in my mind that doing that — which is well-intentioned — makes it much easier for people to be absent.”
The numbers back that up. Gershenson calculated that before the pandemic, skipping 10 days of school caused a student to lose the equivalent of a month’s worth of learning. Now, the learning loss from this amount of absenteeism is about 10 percent less; instead of losing a month of school, it’s like losing 90 percent of a month. Gershenson said that’s still big enough to matter.
And students haven’t felt the most severe consequence: failing. Indeed, even as absenteeism has surged, school grades and graduation rates have been rising. Many blame grade inflation and an effort to avoid a high school dropout epidemic.
7. Today’s absenteeism could mean labor force problems tomorrow.
Academic harm may not be the most significant consequence of today’s elevated levels of chronic absenteeism. Indeed, researchers calculated that returning to pre-pandemic levels of chronic absenteeism would erase only 7.5 percent of the nation’s pandemic learning losses. There are other more profound (and little understood) reasons for why students are so far behind.
More importantly, the experience of attending school regularly doesn’t just improve academic performance, researchers say. It also sets up good habits for the future. “Employers value regular attendance,” said Gershenson. He said employers he has talked to report having trouble finding reliable workers.
“There’s much more than test scores here,” Gershenson said. “This is a valuable personality trait. It’s part of a habit that gets formed early in school. And we’ve definitely lost some of that. And hopefully we can bring it back.”
Next week, I’ll be writing a follow-up column about how some schools are solving the absenteeism puzzle — at least with some students — and why the old pre-pandemic playbooks for reducing absenteeism aren’t working as well anymore.
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.
In the race to help students recover from pandemic-related learning loss, education leaders have overlooked one of the most powerful tools already at their disposal: experienced teachers.
For decades, a myth has persisted in education policy circles that after their first few years on the job, teachers stop improving. This belief has undercut efforts to retain seasoned educators, with many policymakers and administrators treating veteran teachers as replaceable cogs rather than irreplaceable assets.
But that myth doesn’t hold up. The evidence tells a different story: Teachers don’t hit a plateau after year five. While their growth may slow, it doesn’t stop. In the right environments — with collaborative colleagues, supportive administrators and stable classroom assignments — teachers can keep getting better well into their second decade in the classroom.
This insight couldn’t come at a more critical time. As schools work to accelerate post-pandemic learning recovery, especially for the most vulnerable students, they need all the instructional expertise they can muster.
That means not just recruiting new teachers but keeping their best educators in the classroom and giving them the support they need to thrive.
In a new review of 23 longitudinal studies conducted by the Learning Policy Institute and published by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, all but one of the studies showed that teachers generally improve significantly during their first five years. The research review also found continued, albeit slower, improvement well into years 6 through 15; several of the studies found improvement into later years of teaching, though at a diminished pace.
These gains translate into measurable benefits for students: higher test scores, fewer disciplinary issues, reduced absenteeism and increased postsecondary attainment. In North Carolina, for example, students with highly experienced English teachers learned more and were substantially less likely to skip school and more likely to enjoy reading. These effects were strongest for students who were most at risk of falling behind.
While experience helps all teachers improve, we’re currently failing to build that experience where it’s needed most. Schools serving large populations of low-income Black and Hispanic students are far more likely to be staffed primarily by early career teachers.
And unfortunately, they’re also more likely to see those teachers leave after just a few years. This churn makes it nearly impossible to build a stable, experienced workforce in high-need schools.
It also robs novice teachers of the veteran mentors who could help them get better faster and robs students of the opportunity to learn from seasoned educators who have refined their craft over time.
To fix this, we need to address both sides of the equation: helping teachers improve and keeping them in the classrooms that need them most.
Research points to several conditions that support continued teacher growth. Beginning teachers are more likely to stay and improve if they have had high-quality preparation and mentoring. Teaching is not a solo sport. Educators who work alongside more experienced peers improve faster, especially in the early years.
Teachers also improve more when they’re able to teach the same grade level or subject year after year. Unfortunately, those in under-resourced schools are more likely to be shuffled around, undermining their ability to build expertise.
Perhaps most importantly, schools that have strong leadership and which foster time for collaboration and a culture of professional trust see greater gains in teacher retention over time.
Teachers who feel supported by their administrators, who collaborate with a team that shares their mission and who aren’t constantly switching subjects or grade levels are far more likely to stay in the profession.
Pay matters too, especially in high-need schools where working conditions are toughest. But incentives alone aren’t enough. Short-term bonuses can attract teachers, but they won’t keep them if the work environment drives them away.
If we’re serious about improving student outcomes, especially in the wake of the pandemic, we have to stop treating teacher retention as an afterthought. That means retooling our policies to reflect what the research now clearly shows: experience matters, and it can be cultivated.
Policymakers should invest in high-quality teacher preparation and mentoring programs, particularly in high-need schools. They should create conditions that promote teacher stability and collaboration, such as protected planning time and consistent teaching assignments.
Principals must be trained not just as managers, but as instructional leaders capable of building strong school cultures. And state and district leaders must consider meaningful financial incentives and other supports to retain experienced teachers in the classrooms that need them most.
With the right support, teachers can keep getting better. In this moment of learning recovery, a key to success is keeping teachers in schools and consciously supporting their growing effectiveness.
Linda Darling-Hammond is founding president and chief knowledge officer at the Learning Policy Institute. Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and an executive editor of Education Next.
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.
NEW ORLEANS — Kapri Clark used the $50 to help pay for her braces. Lyrik Grant saved half of it, and used the rest for dance classes. Kevin Jackson said he squandered the cash on wings, ride shares for dates and some DJ equipment he later tossed.
For the past five years, Clark, Grant, Jackson and hundreds of high schoolers in New Orleans have shopped — or saved — as part of a project to explore what happens if you give cash directly to young people, no strings attached.
“That was the most helpful thing ever,” said Clark, now a student at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, who said she could still use that extra cash.
“The $50 study,” as it’s known, began at Rooted School, a local charter school, as an experiment to increase attendance. The study has since grown to eight other high schools in the city, as well as Rooted’s sister campus in Indianapolis, with students randomly selected to receive $50 every week for 40 weeks, or $2,000 total. By comparing their spending and savings habits to a larger control group, researchers wanted to figure out whether the money improved a teen’s financial capability and perception of themselves. They also wanted to know: Could the cash boost their grade-point averages and reading scores?
Now, as the experiment expands to Washington, D.C., and perhaps Texas, a final report of the $50 study suggests a little bit of spending cash can make a difference in young people’s lives.
The report, released Tuesday, shows students who received the cash payments were slightly more likely to attend school than those who didn’t. Academic performance did not differ between the groups. But financially, the extra cash helped students acquire stronger long-term planning skills and familiarity with savings accounts and other financial products. They ended the study, on average, with $300 saved away — a 15 percent savings rate, triple the national average for American adults.
“When young people are given the opportunity to manage money in low-stakes environments, they build the habits that shape long-term financial health,” said Stacia West, an associate professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and co-founder of the Center for Guaranteed Income Research, which partnered with the Rooted School Foundation to run the study. “The short-term habits we’re seeing are laying the foundation for lifelong financial capability.”
Across the United States and the globe, hundreds of communities have tinkered with some form of universal basic income, or UBI, a social welfare program that provides people with regular cash payments to meet their needs. Direct cash transfer programs like the $50 study or the child tax credit for families are similar, but they often provide smaller amounts and target specific populations to boost a person’s income. Many studies have linked UBI to financial stability and better employment and health outcomes.
In the U.S. and Canada, researchers have found links between cash transfer pilots that focus on low-income families and better test scores and graduation rates for their kids. So far, though, few experiments have targeted young people or examined how the programs influence their lives specifically.
Talia Livneh, senior director of programs at the Rooted School in New Orleans, poses for a portrait on the school grounds. Credit: Daniella Zalcman for The Hechinger Report
“There’s a deep, deep distrust that we adults have of young people,” said Jonathan Johnson, CEO of the Rooted School Foundation, which operates the network’s four charter schools. “That distrust is to their detriment.”
In New Orleans, roughly 4 in 5 of Rooted students come from economically disadvantaged families, and during the pandemic, many struggled to prioritize school. Some students skipped class to provide child care for their working parents, or because they needed to work themselves, according to Johnson. With some seed funding from a local education nonprofit, Rooted started a “micropilot” to test whether cash could help students make ends meet and get themselves to school.
The original cohort included 20 students, half of whom received the $50 payment. In that micropilot, those receiving the cash saw their material wellbeing improve, meaning their family could more easily afford rent or utilities, and they gained skills around setting financial goals. Rooted added students from its Indianapolis campus and another high school in New Orleans, G.W. Carver. And for their final report released this week, researchers sifted through the spending and survey data from 170 students who received the cash payments and 210 students who did not.
The two-year report found students in the treatment group attended 1.23 more days of school, and spent close to half their funds on essentials like food and groceries. The report also noted that 70 percent of all students at the participating schools qualify for subsidized meals, suggesting “this spending may reflect efforts to meet immediate nutritional needs.” One 12th grader in a survey mentioned using the money to feed their siblings.
Kapri Clark recalled waiting every Wednesday morning for the $50 deposit to appear in her banking app. And every Wednesday afternoon, during her senior year at Carver High School, she put that money toward her $200 bill for braces she covered out of pocket.
She braided hair to cover the rest, and still books clients when she has time in between her studies to become a nurse at the Lafayette campus. Even in college, Clark can see the need for some supplemental income for herself and her peers.
“I make enough to take care of myself, but I watch every dollar,” said Clark. “There’s a lot of people struggling in life to eat, to live. Think if they got kids.”
Read Irvin, chief of staff for Collegiate Academies in New Orleans, a network of five charter high schools that includes Carver High, said the $2,000 had provided the extra incentive a few students needed to stick it out until graduation. “That’s incredibly impactful for their life trajectories,” she said.
In January 2024, the city of New Orleans invested $1 million to bankroll another extension of the study, as part of an economic mobility initiative that tapped federal Covid relief funding. During the pandemic, a skyrocketing murder rate and spike in overall crime had convinced the city to help more residents, especially young people, find stability.
“Research shows that people who are economically stable are less likely to commit crime,” said Courtney Wong, the city’s deputy director of economic development.
The city funding not only expanded the $50 study to nine high schools, it also set a longer timeline for the research: About 800 seniors who participate will have their data tracked for 18 months after their graduation.
A former high school teacher and administrator, Wong said $50 could have made a difference in the lives of many of her former students.
“This targets young people in that perfect moment,” she said. “They’re in the right spot where even a little amount of help could have big, positive impacts before issues of crime or unemployment or things like that even come up.”
Researchers also found students who received the $50 reported greater agency. They felt more control over their finances and more confidence about making long-term financial decisions. Students, according to the report, aligned their spending to future goals such as college prep classes and getting a driver’s license.
Lyrik Grant, a rising junior at Carver High School, is the second-youngest of six kids with two working parents. She could ask them for help, but the $50 allowed Grant to afford the tights and tops she needed for dance class on her own. The money helped cover a college entrance exam, which she aced, and Grant wants to learn how to drive soon.
“My first thought was: What am I going to do with all this money?” Grant said, adding that the cash helped some of her classmates find financial stability. “Children don’t always want to spend their parent’s money, and some parents don’t always have money to give them.”
Still, for some students, the money wasn’t exactly life-changing. Irvin of Collegiate Academies said many used the cash to “just be teenagers.”
That was true for Kevin Jackson, a rising junior at Rooted School New Orleans.
“It’s cool to get free money,” he said. “I was spending it on the TikTok shop: posters, keyboards, lights — stuff I liked, not stuff I actually needed.”
Despite the studies that show a positive impact from UBI, many Americans appear skeptical of the idea of a federal program that gives unconditional financial support to people. Aditi Vasan, a pediatrician and researcher at PolicyLab at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said skeptics often worry about recipients using public dollars for drug use or other illicit behavior, even though the data does not support that.
Still, that fear will likely keep any large-scale cash transfer program from being adopted in the United States any time soon, she said.
“That concern exists certainly for cash transfers in general but might be particularly magnified for teens,” Vasan said. “We’ve not seen that play out in the evidence from the quality studies that have been done.”
Next year, in Washington, D.C., the nonprofit Education Forward will fund a pilot of the $50 study with 40 high schoolers. The Rooted school network resumed talks, meanwhile, to take the study to neighboring Texas, after state lawmakers earlier this year failed to pass legislation that threatened to ban local governments from adopting guaranteed income programs.
Talia Livneh, senior director of programs for the Rooted School Foundation, said the politics may need to catch up to the research.
“I don’t think what we’re doing is so radical. I believe this just works,” she said. “Kids don’t lack character. They lack cash,” Livneh added. “They deserve deep, deep trust that students and people know what’s best for them.”
It’s been four years since Vernell Cheneau III received the $50 for 40 weeks while a student at Rooted in New Orleans, and his economic life isn’t easy. He struggled for months to find part-time work in his hometown. But on a recent summer morning, the same day he finally received a job offer, Cheneau recalled what he learned from the study.
Vernell Cheneau III (left) with two other students who participated in the cash transfer program at Rooted School, in New Orleans. Credit: Courtesy of Rooted School
“You learn that money goes fast, especially if it’s free,” said Cheneau, 22.
As a student, he tried to use the money to build some credit history. Since then, he’s learned the full cost of being an adult in America: health care, fuel and maintenance for his car, getting your hair done before a new job. Cheneau has also spent that time trying to convince friends and family to support UBI.
Most oppose giving “free” money to people, he said. “How much does it cost to feed children? Get to work? We can’t just allow people to drown.”
“Everything costs something,” Cheneau added. “If you’re stuck in a rut, it’s expensive to restart. In this country, it’s expensive to be poor.”
Contact staff writer Neal Morton at 212-678-8247, on Signal at nealmorton.99, or via email at [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.
Peggy Carr, the former commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, at her Maryland home on July 1. Carr worked for the Education Department for more than 35 years before the Trump administration placed her on administrative leave on Feb. 24. Credit: Valerie Plesch for The Hechinger Report
Peggy Carr’s last day on the job came so abruptly that she only had time to grab a few personal photos and her coat before a security officer escorted her out of her office and into a chilly February afternoon. She still doesn’t know why she was summarily dismissed as commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), where she helped buildthe National Assessment of Educational Progress into the influential Nation’s Report Card. NCES is the federal government’s third-largest statistical agency after the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Running it for three and a half years was the capstone of Carr’s 35-year career at the Education Department.
And suddenly, she was out in the cold with no explanation.
“I would say that what has happened is a professional tragedy, not just for me, but for all of NCES and my staff,” said Carr, 71, in a recent interview. “But for me, it really was a personal tragedy because I have spent my career helping NCES build its solid reputation as a premier statistical agency in the federal system.”
Carr doesn’t know if the decision to fire her came from the White House, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency or an outside policy advocate.
But she is clear about what was lost by the firing of the head of a nonpartisan statistical agency: an objective assessment of how American students are doing. And she finds it “ironic,” she said, that her increasingly grim reports were President Donald Trump’s public rationale for dismantling the Education Department.
Although Carr was the first woman and the first Black person to run NCES, her “firsts” go back decades. She joined NCES in 1993, after teaching statistics at Howard University and a stint as a statistician in the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights. “I was the first person of color in NCES to ever have a managerial job, period,” said Carr. She broke a long record: The education statistical agency dates back to 1867, created in the aftermath of the Civil War as part of an effort to help the South recover during Reconstruction. She was appointed commissioner by former President Joe Biden in 2021.
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“It’s a kill-the-messenger strategy,” she said. “We have just been the messenger of how students in this country are faring.”
Congress established a six-year term for the commissioner so that the job would straddle administrations and insulate statistics from politics. Carr’s term was supposed to extend through 2027, but she made history with yet another first: the first NCES commissioner to be fired by a president.
Carr wasn’t thinking about her gender or her race, despite the fact that three days earlier, Trump had abruptly fired another Black senior official, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Maybe they found out I was the only Biden appointee left in the department,” Carr said. “Maybe they didn’t realize that until then.”
Carr has reason to be puzzled by her firing. She is hardly a radical. She defended standardized tests against charges that they are racist. She publicly made the case that the nation needs to pay attention to achievement gaps, even if it sometimes means putting a spotlight on the low achievement of Black and Hispanic students. “The data can reveal things about what people can do to improve it,” Carr said.
She was dismissed on Feb. 24, more than a week before Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s Senate confirmation on March 3. The department named Carr’s deputy, Chris Chapman, to act as her replacement, but subsequently fired him in a round of mass layoffs on March 11. The agency was then leaderless until July 7,when another senior department official was told to add NCES to his responsibilities.
Civil servant
In January, at the start of the second Trump administration, Carr thought her job was relatively safe. As a career civil servant, she’d worked with many Republican administrations and served as second in command under James “Lynn” Woodworth, whom Trump appointed as NCES commissioner in his first term. Both Woodworth and Carr say they had a good working relationship because they both cared about getting the numbers right. Indeed, Woodworth was so troubled and disturbed by Carr’s dismissal and the fate of the nation’s education statistics agency that he spoke out publicly, risking retaliation.
Even Carr’s fiercest critics, who contend she was an entrenched bureaucrat who failed to modernize the statistical service and allowed costs to balloon, condemned the humiliating way she was dismissed.
“She deserves the nation’s gratitude and thanks” for setting up a whole system of assessments, said Mark Schneider, who served as the director of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), which oversees NCES, from 2018 to 2024 and as NCES commissioner from 2005 to 2008.
The official appointment of Peggy Carr as commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics by former President Joe Biden. Credit: Valerie Plesch for The Hechinger Report
A landing team
The transition seemed normal at first. A “landing team” — emissaries from the Trump transition team — arrived in mid-January and Carr briefed them three times. They asked questions about NCES’s statistical work. “They were quite pleasant, to be honest,” Carr said. “They seemed curious and interested.”
Days later, DOGE arrived. Still, Carr wasn’t worried. “We actually thought we were going to be OK,” Carr said. “We thought that their focus was going to be on grants, not contracts.”
The Institute of Education Sciences had awarded millions of dollars in grants to professors and private-sector researchers to study ways to improve diversity and equity in the classroom — priorities that were now out of favor with the Trump team. Carr’s agency is housed under the IES umbrella, but Carr’s work didn’t touch upon any of that.
However, NCES has an unusual structure. Unlike other statistics agencies, NCES has never had many statisticians on staff and didn’t do much in-house statistical work. Because Congress put restrictions on its staffing levels, NCES had to rely on outside contractors to do 90 percent of the data work. Only through outside contractors was the Education Department able to measure academic achievement, count students and track university tuition costs. Its small staff of 100 primarily managed and oversaw the contracts.
Keyword searches
Following DOGE instructions, Carr’s team conducted keyword searches of DEI language in her agency’s contracts. “Everyone was asked to do that,” she said. “That wasn’t so bad. The chaotic part really started when questions were being asked about reductions in the contracts themselves.”
Carr said she never had direct contact with anyone on Musk’s team, and she doesn’t even know how many of them descended upon the Education Department. Her interaction with DOGE was secondhand. Matthew Soldner, acting director of IES, summoned Carr and the rest of his executive team to his office to respond to DOGE’s demands. “We met constantly, trying to figure out what DOGE wanted,” Carr said. DOGE’s orders were primarily transmitted through Jonathan Bettis, an Education Department attorney, who was experienced with procurement and contracts. It was Bettis who talked directly with the DOGE team, Carr said.
The main DOGE representative who took an interest in NCES was “Conor.” “I don’t know his last name,” said Carr. “My staff never saw anyone else but Conor if they saw him at all.” Conor is 32-year-old Conor Fennessy, according to several media reports. His deleted LinkedIn profile said he has a background in finance. (Fennessy has also been involved in getting access to data at Health and Human Services and spearheading cuts at the National Park Service, according to media reports.) Efforts to reach Fennessy through the Education Department and through DOGE were unsuccessful.
“It was chaotic,” said Carr. “Bettis would tell us what DOGE wanted, and we ran away to get it done. And then things might change the next day. ‘You need to cut more.’ ‘I need to understand more about what this contract does or that contract does.’”
It was a lot. Carr oversaw 60 data collections, some with multiple parts. “There were so many contracts and there were hundreds of lines on our acquisition plans,” she said. “It was a very complex and time-consuming task.”
Lost in translation
The questions kept coming. “It was like playing telephone tag when you have complicated data collections and you’re trying to explain it,” Carr said. Bettis “would sometimes not understand what my managers or I were saying about what we could cut or could not cut. And so there was this translation problem,” she said. (Efforts to reach Bettis were unsuccessful.) Eventually a couple of Carr’s managers were allowed to talk to DOGE employees directly.
Carr said her staff begged DOGE not to cut a technology platform called EDPass, which is used by state education agencies to submit data to the federal Education Department on everything from student enrollment to graduation rates. For Carr, EDPass was a particular point of pride in her effort to modernize and process data more efficiently. EDPass slashed the time it took to release data from 20 months in 2016-17 to just four months in 2023-24.
Carr said DOGE did not spare EDPass. Indeed, DOGE did not spare much of NCES.
On Feb 10, only about a week after DOGE arrived, Carr learned that 89 of her contracts were terminated, which represented the vast majority of the statistical work that her agency conducts. “We were in shock,” said Carr. “What do you mean it’s all gone?”
Even its advocates concede that NCES needed reforms. The agency was slow to release data,it usedsomeoutdated collection methods and there were places where costs could be trimmed. Education Department spokesperson Madi Biedermann said that the department, “in partnership with DOGE employees,” found contracts with overhead and administrative expenses that exceeded 50 percent, “a clear example of contractors taking advantage of the American taxpayer.”
Piloting an old airplane
Carr said she was never a fan of the contracting system and wished she could have built an in-house statistical agency like those at the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But that would have required congressional authorization for the Education Department to increase its headcount. That never happened. Carr was piloting an old airplane, taped together through a complicated network of contracts, while attempting to modernize and fix it. She said she was trying to follow the 2022 recommendations of a National Academies panel, but it wasn’t easy.
The chaos continued over the next two weeks. DOGE provided guidelines for justifying the reinstatement of contracts it had just killed and Carr’s team worked long hours trying to save the data. Carr was particularly worried about preserving the interagency agreement with the Census Bureau, which was needed to calculate federal Title I allocations to high-poverty schools. Those calculations needed to be ready by June and the clock was ticking.
The DOGE sledgehammer came just as schools were administering an important international test — the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). The department was also in the midst of a national teachers and principals survey. “People were worried about what was going to happen with those,” said Carr.
Even though DOGE terminated the PISA contract, the contractor continued testing in schools and finished its data collection in June. But now it’s unclear who will tabulate the scores and analyze them. The Education Department disclosed in a June legal brief that it is restarting PISA. “I was told that they’re not going to do the national report, which is a little concerning to me,” Carr said. Asked for confirmation, the Education Department did not respond.
Another widely used data collection, the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey (ECLS-K 2024), which tracks a cohort of students from kindergarten through elementary school, was supposed to collect its second year of data as the kindergarteners progressed to first grade. “We had to give up on that,” said Carr.
NAEP anxiety
Carr said that behind the scenes, her priority was to save NAEP. DOGE was demanding aggressive cuts, and she worked throughout the weekend of Feb. 22-23with her managers and the NAEP contractors to satisfy the demands. “We thought we could cut 28 percent — I even remember the number — without cutting into critical things,” she said. “That’s what I told them I could do.”
DOGE had been demanding 50 percent cuts to NAEP’s $185 million budget, according to several former Education Department employees. Carr could not see a way to cut that deep. The whole point of the exam is to track student achievement over time, and if too many corners were cut, it could “break the trend,” she said, making it impossible to compare the next test results in 2026 with historical scores.
“I am responsible in statute and I could not cut NAEP as much as they wanted to without cutting into congressionally mandated activities,” Carr said. “I told them that.”
While Carr and DOGE remained far apart in negotiations over cost, a security officer appeared at her office door at 3:50 p.m. on Feb. 24. Carr remembers the exact time because colleagues were waiting at her door to join her for a 4 p.m. Zoom meeting with the chair of the board that oversees NAEP.
The security officer closed the door to her office so he could tell her privately that he was there to escort her out. He said she had 15 minutes to leave. “Escort me where? What do you mean?” Carr asked. “I was in shock. I wasn’t even quite understanding what he was asking, to be honest.”
The security officer told her about an email saying she was put on administrative leave. Carr checked her inbox. It was there, sent within the previous hour.
The security officer “was very nice,” she said. “He refused to call me Peggy,” and addressed her as Dr. Carr. “He helped me collect my things, and I left.” He opened the doors for her and walked her to her car.
“I had no idea that this was going to happen, so it was shocking and unexpected,” Carr said. “I was working like I do every other day, a busy day where every minute is filled with something.”
She said she’s asked the department why she was dismissed so abruptly, but has not received a response. The Education Department said it does not comment to the public on its personnel actions.
Packing via Zoom
Two days later, Carr returned to pick up other belongings. Via Zoom, Carr’s staff had gone through her office with her — 35 years worth of papers and memorabilia — and packed up so many boxes that Carr had to bring a second car, an SUV.
When Carr and her husband arrived, she said, “there were all these people waiting in the front of the building cheering me on. The men helped me put the things in my husband’s car and my car. It was a real tearjerker. And that was before they would be dismissed. They didn’t know they would be next.”
Less than two weeks later, on March 11, most of Carr’s staff — more than 90 NCES staffers — was fired. Only three remained. “I thought maybe they just made a mistake, that it was going to be a ‘whoops moment’ like with the bird flu scientists or the people overseeing the weapons arsenal,” Carr said.
The fate of NCES remains uncertain. The Education Department says that it is restarting and reassessing some of the data collections that DOGE terminated, but the scope of the work might be much smaller. Carr says it will take years to understand the full extent of the damage. Carr was slated to issue a statement about her thoughts on NCES on July 14.
The damage
The immediate problem is that there aren’t enough personnel to do the work that Congress mandates. So far, NCES has missed an annual deadline for delivering a statistical report to Congress — a deadline NCES had “never, ever missed” in its history, Carr said — and failed to release the 2024 NAEP science test scores in June because there was no commissioner to sign off on them. But the department managed to calculate the Title I allocations to high-poverty schools “in the nick of time,” Carr said.
In addition to the collection of fresh data, Carr is concerned about the maintenance of historical datasets. When DOGE canceled the contracts, Carr counted that NCES had 550 datasets scattered in different locations. NCES doesn’t have its own data warehouse and Carr was trying to corral and store the datasets. She’s worried about protecting privacy and student confidentiality.
An Education Department official said that this data is safe and will soon be transferred to IES’s secure servers.
Peggy Carr holds artwork made by a former colleague at the National Center for Education Statistics. NAEP stands for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which Carr helped build into the influential barometer of how American students are faring. Credit: Valerie Plesch for The Hechinger Report
In the meantime, Carr says she plans to stay involved in education statistics — but from the outside. “With this administration wanting to push education down to the states, there are opportunities that I see in my next chapter,” Carr said. She said she’s been talking with states and school districts about calculating where they rank on an international yardstick.
Carr is in close touch with her former team. In May, 50 of them gathered at a church in Virginia to commiserate. A senior statistician gave Carr a homespun plaque of glued blue buttons spelling the letters NAEP with a shiny gold star above it. It was a fitting gift. NAEP is regarded as the best designed test in the country, the gold standard. Carr built that reputation, and now it has gone home with her.
This story about Peggy Carr 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.
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