In an age defined by digital transformation, access to reliable, high-speed internet is not a luxury; it is the bedrock of opportunity. It impacts the school classroom, the doctor’s office, the town square and the job market.
As we stand on the cusp of a workforce revolution driven by the “arrival technology” of artificial intelligence, high-speed internet access has become the critical determinant of our nation’s economic future. Yet, for millions of Americans, this essential connection remains out of reach.
This digital divide is a persistent crisis that deepens societal inequities, and we must rally around one of the most effective tools we have to combat it: the Universal Service Fund. The USF is a long-standing national commitment built on a foundation of bipartisan support and born from the principle that every American, regardless of their location or income, deserves access to communications services.
Without this essential program, over 54 million students, 16,000 healthcare providers and 7.5 million high-need subscribers would lose internet service that connects classrooms, rural communities (including their hospitals) and libraries to the internet.
The discussion about the future of USF has reached a critical juncture: Which communities will have access to USF, how it will be funded and whether equitable access to connectivity will continue to be a priority will soon be decided.
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court found the USF’s infrastructure to be constitutional — and a backbone for access and opportunity in this country. Congress recently took a significant next step by relaunching a bicameral, bipartisan working group devoted to overhauling the fund. Now they are actively seeking input from stakeholders on how to best modernize this vital program for the future, and they need our input.
I’m urging everyone who cares about digital equity to make their voices heard. The window for our input in support of this vital connectivity infrastructure is open through September 15.
While Universal Service may appear as only a small fee on our monthly phone bills, its impact is monumental. The fund powers critical programs that form a lifeline for our nation’s most vital institutions and vulnerable populations. The USF helps thousands of schools and libraries obtain affordable internet — including the school I founded in downtown Brooklyn. For students in rural towns, the E-Rate program, funded by the USF, allows access to the same online educational resources as those available to students in major cities. In schools all over the country, the USF helps foster digital literacy, supports coding clubs and enables students to complete homework online.
By wiring our classrooms and libraries, we are investing in the next generation of innovators.
The coming waves of technological change — including the widespread adoption of AI — threaten to make the digital divide an unbridgeable economic chasm. Those on the wrong side of this divide experienced profound disadvantages during the pandemic. To get connected, students at my school ended up doing homework in fast-food parking lots. Entire communities lost vital connections to knowledge and opportunity when libraries closed.
But that was just a preview of the digital struggle. This time, we have to fight to protect the future of this investment in our nation’s vital infrastructure to ensure that the rising wave of AI jobs, opportunities and tools is accessible to all.
AI is rapidly becoming a fundamental tool for the American workforce and in the classroom. AI tools require robust bandwidth to process data, connect to cloud platforms and function effectively.
The student of tomorrow will rely on AI as a personalized tutor that enhances teacher-led classroom instruction, explains complex concepts and supports their homework. AI will also power the future of work for farmers, mechanics and engineers.
Without access to AI, entire communities and segments of the workforce will be locked out. We will create a new class of “AI have-nots,” unable to leverage the technology designed to propel our economy forward.
The ability to participate in this new economy, to upskill and reskill for the jobs of tomorrow, is entirely dependent on the one thing the USF is designed to provide: reliable connectivity.
The USF is also critical for rural health care by supporting providers’ internet access and making telehealth available in many communities. It makes internet service affordable for low-income households through its Lifeline program and the Connect America Fund, which promotes the construction of broadband infrastructure in rural areas.
The USF is more than a funding mechanism; it is a statement of our values and a strategic economic necessity. It reflects our collective agreement that a child’s future shouldn’t be limited by their school’s internet connection, that a patient’s health outcome shouldn’t depend on their zip code and that every American worker deserves the ability to harness new technology for their career.
With Congress actively debating the future of the fund, now is the time to rally. We must engage in this process, call on our policymakers to champion a modernized and sustainably funded USF and recognize it not as a cost, but as an essential investment in a prosperous, competitive and flourishing America.
Erin Mote is the CEO and founder of InnovateEDU, a nonprofit that aims to catalyze education transformation by bridging gaps in data, policy, practice and research.
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.
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.
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 reported by and originally published by APM Reports in connection with its podcast Sold a Story: How Teach Kids to Read Went So Wrong.
When voters elected Donald Trump in November, most people who worked at the U.S. Department of Education weren’t scared for their jobs. They had been through a Trump presidency before, and they hadn’t seen big changes in their department then. They saw their work as essential, mandated by law, nonpartisan and, as a result, insulated from politics.
Then, in early February, the Department of Government Efficiency showed up. Led at the time by billionaire CEO Elon Musk, and known by the cheeky acronym DOGE, it gutted the Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences, posting on X that the effort would ferret out “waste, fraud and abuse.”
DOGE is looking for help from the general public!
Please DM insight for reducing waste, fraud, and abuse, along with any helpful insights or awesome ideas, to the relevant DOGE affiliates (found on the Affiliates tab). For example, @DOGE_USDA, @DOGE_SSA, etc. We will add…
A post from the Department of Government Efficiency.
When it was done, DOGE had cut approximately $900 million in research contracts and more than 90 percent of the institute’s workforce had been laid off. (The current value of the contracts was closer to $820 million, data compiled by APM Reports shows, and the actual savings to the government was substantially less, because in some cases large amounts of money had been spent already.)
Among staff cast aside were those who worked on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — also known as the Nation’s Report Card — which is one of the few federal education initiatives the Trump administration says it sees as valuable and wants to preserve.
The assessment is a series of tests administered nearly every year to a national sample of more than 10,000 students in grades 4, 8 and 12. The tests regularly measure what students across the country know in reading, math and other subjects. They allow the government to track how well America’s students are learning overall. Researchers can also combine the national data with the results of tests administered by states to draw comparisons between schools and districts in different states.
The assessment is “something we absolutely need to keep,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said at an education and technology summit in San Diego earlier this year. “If we don’t, states can be a little manipulative with their own results and their own testing. I think it’s a way that we keep everybody honest.”
But researchers and former Department of Education employees say they worry that the test will become less and less reliable over time, because the deep cuts will cause its quality to slip — and some already see signs of trouble.
“The main indication is that there just aren’t the staff,” said Sean Reardon, a Stanford University professor who uses the testing data to research gaps in learning between students of different income levels.
All but one of the experts who make sure the questions in the assessment are fair and accurate — called psychometricians — have been laid off from the National Center for Education Statistics. These specialists play a key role in updating the test and making sure it accurately measures what students know.
“These are extremely sophisticated test assessments that required a team of researchers to make them as good as they are,” said Mark Seidenberg, a researcher known for his significant contributions to the science of reading. Seidenberg added that “a half-baked” assessment would undermine public confidence in the results, which he described as “essentially another way of killing” the assessment.
The Department of Education defended its management of the assessment in an email: “Every member of the team is working toward the same goal of maintaining NAEP’s gold-standard status,” it read in part.
The National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policies for the national test, said in a statement that it had temporarily assigned “five staff members who have appropriate technical expertise (in psychometrics, assessment operations, and statistics) and federal contract management experience” to work at the National Center for Education Statistics. No one from DOGE responded to a request for comment.
Harvard education professor Andrew Ho, a former member of the governing board, said the remaining staff are capable, but he’s concerned that there aren’t enough of them to prevent errors.
“In order to put a good product up, you need a certain number of person-hours, and a certain amount of continuity and experience doing exactly this kind of job, and that’s what we lost,” Ho said.
The Trump administration has already delayed the release of some testing data following the cutbacks. The Department of Education had previously planned to announce the results of the tests for 8th grade science, 12th grade math and 12th grade reading this summer; now that won’t happen until September. The board voted earlier this year to eliminate more than a dozen tests over the next seven years, including fourth grade science in 2028 and U.S. history for 12th graders in 2030. The governing board has also asked Congress to postpone the 2028 tests to 2029, citing a desire to avoid releasing test results in an election year.
“Today’s actions reflect what assessments the Governing Board believes are most valuable to stakeholders and can be best assessed by NAEP at this time, given the imperative for cost efficiencies,” board chair and former North Carolina Gov. Bev Perdue said earlier this year in a press release.
The National Assessment Governing Board canceled more than a dozen tests when it revised the schedule for the National Assessment of Educational Progress in April. This annotated version of the previous schedule, adopted in 2023, shows which tests were canceled. Topics shown in all caps were scheduled for a potential overhaul; those annotated with a red star are no longer scheduled for such a revision.
Recent estimates peg the annual cost to keep the national assessment running at about $190 million per year, a fraction of the department’s 2025 budget of approximately $195 billion.
Adam Gamoran, president of the William T. Grant Foundation, said multiple contracts with private firms — overseen by Department of Education staff with “substantial expertise” — are the backbone of the national test.
“You need a staff,” said Gamoran, who was nominated last year to lead the Institute of Education Sciences. He was never confirmed by the Senate. “The fact that NCES now only has three employees indicates that they can’t possibly implement NAEP at a high level of quality, because they lack the in-house expertise to oversee that work. So that is deeply troubling.”
The cutbacks were widespread — and far outside of what most former employees had expected under the new administration.
“I don’t think any of us imagined this in our worst nightmares,” said a former Education Department employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation by the Trump administration. “We weren’t concerned about the utter destruction of this national resource of data.”
“At what point does it break?” the former employee asked.
Every state has its own test for reading, math and other subjects. But state tests vary in difficulty and content, which makes it tricky to compare results in Minnesota to Mississippi or Montana.
“They’re totally different tests with different scales,” Reardon said. “So NAEP is the Rosetta stone that lets them all be connected.”
Reardon and his team at Stanford used statistical techniques to combine the federal assessment results with state test scores and other data sets to create the Educational Opportunity Project. The project, first released in 2016 and updated periodically in the years that followed, shows which schools and districts are getting the best results — especially for kids from poor families. Since the project’s release, Reardon said, the data has been downloaded 50,000 times and is used by researchers, teachers, parents, school boards and state education leaders to inform their decisions.
For instance, the U.S. military used the data to measure school quality when weighing base closures, and superintendents used it to find demographically similar but higher-performing districts to learn from, Reardon said.
If the quality of the data slips, those comparisons will be more difficult to make.
“My worry is we just have less-good information on which to base educational decisions at the district, state and school level,” Reardon said. “We would be in the position of trying to improve the education system with no information. Sort of like, ‘Well, let’s hope this works. We won’t know, but it sounds like a good idea.’”
Seidenberg, the reading researcher, said the national assessment “provided extraordinarily important, reliable information about how we’re doing in terms of teaching kids to read and how literacy is faring in the culture at large.”
Producing a test without keeping the quality up, Seidenberg said, “would be almost as bad as not collecting the data at all.”
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.
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.
Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.
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.”
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 podcast, Sold a Story, was produced by APM Reports and reprinted with permission.
There’s an idea about how children learn to read that’s held sway in schools for more than a generation – even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read. In this new American Public Media podcast, host Emily Hanford investigates the influential authors who promote this idea and the company that sells their work. It’s an exposé of how educators came to believe in something that isn’t true and are now reckoning with the consequences – children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended.
Episode 14: The Cuts
Education research is at a turning point in the United States. The Trump administration is slashing government funding for science and dismantling the Department of Education. We look at what the cuts mean for the science of reading — and the effort to get that science into schools.
This podcast, Sold a Story, was produced by APM Reports and reprinted with permission.
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.
After graduating from Knox College in Illinois with a bachelor’s degree, Stephanie Martinez-Calderon’s plans were upended by the pandemic. She hadn’t planned on becoming a teacher but found an opportunity to tutor remotely for the year after college.
Tutoring helped her build confidence and develop instructional skills, and today she’s a middle school teacher in the Washoe County School District in Nevada.
Tutoring can be a powerful training ground for future educators, providing hands-on experience, confidence and a bridge into the classroom. And what might begin as a temporary opportunity can become a career path at a time when teachers are needed more than ever: A recent report noted that nearlyone in five K-12 teachers plan to leave teaching or are unsure if they’ll stay.
Turnover remains a crisis in many districts, one that can be solved by a ready-made pipeline of young future educators with instructional experience and relationship-building skills they’ve gained from tutoring.
How school districts think about tutoring should evolve. Rather than seeing it as a short-term response to pandemic-interrupted learning, they should view it as part of the fabric of school design and future educator development. This requires including tutoring in strategic plans, forming community partnerships and creating a structure to sustain programs that cultivate tutors for careers in education. To fund these programs and pay tutors, districts can redirect Title I funds, use federal work-study and create apprenticeship programs.
Starting as a tutor allows aspiring educators to build core teaching skills in a supportive, lower-stakes environment. Tutors learn to navigate student relationships and adapt lessons to individual needs. Without having to manage an entire classroom, they can practice asking questions that get students thinking and selecting problems to help students learn. This early practice eases the transition into teaching.
Tutors from Generation Z, born between 1996 and 2012, often bring fresh energy to the profession. As digital natives, they are reimagining how to engage and inspire students, leverage technology and foster creativity and new approaches to learning.
They are alsothe most ethnically and racially diverse generation yet: Many come from backgrounds historically underrepresented in the teaching force; over half of undergraduates identify as first-generation college students. Their engagement broadens the prospects for a more diverse teacher pipeline.
Gen Z’s emphasis on flexibility and remote opportunities is one of the most significant workforce changes since the pandemic. They value mental health, stability and mission-driven work. Part-time, hybrid and wellness benefits help recruit young talent.
At our nonprofit, recruiters hear from education candidates that Gen Z appreciates the chance to try out industries, and that tutoring provides them with a window into the world of teaching.
Public schools could better meet the evolving needs of young professionals entering education by reimagining tutor roles to include hybrid options, mental health supports and collaborative teaching pathways for professional growth. For instance, a tutor might start off working in a part-time online tutoring role, but after interacting with students virtually and gaining more experience, they may be more excited to take on a full-time teaching role on-site.
For school districts, tutoring programs can serve as effective recruitment pipelines. By offering recent graduates a low-barrier entry point into education — one that doesn’t require immediate certification — districts can spark interest in teaching among candidates who may not have previously considered it.
When tutors step into teaching roles, they bring valuable continuity — familiarity with the students and insight into progress and school culture. This seamless transition supports both student learning and district staffing needs.
The idea that tutoring should be built into future educator pipelines is spreading. For example, since the launch of its Ignite Fellowship in 2020, Teach for America says that 550 of its former tutors have become full-time teachers. The program has proven to be especially effective at drawing in nontraditional candidates — those who may not have initially envisioned themselves in the classroom. In Washington, D.C., the school district launched a tutor-to-teacher apprenticeship program after success with high-impact tutoring. In Texas, teacher residents are required to work as tutors and in other support roles while co-teaching with a mentor.
By offering flexible, purpose-driven opportunities, districts can attract Gen Z professionals and give them a meaningful entry point into teaching. And tutoring programs can become more than academic support — they can serve as strategic talent pipelines that strengthen the future of the teaching workforce.
Alan Safran is co-founder, CEO and chair of the board ofSaga Education; Halley Bowman is senior director of academics.
This story about tutoring was produced byThe 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.
ELKHART, Ind. — The numbers were discouraging, and in some cases getting worse. Nearly 30 percent of Indiana’s high schoolers were chronically absent in 2022. Only about 52 percent of students in the state enrolled in collegein 2023, a 12-percentage-point drop in seven years. Fewer students were pursuing other paths, too: The share of students enlisting in the military, for example, declined by 41 percent from 2018 to 2022.
When Katie Jenner toured the state after becoming education secretary in 2021, she heard from many students who said they simply didn’t value high school or see how it would help them.“That was really hard to hear,” Jenner said. “We had to look in the mirror and say, ‘OK, this is the reality. Let’s do better.’”
Jenner and her team began redesigning what high school looks like in Indiana, in an effort to make it more relevant to young people’s futures and help them gain a better grasp of career paths. For too long, she and others argued, kids had been pushed to plan for four-year college, yet only about half of seniors actually enrolled, and those who did go often dropped out before graduating.
When a draft of the plan was released in early 2024, it drew fierce protest from many parents and educators who worried the state was prioritizing workforce learning over academics. Jenner and her staff reworked the proposal, eventually crafting a plan that alleviated some, though not all, of the concerns.
The “New Indiana Diploma” — which was signed into law in April and goes into effect for all incoming first-year students this academic year — gives students the option to earn different “seals” in addition to a basic diploma, depending on whether they plan to attend college, go straight to work or serve in the military. Jenner describes it as an effort to tailor the diploma to students’ interests, expose students to careers and recognize different forms of student achievement.
Experts said the template is something of a model nationally, at a time when more states are reconsidering how to help students prepare for careers and the federal government is also pushing alternatives to four-year college. Elements of that effort have earned bipartisan support: Presidents from both parties have advocated for expanding work-based learning, and President Donald Trump recently called for the creation of 1 million new apprenticeships.
“The basic architecture of American high school is being questioned and challenged,” said Timothy Knowles, president of the Carnegie Foundation.* Indiana is at the forefront of an effort to incorporate more experiential learning instead of restricting education to school buildings, he said: “Indiana is really breaking ground.”
The initial proposal Jenner’s agency drafted would have created two high school diplomas, “Graduates Prepared to Succeed” and “Graduates Prepared to Succeed Plus.” Both would have scaled back math and science requirements and loosened recommendations for world languages and other electives. Meanwhile, they would have encouraged all students to participate in work-based learning in apprenticeships, internships or job shadowing, with at least 75 hours in such activities required for the “plus” diploma.
Indiana hopes that work-based learning opportunities at companies like Alpha Systems and Hoosier Crane Service Company, in Elkhart, Indiana, can flourish under the new diploma system. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
In 2024, the state board of education held dozens of meetings to gather feedback on the proposal for the revamped diplomas — and the backlash was intense. Leaders of higher education institutions, including the state’s flagship schools, Indiana and Purdue universities, said students graduating under the new system would not meet minimum requirements for admission. Purdue’s president, Mung Chiang, wrote a letter to Jenner showing that the proposed diploma system required too few credits in every subject except English.
Hoosier parents were furious that their children might have to sacrifice more challenging courses to fulfill the mandatory work experience requirement under the “plus” option. At an Indiana Department of Education hearing in June 2024, parent Michelae Hill was among dozens who criticized the proposal, calling it “intentionally dumbing down our population” and warning that “what will happen is that we are ensuring a permanent underclass, we are ensuring cheap workers.” There were also questions about the logistics of workplace learning, including transportation and possible safety issues on job sites.
State education policy makers went back to the drawing board. The revised version, adopted last December, establishes one basic diploma that all graduates earn, plus the seals students can pursue depending on their post-high-school plans. Even within each seal, students have several ways of meeting the requirements.
For example, to receive the “enrollment” seal — meant primarily for college-bound students — high schoolers can choose from more advanced classes in math, science, social studies and world languages, and may earn additional credits in Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or other such college-level courses. An “enrollment honors plus” seal requires that students concurrently obtain a credential such as an associate’s degree or technical certificate and complete 75 hours of work-based learning in apprenticeships, internships or other such programs.
“We wanted rigor and flexibility and less cookie cutter,” said Jenner.
Even the updated system has critics, though. For the basic diploma, students must earn a minimum of 42 credits, two more than before. But how students reach that threshold is different: Economics, geometry and Algebra II are no longer required, while courses in financial literacy and communication are. Physical education is one credit instead of two, and world languages and fine arts are no longer recommended electives.
Professor Michael Hicks, who runs the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University in Indiana, said he worries about the reduced mathematics rigor in particular. While most states do not require Algebra II for graduation, the class is often seen as a necessity for admission to selective colleges and for certain careers. Hicks said high-achieving, well-resourced students may benefit from the flexibility of the new diploma, as could students committed to the military. But many other students could be harmed, he said, if they are left with the impression that the basic diploma alone will prepare them well for college when it does not.
“It is essentially funneling children away from academic opportunity very early at a time when we really needed to have more kids pushed into the academic options that would get them into college,” he said, arguing that people with college degrees outearn those with only a high school education and have also fueled the state’s and country’s economic growth of the past several decades. “This curriculum will cause the Indiana economy to stall and potentially go into reverse.”
At public meetings last winter, some parents and educators raised concerns that the new system amounted to an unfunded mandate for school districts and would put a huge burden in particular on counselors, who would be working closely with students to help chart their diploma paths. Critics also objected to the de-emphasis of other classes like music and foreign languages. Megan Worcester, the president of the Indiana Foreign Language Teachers Association, said the reduced emphasis on foreign language would hurt the state’s economy; she cited a study in which nearly 1 in 4 employers surveyed said they had lost or couldn’t pursue a business opportunity because of language barriers.
Jenner, a former high school teacher, said the new diploma allows students greater flexibility to choose electives depending on their goals, which could include language and music study. While Algebra II is no longer required, students must take four math credits beyond the required Algebra I and personal finance, she said. Jenner also said the state had allocated a portion of $50 million in discretionary funding to train counselors in helping students navigate the new diploma system. In addition, it dedicated up to $10 million in grants to help students pay for transportation, equipment and certifications related to work-based learning, and also provided financial assistance to companies that take on apprentices. Each school that offers work-based learning will receive an extra $500 per participating student.
The new plan eventually quieted the concerns of many education leaders. Several universities, including Indiana and Purdue, released letters of support. “We appreciate the thoughtful adjustments to the work based learning requirements, AP testing and transferability of dual credits,” wrote Pamela Whitten, president of Indiana University. (Neither university agreed to an interview with its leaders.) All major education groups in the state, including the Indiana State Teachers Association, Indiana School Boards Association and the Indiana Association of Public School Superintendents, endorsed the plan.
Ty Zartman, a student apprentice at Hoosier Crane Service Company in Elkhart, Indiana, decided to go straight to work after graduating high school, despite being a straight A student. Parents and educators objected to Indiana’s first proposal for a new high school diploma system, arguing that the emphasis on workplace experience would crowd out academic learning. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
In April, Gov. Mike Braun announced that beginning this year, students who earn the state’s “enrollment honors plus” seal will be automatically accepted into the state’s public colleges and universities, including Purdue and Indiana, potentially persuading more students to enroll.
Parent Chantee Eldridge said she believes the new diploma will make higher education more affordable and help students sharpen their career plans at an earlier age. Her son, Micah, is a 16-year-old senior at Brownsburg High School, near Indianapolis, and has already taken dual credit courses through a partnership with Vincennes University. College credits can be expensive, she said, so earning them at no cost in high school can be a big money saver.
Micah, who has a 3.7 GPA and plays semi pro soccer, said he’s always enjoyed challenging classes and plans to go to college. “When things get repeated, that’s when I get bored and start to tap out mentally,” he said. In college, he anticipates studying psychology — a surprise to his mother, who expected him to pursue math or physics, two topics he’s always excelled in. She likes the idea of him doing an internship with a psychologist, so he can learn more about the field and gain practical work experience before he goes to college; that’s the sort of opportunity that will become more common under this new diploma system.
“Very rarely do you know exactly what you want to do between 16 and 18,” Eldridge said. “That will help students and their families make an informed decision.”
For students who want to go straight into the workforce, the employment seals are designed to provide exposure to career options and work experience that boost students more quickly into higher-paying roles. Under the “employment honors” seal, students must: take coursework or earn a credential aligned to a specific occupation; complete 150 hours of work-based learning; and demonstrate communication, collaboration and work ethic skills. The “employment honors plus” seal requires that students also earn an associate’s degree or advanced industry certificate and complete 650 hours of work-based learning.
Matt Mindrum, president and CEO of the Indy Chamber, said that most of the 150,000 vacant jobs in Indiana right now don’t require a four-year degree. “And yet 100 percent of our high school students are pushed through a college preparatory path. That makes no sense,” he said. He believes an alternate path is critical for driving economic growth in the state, by helping to fill existing jobs and attract new businesses.
Edgar Soto, a senior at Concord High School in Elkhart, is the kind of student Mindrum has in mind. Soto said he has never wanted to attend a four-year college. To get workforce experience, he enrolled in an apprenticeship through his school and is up before dawn each morning to start work with manufacturing technology company Alpha Systems. “It’s something new every day. I love it,” he said. He earns $17 an hour and gives half his paycheck to his mom for family expenses. When school is in session, he spends his afternoons taking classes back at Concord High.
Indiana’s Elkhart County has been at the forefront of expanding apprenticeships to high schoolers, but it’s had trouble recruiting companies — a challenge for the state as it tries to expand work-based learning. Credit: Camilla Forte/The Hechinger Report
Working has motivated him to study harder at school, he said; he’s never cared for math, but when he realized it was important for his job, he began asking his teacher for extra help. “I got a taste of the real world and I want to be that type of person who does things right,” he said.
Alpha Systems pays for him to take classes in industrial systems through the state community college system, Ivy Tech, and has promised to pay for any further postsecondary education if he stays with the company. In just a few years, company executives said, he could easily make more than $40 an hour, approximately $80,000 a year.
Mindrum is working with employers around the state to try to increase work-based learning opportunities so they match student demand, a particular challenge in rural areas. Communities that have already made a commitment to work-based learning have had trouble recruiting enough employers: For example, in Elkhart County, only 1 in 3 high schoolers who apply for an apprenticeship gets one. Schools will also have to reorganize class schedules and overcome transportation challenges to ensure students can complete the necessary work-based learning under the various seals. The state has a goal of 50,000 apprenticeships by 2030. “It’s an aggressive but achievable target,” Mindrum said.
Supporters hope the revamped diploma will also encourage more students to enlist in military service. Nationally, the military is struggling to recruit, and according to Army data, just 23 percent of 17- to 24-year-olds who apply to the U.S. military meet its medical fitness and academic requirements. In Indiana, the number of students enlisting in the National Guard dropped by 38 percent between 2018 and 2022, the sharpest decline of any state.
Retired Maj. Gen. Dale Lyles, who led the Indiana National Guard and helped create the “enlistment” seal criteria, said students often don’t know much about enlisting and the benefits of military service. In Indiana, for example, serving in the National Guard unlocks free tuition to state colleges.
The new diploma options are meant to fix that: Students in the “enlistment honors” and “enlistment honors plus” seals are taught about each branch of service, what it means to swear an oath to your country and the many different job opportunities available. They also must take a public service course or complete a year of Junior ROTC and receive a certain score on the military’s aptitude test, the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, among other requirements. Students can receive coaching for the test and have the opportunity to visit Camp Atterbury-Muskatatuck, a nearly 35,000-acre military post, for hands-on learning opportunities.
“Today’s military is much different than it was even five years ago, just because of the high degree of technology,” said Lyles, citing the Indiana National Guard’s platoon that flies automated aerial drones and its cyber warfare battalion. “We are in a battle for talent.” He added that the pathway emphasizes that there are other ways to serve, including as a firefighter, as a police officer or in the Department of Homeland Security.
Nicholas Purdy, a 17-year-old from Marion, has three grandparents who served in the military and said he’s always been interested in enlisting. In his first year of high school, he signed up for JROTC, and he said he loves traveling to other states for competitions and leadership camps where students participate in activities such as rappelling, water operations and land navigation. “It doesn’t matter what your background is, how much money you have, your looks,” he said of the experience. “The only thing that matters is your character.”
His mother, Stephanie Purdy, said she’s seen his confidence deepen as a result of his experiences with JROTC. Nicolas has won ribbons and pins for marksmanship and leadership that he wears on his uniform, and he likes the idea that under the new seals, those accomplishments would be reflected on his high school transcript. Nicholas wants to become a combat medic in the army. “The training set me up for really good opportunities, and it’s all paid for,” he said.
Jenner’s work continues — with a pressing deadline, as schools roll out these changes for first-year students this year. Her office is working on an online advising tool, a pilot program to help communities identify solutions to transportation challenges, guidance for educators on the new diploma options and courses, and incentives for school districts to measure skills like communication, collaboration and work ethic, not just academic outcomes.
It’s a big task. “This is new terrain for our country when you think about the level of scale we’re trying to accomplish,” said Jenner. “We don’t have a model to just copy and paste, so we’re going to learn some lessons along the way.”
*Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this story included an inaccurate description of the Carnegie Foundation.
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on 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.
(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?”
Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.
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.
Last August, Republican Rep. Gino Bulso looked out at a room filled with dozens of fellow state lawmakers as he touted new legislation he had just helped become a reality in Tennessee. Under the law, a fetal ultrasound or a video of a computer-animated fetus developing in the womb had become mandatory viewing for students in the state’s sex education classes.
Bulso was there at the request of the event’s host, anti-abortion advocacy nonprofit Live Action. The group had gathered legislators from across the country to provide them “with the policy information and persuasion strategies they need to end abortion,” according to its annual report.
Bulso’s panel, “The Agenda for Life in Schools and Beyond,” focused on how he had successfully shepherded his bill into becoming the second so-called fetal development education law in the country.
When lawmakers returned to their home states after the Live Action event, The Hechinger Report found, at least 10 of them sponsored bills similar to Bulso’s, in some cases proposing that students as young as third grade watch fetal development videos. Another legislator who introduced such a bill had sent his chief of staff and wife to the event. And the volume of legislation stemming from the gathering may be higher: Live Action keeps its list of attendees private, though many lawmakers posted about the event on social media or were featured in Live Action’s promotional materials.
Since 2023, when North Dakota became the first state to pass fetal development education legislation, anti-abortion lawmakers in more than 20 additional states have proposed such bills; 6 of those states, including Bulso’s, have passed them. As a result, this fall, nearly 4 million children will attend school in a state that requires them to watch a video or ultrasound of a fetus in the womb during sex education classes. And this year, legislators in four states tried to go even further: Their proposals would have required students to view depictions of abortions, including computer-animated videos.
After the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022, public schools have become an increasingly important battleground in the fight over abortion rights. Even though 12 states now ban abortion in all circumstances, the number of procedures has increased nationwide since the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe.Public support for abortion rights has also risen. Many anti-abortion advocates hope that getting their message in front of students can help them win the hearts and minds of young people and change these trends in the long run.
While critics, including medical professionals and some parents, say that the fetal development education materials being introduced to schools are manipulative and little more than propaganda, Live Action and other groups that produce them maintain they are medically accurate and unbiased. Experts in sex education and abortion policy say a related problem is the dearth of sex education in schools — students, on average, receive only about six hours during their high school years — that creates a vacuum for anti-abortion groups to move into.
“They’re attempting to reach children at an age where I would assume most haven’t been exposed to issues of an abortion,” says Alisa Von Hagel, a political science professor at University of Wisconsin-Superior who has studied the strategies of the anti-abortion movement. “They’re attempting to be the first to imprint this quote, unquote ‘knowledge’ or opinion about these issues.”
During a debate earlier this year in the Arkansas Senate, Republican Sen. Alan Clark referred to his state’s proposal as “one of the most important pro-life bills that’s ever come before us.” He also said, “It will shape the minds of kids from now on.”
The proposal would have required showing a video created by Live Action to students starting in sixth grade. In the video, titled “Meet Baby Olivia,” a narrator tells the viewer that life begins at conception and says the fetus, named Baby Olivia, begins playing and exploring as early as 11 weeks.
In an annual report, Live Action noted that its “Meet Baby Olivia” video caused a “37-point shift towards the pro-life perspective among viewers.” The organization also highlighted the impact its materials can have on kids, in particular, to help “instill a reverence for life as children at impressionable ages develop their world view.”
Tennessee state Rep. Gino Bulso sponsored the nation’s second fetal development education law. He credits the anti-abortion group Live Action with helping him get it passed. Credit: George Walker IV/AP Images
Both Bulso and Noah Brandt, Live Action’s vice president of communications, have said the only goals of Baby Olivia and fetal development education are to teach and inform students — but they also expected it to leave an impression. “It is intuitive that, after watching that, people would be less likely to support abortion on demand,” Brandt said.
Live Action’s work to connect with students is also part of playbooks for other anti-abortion organizations. Take Heartbeat International, for example, a group that supports clinics known as “crisis pregnancy centers,” which provide limited medical care and encourage people not to have abortions. Heartbeat also offers in-person and online training, including one program on how to “Change the Nation with Pro-life Education,” featuring specific tactics for working with public schools. One speaker at Heartbeat’s 2023 national conference described performing an ultrasound on a pregnant woman in front of public school students to “plant a seed of life.”
Before creating “Meet Baby Olivia,” Live Action was best known for anti-abortion campaigns and undercover stings against Planned Parenthood, and largely worked outside of policymaking. But as the organization has grown in recent years, it has begun to coordinate directly with legislators.
Live Action held its inaugural lawmaker summit in 2022, two months after Roe was overturned. The following spring, North Dakota passed a fetal development education law, the nation’s first.
Many proposed fetal development education bills mention the video “Meet Baby Olivia” by name. Critics say that the video is designed to manipulate the viewer’s emotions, while its creator, Live Action, says it is accurate. Credit: Live Action
By 2024, the summit had doubled in size to host 70 lawmakers at a four-star hotel in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Lawmakers attended panel discussions titled “Saving Our Children and Helping Their Mothers” and “Communications and Persuasion: Winning the Messaging War.” Live Action also screened its abortion videos, including “Meet Baby Olivia.”
On his panel, Bulso walked through every step of creating Tennessee’s law, from filing the bill to committee deliberations to its eventual passage. He gave Live Action credit for providing him with resources to help make the case that “Meet Baby Olivia” was scientifically accurate.
Most of the proposed fetal development education bills don’t prescribe a specific video, but many suggest the Baby Olivia video. Two bills in Texas do mention alternatives: A 1983 film by PBS’s NOVA called “The Miracle of Life” and a video produced by the St. John Paul II Life Center, a crisis pregnancy center.
Said Brandt, it’s up to “lawmakers, school board members, teachers, that kind of thing, to try to make prudential judgments about, ‘Is the actual resource I’m using a good resource to accomplish the goal that I’ve been tasked to accomplish?’”
“Meet Baby Olivia” in particular, has been sharply criticized by medical experts since Live Action released the video in 2021. Many doctors have raised concerns about its language and portrayal of the timeline of fetal development. Parents and students in Fargo, North Dakota, used arguments such as these to convince the school district to use a different video to meet the state law.
“The Baby Olivia video is designed to manipulate students’ emotions rather than to share objective facts about embryonic and fetal development,” Nisha Verma, senior advisor of reproductive health policy and advocacy for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said in a statement. “The video attempts to advance anti-abortion policies such as fetal personhood and uses non-scientific language about conception, pregnancy, embryos, and fetuses to evoke an emotional response.”
Live Action maintains the video is medically accurate — and has its own roster of anti-abortion doctors who endorse it, including a handful who collaborated with the organization on the video’s creation.
The approval of some medical professionals was part of the appeal of “Meet Baby Olivia” and another Live Action video series called “What Is Abortion?” for New Hampshire Rep. John Sellers, another Republican who attended the group’s lawmaker summit. The series shows a computer rendering of three different points in the pregnancy process.
Since 2023, getting fetal development education into public schools has been a priority for the anti-abortion group, Live Action. Credit: Live Action
In January, Sellers filed two bills to make Live Action’s videos required viewing for New Hampshire students — including college students in the case of “Meet Baby Olivia.” Both bills, however, faced opposition: Nearly 700 residents officially recorded their objection with the state or submitted testimony opposing the fetal development bill, and 1,080 registered their opposition to the abortion video legislation. By comparison, the number of residents who registered in favor was 23 and 30, respectively.
Many of those who submitted written testimony called the bill an attempt to indoctrinate students; Sellers maintained the legislation was nonpolitical. “We’re just trying to get the information out to the kids so they’re educated,” he said in an interview. “I don’t know how you indoctrinate somebody with the truth of the development of life … or the truth that these are the types of procedures of abortions. I can’t see that being indoctrination.”
Sellers said further that he hoped education could help people “make a better decision of, ‘Should I get an abortion or not?’”
Several people who opposed Sellers’ bills agreed that the videos contained some factual information and that topics such as fetal development and abortion could be useful to learn about in schools, but it was the presentation of the information — and that it came from an anti-abortion group — that worried them, they explained.
“My biggest concern is that it’s set up to come from a moralistic and fear-based place as opposed to a medical or wellness model,” said Stephanie Vazzano, a therapist who lives in New Hampshire who submitted written testimony opposing the abortion video bill. “They do have some facts. When you watch them you can be really seduced by those facts … but then these other things get slipped in.”
During the hearing for his bills, Sellers repeatedly said he was open to other abortion videos being shown but didn’t know of any. This lack of alternativeshas allowed Live Action to succeed in getting into schools so far, said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at University of California-Davis and author of several books on the history of abortion debates. “Part of what they’ve exposed is that there are gaps in the way we’ve done sex education,” she points out. “There’s truth in the sense that sex education programs across the board, including those favored by progressives, don’t have enough information about pregnancy, childbirth, abortion or fetal development.”
In many ways, Live Action’s efforts — as well as those of Heartbeat International and other organizations working to reach K-12 students — are a response to groups that run comprehensive sex education programs. Five states require comprehensive sex education, and individual districts in other states also provide it. These programs typically cover an array of topics including contraception, gender identity, consent, and options if one becomes pregnant. Planned Parenthood offers such a program to schools and has become the single-largest provider of sex ed nationwide.
“I’m sympathetic if someone says we wouldn’t want any organization that has any point of view creating any materials for our public school system,” Brandt of Live Action said. “But I would just say that’s not the reality that’s happening across the country. It’s tough to find curriculum that is from a group that no one would oppose.”
Even some anti-abortion Republicans have drawn a line at directly promoting the use of Live Action materials in public schools. Among them is Arkansas Sen. Breanne Davis, who led the opposition to a bill that specifically called for “Meet Baby Olivia” to be shown in schools. She raised concerns about requiring content from “a political advocacy group.” Davis said in an interview, “That’s just out of bounds for what we should be putting into law.”
At least 11 state legislators who attended Live Action’s Lawmaker Summit, including Arkansas Rep. Mary Bentley, introduced fetal development legislation during the 2025 legislative session. Credit: Facebook
In hearings, Arkansas representative and bill sponsor Mary Bentley argued it would be easier and better for school districts to be told which video to use rather than have to make that determination themselves. She remains staunchly in support of the Baby Olivia video: “I think it’s so good to help kids understand the process of fetal development,” she said. “I just assumed that it would get the support that we needed in the most pro-life state in the nation.”
Davis proposed a competing bill, one that would require the Arkansas department of education to adopt standards for age-appropriate fetal development education, including showing an ultrasound, in the future. No video would be required, but districts could still show one, such as “Meet Baby Olivia,” if they chose to.
In the end, Bentley’s bill died and Davis’s legislation was signed into law in April.
For Brandt, of Live Action, the law falls short of what he considers the “gold standard” of fetal development education, but “We’re happy that they passed some version of it,” he said. “That is definitely better than nothing, and maybe can even be improved upon in the future.”
Contact investigations editor Sarah Butrymowicz at [email protected] or on Signal: @sbutry.04.
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