Category: Politics

  • Universal vouchers have public schools worried about market share

    Universal vouchers have public schools worried about market share

    by Laura Pappano, The Hechinger Report
    November 6, 2025

    TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — As principal of Hartsfield Elementary School in the Leon County School District, John Olson is not just the lead educator, but in this era of fast-expanding school choice, also its chief salesperson.

    He works to drum up enrollment by speaking to parent and church groups, offering private tours and giving Hartsfield parents his cell phone number. He fields calls on nights, weekends and holidays. With the building at just 61 percent capacity, Olson is frank about the hustle required: “Customer service is key.”

    It’s no secret that many public schools are in a battle for students. As school started in Florida this August, large districts, including Hillsborough, Miami-Dade and Orange, reported thousands fewer students, representing drops of more than 3 percent year over year. In Leon County, enrollment was down 8 percent from the end of last year.

    Part of the issue is the decline in the number of school-age children, both here and across the country. But there’s also the growing popularity of school choice in Florida and elsewhere — and what that means for school budgets. Leon County’s leaders anticipate cutting about $6 million next year unless the state increases its budget, which could mean reduced services for students and even school closures. 

    Other Florida school districts are also trimming budgets, and some have closed schools. As districts scramble for students, some are hiring consulting firms to help recruit, and also trying to sell seats in existing classes to homeschoolers. There is also the instability of students frequently switching schools — and of new charter or voucher schools that open and then shut down, or never open at all as promised. 

    Two years after the Florida Legislature expanded eligibility for school vouchers to all students, regardless of family income, nearly 500,000 kids in the state now receive vouchers worth about $8,000 each to spend on private or home education, according to Step Up For Students, the nonprofit that administers the bulk of the scholarships. And Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship, created in 2001 to allow corporations to make contributions to private school tuition, is the model for the new federal school voucher program, passed this summer as part of Republicans’ “one big, beautiful bill.” The program, which will go into effect in 2027, lets individuals in participating states contribute up to $1,700 per year to help qualifying families pay for private school in exchange for a 1:1 tax credit.

    “We are in that next phase of public education,” said Keith Jacobs of Step Up For Students, who recruits public school districts to offer up their services and classes on its educational marketplace. “Gone are the days when a government institution or your zoned neighborhood school had the authority to assign a child to that school.”

    Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter featuring the most important stories in education. 

    That’s a problem for Leon County Schools, which boasts a solid “B” rating from the state and five high schools in the top 20 percent of U.S. News’ national rankings. The district, located in the Florida panhandle, serves a population of around 30,000 students, 44 percent of whom are Black, 43 percent white and 6 percent Hispanic.

    “There’s just not enough money to fund two parallel programs, one for public schools and one for private schools,” said Rocky Hanna, the Leon County Schools superintendent. 

    Over the past few years, the Legislature has increased state and local funding for charter schools and created new rules to encourage more to open. (Charter schools are public schools that are independently operated; the Trump administration recently announced a $60 million increase in charter school funding this year, along with additional competitive grants.)

    But vouchers are the big disrupter. The nonprofit Florida Policy Institute projects annual voucher spending in Florida will hit $5 billion this year. In Leon County, money redirected from district school budgets to vouchers has ballooned from $3.2 million in 2020-21 to nearly $38 million this academic year, according to state and district figures. Enrollment in local charter schools has also ticked up, as has state per-pupil money directed to them, from $12 million to $15 million over that time.

    As a mark of how the landscape is shifting, Step Up For Students is now helping districts market in-person classes to homeschoolers on the group’s Amazon-like marketplace to fill seats and capture some money. Jacobs said Osceola County put its entire K-12 course catalog on the site. A year of math at a Miami elementary school? It’s $1,028.16. And just $514.08 for science, writing or P.E.

    “A student can come take a class for nine weeks, for a semester, for a year,” said Jacobs, adding that 30 districts have signed on. They are thinking, he said, “if we can’t have them full-time, we have them part-time.”

    Leon County is considering signing on, said Hanna, “to basically offer our courses à la carte.” It could be a recruitment tool, said Marcus Nicolas, vice chair of the county’s school board. “If we give them an opportunity to sniff the culture of the school and they like it, it could potentially bring that kid back full-time.”

    Related: Federal school vouchers: 10 things to know 

    Because of his shrinking budget, Hanna is looking at cuts to IT, athletics, arts, counselors, social workers and special tutors for struggling students, along with exploring school closings or consolidations. 

    Another challenge: With more school options, a growing number of students are leaving charters or private schools and enrolling in the district mid-year. Yet state allocations are based on October and February enrollment counts.

    Last year, 2,513 students — about 8 percent of Leon County’s district enrollment — entered after February. “Those are 2,500 students we don’t receive any money for,” Hanna said at an August school board meeting.

    Public schools do a lot well, but have been slow to share that, said Nicolas. “We got lazy, and we got complacent, and we took for granted that people would choose us because we’re the neighborhood school,” he said.

    Even as more parents choose private voucher schools, it’s not necessarily easy for them to determine if those schools are performing well. Although Florida State University evaluates the state’s Tax Credit Scholarship program, its report lags by about two years. It includes an appendix with voucher schools’ test scores, but there is no consequence for low performance. And scores cannot be compared, because even though schools must test students in grades 3 to 10, the schools pick which test to give.

    The result, said Carolyn Herrington, director of the Education Policy Center at Florida State University, who has written some of the evaluation reports, is that “the only real metric here is parent satisfaction,” which she said “is not sufficient.” 

    Yet many parents like the idea of school choice. According to a poll released last month by EdChoice, a school choice advocacy group, just over half of all Americans and 62 percent of parents broadly favor school vouchers.

    Related: Florida just expanded school vouchers — again. What does that really mean? 

    Mother Carrie Gaudio, who attended the local charter school her parents helped to found, was surprised when her son Ross visited Hartsfield Elementary, a Title I school that serves a high percentage of low-income households — and loved it.

    Before enrolling him, however, she and her husband, Ben Boyter, studied the enrollment situation. The school was under capacity, but they noticed more students coming each year.

    “We felt like if they ended up having to close a school it wouldn’t be one that’s had continual increases in enrollment,” she said, and added, “it’s a real bummer that you have to consider that, that you can’t just consider, ‘Are these people kind? Is my kid comfortable here? Do we feel safe here?’”

    Indeed, a school that a parent chooses one year may close the next.

    That’s what happened last year to Kenia Martinez. Since fall 2022, her two sons had attended a charter school run by Charter Schools USA, among the largest for-profit charter operators in the state. Last spring, she learned from a teacher that the school, Renaissance Academy, was shutting down. 

    Previously named Governor’s Charter Academy, Renaissance recently received a “D” grade, and saw enrollment fall from 420 students in 2020-21 to 220 last year. It also ran deficits, with a negative net position of $1.9 million at the end of the 2023-24 school year, according to the most recent state audit report. It closed last May.

    The school building was to re-open as Tallahassee Preparatory Academy — a private school — which was advertised on its website as a STEM school for “advanced learners” that would charge a fee, ranging from $1,500 to $3,200, in addition to the money paid through a voucher. 

    The school was to be run not by Charter Schools USA but by Discovery Science Schools, which operates several STEM charter schools in the state. The deal revealed a possible exit strategy for faltering charters: conversion to a private voucher school that gets state money, but without the requirement of state tests, grades or certified teachers — in other words, without accountability. 

    Yet as this school year began, the building remained dark. The parking lot was vacant. There was no response to the doorbell, or to emails or phone calls made to the contact information on the new school’s website. Discovery Science Schools’ phone number and email were not in service, and emails to founder Yalcin Akin and board president David Fortna went unanswered. A Charter Schools USA spokesperson, Colleen Reynolds, wrote in an email that “CUSA is not involved with the building located where the former Renaissance Academy Building stands” and did not provide additional clarification on why state audit reports indicate otherwise. 

    The Leon County School Board fiercely debated whether to sue Charter Schools USA for access to the building and its contents, which had been funded with taxpayer dollars. But school board members dropped the idea after learning that the building had a large lien, the result of how financing was crafted through Red Apple Development, the real estate arm of Charter Schools USA. Hanna was frustrated that for-profit companies benefited from taxpayer dollars — but still owned the assets.

    Related: Inside Florida’s ‘underground lab’ for far-right education policies

    When Renaissance announced it was closing, a friend of Martinez’s suggested her family apply for vouchers, which covered the full cost of attendance for her two sons at the Avant Schools of Excellence, a private Christian school with campuses in Tallahassee and Florida City. 

    The school takes vouchers (along with a school scholarship) as full payment, although its website lists tuition and fees at $22,775 per year. Martinez liked that the school is Christian, and small. None of their friends from Renaissance Academy are there. Martinez drives them 30 minutes each way, every day.

    The Tallahassee building that houses Avant was previously home to at least two charter schools. (One lasted a month.) Since the campus opened three years ago, said Donald Ravenell, who co-founded Avant with his wife, enrollment has jumped from 55 to 175.

    Ravenell, who on a recent weekday wore a red and blue tie (school colors are red, white and blue), attributed the school’s success to a focus on faith (“We talk about God all the time”) and the aim of preparing each student to be “a successful citizen and person.” 

    Like Olson at Hartsfield, he well understands this is a competitive marketplace. He wants his school to be known for offering a quality product, which he underscored by drawing a comparison to fried chicken.

    “I have nothing against Chester’s Chicken,” said Ravenell, referring to the quick-service chain sold in gas stations and rest stops. But he expects Avant to reach for more: “We want to be Chick-fil-A.”

    Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at [email protected]. 

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

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  • Colleges build environmental lessons into degrees

    Colleges build environmental lessons into degrees

    by Olivia Sanchez, The Hechinger Report
    November 5, 2025

    LA JOLLA, Calif. — On a Thursday this fall, hundreds of students at the University of California, San Diego, were heading to classes that, at least on paper, seemed to have very little to do with their majors. 

    Hannah Jenny, an economics and math major, was on their way to a class on sustainable development. Angelica Pulido, a history major who aspires to work in the museum world, was getting ready for a course on gender and climate justice. Later that evening, others would show up for a lecture on economics of the environment, where they would learn how to calculate the answer to questions such as: “How many cents extra per gallon of gas are people willing to pay to protect seals from oil spills?”

    Although most of these students don’t aspire to careers in climate science or advocacy, the university is betting that it’s just as important for them to understand the science and societal implications of climate change as it is for them to understand literature and history, even if they’re not planning to become writers or historians. UCSD is perhaps the first major public university in the country to require all undergraduate students to take a class on climate change to earn their degree. 

    The requirement, which rolled out with first-year students last fall, came about because UCSD leaders believe students won’t be prepared for the workforce if they don’t understand climate change. Around the globe, global warming is already causing severe droughts, water scarcity, fires, rising sea levels, flooding, storms and declining biodiversity; leaders at UCSD argue every job will be affected. 

    And even as President Donald Trump dismisses climate change as a hoax and cancels funding for research on it, other colleges are also exploring how to ensure students are knowledgeable about the subject. Arizona State University began requiring that students take a class in sustainability last year, while San Francisco State University added a climate justice class requirement to begin this fall. 

    “You can’t avoid climate change,” said Amy Lerner, a professor in the urban planning department at UCSD. “You can’t escape it in the private sector. You can’t escape it in the public sector. It’s just everywhere.” Students, she said, must be made ready to engage with all of its likely consequences.

    Related: Want to read more about how climate change is shaping education? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

    UCSD, a public university that serves roughly 35,000 undergraduate students, is not demanding that everyone sign up for Climate Change 101. Instead, students can fulfill the requirement by taking any of more than 50 classes in at least 23 disciplines across the university, including sustainable development, the course Jenny is taking. 

    There’s also psychology of the climate crisis, religion and ecology, energy economics, and several classes in the environmental science and oceanography departments, among others. And leaders at the university are working to develop more classes that satisfy the requirement, including one on the life cycle of a computer.

    Bryan Alexander, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and author of a book on higher education and the climate crisis, said that while colleges have long taught about climate change in classes related to ecology, climatology and environmental science, it’s only been in the last decade or so that he’s seen other disciplines tackle the topic. 

    Climate change, Alexander said, “is the new liberal arts” — and colleges should take it seriously. 

    K. Wayne Yang, a UCSD provost who served on the original group that advocated for the requirement, said every industry and career field will experience the effects of climate change in some way. Health care providers need to know how to treat people who have been exposed to extreme heat or wildfire smoke; psychologists need to understand climate anxiety; and café owners need to know how the price of coffee changes in response to droughts or other natural disasters in coffee-growing regions.  

    Jenny, the senior taking a class on sustainable development, is eager to get answers to a question that has, in their three years as an economics and mathematics major, become difficult not to ponder: How can economic growth be the silver bullet of societal change if it has so many negative consequences for the planet?

    “It’s definitely my hope that this is a class that will teach me something new about how to consider humanity’s path forward without destroying this earth, without destroying each other, without sacrificing quality of life for any person on this planet,” Jenny said. 

    Jenny isn’t subject to the requirement because they entered college before it rolled out. But they said they like the idea of encouraging students to step outside their comfort zones and fields of study and, in many cases, consider their future career paths in the context of the changing climate.

    Other students, like junior Pulido, don’t see a specific link between climate change and their future careers. Pulido, who has spent the last few years working in the visitors center at San Diego’s Balboa Park and aspires to work in museums, said she signed up for the gender and climate justice class simply because it sounded interesting to her. She believes climate change is important, and she’s hoping that taking this class will help give her a better idea of how its role in history and might play into her career.

    Related: How colleges can become ‘living labs’ for combating climate change  

    Colleges are taking different approaches to teaching their students about climate change, with some requiring a course in sustainability, a broad discipline that goes beyond the specific scientific phenomenon of climate change.

    At Arizona State, sustainability classes can cover anything about how human, social, economic, political and cultural choices affect human and environmental well-being generally, said Anne Jones, the university’s vice provost for undergraduate education.

    Dickinson and Goucher colleges have had such requirements since 2015 and 2007, respectively. 

    At San Francisco State University, leaders said they instead chose to require climate justice for all students, beginning with the class of 2029, because of the urgency of understanding how climate change affects communities differently. 

    Students need to understand broader systems of oppression and privilege so that they can address the unequal effects of climate change for “communities of color, low-income communities, global south communities and other marginalized communities,” said Autumn Thoyre, co-director of Climate HQ, the university’s center for climate education, research and action.

    Yang and other UCSD leaders believe that, despite the increased politicization of climate change under Trump, they’ve received little pushback on the new requirement because of the university’s reputation as a climate-concerned institution. (It descended from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, initially founded in 1903.) But this model may not work as well on other campuses. 

    In communities where people’s livelihoods depend on activities that contribute to climate change, like coal mining or oil production, educators may have to modify their approach so as to not come off as offensive or threatening, said Jo Tavares, director of the California Center for Climate Change Education at West Los Angeles College. 

    “Messaging is so important, and education cannot be done in a way that just forces facts upon people,” Tavares said. 

    Related: One state mandates teaching about climate change in almost all subjects — even PE

    At UCSD, to meet the graduation requirement, a course must be at least 30 percent about climate change: For example, a class that meets twice a week for a 10-week term must have at least six of its 20 sessions be about climate change. And the course syllabus must address at least two of the following four categories: the scientific aspects; human and social dimensions; project-based learning; or solutions.

    The first time Lerner, the urban studies professor, applied for her sustainable development course to count toward the requirement, in July 2024, the committee told her she needed to better explain how the class addressed climate change. It wasn’t enough to simply have “sustainable” in the course name, committee members told her; she had to better articulate the role of climate change in sustainable development, a course she’s been teaching some version of for nearly 20 years. 

    Her students helped her go through the syllabus and identify all the points where she was teaching about how development contributes to climate change, even if she wasn’t explicitly putting those words to paper. After Lerner revised the descriptions of the class topics and made a few additions, the class was approved, she said. 

    On that fall Thursday, Lerner walked around her large glass-walled classroom while discussing development and globalization with the 65 undergraduate students in her sustainable development class. They covered how to balance equity, economy and environment in development, as well as various ways to measure the well-being of societies, including gross national income, food security, birthrate and infant mortality, happiness, fertility, education and lifespan. Lerner peppered her lecture with jokes and relatable examples, asking, for example, how many siblings students had before explaining the role of fertility and birth rate in a healthy society. (One student had 12, but the average was closer to two.)

    Lerner, who now chairs the committee that decides which classes meet the requirement, said most of her students come in with the understanding that climate change is caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere, and some have even used an online tool to calculate their own carbon footprints. Often, their education has been focused on the hard science aspect of climate change, but they haven’t learned about what society has experienced as a result of climate change, she said. 

    When she asks them what can be done about climate change, she said, “they’re deer in the headlights.”

    Related: Changing education could change the climate

    Across campus, economics professor Mark Jacobsen teaches a lecture class every Thursday night on the economics of the environment. It meets the climate change requirement, but it also covers a core economics idea, he said: achieving efficiency. 

    Jacobsen is teaching students the formulas and methods they’ll need to answer questions like whether it’s worth it to spend $1 billion now to build renewable energy sources to avoid $10 billion in natural disaster cleanup in 30 years.

    Though Jenny hasn’t taken Jacobsen’s class, this is exactly the type of dilemma they’re worried about. 

    Jenny, a public transit enthusiast so dedicated that they got a commercial driver’s license just to drive for Triton Transit, the campus bus system, said the requirement encourages students to face the climate crisis rather than shy away from it. 

    “It can be easy to kind of put your head down and be like, ‘That is too big for me to think about, and too scary,’” Jenny said. But it’s imperative, they added, that students be “forced to reckon with it and think about it and talk about it, to have that knowledge kind of swirling around in your head.” 

    Contact staff writer Olivia Sanchez at 212-678-8402 or [email protected]. 

    This story about climate literacy was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our climate and education newsletter and for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

    This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/climate-change-is-the-new-liberal-arts-colleges-build-environmental-lessons-into-degrees/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>

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  • The new AI tools are fast but can’t replace the judgment, care and cultural knowledge teachers bring to the table

    The new AI tools are fast but can’t replace the judgment, care and cultural knowledge teachers bring to the table

    by Tanishia Lavette Williams, The Hechinger Report
    November 4, 2025

    The year I co-taught world history and English language arts with two colleagues, we were tasked with telling the story of the world in 180 days to about 120 ninth graders. We invited students to consider how texts and histories speak to one another: “The Analects” as imperial governance, “Sundiata” as Mali’s political memory, “Julius Caesar” as a window into the unraveling of a republic. 

    By winter, our students had given us nicknames. Some days, we were a triumvirate. Some days, we were Cerberus, the three-headed hound of Hades. It was a joke, but it held a deeper meaning. Our students were learning to make connections by weaving us into the histories they studied. They were building a worldview, and they saw themselves in it. 

    Designed to foster critical thinking, this teaching was deeply human. It involved combing through texts for missing voices, adapting lessons to reflect the interests of the students in front of us and trusting that learning, like understanding, unfolds slowly. That labor can’t be optimized for efficiency. 

    Yet, today, there’s a growing push to teach faster. Thousands of New York teachers are being trained to use AI tools for lesson planning, part of a $23 million initiative backed by OpenAI, Microsoft and Anthropic. The program promises to reduce teacher burnout and streamline planning. At the same time, a new private school in Manhattan is touting an AI-driven model that “speed-teaches” core subjects in just two hours of instruction each day while deliberately avoiding politically controversial issues. 

    Marketed as innovation, this stripped-down vision of education treats learning as a technical output rather than as a human process in which students ask hard questions and teachers cultivate the critical thinking that fuels curiosity. A recent analysis of AI-generated civics lesson plans found that they consistently lacked multicultural content and prompts for critical thinking. These AI tools are fast, but shallow. They fail to capture the nuance, care and complexity that deep learning demands. 

    Related: A lot goes on in classrooms from kindergarten to high school. Keep up with our free weekly newsletter on K-12 education.  

    When I was a teacher, I often reviewed lesson plans to help colleagues refine their teaching practices. Later, as a principal in Washington, D.C., and New York City, I came to understand that lesson plans, the documents connecting curriculum and achievement, were among the few steady examples of classroom practice. Despite their importance, lesson plans were rarely evaluated for their effectiveness.  

    When I wrote my dissertation, after 20 years of working in schools, lesson plan analysis was a core part of my research. Analyzing plans across multiple schools, I found that the activities and tasks included in lesson plans were reliable indicators of the depth of knowledge teachers required and, by extension, the limits of what students were asked to learn. 

    Reviewing hundreds of plans made clear that most lessons rarely offered more than a single dominant voice — and thus confined both what counted as knowledge and what qualified as achievement. Shifting plans toward deeper, more inclusive student learning required deliberate effort to incorporate primary sources, weave together multiple narratives and design tasks that push students beyond mere recall. 

     I also found that creating the conditions for such learning takes time. There is no substitute for that. Where this work took hold, students were making meaning, seeing patterns, asking why and finding themselves in the story. 

    That’s the transformation AI can’t deliver. When curriculum tools are trained on the same data that has long omitted perspectives, they don’t correct bias; they reproduce it. The developers of ChatGPT acknowledge that the model is “skewed toward Western views and performs best in English” and warn educators to review its content carefully for stereotypes and bias. Those same distortions appear at the systems level — a 2025 study in the World Journal of Advanced Research and Reviews found that biased educational algorithms can shape students’ educational paths and create new structural barriers. 

    Ask an AI tool for a lesson on westward expansion, and you’ll get a tidy narrative about pioneers and Manifest Destiny. Request a unit on the Civil Rights Movement and you may get a few lines on Martin Luther King Jr., but hardly a word about Ella Baker, Fannie Lou Hamer or the grassroots organizers who made the movement possible. Native nations, meanwhile, are reduced to footnotes or omitted altogether. 

    Curriculum redlining — the systematic exclusion or downplaying of entire histories, perspectives and communities — has already been embedded in educational materials for generations. So what happens when “efficiency” becomes the goal? Whose histories are deemed too complex, too political or too inconvenient to make the cut? 

    Related: What aspects of teaching should remain human? 

    None of this is theoretical. It’s already happening in classrooms across the country. Educators are under pressure to teach more with less: less time, fewer resources, narrower guardrails. AI promises relief but overlooks profound ethical questions. 

    Students don’t benefit from autogenerated worksheets. They benefit from lessons that challenge them, invite them to wrestle with complexity and help them connect learning to the world around them. That requires deliberate planning and professional judgment from a human who views education as a mechanism to spark inquiry. 

    Recently, I asked my students at Brandeis University to use AI to generate a list of individuals who embody concepts such as beauty, knowledge and leadership. The results, overwhelmingly white, male and Western, mirrored what is pervasive in textbooks.  

    My students responded with sharp analysis. One student created color palettes to demonstrate the narrow scope of skin tones generated by AI. Another student developed a “Missing Gender” summary to highlight omissions. It was a clear reminder that students are ready to think critically but require opportunities to do so.  

    AI can only do what it’s programmed to do, which means it draws from existing, stratified information and lags behind new paradigms. That makes it both backward-looking and vulnerable to reproducing bias.  

    Teaching with humanity, by contrast, requires judgment, care and cultural knowledge. These are qualities no algorithm can automate. When we surrender lesson planning to AI, we don’t just lose stories; we also lose the opportunity to engage with them. We lose the critical habits of inquiry and connection that teaching is meant to foster. 

    Tanishia Lavette Williams is the inaugural education stratification postdoctoral fellow at the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy, a Kay fellow at Brandeis University and a visiting scholar at Harvard University. 

    Contact the opinion editor at [email protected].  

    This story about male AI and teaching 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.  

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  • Can the world’s largest democracy accept all faiths?

    Can the world’s largest democracy accept all faiths?

    Sidra Khan is a young Muslim woman in India who aspires to be a lawyer. Since early childhood, she has valued and respected Islam, the religion she was born into. But her headscarf now meets eagle eyes when she travels on public transport or tries to make a point during college lectures. 

    She feels that anti-Muslim rhetoric in India is causing her peers to judge her on the basis of religion and not merit. This, many Muslim students like Khan feel, is a casualty of having the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi rule India.

    Over the last decade, the government of this secular country long considered the world’s largest democracy has introduced religious-based laws and politicians have incited anger and hatred against those who aren’t Hindu through rhetoric in speeches and AI campaigns. In northeast India’s Assam state, Wajid Alam, a college history student, watched a new election video from the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party with unease.

    An AI generated video shared by BJP’s official social media handles suggested that if the BJP loses power, Assam would be overrun by Muslims. It used AI-generated imagery to depict Muslims in hijabs and skull caps allegedly taking over airports, stadiums, tea gardens and other public spaces.

    It concluded with a message claiming Muslims could grow to 90% of Assam’s population, provoking other religious groups to choose the BJP to get rid of Muslims.

    The politics of religion

    For Alam and millions of Muslims in Assam, the video felt like an attack. And it is not the first time the BJP has been accused of demonizing religious minorities. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India — a country founded on principles of secularism and religious freedom — has seen growing hostility toward Muslims and Christians.

    Some 200 million people in India practice the Muslim faith, making it the world’s third largest population of Muslims.

    Modi became India’s 14th prime minister in May 2014. Not long after, reports of attacks on religious minorities began to climb. In June 2014, Mohsin Shaikh, a young Muslim IT worker in Pune, was beaten to death by Hindu extremists — the first of several lynchings that followed. 

    A year later, in 2015, a Hindu mob in Dadri, Uttar Pradesh, killed Mohammad Akhlaq on suspicion of eating beef — considered a serious offense in the Hindu religion. That made global headlines and signalled the rise of cow-protection vigilantism. 

    By 2016–17, assaults on Muslims accused of trading or transporting cattle spread across northern India, with cases like the lynching of dairy farmer Pehlu Khan in Rajasthan. Christians, too, came under pressure during this period: nationalist groups staged forced reconversion campaigns, disrupted prayer meetings, vandalized churches and invoked new anti-conversion laws to arrest pastors and worshippers.

    Muslims under Modi’s rule

    Together, these incidents marked the early years of the Modi era as a turning point, when both Muslims and Christians began to face growing hostility in daily life.

    At the same time, hostile rhetoric against minorities became increasingly common in election campaigns. BJP leaders and affiliated Hindu nationalist groups framed Muslims as “outsiders” or “invaders,” with speeches warning of demographic “takeovers” or linking entire communities to terrorism and cow slaughter.

    Christians were accused of running covert “conversion factories,” with pastors painted as threats to India’s cultural identity. These narratives — echoed at rallies, on television debates and, more recently, through AI-generated propaganda — blurred the line between campaign messaging and hate speech. For many analysts, this marked a shift: politics was no longer just influenced by religion, but actively weaponizing it to polarize voters.

    These speeches were not isolated slips but part of a larger pattern. Muslims were painted as “infiltrators,” “termites” or participants in a supposed “love jihad” plot to convert Hindu women, while Christians were accused of running “conversion factories” and threatening India’s culture.

    Senior BJP figures, including party president Amit Shah and Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, used such language at rallies to mobilize support. Over time, this messaging blurred into mainstream political discourse, normalizing suspicion and hostility toward entire communities.

    Political divisions

    India’s experience is part of a wider global pattern. Around the world, political movements are blending nationalism and religion to define who “belongs.” A recent Pew Research Center study found that while the United States ranks lower than many countries on overall religious nationalism, it stands out among wealthy democracies for how many adults say the Bible should influence national laws or that being Christian is essential to being truly American.

    In the United States, debates over Christian nationalism have become a powerful current within the Republican Party and Donald Trump’s political rhetoric.

    Trump and allied evangelical leaders increasingly frame America as a “Christian nation,” a message that blurs the line between faith and state power. Commentators warn that this effort to link patriotism with religion mirrors broader global trends — from India to Israel to Turkey — where religious identity is being harnessed for political gain.

    Both the U.S. and Indian constitutions enshrine secularism, which is the idea that the state would keep equal distance from all religions. In India’s case, that principle mattered in a country where Hindus form the majority but millions of Muslims, Christians, Sikhs and Buddhists also call the nation home. 

    A history of strife

    Even before Modi, religion and politics were sometimes entwined: the Congress Party drew on Hindu symbolism, the 1984 anti-Sikh riots scarred the country and the destruction of the Babri mosque in 1992 shook faith in secularism. Still, the political consensus was that India was not to be defined by one faith.

    “But a lot has changed under Modi and the BJP,” said Sneha Lal, a Hindu student studying to become a primary school teacher. “We did not grow up in this India.”

    Lal is bothered by some of the BJP’s tactics that have promoted anti-conversion laws in several states, laws often used against Christians and Muslims accused of proselytizing. 

    In 2019, the Citizenship Amendment Act introduced fast-track citizenship for non-Muslim refugees, a move widely criticized as discriminatory toward Muslims. That same year, Delhi revoked the autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir, India’s only Muslim-majority state. Alongside these legal changes, election campaigns have increasingly featured polarizing rhetoric, and propaganda — including AI-generated videos — has circulated warning of demographic “takeovers.” 

    Critics say these policies and messages together mark a break from India’s founding secular vision, pushing the country toward a Hindu-first identity.

    Can there be a unified national identity?

    Seema Chishti, a senior journalist who has witnessed India’s journey from secular to right-wing, said that mixing religion with politics and diluting India’s unified national identity across religious and ethnic groups is a stated core principle of the ruling party, based on its militant roots. 

    “The Indian Constitution recognises no barriers to being Indian, i.e. nationality is not contingent on faith, caste, region, creed, gender or political views,” Chishti said. “BJP has loudly proclaimed ‘Hindu-India’ and instilled ‘Hindu’ nationalism in politics, education, the armed forces and every other facet of Indian life.”

    An example of Modi’s attempt to link Indian-ness with Hinduism is the Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019 which fast-tracks Indian citizenship for non-Muslims from three neighbours: Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. “This action echoes ideas of India being a Hindu homeland,” Chishti said.

    On 15 August 2025, on India’s 79th Independence Day, Modi addressed crowds gathered at Delhi’s historical Red Fort, as he did the last 11 years that he has been in power. 

    On a day which commemorates India’s long struggle for self-rule that culminated in self-governance and independence from the British empire, Modi referred to the right-wing paramilitary organization Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh or RSS as a philanthropic organization. RSS has espoused an India for Hindus only. 

    Intolerance and violence

    All this has had tragic consequences. On 25 September, a seven-year-old Muslim boy was abducted from his neighborhood and brutally murdered in northern India’s Azamgarh. 

    But religious hate crimes haven’t only targeted Muslims. On 11 June, a mob allegedly linked to Hindu extremist groups attacked guests at a Christian wedding and set fire to a utility vehicle. And on 25 July, two Catholic nuns were arrested in central India’s Chhattisgarh state following a complaint by a member of an extremist Hindu group.

    India’s United Christian Forum reported that in 2024, Christians across the country witnessed 834 such incidents, up 100 incidents from 734 in 2023 — that comes out to more than two Christians being targeted every day in India simply for practising their faith. 

    These incidents of attacks and even public hate speeches against Christians are not limited to vandalism, they extend to physical assaults, disruption of prayer gatherings, financial boycotts and even motivated arrests. 

    This anti-Christian sentiment has been fanned by Hindu extremist groups in the country, which are indirectly and sometimes directly backed by the ruling BJP and other Hindu nationalist groups. These groups are increasingly using anti-conversion laws created in the Modi era to harass Christians. 

    Christians in India

    Arun Pannalal, president of the Chhattisgarh Christian Forum, said that two things are happening: Lawlessness of mobs who target Christians is ignored by police, while Christians often find themselves subject to seemingly random arrests. 

    “On random calls by Bajrang Dal goons the Police arrested the nuns, without evidence of anything,” Pannalal said. “But when the nuns wanted to complain against the goons, it was not lodged.”

    Chishti said that more than politicising religion, by inserting religion into politics, the BJP is trying to portray itself as the only ‘Hindu’ party and the others consequently as not. She maintains that the BJP has fought elections on issues that polarise Indians, divide them and not on its performance or electoral record. Its electoral dominance has also meant that other parties in the fray, the opposition too find themselves playing on the BJP’s turf. 

    “The BJP has done its best to make the political discourse about faith, symbols of religion — Hindu and Muslim — and portraying themselves as saviours of the Hindu faith and righting so-called historical wrongs,” Chishti said.

    As a result, the media focuses on the religious conflicts, instead of other pressing issues, such as the economic well-being of people, the public health or education systems, joblessness and inflation, Chishti said.

    As India heads toward future elections, the blending of religion and politics raises questions not just for its own democracy but for others around the world. For young people in India, the stakes are immediate: whether their country remains true to its founding promise of secularism and equal rights.

    But for readers everywhere, India’s story is part of a larger global trend from the United States to Turkey to Israel, where religion and nationalism intertwine to shape politics. Understanding how these forces play out in the world’s largest democracy can help us make sense of how faith and power continue to influence politics across the globe.

    India’s struggle shows that when religion becomes a political weapon, democracy itself can become the battleground.

    Questions to consider:

    1. How is freedom of religion protected in India?

    2. In what ways are Muslims being treated differently by the Modi administration?

    3. In what ways to you feel comfortable or uncomfortable in your community expressing your faith?

     

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  • What research says about Mamdani and Cuomo’s education proposals

    What research says about Mamdani and Cuomo’s education proposals

    by Jill Barshay, The Hechinger Report
    November 3, 2025

    New York City, where I live, will elect a new mayor Tuesday, Nov. 4. The two front runners — state lawmaker Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, running as an independent — have largely ignored the city’s biggest single budget item: education. 

    One exception has been gifted education, which has generated a sharp debate between the two candidates. The controversy is over a tiny fraction of the student population. Only 18,000 students are in the city’s gifted and talented program out of more than 900,000 public school students. (Another 20,000 students attend the city’s elite exam-entrance high schools.) 

    But New Yorkers are understandably passionate about getting their kids into these “gated” classrooms, which have some of the best teachers in the city. Meanwhile, the racial composition of these separate (some say segregated) classes — disproportionately white and Asian — is shameful. Even many advocates of gifted education recognize that reform is needed. 

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

    Mamdani wants to end gifted programs for kindergarteners and wait until third grade to identify advanced students. Cuomo wants to expand gifted education and open up more seats for more children. 

    The primary justification for gifted programs is that some children learn so quickly that they need separate classrooms to progress at an accelerated pace. 

    But studies have found that students in gifted classrooms are not learning faster than their general education peers. And analyses of curricula show that many gifted classes don’t actually teach more advanced material; they simply group mostly white and Asian students together without raising academic rigor.

    In my reporting, I have found that researchers question whether we can accurately spot giftedness in 4- or 5-year-olds. My colleague Sarah Carr recently wrote about the many methods that have been used to try to identify young children with high potential, and how the science underpinning them is shaky. In addition, true giftedness is often domain-specific — a child might be advanced in math but not in reading, or vice versa — yet New York City’s system labels or excludes children globally rather than by subject. 

    Because of New York City’s size — it’s the nation’s largest public school system, even larger than 30 states — what happens here matters.

    Policy implications

    • Delaying identification until later grades, when cognitive profiles are clearer, could improve accuracy in picking students. 
    • Reforming the curriculum to make sure that gifted classes are truly advanced would make it easier to justify having them. 
    • Educators could consider ways for children to accelerate in a single subject — perhaps by moving up a grade in math or English classes. 
    • How to desegregate these classrooms, and make their racial/ethnic composition less lopsided, remains elusive.

    I’ve covered these questions before. Read my columns on gifted education:

    Size isn’t everything

    Another important issue in this election is class size. Under a 2022 state law, New York City must reduce class sizes to no more than 20 students in grades K-3 by 2028. (The cap will be 23 students per class in grades 4-8 and 25 students per class in high school.) To meet that mandate, the city will need to hire an estimated 18,000 new teachers.

    During the campaign, Mamdani said he would subsidize teacher training, offering tuition aid in exchange for a three-year commitment to teach in the city’s public schools. The idea isn’t unreasonable, but it’s modest — only $12 million a year, expected to produce about 1,000 additional teachers annually. That’s a small fraction of what’s needed.

    The bigger problem may be the law itself: Schools lack both physical space and enough qualified teachers. What parents want — small classes led by excellent, experienced educators — isn’t something the city can scale quickly. Hiring thousands of novices may not improve learning much, and will make the job of school principal, who must make all these hires, even harder.

    For more on the research behind class-size reductions, see my earlier columns:

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

    This story about education issues in the New York City mayoral election was 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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  • The network effects of a university collapse

    The network effects of a university collapse

    Universities are bound together more tightly than ministers like to admit. They share credit lines, pension schemes, suppliers, and reputations. Contagion, once started, moves faster than policy can catch it.

    The question up until recently was the wrong one: could a university fail. The grown-up question is what happens next: to students who haven’t applied yet, to local communities, and to neighbouring universities. We have to begin with the obvious: students come first.

    Failure at one institution produces contagion effects, the magnitude of which depends on regional centrality and clustering. Government should focus on keeping that transmission reproduction number (or R number – remember that from Covid?) below one. This piece maps some of those transmission channels – I’ve modelled small changes to the bottom line of an average neighbouring university, based on student spend, pensions, interest rates and group buying.

    Our patient zero – that is, the first to fall – is a provider that is OfS-registered and regionally significant, and I have estimated the price shock for its financially average neighbour. Of course, I have to assume no rescue package from government (they have signalled as such).

    The calculations below are based on the average university using 2023–24 HESA data, excluding FE colleges with HE provision. Each percentage change is illustrative rather than predictive and actual outcomes will depend on local factors.

    Stay at home

    Student demand runs on policy signals and vibes as much as price. In 2024 we saw sponsored study visas fall year-on-year and dependants drop sharply, while PGT overseas remained twitchy.

    Throw a closure into that salad and you start to see conversion eroding. Bursary spend and fee waivers will rise to keep offers attractive. A percentage point here or there looks insignificant but adds up across multiple providers.

    International students will start looking elsewhere: Australia, Canada, Germany. Or they’ll just stay at home. Better to choose a sure thing than risk having your course disrupted halfway through. Home students may be similarly spooked – but have fewer alternatives.

    There are a few antidotes: multiple guaranteed transfer corridors, decent student protection plans, and teach-out clarity. And most importantly, comms that make sense to agents and parents.

    Illustrative hits to an average university elsewhere:

    • Additional bursary spend on international: £80m × 0.5% = £400k
    • Reduced international demand: £80m × 0.5% = £400k

    Protect the USS

    Multi-employer pension schemes, like USS and LGPS, can go very squiffy when a member exits. In that case, the rules force the member to pay a large exit bill called “Section 75”, and the sums can be eye-watering. It’s a standard expectation of a “last man standing” scheme.

    Trinity College, Cambridge wrote a cheque for about £30m to leave USS in 2019. USS has suggested that, for a sample of employers (mainly Oxbridge colleges), a crystallised bill could represent anywhere from 4 to 97 per cent of their cash and long-term investment balances, averaging around 26 per cent.

    In practice, an insolvent provider wouldn’t cough up, so other universities would absorb the orphan liability. But there isn’t a mechanical “spread the S75 bill this year” formula; it would show up, if at all, via the valuation and rate-setting process. The scheme is currently in surplus, so additional contribution costs are uncertain. Of course, not all universities are enrolled in USS, but the vast majority are enrolled in multi-employer schemes.

    Illustrative hit to a USS-enrolled university elsewhere:

    • Salary base: £181m × 72% = £130m
    • USS proportion: £130m × 70% (say) = £91m
    • 1 pp rate bump: £91m × 1% = £910k

    Save livelihoods

    Universities drive jobs, rents, transport and culture. Liverpool estimates £2.2bn GVA and 26,630 jobs supported nationwide, roughly one in fifty locally. Northampton reports £823m GVA and 10,610 jobs. National estimates put the sector above £116bn.

    Remove the local provider and the GVA virtuous circle turns vicious. Cafés lose footfall, landlords lose tenants (poor them), and pubs are no longer full of students. The extent depends on how rooted the provider is in its community.

    Government will find itself paying anyway. Either pre-emptively with small civic grants to keep key services alive, or retrospectively with bigger cheques after the rot sets in. Maybe it will finally put a stop to town and gown tensions.

    Illustrative hit to an average university elsewhere:

    • No direct cost to other universities
    • Material GDP and tax impacts for government
    • Likely need for community grants.

    Flatten the yield curve

    Lenders rarely treat a closure as an isolated blip; being hawkish, they would probably reprice the entire university category.

    Add 50 basis points to a £90m facility and you’ve created a recurring £450k drag until you refinance. All in all, that’s not a huge bite out of your cash flow, but it will certainly make you more cautious.

    To fix this, listen to your finance directors: stagger your maturities and fix your rates well in advance. Or, radical thought – stop yanking at your credit lines and make do with what you have.

    Illustrative hit to an average university elsewhere:

    • Additional interest costs: £90m × 0.50% = £450k

    Herd immunity

    Group buying is one of the few places with cash on the table. In 2023–24, the UK Universities Procurement Consortia (UKUPC) members put about £2.4bn through frameworks and reported roughly £116.1m (4.84%) in cashable savings. The Southern Universities Procurement Consortium (SUPC) talks about £575m of member spend and average levy rebates of around £30,000 per full member.

    If fewer universities use those routes, frameworks lose clout, and with that, discounts and rebates. The more volume that stays in the collective pot, the better the prices – but for critical services, it’s still wise to have a backup supplier in case one fails.

    Another group issue is shared services. Up until recently, they were seen as a poisoned chalice, but are now growing out of necessity. The usual worries are well-rehearsed: loss of control, infighting and VAT jitters. Still, some experiments, like Janet and UCAS, have been tremendously successful, although pricing relies on throughput.

    Shared IT, payroll, procurement or estates often come with joint and several obligations. If one partner hits trouble, you start to see real governance friction.

    The practical fixes are contractual. Ringfence any arrears so they do not spill onto everyone else, and rebalance charges on a published, defensible formula.

    Illustrative hit to an average university elsewhere:

    • Frameworked spend: £131m (total non-staff) × 60% (frameworked, say) x 4.84% (cashable savings) x 10% (diminution) = £380k.
    • Shared services: impossible to quantify.

    What ministers can do without a podium

    I’ve modelled small changes to the bottom line (again, illustratively) – in this example one university going under could cost others £2.5m, or 50 per cent of the average university’s 2023–24 surplus. This number isn’t rigorous or comprehensive, but serves as an interesting thought experiment.

    The rational response is a resolution regime that protects students and research, temporary liquidity for solvent neighbours, clear transfer routes when the worst happens, and deployment of short, targeted grants for civic programmes.

    A single collapse could probably be absorbed; a string of them could set off an irreversible domino effect with far-reaching consequences. Ministers need to plan for this now – or else risk a very hefty civic bailout.

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  • ‘The clock is ticking’: Shutdown imperils food, child care for many

    ‘The clock is ticking’: Shutdown imperils food, child care for many

    For families in more than a hundred Head Start programs across the country, November could mark the beginning of some hard decisions.

    On Saturday, 134 Head Start centers serving 58,400 children would normally receive their annual federal funding, but the ongoing government shutdown has put that money in jeopardy. The federally funded Head Start provides free preschool and child care for low-income families, and is particularly important to rural communities with few other child care options. 

    At the same time, the federal government has said that because of the shutdown, it cannot distribute Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits that families also expect on the first of the month. Plus, a program that provides extra money for families to buy milk, baby formula, and fruit and vegetables is also running out of $300 million in emergency funding provided to it earlier this month.

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

    All this means low-income families are facing upheaval on multiple fronts, said Christy Gleason, the vice president of policy, advocacy and campaigns for the nonprofit group Save the Children. Families in Head Start often receive other federal benefits, so they could simultaneously be facing a disruption in child care — and the meals provided there — and public food assistance.

    “You’re going to end up with parents and caregivers who are skipping meals themselves, because that’s the way they put food on the table for their kids,” Gleason said. Save the Children manages Head Start programs in rural Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Tennessee, but its programs are not among those affected by the Nov. 1 annual funding deadline. Head Start has 1,600 programs that receive their yearly funding throughout the calendar year.

    There are still a few days left to avert the crisis, Gleason said. More than two dozen states are suing the government to force it to use a pot of money that had been set aside for paying SNAP benefits in an emergency. President Donald Trump also said this week that the food aid situation would be fixed, but didn’t offer details. Federal lawmakers have also introduced different proposals to keep food assistance money flowing. A handful of states said they will continue to pay for the supplemental milk and formula program, known as WIC. Head Start programs may be able to tap local money, but that isn’t expected to last long. 

    “The clock is ticking,” Gleason said. “Every hour that goes by is an hour where the stress for these families grows, but it’s not too late for government action to change course and make sure children are not the ones to suffer the consequences of political decisions.”

    New data quantifies child care gaps

    Nearly 15 million ages 5 and under in the United States have “all available parents” — both adults in a two-parent household, or one if the child has one adult caregiver — in the workforce. The country has about 11 million licensed or registered child care slots.

    That leaves about 4 million children whose families may need child care — a hard-to-grasp number that obscures the fact that some parts of the country may have greater needs than other regions because child care providers are concentrated in some areas and sparse in others.

    The Buffett Early Childhood Institute, based at the University of Nebraska, is trying to address that problem. It has created a map that it says will give a more accurate view of where child care is needed the most, down to the congressional district. 

    The map captures the number of children with working parents and the number of available spots in licensed child care. What it cannot capture is demand — not every family needs child care, even families with parents in the workforce — but the map does allow policymakers a starting place for a more nuanced evaluation of their community’s needs.

    “We know the limitations of the data, but we also know in order to address the gap, this needs to be broken down into bite-sized pieces,” said Linda Smith, director of policy at the Buffett Institute.

    This story about the government shutdown 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.

    Join us today.

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  • Podcast: Public attitudes, housing, employability

    Podcast: Public attitudes, housing, employability

    This week on the podcast we discuss fresh polling on public attitudes to UK universities, which shows how a widening graduate/non-graduate divide and sharper political splits are fuelling worries about degree quality and whether universities are focused on the country’s interests.

    Plus we discuss the housing crunch – the new Renters’ Rights Act, warnings on missed housebuilding targets, and what a forthcoming statement of expectations on student accommodation could require of providers working with local authorities. And we explore employability insights from new research – the language gap between university “attributes” and real job adverts, and how to recognise skills students gain beyond the curriculum.

    With Ben Ward, CEO at the University of Manchester Students’ Union, Johnny Rich, Chief Executive at the Engineering Professors’ Council and Push, Livia Scott, Associate Editor at Wonkhe and presented by Jim Dickinson, Associate Editor at Wonkhe.

    Student accommodation – a tale of two cities, and 2point4 students

    The Renters’ Rights Act is out of the oven, but the student housing market is still cooked

    Shared Institutions: The public’s view on the role of universities in national and local life / More in Common and UCL Policy Lab

    AGCAS: Uncovering Skills

    Employability: degrees of value / Johnny Rich

    Research Plus

    You can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, Spotify, Acast, Amazon Music, Deezer, RadioPublic, Podchaser, Castbox, Player FM, Stitcher, TuneIn, Luminary or via your favourite app with the RSS feed.

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  • The power of one voice

    The power of one voice

    The reaction to Alla’s interview contrasted with the pro-Ukraine demonstrations that met Russian soprano Anna Netrebko when she appeared on the opening night of Puccini’s “Tosca” at the Royal Opera House in London earlier this month.

    In contrast, the appearance of Netrebko, who has said in an understated way that she is against the war, sparked a debate in the British press about whether politics and art should be mixed.

    But Alla was clear. She said she felt she had to tell the truth for the sake of her children.

    Repercussions of speaking out

    Her interview, lasting more than three-and-a-half hours, ranged over many topics, from her musical memories to her five husbands. But it was when she grasped the nettle of politics — and how politics affected her family — that it became gripping.

    Alla is married to the Russian-Israeli stand-up comedian Maxim Galkin, who at 49 is 27 years her junior (their 12-year-old twins Liza and Harry were born via a surrogate mother).

    Straight-talking and irreverent, Galkin shared a stage with Ukraine’s comedian-turned-president Volodymyr Zelensky for Russia’s iconic New Year’s Eve show in 2013. He opposed the war with Ukraine, when it broke out in 2022.

    After Galkin spoke out, Alla said she was summoned to the Kremlin for a “talk” with Sergei Kiriyenko, the first deputy chief of staff of the presidential administration. The conversation seemed to be friendly enough. But a few days later, Galkin was declared a “foreign agent”.

    Alla said that when their children went to school after that, they were mocked as the children of spies and told that their father was a foreign agent and their parents were enemies. The family packed up and left — first to Israel and then to Cyprus. They spend their summer holidays in Latvia.

    “They call me a traitor,” Alla said in the interview. “And what exactly did I betray? I have said that I could leave my homeland, which I love very much, only in one case — if my homeland betrayed me. And it has betrayed me.”

    Strong words from a woman who has been a celebrity in Russia for decades.

    A performer for the people

    Classically trained to conduct choirs, Alla shot to stardom in 1975 when she won the grand prix at the Golden Orpheus international song contest in Bulgaria with the song “Arlekino” (Harlequin).

    Banned by the Communist Party from collaborating with ABBA, she became huge in her own right — as big as Tina Turner, say, in the United States — and always sang for the people. In 1986, for example, she appeared in a special concert for the firemen who risked their lives in the aftermath of a devastating explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in northern Ukraine, when it was part of the Soviet Union.

    Because Alla never projected herself as a diva but rather as “the woman who sings”, she won the hearts of millions and was loved by everyone, from housewives to mafia bosses. In the 1990s, there was even a petition calling for her to stand as Russian president, which she modestly laughed off.

    Russian journalist and writer Mikhail Zygar, who now lives in Berlin, wrote that Alla’s statements against Putin are important because she had never been a political activist.

    “Millions of Russians always considered her ‘one of their own’ — because through her songs she expressed the pain and suffering of ordinary Russians,” he said. “The fact that she has stopped keeping silent and spoken out openly against the war is a very important signal. She has always been the voice of millions of mute, wordless, unhappy Russians. Now they will think the way she put it — that’s how her interview is being described on social media.”

    Perhaps the biggest indication of the strength of the interview was the speed and viciousness with which the Russian authorities reacted.

    Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called it a “bazaar of hypocrisy” while parliamentary deputy Vitaly Milonov said: “I believe that in her interview, Pugacheva said enough not only to warrant the status of ‘foreign agent’ but also to fall under several criminal articles, including the justification of terrorism.” The pro-Kremlin ruler of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, went so far as to call Alla an “enemy of the people”.

    Questions to consider:

    1. In what ways could it be “patriotic” to criticise your own country?

    2. Should art and politics be mixed?

    3. Can you think of other artists or musicians who have risked their popularity by standing out against their government’s policies?

     



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  • A Conversation with Author Jon Nichols – Edu Alliance Journal

    A Conversation with Author Jon Nichols – Edu Alliance Journal

    By Dean Hoke, October 21, 2025

    🎧 Listen to the full podcast episode: https://smallcollegeamerica.transistor.fm/25
    📺 Watch the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/5e7TmyDxBWo

    In the newest episode of Small College America, my co-host Kent Barnds and I speak with Jon Nichols, author of Requiem for a College: The Troubling Trend of College Closures in the United States. Nichols’ book offers a deeply personal and reflective look at the 2017 closure of Saint Joseph’s College, an institution intertwined with his family for three generations—his father, Dr. John Nichols, taught there for five decades, and his brother Michael continues to teach at Purdue University.

    The Story of Saint Joseph’s College

    Founded in 1889 by the Missionaries of the Precious Blood, Saint Joseph’s College in Rensselaer, Indiana, was a small Catholic liberal arts institution known for its close-knit community, rigorous Core Curriculum, and dedication to service. For more than a century, it served as both an educational and cultural anchor for Rensselaer and surrounding Jasper County, educating generations of teachers, business leaders, and clergy. At its peak in the 1970s, the college enrolled more than 1,500 students and earned national recognition for its innovative Core Program, which blended history, philosophy, and theology in an interdisciplinary approach to learning.

    Despite its enduring mission and loyal alumni base, Saint Joseph’s faced mounting financial pressures and declining enrollment, leading to the suspension of operations in 2017. By that year, the college’s enrollment had declined to about 900 students, a sharp drop from its earlier decades of strength. The closure reverberated throughout the region, symbolizing a growing crisis among small, tuition-dependent private colleges across the United States.

    About Jon Nichols

    Jon Nichols is an author, educator, and observer of the changing higher education landscape. A graduate of Saint Joseph’s College and longtime member of its academic community, Nichols witnessed firsthand the personal and institutional struggles that informed Requiem for a College: The Troubling Trend of College Closures in the United States. His work combines narrative storytelling with research and reflection, capturing both the emotional and systemic dimensions of college closures. Today, Nichols teaches English at Waubonsee Community College in Illinois, where he continues to write and speak about the sustainability challenges facing small colleges and the communities they serve.

    Nichols captures the profound emotional and social toll of a college closure—on faculty, students, alumni, and the surrounding town. His narrative reminds readers that when a college closes, it is not just an institution that disappears, but a community, a sense of purpose, and a shared legacy.

    Our conversation explores a range of topics, including the warning signs that should have been taken more seriously—both at Saint Joseph’s and across higher education—and how his book captures not only institutional failure but also human loss: the erasure of identity, community, and legacy. Nichols also reflects on what sustainable models of higher education might look like in the years ahead and what long-term effects the closure has had on former students, faculty, and the Rensselaer community.

    Small College America is a podcast series that shines a spotlight on the powerful impact of small colleges across the nation. Hosted by Dean Hoke and Kent Barnds, the podcast brings listeners inside the world of small colleges through candid conversations with higher education leaders, policy experts, and innovators. Each episode explores how these institutions are adapting, thriving, and continuing to deliver a personal, high-quality education.

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