Hello! This is Christina Samuels, the early education editor here at Hechinger.
By now, I hope you’ve had a chance to read my colleague Jackie Mader’s story about the important role that Head Start plays in rural communities. While Jackie set her story in western Ohio, she also interviewed Head Start parents and leaders in other parts of the country and collected their views for a follow-up article.
In a fortunate bit of timing, the advocacy group First Five Years Fund published the results of a survey it commissioned on rural Americans and their feelings on child care access and affordability. Like the people Jackie interviewed, the survey respondents, more than half of whom identified as supporters of President Donald Trump, said they had very positive views of Head Start. The federally funded free child care program received positive marks from 71 percent of rural Republicans, 73 percent of rural independents and 92 percent of rural Democrats.
The survey also found that 4 out of 5 respondents felt that finding quality child care is a major or critical problem in their part of the country. Two-thirds of those surveyed felt that spending on child care and early education programs is a good use of taxpayer dollars, and a little more than half said they’d like to see more federal dollars going to such programs.
First Five Years Fund was particularly interested in getting respondents to share their thoughts on Head Start, said Sarah Rubinfield, the managing director of government affairs for First Five Years Fund. The program has been buffeted by regional office closures and cuts driven by the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency.
“We recognize that these are communities that often have few options for early learning and care,” Rubinfield said.
In the survey, rural residents said they strongly supported not just the child care offered by Head Start, but the wraparound services such as healthy meals and snacks and the program’s support for children with developmental disabilities. Though Head Start programs are federally funded, community organizations are the ones in charge of spending priorities.
“Rural voters want action. They support funding for Head Start and for child care. They want Congress to do more,” Rubinfield said. Though the “big beautiful bill” signed into law in July expands the child care tax credit for low-income families, survey respondents “recognized that things were not solved,” she added.
The First Five Years Fund survey was released just a few days before a congressional standoff led to a government shutdown. The shutdown is not expected to touch Head Start immediately, said Tommy Sheridan, the deputy director of the National Head Start Association, in an interview with The New York Times. The 1,600 Head Start programs across the country receive money at different points throughout the calendar year; eight programs serving about 7,500 children were slated to receive their federal funding on Oct. 1, Sheridan told the Times. All should be able to continue operating, as long as the shutdown doesn’t last more than a few weeks, he said.
“We’re watching with careful concern but trying not to panic,” Rubinfield said. “We know the impacts may not be immediate, but the longer this goes on, the harder the impacts may be for families and programs.”
This story about rural Americans 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.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky says religion was one topic his family never mentioned at the dinner table.
That could be because he’s from the Jewish minority, or because the overwhelming Orthodox Christian majority was split into different branches.
Ukraine’s Orthodox have gradually become more Ukrainian, to the detriment of a once-powerful pro-Russian Church, and the trend has sped up now that Kyiv and Moscow are at war.
The conflict between the pro-Kyiv Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU) and the pro-Moscow Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) gets lost in the international coverage of the drama on the battlefield.
But with about 80% of Ukrainians identifying as Orthodox Christians, even if probably less than half attend church regularly, this split between the two Churches seeps into politics.
Christmas in Kyiv
The religious conflict crept into the news last month when the pro-Kyiv Church authorized all Ukrainian parishes to celebrate Christmas on December 25 if they wished, rather than the traditional Orthodox date of January 7.
The symbolism of allowing Christmas to be celebrated on the date used in the West was not lost on Ukrainian believers.
The roots to this clash go back to the communist period. While Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, it was under the umbrella of the Russian Orthodox Church.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church continued to operate in the newly sovereign Ukraine, but proclaimed its loyalty to the Moscow Patriarchate.
Ukrainian patriots objected and said they deserved their own Church. Their rival Orthodox Church of Ukraine was created in 1992, soon after Ukraine’s independence. It was recognized as autocephalous (independent) by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul — the highest authority in Orthodox Christianity — in 2019.
The politics of praying in Ukrainian
The two Churches have the same theology, liturgy and even architecture as the Moscow Church. But the Kyiv Church prays in Ukrainian rather than Church Slavonic and declares allegiance to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in Istanbul instead of Moscow’s Patriarch Kirill.
Originally much larger, the Moscow Church saw parishes defecting to its rival, especially after the war began. Under this pressure, the Ukrainian branch declared its independence from Russia in May, condemned the invasion and refused to recognize Patriarch Kirill in its liturgies.
It’s unclear now which Church is larger. But the head of the Kyiv Patriarchate, Metropolitan Epiphinius, told Religion News Service in May: “Every day, Ukrainians are gradually coming to understand which Church is truly Ukrainian and which Church is Russian.”
The Moscow Patriarchate tried to shield off Russian-occupied Crimea by creating its own metropolitanate (archdiocese) there in June. The Kyiv Church refused to recognize this.
When Putin annexed four Ukrainian territories in September — even though he did not completely control them — he tried to justify the move in religious terms, calling it a “glorious spiritual choice.”
Sermons, spies and the Security Service
But Kyiv increasingly saw the pro-Moscow Church as a fifth column, or spies of Putin. In October, the acting head of Ukraine’s Security Service revealed it had found 33 suspected Russian agents among the Moscow Church’s clergy in Ukraine.
Some preached pro-Russian sermons, Kyiv said, some had anti-Ukrainian literature and some were army chaplains who passed on information about Ukrainian artillery batteries to Russian agents.
That’s when the Kyiv Church authorized all Ukrainian parishes to celebrate Christmas on December 25 if they wished. On December 1, Zelensky upped the ante by calling for an official ban on all activities of the Moscow Patriarchate’s Church in Ukraine. Parliament was asked to draft a suitable law, which may be difficult given the provision in the Ukrainian constitution of freedom of religion.
In late December, Ukraine refused to renew the Moscow Church’s lease on the Cathedral of the Dormition at Kyiv’s Monastery of the Caves, traditionally the center of Ukrainian Orthodoxy.
On January 7, Metropolitan Epiphanius, head of the pro-Kyiv Church, celebrated the traditional Christmas there to show he was the new man in charge now.
And in its latest turn to faith, Russia called for a 36-hour truce to mark the traditional Christmas on January 7. Kyiv and its western allies rejected this as a cynical ploy, and both sides continued shelling each other as if nothing had happened.
The battlefield struggle is still the main story, both in its ultimate importance and in the David-and-Goliath story that readers understand. The religious rivalry will always be secondary.
But these pinpricks on the faith front add up to a new phase in the growth of local nationalism, which helps buoy Ukrainian morale. In hoping to defeat a country he thought would easily give in, Putin has done more than anyone to forge a united and defiant Ukrainian nation.
Three questions to consider:
1. Why do politicians often appeal to religion during a war?
2. Do mainstream journalists make religious angles clear in a conflict?
3. When do separate small events add up to a noteworthy trend?
This week on the podcast we examine the results of the Office for Students’ first sector-wide survey on sexual misconduct.
With over 50,000 responses from final-year undergraduates, the data provides a stark picture of prevalence, reporting, and staff-student relationships in higher education. But with only sector-level results released, questions remain about transparency, accountability, and the regulator’s approach to such a sensitive issue.
Plus we discuss the politics and potential consequences of a proposed levy on international student fees – a policy idea that could reshape funding, recruitment, and the UK’s global competitiveness. And we take stock of warnings from the Institute of Physics about possible closures of departments and courses, asking what this says about funding for high-cost subjects and the sector’s capacity to manage contraction and change.
With Charlotte Corrish, Head of Public Policy at the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education, Mark Bennett, Vice President Research and Insight at Keystone Education Group, and David Kernohan, Deputy Editor at Wonkhe, and presented by Mark Leach, Editor-in-Chief at Wonkhe.
Why is it that young leaders are in such short supply?
Former Irish President Mary Robinson recently gave one of the most forceful condemnations of Israel’s war on Gaza. Now the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Robinson visited Egypt and the Rafah border and called on states to implement “decisive measures” to halt the genocide and famine in Gaza.
“Governments that are not using all the tools at their disposal to halt the unfolding genocide in Gaza are increasingly complicit,” she said.
Robinson is a member of an organization that calls itself “The Elders.” Founded in 2007 by Nelson Mandela, the South African political prisoner turned president, the group advocates peace, human rights and environmental sustainability.
In her comments, Robinson chided today’s leaders for not fulfilling their legal obligations. “Political leaders have the power and the legal obligation to apply measures to pressure this Israeli government to end its atrocity crimes,” she said.
Robinson is 81 years old. Where are the young leaders making such statements? Where are they organizing groups like The Elders?
Youth power
The media’s attention to Robinson was impressive. Her August press conference was followed by several lengthy interviews on major networks. An independent group like The Elders — whose members include former presidents, UN officials and civil society activists — deserves recognition. It also invites reflection on the role of age in today’s accelerated time.
Being elderly and having once held an important position was not always politically positive. “Don’t trust anyone over 30,” was a popular expression in the 1960s. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was just 26 when he led the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and 34 when he delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech during the 1963 Washington rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial. John F. Kennedy was 30 when he was elected to the U.S. Congress and 43 when he was elected president. Student leaders made their marks on U.S. politics in the 1960s.
Mario Savio was 21 when he led the Berkeley Free Speech Movement in California, which demonstrated the political power of student protests.
Mark Rudd was a 20-year-old junior when he led strikes and student sit-ins at Columbia University to push for student involvement in university decision making.
Tom Hayden was 20 when he cofounded Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a national student movement that opposed the Vietnam War and pushed for a complete reform of the political system. At age 22, he wrote the Port Huron Statement, a political manifesto that called for non-violent student activism and widespread civil disobedience achieve the international peace and economic equality that government leaders had failed to achieve.
Savio, Rudd and Hayden were more than just campus activists; they were front page national news.
Age politics
Where are the student leaders opposing Trump’s attack on universities and freedom of expression now? College presidents, professors and boards of trustees are shouldering the burden. There is a generational vacuum.
Youth and youthful dynamism are no longer viewed as political positives. Today, no one could imagine the 79-year-old Donald Trump playing touch football on a beach in Florida as John F. Kennedy and family did at Hyannis Port on Cape Cod when he was president.
In reality, Kennedy suffered from many serious medical conditions but they were largely hidden from the public; it was crucial that he maintain his youthful image. Trump swinging a golf club and riding in a golf cart is not a youthful image; even his awkward swing shows his age.
Nor are the pictures of the members of his Mar-a-Lago crowd youthful; they look like a meeting of grandparents. As slogans reflecting their times, Make America Great Again is far from the New Frontier which called for an end to poverty and investing in technology and science to send humans to the moon.
Robinson visited the Rafah crossing with another member of The Elders, Helen Clark. Clark is 75 years old, the former Prime Minister of New Zealand and United Nations Development Program administrator.
Generational change
Of her visit Clark said that she was horrified to learn from United Nations Sexual and Reproductive Health Agency that the birth rate in Gaza had dropped by over 40% in the first half of 2025, compared to the same period three years ago. “Many new mothers are unable to feed themselves or their newborn babies adequately, and the health system is collapsing,” Clark said. “All of this threatens the very survival of an entire generation.”
Based on her years of experience, Clark wisely talked of generational change.
Age benefits people who, like Robinson and Clark, have held important positions. Because of that experience, members of The Elders take no political risks by speaking out.
The 83-year-old U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders is a notable exception of an elder speaking out in the United States while still in office. For whatever reasons, the elderly members of the Senate — there are currently seven senators who are in their 80s and 17 are in their 70s — have been particularly silent on issues like Gaza.
In fact, they have been particularly silent on most issues.
Where are the Savio/Rudd/Haydens today? A comparable young leader is Greta Thunberg. Greta was only 15 when she initiated the climate strike movement Fridays for Future. But while Greta initiated the movement, she did not organize it as Tom Hayden did with the formation of the SDS. Thunberg is an important symbol and example of courage — the drone attack on her Gaza-bound “Freedom Flotilla” is beyond reprehensible and consistent with Israel’s total war — but she is not a movement organizer on a national or global level.
What makes statements by people like Robinson and Clark so impressive is that they stand out in a realm of stunning silence.
The New Frontier
The Democratic Party in the United States, for example, has no serious leadership. (The same might be said for Socialists in Europe and the Labour Party in Great Britain.) The Democrats inability to rally around 33-year-old Zohran Mamdani who is running for mayor of New York City is an example of the Party’s cowardice and/or lack of vision.
While the older, established Democrats are quick to criticize Trump, they offer no new strategies or actions.
We are desperately waiting for something new. JFK’s motto The New Frontier touched a foundational American embrace of the frontier, the space between the known and new. Back in 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner came up with a theory that the continual expansion of the American frontier westward allowed for continual reinvention and rebirth, and that shaped the character of the American people. This frontier theory is essential to an America’s identity built on always moving forward. In contrast, Trump’s return to the past is anti-frontier. MAGA is nostalgia and passé.
Where are today’s young progressives presenting new political possibilities as Hayden and his cohorts did with Port Huron and SDS? Or does asking that question show that I am being too nostalgic about the past as well?
A version of this article was published previously in the magazine Counterpunch.
Questions to consider:
1. Who are “The Elders” and what are they trying to achieve?
2. What was “The New Frontier” and what did it say about the American character?
3. Do you think you would be more likely to vote for some very old over someone very young for political office? Why?
This week on the podcast we examine the Office for Students’ proposed overhaul of England’s quality system, as radical reforms seek to integrate the Teaching Excellence Framework with minimum standards and give TEF some serious teeth.
Plus we discuss the government’s long-awaited “Hillsborough law” as the Public Office (Accountability) Bill imposes new duties of candour on universities, and examine the machinery of government changes that have seen apprenticeships policy and Skills England transferred from the Department for Education to Pat McFadden’s expanded Department for Work and Pensions.
With Andrea Turley, Partner at KPMG, Shane Chowen, Editor at FE Week, Debbie McVitty, Editor at Wonkhe and presented by Jim Dickinson, Associate Editor at Wonkhe.
This morning we woke to the news that the ABC television network in the United States had suspended late night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel indefinitely over a statement he made about the accused assassin of right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk. In July, the CBS network announced that it would end The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in May. Colbert has for years mocked and criticized Donald Trump. These two announcements got us thinking about all the different ways governments and those in power try to silence speech.
The very first amendment to the U.S. Constitution begins with this phrase:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press …
Because of that amendment, the world has long considered the United States the model for free speech — few countries live up to the standard that the United States has historically set. But across the world now, free speech seems to be endangered. So to put into perspective the many ways censorship can occur and in the many places we see this happening, we decided to offer up an assortment of News Decoder stories on this topic by both our professional correspondents and student authors.
ASHE COUNTY, N.C. — In the time it took to read an email, the federal money vanished before Superintendent Eisa Cox’s eyes: dollars that supported the Ashe County school district’s after-school program, training for its teachers, salaries for some jobs.
The email from the Department of Education arrived June 30, one day before the money — $1.1 million in total — was set to materialize for the rural western North Carolina district. Instead, the dollars had been frozen pending a review to make sure the money was spent “in accordance with the President’s priorities,” the email said.
In a community still recovering from Hurricane Helene, where more than half of students are considered economically disadvantaged, Cox said there was no way they could replace that federal funding. “It is scary to think about it, you’re getting ready to open school and not have a significant pot of funds,” she said.
School leaders across the country were reeling from the same news. The $1.1 million was one small piece of a nearly $7 billion pot of federal funding for thousands of school districts that the Trump administration froze — money approved by Congress and that schools were scheduled to receive on July 1. For weeks, leaders in Ashe County and around the country scrambled to figure out how they could avoid layoffs and fill financial holes — until the money was freed July 25, after an outcry from legislators and a lawsuit joined by two dozen states.
“I had teachers crying, staff members crying. They thought they were going to lose their jobs a week before school,” said Curtis Finch, superintendent of Deer Valley Unified School District in Phoenix.
About $1.1 million was at stake for the Ashe County school district in western North Carolina this summer when a portion of K-12 schools’ federal funding was frozen. Credit: Ariel Gilreath/The Hechinger Report
Now, as educators welcome students back to classrooms, they can no longer count on federal dollars as they once did. They must learn to plan without a playbook under a president intent on cutting education spending. For many districts, federal money is a small but crucial sliver of their budgets, potentially touching every part of a school’s operations, from teacher salaries to textbooks. Nationally, it accounts for about 14 percent of public school funding; in Ashe County, it’s 17 percent. School administrators are examining their resources now and budgeting for losses to funding that was frozen this summer, for English learners, after-school and other programs.
So far, the Trump administration has not proposed cutting the largest pots of federal money for schools, which go to services for students with disabilities and to schools with large numbers of low-income students. But the current budget proposal from the U.S. House of Representatives would do just that.
At the same time, forthcoming cuts to other federal support for low-income families under the Republican “one big, beautiful bill” — including Medicaid and SNAP — will also hammer schools that have many students living in poverty. And some school districts are also grappling with the elimination of Department of Education grants announced earlier this year, such as those designed to address teacher shortages and disability services. In politically conservative communities like this one, there’s an added tension for schools that rely on federal money to operate: how to sound the alarm while staying out of partisan politics.
For Ashe County, the federal spending freeze collided with the district’s attempt at a fresh start after the devastation of Helene, which demolished roads and homes, damaged school buildings and knocked power and cell service out for weeks. Between the storm and snow days, students here missed 47 days of instruction.
Cox worries this school year might bring more missed days: That first week of school, she found herself counting the number of foggy mornings. An old Appalachian wives’ tale says to put a bean in a jar for every morning of fog in August. The number of beans at the end of the month is how many snow days will come in winter.
“We’ve had 21 so far,” Cox said with a nervous laugh on Aug. 21.
Fragrant evergreen trees blanket Ashe County’s hills, a region that bills itself as America’s Christmas Tree Capital because of the millions of Fraser firs grown for sale at the holidays. Yet this picturesque area still shows scars of Hurricane Helene’s destruction: fallen trees, damaged homes and rocky new paths cut through the mountainsides by mudslides. Nearly a year after the storm, the lone grocery store in one of its small towns is still being rebuilt. A sinkhole that formed during the flooding remains, splitting open the ground behind an elementary school.
Ashe County Schools Superintendent Eisa Cox visits classrooms at Blue Ridge Elementary School during the first week of the school year in Warrensville, N.C. Credit: Ariel Gilreath/The Hechinger Report
As students walked into classrooms for the first time since spring, Julie Taylor — the district’s director of federal programs — was reworking district budget spreadsheets. When federal funds were frozen, and then unfrozen, her plans and calculations from months prior became meaningless.
Federal and state funding stretches far in this district of 2,700 students and six schools, where administrators do a lot with a little. Even before this summer, they worked hard to supplement that funding in any way possible — applying to state and federal grants, like one last year that provided money for a few mobile hot spots for families who don’t have internet access. Such opportunities are also narrowing: The Federal Communications Commission, for example, recently proposed ending its mobile hot spot grant program for school buses and libraries.
“We’re very fiscally responsible because we have to be — we’re small and rural, we don’t have a large tax base,” Taylor said.
When the money was frozen this summer, administrators’ minds went to the educators and kids who would be most affected. Some of it paid for a program through Appalachian State University that connects the district’s three dozen early-career teachers with a mentor, helps them learn how to schedule their school days and manage classroom behavior.
The program is part of the reason the district’s retention rate for early career teachers is 92 percent, Taylor said, noting the teachers have said how much the mentoring meant to them.
Also frozen: free after-school care the district provides for about 250 children throughout the school year — the only after-school option in the community. Without the money, Cox said, schools would have to cancel their after-school care or start charging families, a significant burden in a county with a median household income of about $50,000.
Sixth grade students make self-portraits out of construction paper during the first week of the school year at Blue Ridge Elementary School in Warrensville, N.C., in August. Credit: Ariel Gilreath/The Hechinger Report
The salary for Michelle Pelayo, the district’s migrant education program coordinator for nearly two decades, was also tied up in that pot of funding. Because agriculture is the county’s biggest industry, Pelayo’s work in Ashe County extends far beyond the students at the school. Each year, she works with the families of dozens of migrant students who move to the area for seasonal work on farms, which generally involves tagging and bundling Christmas trees and harvesting pumpkins. Pelayo helps the families enroll their students, connects them with supplies for school and home, and serves as a Spanish translator for parent-teacher meetings — “whatever they need,” she said.
Kitty Honeycutt, executive director of the Ashe County Chamber of Commerce, doesn’t know how the county’s agriculture industry would survive without the migrant students Pelayo works with. “The need for guest workers is crucial for the agriculture industry — we have to have them,” she said.
A couple of years ago, Pelayo had the idea to drive to Boone, North Carolina, where Appalachian State University’s campus sits, to gather unwanted appliances and supplies from students moving out of their dorm rooms at the end of the year to donate to migrant families. She’s a “find a way or make a way” type of person, Honeycutt said.
Cox is searching for how to keep Pelayo on if Ashe County loses these federal funds next year. She’s talked with county officials to see if they could pay Pelayo’s salary, and begun calculating how much the district would need to charge families to keep the after-school program running. Ideally, she’d know ahead of time and not the night before the district is set to receive the money.
Districts across the country are grappling with similar questions. In Detroit, school leaders are preparing, at a minimum, to lose Title III money to teach English learners. More than 7,200 Detroit students received services funded by Title III in 2023.
In Wyoming, the small, rural Sheridan County School District 3 is trying to budget without Title II, IV and V money — funding for improving teacher quality, updating technology and resources for rural and low-income schools, among other uses, Superintendent Chase Christensen said.
Schools are trying to budget for cuts to other federal programs, too — such as Medicaid and food stamps. In Harrison School District 2, an urban district in Colorado Springs, Colorado, schools rely on Medicaid to provide students with counseling, nursing and other services.
The district projects that it could lose half the $15 million it receives in Medicaid next school year.
“It’s very, very stressful,” said Wendy Birhanzel, superintendent of Harrison School District 2. “For a while, it was every day, you were hearing something different. And you couldn’t even keep up with, ‘What’s the latest information today?’ That’s another thing we told our staff: If you can, just don’t watch the news about education right now.”
There’s another calculation for school leaders to make in conservative counties like Ashe, where 72 percent of the vote last year went for President Donald Trump: objecting to the cuts without angering voters. When North Carolina’s attorney general, a Democrat, joined the lawsuit against the administration over the frozen funds this summer, some school administrators told state officials they couldn’t publicly sign on, fearing local backlash, said Jack Hoke, executive director of the North Carolina School Superintendents’ Association.
Cox sees the effort to slash federal funds as a chance to show her community how Ashe County Schools uses this money. She believes people are misguided in thinking their schools don’t need it, not malicious.
“I know who our congresspeople are — I know they care about this area,” Cox said, even if they do not fully grasp how the money is used. “It’s an opportunity for me to educate them.”
If the Education Department is shuttered — which Trump said he plans to do in order to give more authority over education to states — she wants to be included in state-level discussions for how federal money flows to schools through North Carolina. And, importantly, she wants to know ahead of time what her schools might lose.
As Cox made her rounds to each of the schools that first week back, she glanced down at her phone and looked up with a smile. “We have hot water,” she said while walking in the hall of Blue Ridge Elementary School. It had lost hot water a few weeks earlier, but to Cox, this crisis was minor — one of many first-of-the-year hiccups she has come to expect.
Still, it’s one worry she can put out of her mind as she looks ahead to a year of uncertainties.
Meanwhile, the anxiety about this school year hasn’t reached the students, who were talking among themselves in the high school’s media center, creating collages in the elementary school’s art class and trekking up to Mount Jefferson — a state park that sits directly behind the district’s two high schools — for an annual trip.
They were just excited to be back.
Marina Villeneuve contributed data analysis to this story.
Contact staff writer Ariel Gilreath on Signal at arielgilreath.46 or 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.
From Texas to Florida to Arizona, school voucher policies are reshaping the landscape of American education. The Trump administration champions federal support for voucher expansion, and many state-level leaders are advancing school choice programs. Billions of public dollars are now flowing to private schools, church networks and microeducation platforms.
The push to expand school choice is not just reallocating public funds to private institutions. It is reorganizing the very purpose of schooling. And in that shift, something essential is being lost — the public mission of education as a foundation of democracy.
Civic education is becoming fragmented, underfunded and institutionally weak.
In this moment of sweeping change, as public dollars shift from common institutions to private and alternative schools, the shared civic entities that once supported democratic learning are being diminished or lost entirely — traditional structures like public schools, libraries and community colleges are no longer guaranteed common spaces.
The result is a disjointed system in which students may gain academic content or career preparation but receive little support in learning how to lead with integrity, think across differences or sustain democratic institutions. The very idea of public life is at risk, especially in places where shared experience has been replaced by polarization. We need civic education more than ever.
If we want students who can lead a multiracial democracy, we need schools of every type to take civic formation seriously. That includes religious schools, charter schools and homeschooling networks. The responsibility cannot fall on public schools alone. Civic formation is not an ideological project. It is a democratic one, involving the long-term work of building the skills, habits and values that prepare people to work across differences and take responsibility for shared democratic life.
What we need now is a civic education strategy that matches the scale of the changes reshaping American schooling. This will mean fostering coordinated investment, institutional partnerships and recognition that the stakes are not just academic, they are also democratic.
Americans overwhelmingly support civic instruction. According to a 2020 survey in Texas by the Center of Women in Politics and Public Policy and iCivics, just 49 percent of teachers statewide believed that enough time was being devoted to teaching civics knowledge, and just 23 percent said the same about participatory-democracy skills. This gap is not unique to Texas, but there is little agreement on how civics should be taught, and even less structural support for the schools trying to do it.
Without serious investment, civic formation will remain an afterthought — a patchwork effort disconnected from the design of most educational systems.
This is not an argument against vouchers in principle. Families should have options. But in the move to decentralize education, we risk hollowing out its civic core. A democratic society cannot survive on academic content alone. It requires citizens — not just in the legal sense, but in the civic one.
A democratic society needs people who can deliberate, organize, collaborate and build a shared future with others who do not think or live like they do.
And that’s why we are building a framework in Texas that others can adopt and adapt to their own civic mission.
The pioneering Democracy Schools model, to which I contribute, supports civic formation across a range of public and private schools, colleges, community organizations and professional networks.
Civic infrastructure is the term we use to describe our approach: the design of relationships, institutions and systems that hold democracy together. Just as engineers build physical infrastructure, educators and civic leaders must build civic infrastructure by working with communities, not for or on them.
We start from a democratic tradition rooted in the Black freedom struggle. Freedom, in this view, is not just protection from domination. It is the capacity to act, build and see oneself reflected in the world. This view of citizenship demands more than voice. It calls for the ability to shape institutions, policies and public narratives from the ground up.
The model speaks to a national crisis: the erosion of shared civic space in education. It must be practiced and must be supported by institutions that understand their role in building public life. Historically Black colleges and universities like Huston-Tillotson University offer a powerful example. They are not elite pipelines disconnected from everyday life. They are rooted in community, oriented toward public leadership and shaped by a history of democratic struggle. They show what it looks like to educate for civic capacity — not just for upward mobility. They remind us that education is not only about what students know, but about who they become and what kind of world they are prepared to help shape.
Our national future depends on how well we prepare young people to take responsibility for shared institutions and pluralistic public life. This cannot be accomplished through content standards alone. It requires civic ecosystems designed to cultivate public authorship.
We have an enormous stake in preparing the next generation for the demands of democratic life. What kind of society are we preparing young people to lead? The answer will not come from any single institution. It will come from partnerships across sectors, aligned in purpose even if diverse in approach.
We are eager to collaborate with any organization — public, private or faith-based — committed to building the civic infrastructure that sustains our democracy. Wherever education takes place, civic formation must remain a central concern.
Robert Ceresa is the founding director of the Politics Lab of the James L. Farmer House, Huston-Tillotson University.
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 week on the podcast we examine the bombshell merger announcement between the University of Greenwich and the University of Kent, set to create the London and South East University Group – one of the largest higher education institutions in the UK.
With a memorandum of understanding signed and contracts expected by Christmas, this “super university” is being hailed as a potential blueprint for sector transformation. But what does this new multi-university model really mean for students, staff, and the future of higher education consolidation?
Plus we discuss the recent government reshuffle and its implications for the sector, as Angela Rayner’s departure triggers ministerial changes across departments with direct links to higher education – from Liz Kendall’s appointment as Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology to questions about skills policy under Pat McFadden’s expanded brief at the newly configured Department for Work and Pensions.
With Ben Vulliamy, Executive Director at the Association of Heads of University Administration, Emma Maslin, Senior Policy and Research Officer at AMOSSHE, Michael Salmon, News Editor at Wonkhe, and presented by Mark Leach, Editor-in-Chief at Wonkhe.
It’s been about eighteen months since this podcast last visited Australia. The story at the time was about something called “the Universities Accord”, an oddly-named expert panel report which was supposed to give the Labor government a roadmap for re-structuring a higher education system widely believed to be under enormous stress.
Since then, lots has happened. There’s been an international student visa controversy, a whole ton of cutbacks at institutions (including a quite wild polycrisis at Australian National Universities) and a general election which saw the Labor Party unexpectedly returned to power with an increased majority.
So, what’s on the agenda now? To answer that question, we called up long-time podcast friend Andrew Norton, currently Research Fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies, and Policy and Government Relations Adviser at the University of Melbourne, and as usual he’s here to give us the straight dope down under. Our discussion ranges pretty widely over developments in the last 18 months: to me the most interesting question is why the government has been so slow to move on key aspects of the Universities Accord. Andrew’s answer to that question is, I think, pretty revealing, and should resonate both in Canada and the UK – quite simply, left-wing governments aren’t as different from right-wing ones as you might think when it comes to delivering change in higher education.
The World of Higher Education Podcast Episode 4.2 | Higher Ed at the Ballot Box: Australia’s Election and the Accord with Andrew Norton
Transcript
Alex Usher: Andrew, welcome back. Last time we talked was about 18 months ago, and the Universities Accord report had just dropped. There were a whole bunch of recommendations about funding, job-ready graduates, access, system regulation, and even something odd about a national regional university. Labor had about a year and a half between the time the report came out and the election this past May. What did they do with that time? What aspects did they move on most quickly?
Andrew Norton: It was a bit of an odds-and-ends approach. The big, expensive changes to the way students and institutions are funded have really been postponed. But they’ve done a range of things.
They’ve introduced a national student ombudsman—the first national complaints organization for students. They’ve created a new system for funding people in preparatory courses. They’ve increased regulations on universities to support students who are struggling or at risk of failing.
Mostly, they’ve done things aimed at helping students, while the big structural work is still to come.
Alex Usher: So, they did the cheap stuff?
Andrew Norton: Essentially. They did the things that were cheap for the government but shifted costs onto the universities.
Alex Usher: And with the other elements, did they say no to any of them? Or did they just leave it quiet—maybe we’ll do it, maybe we won’t?
Andrew Norton: The thing they’re attracting the most criticism for is the Job-Ready Graduate student contribution. Back in 2021, the previous government radically redesigned how students pay for their education. The idea was to encourage people into courses the government wanted, like teaching or nursing, by discounting student fees, and to discourage others by raising fees in areas the government regarded as “not job-ready,” like humanities and social sciences.
The Accord’s final report said the system should change—go back to something closer to what we had before, where there’s a rough relationship between fees and likely future earnings. But the government has deferred this to the Australian Tertiary Education Commission (ATEC), which currently exists as a website but doesn’t yet have legislation. That legislation will probably come early next year.
So, the earliest possible date for changes is 2027, and quite possibly later. The government is getting a lot of criticism because, while fees were being increased, they said it was a bad thing and that they’d fix it. Yet first they sent it off to the Accord review, then to ATEC, and now who knows when it will actually happen.
Alex Usher: So, there’s a lot of kicking the can down the road at a time when institutions are having financial trouble?
Andrew Norton: That’s true. A lot of institutions are reducing staff and cutting courses. Exactly why varies—some are still struggling with international student numbers, some with domestic enrolment. But the key problem is that costs are rising faster than revenues.
They’ve signed wage deals that are well above inflation, while government grants are only indexed to inflation. So they’re in a situation where they have to control costs, and staff numbers and courses are one of the few levers they have left.
Alex Usher: You mentioned international students. One of the things we noticed here in Canada—because we went through the same thing a few months before you—was this whole notion of international student caps. The idea was similar: there was a perception, I’m not sure how true it was, that international students were affecting the housing market. Both Labor and the opposition supported caps; they just disagreed on how severe they should be. What actually happened on that front? Are there caps, and how are they regulated?
Andrew Norton: I think the answer is: sort of.
The background is that in the second half of 2023, the government started to believe that international student numbers were contributing to housing shortages and rising rents. Many in the sector agree there’s some truth to that. If you add up all the students, ex-students on temporary graduate visas, and people on bridging visas—often students waiting on another visa—you’re probably looking at around a million people in a population of about 27 million. It’s hard to argue that it has no impact on the housing market.
The government introduced a range of migration measures: making visas more expensive and making it harder to get a student visa in the first place. But this wasn’t really affecting Chinese students, who remain the largest single group in Australia. So in May last year, they introduced legislation that would have put formal caps on the number of students each university and education provider could take. Everyone thought this was certain to pass, since the opposition also supported caps.
But in a big surprise last November, the opposition changed course and didn’t support the bill. Combined with the Greens’ opposition, it couldn’t get through the Senate and didn’t become law.
Instead, the government recycled the caps idea at the “national planning” level. The main feature was that once an institution hit 80% of its allocated number, further visa applications would go into a “go-slow” lane. The implied threat was that if an institution went over in future, there could be penalties. But so far, that hasn’t happened.
So now we’re essentially back to a migration-driven set of restrictions on international numbers.
Alex Usher: Before we get to the election, there was an interesting article—I think it was in Times Higher—about the idea that universities had nobody in their corner going into the election, that they’d lost some of the social license they once had.
Part of it was about the very large vice-chancellors’ salary packages, which have been an issue for a long time—many presidents earning over a million dollars. But there have also been persistent stories about wage theft, with universities systematically underpaying employees. Then there are the narratives about “management gone mad” and cuts—particularly at the Australian National University.
Is it true? Are universities more friendless in Australia than they used to be? Or is there something different this time?
Andrew Norton: I think there is something different this time. It’s not just that there have been a lot of issues.
On wage theft—as the union calls it—this has mostly resulted from universities relying heavily on casual or sessional employees. Payroll systems are complex, with different rates for different activities. It is genuinely hard to get right, but it seems almost every university has failed to align payroll systems with how people are actually employed.
As a result, about half the institutions have had to repay staff or correct wages they didn’t pay the first time. Roughly half a dozen universities are now facing high-level enforcement by workplace authorities, putting them in the same category as traditional rogue employers like those in retail.
The optics are terrible: people on very low wages aren’t being paid correctly, while vice-chancellors are earning over a million dollars a year. That contrast doesn’t look good.
The real big change, though, is political. The Liberal Party opposition has long been skeptical of universities, but what shocked institutions was that the governing Labor Party took the Accord review and, if anything, has been even harsher with universities than the previous government.
That’s why universities are reeling. They expected that after the change of government in 2022, life would get easier. It certainly hasn’t.
Alex Usher: Let’s talk about the election. Your election was only about a week after ours in Canada, and it seemed like a very similar story: a weak center-left government on course to be crushed by a right-wing party. But then that right-wing party suddenly didn’t seem so cuddly once Trump had been in office for two or three months. I think the difference, though, is that higher education actually played some role in the Australian election. What promises did the different parties make?
Andrew Norton: That was quite unusual. Higher education usually isn’t an election issue in Australia. But this time Labor picked up on discontent over student debt in its first term.
The issue was that we index student debt to inflation. And like in many other countries, there was a post-COVID inflationary period. At one point, indexation was around 7% in a single year.
I think that triggered what I’d call a latent issue. Over the 2010s, there was a big increase in student numbers and, correspondingly, in debt. We ended up with about 3 million people holding student debt, totaling over 80 billion Australian dollars. That’s a very large constituency. Labor realized that while this hurt them in their first term, maybe they could turn it into a positive.
They did something similar to what’s been discussed in the U.S.—or in some cases done in the U.S.—which was to promise cutting all debts by 20%. They announced this in November last year. During the campaign they didn’t push it hard until the final week, when they really started to focus on it.
There was a late surge in support for the government, which gave them a very large majority. My theory is that the 20% cut—which was worth more than $5,000 to the average person with student debt—was enough to swing people over the line and deliver Labor its big win.
Alex Usher: What I found odd about this is that debt doesn’t actually affect your payments in Australia, because you’ve got one of the purest and original income-contingent systems in the world. Cutting debt by $5,000 only reduces the length of time you’ll be paying—for example, my debt is paid off in 2050 instead of 2055. I’m amazed that would move the needle so much, because next year what everybody pays is still a function of their income, not the size of their debt. So how did that work?
Andrew Norton: I think it’s because the debt issue had become so salient in people’s minds. The strange thing is that, at the same time, Labor also promised to change the repayment system in ways that would actually reduce how much people repay this year, under laws already operating now. But that got almost no airtime.
When journalists called me, I’d ask, “Do you want me to talk about this too?” And they’d say, “What’s that?” There was zero recognition. It just wasn’t being highlighted.
One reason might be that the repayment change isn’t straightforward. While the average person will repay less, everyone will now face a marginal repayment rate of 47%—that’s including income tax plus the 15% of income they have to repay once they’re over $67,000 Australian.
As this comes into operation, I think there could be political problems. But during the campaign, the overwhelming focus—99%—was simply on the debt cut.
Alex Usher: Let’s be clear about that, because it’s interesting. Australia has always had an income-contingent system where, if you were below a threshold, you paid nothing. But as soon as you went over that threshold, you paid a percentage of your total income, not just the marginal income above the threshold.
Andrew Norton: The change is that it’s now a marginal system. And the threshold for starting repayment has moved from $56,000 Australian to $67,000. So a whole lot of people are now out of the repayment system as a result.
But there’s a downside: more people will see their debt keep rising through indexation, because they’re not making repayments—or their repayments are smaller than the amount added by indexation. I think that’s going to be a problem.
Alex Usher: What’s the marginal rate above that?
Andrew Norton: It’s 15% above $67,000, and then it goes up to 17% at $125,000 a year. Those are high numbers. Once you set a high threshold, you’ve got to set high repayment rates to bring in a reasonable amount of revenue for the government.
Alex Usher: Now that Labor has been reelected, what do you think their agenda looks like for the next three years? Which parts of the Universities Accord that they passed on last year are they actually going to move on? You’ve mentioned the Job-Ready Graduate program and the regulator. Anything else?
Andrew Norton: One thing they’ve already done, consistent with some of their earlier moves, is new legislation on what they call gender-based violence. That’s going to be quite complex regulation for the sector to manage.
The big issue ahead is how they’ll distribute student places in the future. Their general mantra is “managed growth.” What they’re aiming for is a system with much more government control over the number of student places at each university, and likely also more control over which courses those places are allocated to.
At the moment, universities have a maximum grant, but aside from niche areas like medicine, there’s effectively no control over how those places are distributed internally. And even though universities eventually use up all their public funding, they can still enroll more students if they’re willing to accept only the student contribution. Some universities have been quite happy to do that.
Alex Usher: Similar to what we have in Ontario.
Andrew Norton: Exactly. The universities that are currently what we call “over-enrolled”—taking more students than they’re being fully funded for—are feeling vulnerable. Some of them will find this shift very difficult to manage.
Alex Usher: So, the government wants to control domestic student numbers through this mechanism, and they’re effectively going to do something similar for international students through a system of caps, perhaps. Are they going to move on caps again, and will it be in line with this whole notion of managed growth?
Andrew Norton: I think so, yes. The Australian Tertiary Education Commission has said it will regulate international student numbers in the future—at least in the university sector. Presumably there will be some coordination between the domestic and international totals.
In the past, there’s been discussion of saying international students should make up no more than a certain percentage of total enrollments. Some universities already do this voluntarily, so I wouldn’t be surprised if a maximum percentage is formally set.
Alex Usher: It’s interesting you mention growth, because we’ve just been talking about how difficult it is for universities to balance their budgets. If there’s no new money—either from domestic sources or international students—how are they going to grow? I just saw, I think it was today, that the University of Melbourne is giving up on building a second campus.
Andrew Norton: That’s partly due to problems with the particular site they had chosen.
To backtrack a little—when they say “managed growth,” that doesn’t necessarily mean actual growth. They used the same phrase for international students even when the goal was clearly to reduce numbers. So in that case, it was really managed degrowth rather than growth.
What they do want in the long run, as recommended in the Accord, is for a higher percentage of people—particularly from disadvantaged backgrounds—to acquire a university degree. That’s the growth they want to achieve.
The challenge is the student market. The school-leaver market, in my analysis, is probably recovering after being flatter than usual. Universities that rely on school leavers are likely the ones that have managed to over-enroll.
But the mature-age market is in a long slump, apart from a brief spike during COVID. I don’t think that market will fully recover, because many in that cohort have already earned their bachelor’s degrees at a younger age and aren’t returning in the same numbers as before.
Alex Usher: With all these restrictions—fewer international students, slumping domestic enrollments, and declining government funding—what do you think the system looks like five years from now? By 2030, is this a sector that’s found its mojo again, or are we looking at long-term decline?
Andrew Norton: I don’t think it’s as bad as it looks in some other countries, where demographics are worse than in Australia. But I do think the 2020s will continue to be a difficult period.
We’ve been talking about potential structural changes in the labor market and the impact of AI, which could devalue a degree. That could cause shocks in the system we haven’t yet seen.
Higher education has survived numerous ups and downs in the labor market over the decades. Usually, any drop-offs are short-term, and then growth returns. But maybe this time is different—I’m not sure. Right now, we’re not seeing huge effects of AI in either international or domestic enrollment numbers. But it’s definitely possible that, once we start seeing negative labor market signals—like new graduates struggling to find work—that could hit demand.
Alex Usher: Andrew, thanks for joining us on the show.
Andrew Norton: Thanks, Alex.
Alex Usher: And thanks as always to our excellent producers, Sam Pufek and Tiffany MacLennan, and to you—our listeners and readers—for joining us. If you have any questions or comments about today’s episode, or suggestions for future ones, please don’t hesitate to get in touch at [email protected].
Join us next week when Marcelo Rabossi from the Universidad Torcuato Di Tella returns to talk about new developments in Argentina’s university financial crisis, and the showdown between Congress and President Javier Milei over a new higher education law. Bye for now.
*This podcast transcript was generated using an AI transcription service with limited editing. Please forgive any errors made through this service.Please note, the views and opinions expressed in each episode are those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host and team, or our sponsors.
