Why do so many students struggle to understand what they read, even after they learn how to read?
That’s a topic of hot debate among reading researchers. One camp has been arguing that schools have been going about it all wrong. These critics say that instead of drilling students on the main idea (similar to questions students will see on annual state exams), teachers should spend more time building students’ background knowledge of the world.
The theory is that the more familiar students are with science, history, geography and even art, the easier it will be for students to grasp new ideas when reading. Many educators are embracing this theory, and knowledge building lessons have been spreading rapidly across the country, from Baltimore to Mississippi to Colorado.
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But the evidence for this approach is still emerging, and some reading researchers urge caution. They worry that sometimes, too much time is being spent on background knowledge rather than actually reading and discussing texts. These skeptics argue students aren’t going to magically understand what they are reading just from knowing more about the world, and they need to be explicitly taught how to identify the main idea and how to summarize.
Debates like this are common in education as new research addresses unresolved issues, such as exactly how to teach reading once students have learned phonics and how to decode the words on the page.
“Early research showed that background knowledge plays a part,” said Kausalai Wijekumar, a professor of education at Texas A&M University, who has been studying reading instruction and recently produced a study that sheds more light on the debate. “People with good background knowledge seem to be able to read faster and understand quicker.”
For some children, particularly children from affluent families, she said, background knowledge is “enough” to unlock reading comprehension, but not for all. “If we want all the children to read, we have proven that they can be taught with the right strategies,” said Wijekumar. She has a body of research to back her position.
Wijekumar agrees that drilling students on the main point or the author’s purpose isn’t helpful because a struggling reader cannot come up with a point or a purpose from thin air. (She’s also not a fan of highlighting key words or graphic organizers, both common strategies for reading comprehension in schools.) Instead, Wijekumar advocates for a step-by-step process, conceived in the 1970s by her mentor and research partner, Bonnie J.F. Meyer, a professor emeritus at Penn State.
The first step is to guide students through a series of questions as they read, such as “Is there a problem?” “What caused it?” and “Is there a solution?” Based on their answers, students can then decide which structure the passage follows: cause and effect, problem and solution, comparisons or a sequence. Next, students fill in blanks — like in a Mad Libs worksheet — to help create a main idea statement. And finally, they practice expanding on that idea with relevant details to form a summary.
Wijekumar analyzed the story of Cinderella for me, using her approach. The problem? Cinderella is bullied by her stepmother and stepsisters. We learn this because she’s forced to do extra chores and isn’t allowed to attend the ball. The cause of the problem? They’re jealous of her. That’s why they take away her pretty clothes. Finally, the solution: A fairy godmother helps Cinderella go to the ball and meet Prince Charming. Students can then put all these elements together to come up with the main idea: Cinderella is bullied by her stepmother and stepsisters because they are jealous of her, but a fairy godmother saves her.
It’s a formulaic approach and there are certainly other ways of seeing or expressing the main idea. I wouldn’t have analyzed Cinderella that way. I would have guessed it’s a story about never giving up on your dreams even if your life is wretched now. But Wijekumar says it’s a helpful start for students who struggle the most.
“It’s very structured and systematic, and that provides a strong foundation,” Wijekumar said. “This is just the starting point. You can take it and layer on more things, but 99 percent of the children are having difficulty just starting.”
Wijekumar transformed Meyer’s strategy into a computerized tutor called ITSS, which stands for Intelligent Tutoring using the Structure Strategy. About 200,000 students around the world use ITSS. Wijekumar’s nonprofit, Literacy.IO, charges schools $40 a student plus teacher training, which can run $800 per teacher, depending on school size.
The tutor allows students to practice reading comprehension at their own pace. ITSS was one of only three online learning technologies that demonstrated clear evidence for improving student achievement, according to a February 2021 report by the Institute of Education Sciences, the research and development arm of the U.S. Department of Education.
Since then, Wijekumar has continued to refine her reading program and test it with more students. Her most recent study, a large-scale replication in high poverty schools, was highly successful according to one yardstick, but not so successful, according to another measure. It was published last year in the Journal of Educational Psychology.
A team of six researchers led by Wijekumar randomly assigned 17 of 33 schools in the Northeast and along the Texas border to teach reading with ITSS, while the remaining 16 schools taught reading as usual. More than 1,200 fifth graders practiced their reading comprehension using ITSS for 45 minutes a week over six months. Their teachers received 16 hours of training in how to teach reading comprehension this way and also delivered traditional analog reading lessons to their students.
After six months, students who received this reading instruction posted significantly higher scores on a researcher-designed assessment, which measured students’ ability to write main ideas, recall key information and understand text structures. However, there was no statistically significant difference between the two groups on a standardized test, the Gray Silent Reading Test (GSRT), which measured students’ general reading comprehension. The researchers did not report state test scores.
Earlier studies with wealthier students showed improvements on the standardized reading comprehension test. It’s hard to make sense of why this study showed giant benefits using one measure, but none using another.
Substantial changes in the instruction were needed for these high-poverty students. Some were such weak readers that Wijekumar’s team had to draft easier texts so that students could practice the method. But the biggest change was 14 hours of additional teacher training and the creation of instructional guides for the teachers. Wijekumar’s strategies directly contradicted what their schools’ textbooks told them to do. At first, the students were confused with the teachers teaching them one way and ITSS another. So Wijekumar worked with the teachers to scrap their textbook instructions and teach her way.
I consulted with Marissa Filderman,a respected reading expert who has reviewed the literature on comprehension instruction for children who struggle with reading and is an assistant professor at the University of Alabama. She said despite the imperfect evidence from this study, she sees Wijekumar’s body of research as evidence that explicit strategy instruction is important along with building background knowledge and vocabulary. But it’s still an evolving science, and the research isn’t yet clear enough to guide teachers on how much time to spend on each aspect.
Improving reading comprehension is critical, and I’ll be watching for new research to help answer these questions for teachers.
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.
The recent decision to cancel $400 million in AmeriCorps grants is nothing short of a crisis. With over 1,000 programs affected and 32,000 AmeriCorps and Senior Corps members pulled from their posts, this move will leave communities across the country without critical services.
The cuts will dismantle disaster recovery efforts, disrupt educational support for vulnerable students and undermine a powerful workforce development strategy that provides AmeriCorps members with in-demand skills across sectors including education.
AmeriCorps provides a service-to-workforce pipeline that gives young Americans and returning veterans hands-on training in high-demand industries, such as education, public safety, disaster response and health care. Its nominal front-end investment in human capital fosters economic mobility, enabling those who engage in a national service experience to successfully transition to gainful employment.
As leaders of Teach For America and City Year, two organizations that are part of the AmeriCorps national service network and whose members receive education stipends that go toward certification costs, student loans or future education pursuits, we are alarmed by how this crisis threatens the future of the education and workforce pipelines that power our nation’s progress, and it is deeply personal. We both started our careers as corps members in the programs we now lead.
Aneesh began his journey as a Teach For America corps member teaching high school English in Minnesota. Jim’s path began with City Year, serving at a Head Start program in Boston. We know firsthand that AmeriCorps programs are transformative and empower young people to drive meaningful change — for themselves and their communities.
At Teach For America, AmeriCorps grants are essential to recruiting thousands of new teachers every year to effectively lead high-need classrooms across the country. These teachers, who have a consistent and significant positive impact on students’ learning, rely on the AmeriCorps education awards they earn through their two years of service to pay for their own education and professional development, including new teacher certification fees, costs that in some communities exceed $20,000.
Termination of these grants threatens the pipeline of an estimated 2,500 new teachers preparing to enter classrooms over the summer. At a time when rural and urban communities alike are facing critical teacher shortages, cutting AmeriCorps support risks leaving students without the educators they need and deserve.
City Year, similarly, relies on AmeriCorps to recruit more than 2,200 young adults annually to serve as student success coaches in K-12 schools across 21 states, 29 cities and 60 school districts.
These AmeriCorps members serving as City Year student success coaches provide tutoring and mentoring that support students’ academic progress and interpersonal skill development and growth; they partner closely with teachers to boost student achievement, improve attendance and help keep kids on track to graduate. Research shows that schools partnering with City Year are two times more likely to improve their scores on English assessments, and two to three times more likely to improve their scores on math assessments.
Corps members gain critical workforce skills such as leadership, problem-solving and creative thinking, which align directly with the top skills employers seek; the value of their experience has been reaffirmed through third-party research conducted with our alumni. The City Year experience prepares corps members for success in varied careers, with many going into education.
AmeriCorps-funded programs like Breakthrough Collaborative and Jumpstart further strengthen this national service-to-workforce pathway, expanding the number of trained tutors and teacher trainees while also preparing corps members for careers that make a difference in all of our lives.
Those programs’ trained educators ensure all students gain access to excellent educational opportunities that put them on the path to learn, lead and thrive in communities across the country. And the leaders of both organizations, like us, are AmeriCorps alumni, proof of the lasting effect of national service.
Collectively, our four organizations have hundreds of thousands of alumni whose work as AmeriCorps members has impacted millions of children while shaping their own lives’ work, just as it did ours. Our alumni continue to lead classrooms, schools, districts, communities and organizations in neighborhoods across the country.
The termination of AmeriCorps grants is a direct blow to educators, schools and students. And, at a time when Gen Z is seeking work that aligns with their values and desire for impact, AmeriCorps is an essential on-ramp to public service and civic leadership that benefits not just individuals but entire communities and our country at large.
For every dollar invested in AmeriCorps, $17 in economic value is generated, proving that national service is not only efficient but also a powerhouse for economic growth. Rather than draining resources, AmeriCorps drives real, measurable results that benefit individual communities and the national economy.
Moreover, two-thirds of AmeriCorps funding is distributed by governor-appointed state service commissions to community- and faith-based organizations that leverage that funding to meet local needs. By working directly with state and local partners, AmeriCorps provides a more effective solution than top-down government intervention.
On behalf of the more than 6,500 current AmeriCorps members serving with Teach For America and City Year, and the tens of thousands of alumni who have gone on to become educators, civic leaders and changemakers, we call on Congress to protect AmeriCorps and vital national service opportunities.
Investing in AmeriCorps is an investment in America’s future, empowering communities, strengthening families and revitalizing economies. Let’s preserve the fabric of our national service infrastructure and ensure that the next generation of leaders, educators and community advocates who want to serve our nation have the ability to do so.
Aneesh Sohoni is Teach For America’s new CEO. Previously, he was CEO of One Million Degrees and executive director of Teach For America Greater Chicago-Northwest Indiana. He is a proud alum of Teach For America.
Jim Balfanz, a recognized leader and innovator in the field of education and national service, is CEO and a proud alum of City Year.
Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson launched “Project Head Start,” a summer program intended to help children from low-income families prepare for school. Sixty years later, Head Start has expanded into a multi-billion program operating in all 50 states, serving preschoolers as well as infants, toddlers and pregnant women.
But the program is facing serious challenges, such as recent disruptions in federal funding, and cuts among staffers who oversee the program. In a recent feature story for The Hechinger Report, reporter Anya Kamenetz delved into Head Start’s uncertain future. I asked Anya what she learned from her reporting. Her responses have been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Head Start is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, and has persevered through both Democratic and Republican presidential administrations. However, it seems to be uniquely vulnerable this year. What is happening that puts the program at risk?
A: A lot of the federal staff has been fired. And Project 2025, which the Trump administration has been following closely, calls for eliminating the program altogether. (Editor’s note: this week, the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees Head Start, placed staffers at five of Head Start’s 10 regional offices on administrative leave.)
Q: Critics of Head Start say that the program is poorly run and that the money could be better spent at the local level. According to its supporters, why is Head Start still an important program?
A: The program has always been severely underfunded, serving only a fraction of eligible children. The lapses in quality that we know about have come to light in part because the program has better oversight and higher quality standards than the existing patchwork of subsidized, nonprofit and for-profit programs otherwise available across the country. Head Start has been shown to improve long-term educational outcomes. In addition, lawmakers are threatening cuts to Head Start alongside cuts to programs that support families across the board, from food stamps to Medicaid.
Q: States and local communities are stepping in to expand their early childhood offerings. Did state officials share with you if they are ready to step in should Head Start be cut or if the funding shifts?
A: Yes, a bright spot in my article was that in states like Vermont and New Mexico where they have been committed to expanding access to childcare, they are intending to keep this a priority even if federal funding shifts.
This story about Head Start 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.
Maraida Caraballo Martínez es educadora en Puerto Rico desde hace 28 años y directora de la Escuela de la Comunidad Jaime C. Rodríguez desde hace siete. Nunca sabe cuánto dinero recibirá del gobierno cada año porque no se basa en el número de niños matriculados. Un año recibió 36.000 dólares; otro año, 12.000 dólares.
Pero por primera vez como educador, Caraballo notó una gran diferencia durante la administración Biden. Gracias a una inyección de fondos federales en el sistema educativo de la isla, Caraballo recibió una subvención de 250.000 dólares, una cantidad de dinero sin precedentes. La utilizó para comprar libros y ordenadores para la biblioteca, pizarras e impresoras para las aulas, reforzar el programa de robótica y construir una pista polideportiva para sus alumnos. “Esto significó una gran diferencia para la escuela”, dijo Caraballo.
Yabucoa, un pequeño pueblo del sureste de Puerto Rico, fue una de las regiones más afectadas por el huracán María en 2017. Y esta comunidad escolar, como cientos de otras en la isla, ha experimentado trastornos casi constantes desde entonces. Una serie de desastres naturales, como huracanes, terremotos, inundaciones y deslizamientos de tierra, seguidos de la pandemia de coronavirus en 2020, han golpeado la isla e interrumpido el aprendizaje. También ha habido una rotación constante de secretarios de educación locales: siete en los últimos ocho años. El sistema educativo puertorriqueño -el séptimo distrito escolar más grande de Estados Unidos- se ha vuelto más vulnerable debido a la abrumadora deuda de la isla, la emigración masiva y una red eléctrica paralizada.
Relacionado: En las aulas de preescolar a secundaria pasan muchas cosas. Mantente al día con nuestro boletínsemanal gratuito sobre educación.
Bajo la presidencia de Joe Biden, se produjeron tímidos avances, respaldados por miles de millones de dólares y una atención personal sostenida por parte de altos funcionarios federales de educación, dijeron muchos expertos y educadores de la isla. Ahora les preocupa que todo se desmantele con el cambio en la Casa Blanca. El presidente Donald Trump no ha ocultado su desdén por el territorio estadounidense, habiendo dicho supuestamente que estaba “sucio y que la gente era pobre.” Durante su primer mandato, retuvo miles de millones de dólares en ayuda federal tras el huracán María y ha sugerido vender la isla o cambiarla por Groenlandia.
Una reciente orden ejecutiva para hacer del inglés el idioma oficial ha preocupado a los habitantes de la isla, donde solo 1 de cada 5 personas habla inglés con fluidez, y el español es el idioma de instrucción en las escuelas. Trump está tratando de eliminar el Departamento de Educación de EE.UU. y ya ha hecho recortes radicales a la agencia, lo que tendrá implicaciones en toda la isla. Incluso si los fondos federales -que el año pasado representaron más de dos tercios del financiamiento del Departamento de Educación de Puerto Rico, o DEPR- se transfirieran directamente al gobierno local, probablemente traerían peores resultados para los niños más vulnerables, dicen los educadores y expertos en políticas públicas. Históricamente, el DEPR ha estado plagado de interferencias políticas, burocracia generalizada y falta de transparencia.
Maraida Caraballo Martínez ha sido educadora en Puerto Rico durante 28 años y ahora es directora de una escuela primaria. Su escuela ha estado a punto de cerrar tres veces debido a la emigración masiva de la isla. Credit: Kavitha Cardoza for The Hechinger Report
Y el departamento de educación local no está tan avanzado tecnológicamente como otros departamentos de educación estatales, ni es tan capaz de difundir las mejores prácticas. Por ejemplo, Puerto Rico no dispone de una “fórmula por alumno”, un cálculo utilizado habitualmente en el continente para determinar la cantidad de dinero que recibe cada estudiante para su educación. Roberto Mujica es el director ejecutivo de la Junta de Supervisión y Gestión Financiera de Puerto Rico, convocada por primera vez bajo la presidencia de Barack Obama en 2016 para hacer frente al marasmo financiero de la isla. Mujica dijo que la actual asignación de fondos educativos de Puerto Rico es opaca. “Cómo se distribuyen los fondos se percibe como un proceso político”, dijo. “No hay transparencia ni claridad”.
En 2021, Miguel Cardona, Secretario de Educación de Biden, prometió “un nuevo día” para Puerto Rico. “Durante demasiado tiempo, los estudiantes y educadores de Puerto Rico fueron abandonados”, dijo. Durante su mandato, Cardona aignó casi 6.000 millones de dólares federales para el sistema educativo de la isla, lo que se tradujo en un aumento salarial histórico para los profesores, financiamiento para programas de tutoría extraescolar, la contratación de cientos de profesionales de salud mental escolar y la creación de un programa piloto para descentralizar el DEPR.
Cardona designó a un asesor principal, Chris Soto, para que fuera su persona de contacto con el sistema educativo de la isla, subrayando el compromiso del gobierno federal con la isla. Durante casi cuatro años en el cargo, Soto realizó más de 50 viajes a la isla. Carlos Rodríguez Silvestre, director ejecutivo de la Fundación Flamboyán, una organización sin fines de lucro de Puerto Rico que ha dirigido los esfuerzos de alfabetización infantil en la isla, dijo que el nivel de respeto e interés sostenido hicieron sentir que se trataba de una asociación, no un mandato de arriba hacia abajo. “Nunca había visto ese tipo de atención a la educación en Puerto Rico”, afirmó. “Soto prácticamente vivía en la isla”.
Soto también trabajó estrechamente con Víctor Manuel Bonilla Sánchez, presidente del sindicato de maestros, la Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico, o AMPR, lo que dio lugar a un acuerdo por el que los educadores recibieron 1.000 dólares más al mes en su salario base, un aumento de casi el 30% para el maestro promedio. “Fue el mayor aumento salarial en la historia de los maestros de Puerto Rico”, dijo Bonilla, aunque incluso con el aumento, los maestros de aquí siguen ganando mucho menos dinero que sus colegas en el continente.
Una de las mayores quejas que Soto dijo haber escuchado fue lo rígido y burocrático que era el Departamento de Educación de Puerto Rico, a pesar de una ley de reforma educativa de 2018 que permite un mayor control local. La agencia de educación -la unidad de gobierno más grande de la isla, con la mayor cantidad de empleados y el mayor presupuesto- estaba configurada de manera que la oficina central tenía que aprobar todo. Así que Soto creó y supervisó un programa piloto en Ponce, una región en la costa sur de la isla, enfocado en la descentralización.
Por primera vez, la comunidad local eligió un consejo asesor de educación, y los candidatos a superintendente tuvieron que postularse en lugar de ser nombrados, dijo Soto. El superintendente recibió autoridad para aprobar directamente las solicitudes presupuestarias en lugar de enviarlas a través de funcionarios de San Juan, así como flexibilidad para gastar el dinero en su región en función de las necesidades de cada escuela.
En el pasado, eso no se tenía en cuenta: Por ejemplo, Yadira Sánchez, psicóloga que lleva más de 20 años trabajando en la educación puertorriqueña, recuerda cuando una escuela recibió docenas de aires acondicionados nuevos aunque no los necesitaba. “Ya tenían aires acondicionados que funcionaban”, dice, “así que ese dinero se perdió”.
El proyecto piloto también se centró en aumentar la eficiencia. Por ejemplo, ahora se evalúa a los niños discapacitados en sus colegios, en lugar de tener que acudir a un centro especial. Y Soto dice que también intentó eliminar el uso de influencias y aumentar la transparencia en torno al gasto en el PRDE. “Puedes mejorar las facturas, pero si tus amigos políticos son los que se quedancon los trabajos, entonces no tienes un buen sistema escolar”, dijo.
Bajo el mandato de Biden, Puerto Rico también recibió una subvención competitiva o grant del Departamento de Educación de EE.UU. por valor de 10,5 millones de dólares para escuelas comunitarias, otro hito. Y el departamento federal empezó a incluir datos sobre el territorio en algunas estadísticas educativas recopiladas. “Puerto Rico ni siquiera figuraba en estos indicadores, así que empezamos a preguntarnos cómo mejorar los sistemas de datos. Desentrañar el problema de los datos significó que Puerto Rico puede ser debidamente reconocido”, dijo Soto.
Pero ya hay planes para deshacer el esfuerzo de Cardona en Ponce. La recién elegida gobernadora de la isla, Jenniffer González Colón, es republicana y partidaria de Trump. El popular secretario de Educación, Eliezer Ramos Parés, regresó a principios de este año al frente del departamento tras dirigirlo desde abril de 2021 hasta julio de 2023, cuando la gobernadora le pidió inesperadamente que dimitiera, algo nada inusual en el gobierno de la isla, donde los nombramientos políticos pueden terminar de repente y con poco debate público. Ramos dijo a The Hechinger Report que el programa no continuará en su forma actual, calificándolo de “ineficiente”.
“El programa piloto no es realmente eficaz”, dijo, señalando que la política puede influir en las decisiones de gasto no sólo a nivel central, sino también a nivel regional. “Queremos tener algunos controles”. También dijo que ampliar la iniciativa a toda la isla costaría decenas de millones de dólares. En su lugar, Ramos dijo que estaba estudiando enfoques más limitados de la descentralización, en torno a algunas funciones de recursos humanos y adquisiciones. Dijo que también estaba explorando una fórmula de financiación por alumno para Puerto Rico y estudiando las lecciones de otros grandes distritos escolares como la ciudad de Nueva York y Hawai.
Un autobús escolar bajo un árbol que cayó durante el huracán María, que azotó la isla de Puerto Rico en septiembre de 2017. Más de un año después, no había sido retirado. Credit: Al Bello/Getty Images for Lumix
El Departamento de Educación de EE.UU., que complementa la financiación local y estatal para los estudiantes en situación de pobreza y con discapacidades, tiene un papel desproporcionado en las escuelas de Puerto Rico. En la isla, el 55% de los niños viven por debajo del umbral de la pobreza, frente al 17% en los 50 estados; en el caso de los estudiantes de educación especial, las cifras son del 35% y el 15%, respectivamente. En total, durante el año fiscal 2024, más del 68 por ciento del presupuesto de educación en la isla procede de fondos federales, frente al 11 por ciento en los estados de EE UU. El departamento también administra las becas Pell para estudiantes de bajos ingresos -alrededor del 72 por ciento de los estudiantes puertorriqueños las solicitan- y apoya los esfuerzos de desarrollo profesional y las iniciativas para los niños puertorriqueños que van y vienen entre el continente y el territorio.
Linda McMahon, la nueva secretaria de Educación de Trump, ha dicho supuestamente que el Gobierno seguirá cumpliendo sus “obligaciones legales” con los estudiantes aunque el departamento cierre o transfiera algunas operaciones y despida personal. El Departamento de Educación de Estados Unidos no respondió a las solicitudes de comentarios para esta historia.
Algunos dicen que el hecho de que la administración Biden haya vertido miles de millones de dólares en un sistema educativo en problemas con escasa rendición de cuentas ha creado expectativas poco realistas y no hay un plan para lo que ocurre después de que se gasta el dinero. Mujica, director ejecutivo de la junta de supervisión, dijo que la infusión de fondos pospuso la toma de decisiones difíciles por parte del gobierno puertorriqueño. “Cuando se tiene tanto dinero, se tapan muchos problemas. No tienes que enfrentarte a algunos de los retos que son fundamentales para el sistema”. Y afirmó que apenas se habla de lo que ocurrirá cuando se acabe ese dinero. “¿Cómo se va a llenar ese vacío? O desaparecen esos programas o tendremos que encontrar la financiación para ellos”, dijo Mujica.
Dijo que esfuerzos como el de Ponce para acercar la toma de decisiones a donde están las necesidades de los estudiantes es “de vital importancia”. Aún así, dijo que no está seguro de que el dinero haya mejorado los resultados de los estudiantes. “Esta era una gran oportunidad para hacer cambios fundamentales e inversiones que produzcan resultados a largo plazo. No estoy seguro de que hayamos visto las métricas que lo respalden”.
Puerto Rico es una de las regiones más empobrecidas desde el punto de vista educativo, con unos resultados académicos muy inferiores a los del continente. En la parte de matemáticas de la Evaluación Nacional de Progreso Educativo, o NAEP, una prueba que realizan los estudiantes de todo EE.UU., sólo el 2% de los alumnos de cuarto curso de Puerto Rico calificaron como competentes, la puntuación más alta jamás registrada en la isla, y el 0% de los alumnos de octavo curso lo fueron. Los estudiantes puertorriqueños no hacen la prueba NAEP de lectura porque aprenden en español, no en inglés, aunque los resultados compartidos por Ramos en una conferencia de prensa en 2022 mostraron que sólo el 1% de los estudiantes de tercer grado leían a nivel de grado.
Hay algunos esfuerzos alentadores. La Fundación Flamboyán ha liderado una coalición de 70 socios en toda la isla para mejorar la alfabetización de los niños de preescolar a tercer grado, entre otras cosas mediante el desarrollo profesional. La formación del profesorado a través del departamento de educación del territorio ha sido a menudo irregular u opcional.
La organización trabaja ahora en estrecha colaboración con la Universidad de Puerto Rico y, como parte de ese esfuerzo, supervisa el gasto de 3 millones de dólares en formación para la alfabetización. Aproximadamente 1.500 profesores de Puerto Rico (un tercio de los maestros de Kinder a 5º grado) han recibido esta rigurosa formación. Los educadores recibieron 500 dólares como incentivo por participar, además de libros para sus aulas y tres horas de formación continua. “Fueron muchas horas de calidad. No ha sido el método de ‘rociar (con un poco de agua) y rezar’”, dijo Silvestre. Ese esfuerzo continuará, según Ramos, que lo calificó de “muy eficaz”.
Una nueva prueba de lectura para alumnos de primero a tercer grado que la organización sin fines de lucro ayudó a diseñar mostró que entre los años escolares 2023 y 2024, la mayoría de los niños estaban por debajo del nivel del grado, pero hubo avances en los resultados en todos los grados. “Pero aún nos queda un largo camino por recorrer para que estos datos lleguen a los profesores a tiempo y de forma que puedan actuar en consecuencia”, dijo Silvestre.
Kristin Ehrgood, Directora General de la Fundación Flamboyán, afirma que es demasiado pronto para ver resultados espectaculares. “Es realmente difícil ver una tonelada de resultados positivos en un período tan corto de tiempo con la desconfianza significativa que se ha construido durante años”, dijo. Dijo que no estaban seguros de cómo la administración Trump podría trabajar o financiar el sistema educativo de Puerto Rico, pero que la administración Biden había construido una gran cantidad de buena voluntad. “Hay muchas oportunidades que podrían aprovecharse, si una nueva administración decide hacerlo”.
Otra señal esperanzadora es que la junta de supervisión, que fue muy protestada cuando se formó, ha reducido la deuda de la isla de 73.000 a 31.000 millones de dólares. Y el año pasado los miembros de la junta aumentaron el gasto en educación en un 3%. Mujica dijo que la junta se centra en asegurarse de que cualquier inversión se traduzca en mejores resultados para los estudiantes: “Nuestra opinión es que los recursos tienen que ir a las aulas”.
Betty A. Rosa, comisionada de educación y presidente de la Universidad del Estado de Nueva York y miembro de la Junta de Supervisión, afirmó que la inestabilidad educativa en Puerto Rico se debe a los cambios en el liderazgo. Cada nuevo líder se dedica a “reconstruir, reestructurar, reimaginar, elija la palabra que elija”, dijo. “No hay coherencia”. A diferencia de su cargo en el estado de Nueva York, el Secretario de Educación de Puerto Rico y otros cargos son nombramientos políticos. “Si tienes un gobierno permanente, aunque cambie el liderazgo, el trabajo continúa”.
Ramos, que vivió esta inestabilidad cuando el anterior gobernador pidió inesperadamente su dimisión en 2023, dijo que se reunió con McMahon, la nueva secretaria de Educación de EE.UU., en Washington, D.C., y que mantuvieron una “agradable conversación”. “Ella sabe de Puerto Rico, se preocupa por Puerto Rico y demostró total apoyo en la misión de Puerto Rico”, dijo. Dijo que McMahon quería que el DEPR ofreciera más clases bilingües, para exponer a más estudiantes al inglés. Queda por ver si habrá cambios en la otorgación de fondos o cualquier otra cosa. “Tenemos que ver lo que ocurre en las próximas semanas y meses y cómo esa visión y esa política podrían afectar a Puerto Rico”, dijo Ramos.
La Escuela de la Comunidad Jaime C. Rodríguez es una escuela Montessori de Yabucoa, Puerto Rico, que carecía de instalaciones deportivas para sus alumnos. Recientemente comenzó las obras de un centro deportivo polivalente gracias a los fondos federales otorgados por la administración del presidente Biden. Credit: Kavitha Cardoza for The Hechinger Report
Ramos fue muy apreciado por los educadores durante su primera etapa como Secretario de Educación. También tendrá que tomar muchas decisiones, como ampliar las escuelas charter y cerrar las escuelas públicas tradicionales, ya que la matriculación en las escuelas públicas de la isla sigue disminuyendo vertiginosamente. En el pasado, ambas cuestiones provocaron protestas feroces y generalizadas.
Soto es realista y cree que la nueva administración tendrá “puntos de vista diferentes, tanto ideológica como políticamente”, pero confía en que el pueblo de Puerto Rico no quiera volver a la antigua forma de hacer las cosas. “Alguien dijo: ‘Ustedes sacaron al genio de la botella y va a ser difícil volver a ponerlo’ en lo que se refiere a un sistema escolar centrado en el estudiante”, dijo Soto.
Cardona, cuyos abuelos son oriundos de la isla, dijo que Puerto Rico había experimentado un “estancamiento académico” durante años. “No podemos aceptar que los estudiantes rindan menos de lo que sabemos que son capaces”, dijo a The Hechinger Report, justo antes de despedirse como máximo responsable de educación del país. “Empezamos el cambio; tiene que continuar.
La pequeña escuela de la directora Carabello, con 150 alumnos y 14 profesores, ha estado a punto de cerrarse ya tres veces, aunque en todas ellas se ha salvado en parte gracias al apoyo de la comunidad. Carabello confía en que Ramos, con quien ya ha trabajado anteriormente, cambie las cosas. “Conoce el sistema educativo”, afirma. “Es una persona brillante, abierta a escuchar”.
Pero las largas jornadas de los últimos años le han pasado factura. Suele estar en la escuela de 6:30 a.m. a 6:30 p.m. “Entras cuando anochece y te vas cuando anochece”, dice. Ha habido muchas plataformas nuevas que aprender y nuevos proyectos que poner en marcha. Quiere jubilarse, pero no puede permitírselo. Tras décadas en las que el gobierno local no financió suficientemente el sistema de pensiones, se recortaron los subsidios que compensaban el alto precio de los bienes y servicios en la isla y se congelaron los planes de pensiones.
Ahora, en lugar de jubilarse con el 75% de su salario, Carabello recibirá sólo el 50%, 2.195 dólares al mes. Tiene derecho a prestaciones de la Seguridad Social, pero no son suficientes para compensar la pensión perdida. “¿Quién puede vivir con 2.000 dólares en un mes? Nadie. Es demasiado duro. Y mi casa aún necesita 12 años más para pagarse”.
A Carabello, siempre tan fuerte y optimista con sus alumnos, se le saltaron las lágrimas. Pero es raro que se permita tiempo para pensar en sí misma. “Tengo una gran comunidad. Tengo grandes profesores y me siento feliz con lo que hago”, afirma.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Bright morning sun is streaming through her home’s windows as Sandra Dill reads a picture book about penguins to a room full of busy toddlers. While listening, the kids blow kisses, plop in a visitor’s lap, then get up to slide down a small slide.
Dill has been running a family child care business from her home for 15 years, and every one of her 13 grandchildren has spent time here — currently it’s 20-month-old Nathaniel, who has a puff of curly hair and a gooey grin.
“My older ones started to call it ‘grandma school,’” she said. Another one of her granddaughters, now a teenager, is returning this summer to help out.
Four of Dill’s eight available slots are funded through Head Start. This is the federal-to-local program that funds child care and other support for the poorest families in America. (Regular Head Start serves children 3 to 5 years old; Early Head Start is for those under 3.) The program — which began right here in New Haven, Connecticut — is celebrating its 60th anniversary this year.
It’s also never been so at risk: First a federal funding freeze hit providers, then a chunk of Head Start federal support staff were fired by the Department of Government Efficiency. On March 27, the Department of Health and Human Services announced it was cutting a further 10,000 jobs, and reorganizing the Administration for Children and Families, which administers Head Start. As of April 1, Head Start employees in five of the program’s 10 regions — Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Seattle — had reportedly been laid off, according to a LinkedIn post that day from Katie Hamm, a former official with the federal Administration for Children and Families. Hamm said there does not appear to be a transition plan laying out how Head Start programs in those regions will receive funding and support. Project 2025, the conservative policy handbook organized by the Heritage Foundation, which the Trump administration has been following closely, calls for eliminating Head Start altogether.
“I think it’s terrible,” Dill said. “I just can’t imagine. It’s already not enough, and if this happens, it’s going to affect a lot of families that are already struggling.”
Ed Zigler, the “father of Head Start,” was the son of immigrants from Poland. His father was a peddler and his mother plucked chickens to make a little money, according to Walter Gilliam, executive director of the University of Nebraska’s Buffett Early Childhood Institute, who counted Zigler as his closest mentor.
When Zigler was a child, his family made its way to a settlement house in Kansas City, Missouri; these community-based charities offered a two-generation approach, caring for and educating children while also teaching English and job skills to parents and connecting families with medical care and housing help.
“That made a huge impact on his and his family’s life,” Gilliam said.
Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues.
As a young psychology professor at Yale, Zigler was hired as an advisor to President Lyndon Johnson to help design family programs for the federal War on Poverty. In creating Head Start, he turned to the same two-generation model he grew up with.
To date, Head Start has served nearly 40 million children. In fiscal year 2023, the Head Start program was funded to serve 778,420 children. The program has always been underfunded: In 2020 Head Start served barely 1 in 10 eligible infants and toddlers and only half of eligible preschoolers. It’s limited to families making under the federal poverty level, which is just $31,200 for a family of four.
The sand table at Dill’s child care is an opportunity to explore shapes, colors and textures. Credit: Anya Kamenetz for The Hechinger Report
Still, for many of the families who do manage to make it through the doors, the program is life-changing.
“Head Start is in every community in America,” said Cara Sklar, director of early & elementary education policy at the D.C.-based think tank New America. “It’s the original two-generation program, with wraparound support for kids. It’s really held up as a model of quality in early learning.”
The “wraparound support” for Dill’s Early Head Start families is funded by the United Way of Greater New Haven, and comes via a network for family child care educators called All Our Kin. The network helps mothers enroll in community college and apply for housing subsidies. Dill has had mothers who lived in their cars and one who was living with her mother “six to a room,” she said. She also does regular home visits with families to talk about children’s development and support parents in goals like potty training.
Thanks to Early Head Start, a nurse, a mental health consultant and a nutritionist all help Dill keep the kids healthy and safe. And the program also provides extra funds she can use to get back up and running if, for example, the furnace needs fixing.
But Head Start is now facing funding challenges that go far beyond a broken furnace. “The past month has been harrowing for child care providers,” said Carolina Reyes, director of Arco Iris Bilingual Children’s Center, a preschool in Laurel, Maryland, that is a Head Start partner, and also a member of the nationwide advocacy group MomsRising.
The first blow to Head Start in this administration was President Donald Trump’s January 27 executive order calling for a federal funding freeze. Since Head Start is a direct federal-to-local grant program, even temporary interruptions in funding can cause programs to close their doors.
“ Programs like mine operate on razor-thin margins,” said Reyes. “I don’t have any reserves to pull from if funding is delayed or slashed.”
While funding for most programs has resumed, Joel Ryan, the executive director of the Washington State Association of Head Start, said in a recent press conference that as late as the week of Feb. 17, one in four of his programs still had trouble accessing the Head Start payment website.
That same week of the 17th, almost 70 Head Start staffers were pink-slipped in the federal government’s sweep of “probationary” employees — about one-fifth of the program’s workforce. One laid-off employee, who didn’t want to give his name because he is still fighting his dismissal and fears reprisal, said he spent five years as a contractor before switching to full time this past summer, which accounted for his probationary status. He wore many hats at Head Start, doing data analytics, working with grant recipients and serving as a liaison for state partners.
“They say we’re bloated; we could have used two more full-time people,” he said.
The cuts, he feared, will lead to further delays in programs getting the payments they rely on, not to mention the oversight that keeps kids safe.
“I come from the private sector. I will find another job,” he said. “The issue isn’t us, it’s the children and the families. We’ve got all these people in poverty who are getting screwed over by what’s happening.”
A third blow came on February 25, when the House passed a budget resolution calling for $880 billion in cuts to discretionary spending programs over the next decade, with Medicaid the prime target, along with the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Head Start families overwhelmingly rely on these safety net programs. The White House’s gutting of the Department of Education also threatens many services for preschoolers, especially those in special education. (This process, which maps out the next fiscal year, is separate from the recent vote to fund the government until Sept. 30.)
“This is going from the precipice of disaster to decimating the system,” Sklar said. “All the parts that help families, from Head Start to child care to food to health care, are all being destabilized at once.”
Gilliam said that threats to eliminate Head Start are nothing new. After designing the program during the Johnson administration, Zigler was appointed to run it under the presidency of Richard Nixon. “Some folks told him that his job was to destroy, essentially, the program that he had created,” Gilliam said.
Head Start advocates said the program has been able to fight off political challenges in the past because it is widely distributed geographically and has bipartisan support.
“I agree that Project 2025 is a real threat to Head Start, as well as to other programs that we all care about,” said Ryan, with the Washington State Head Start association.
“But I will say this: We have great research. We have great data. We have a great track record. We have a lot of bipartisan support in Congress. And we have parent power.”
By coincidence, the week the House passed its budget resolution, a group of 150 Head Start parents were on Capitol Hill lobbying as part of a group called Start Early, and they met with many Republican senators.
Tommy Sheridan, the deputy director of the National Head Start Association, struck an almost defiantly optimistic tone after the visit to lawmakers: “We still believe and have seen indicators that this administration is supportive of Head Start. And Congress as well.”
NaMaree Cunningham and her twin sister turned two on the day of our visit. Credit: Anya Kamenetz for The Hechinger Report
Another potential bright spot is the growth of child care support and funding on the state level. Elizabeth Groginsky is New Mexico’s first cabinet secretary for the state’s new Early Childhood Education & Care Department, and she said the pandemic woke a lot of people up to the importance of early care and education.
“People began to understand the impact that child care has on children’s development, families’ ability to work, the overall economy,” Groginsky said.
Since 2020, New Mexico has gone through a major expansion in home visits, child care and preschool. Vermont has made similar moves, and New York and Connecticut are heading in that direction as well. Even the deep-red state of Kentucky has expanded access.
What all of these state-level programs have in common is that they are much more widely available to middle-class families, rather than tightly targeted to families in poverty, as Head Start still is. Historically, with programs like Medicare and Social Security, universal access has meant durable support.
Now those states are contemplating stepping in further if the federal government drops the ball.
“Because the state has made such an impressive commitment to child care, we’re potentially in a better spot than others,” said Janet McLaughlin, deputy commissioner for Vermont’s Department of Children and Families. And Groginsky, in New Mexico, said firmly, “The governor and the legislature — I don’t think we’ll let New Mexicans go without. They’ll find a way.”
Support for this reporting was provided by the Better Life Lab at New America.
This story about Head Start 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.
Maraida Caraballo Martinez has been an educator in Puerto Rico for 28 years and the principal of the elementary school Escuela de la Communidad Jaime C. Rodriguez for the past seven. She never knows how much money her school in Yabucoa will receive from the government each year because it isn’t based on the number of children enrolled. One year she got $36,000; another year, it was $12,000.
But for the first time as an educator, Caraballo noticed a big difference during the Biden administration. Because of an infusion of federal dollars into the island’s education system, Caraballo received a $250,000 grant, an unprecedented amount of money. She used it to buy books and computers for the library, white boards and printers for classrooms, to beef up a robotics program and build a multipurpose sports court for her students. “It meant a huge difference for the school,” Caraballo said.
Yabucoa, a small town in southeast Puerto Rico, was one of the regions hardest hit by Hurricane Maria in 2017. And this school community, like hundreds of others in Puerto Rico, has experienced near constant disruption since then. A series of natural disasters, including hurricanes, earthquakes, floods and landslides, followed by the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, has pounded the island and interrupted learning. There has also been constant churn of local education secretaries — seven in the past eight years. The Puerto Rican education system — the seventh-largest school district in the United States — has been made more vulnerable by the island’s overwhelming debt, mass emigration and a crippled power grid.
Maraida Caraballo Martinez has been an educator in Puerto Rico for 28 years and is now the principal of an elementary school. Her school has been slated for closure three times because of mass emigration from the island. Credit: Kavitha Cardoza for The Hechinger Report
Under President Joe Biden, there were tentative gains, buttressed by billions of dollars and sustained personal attention from top federal education officials, many experts and educators on the island said. Now they worry that it will all be dismantled with the change in the White House. President Donald Trump has made no secret of his disdain for the U.S. territory, having reportedly said that it was “dirty and the people were poor.” During his first term, he withheld billions of dollars in federal aid after Hurricane Maria and has suggested selling the island or swapping it for Greenland.
A recent executive order to make English the official language has worried people on the island, where only 1 in 5 people speak fluent English, and Spanish is the medium of instruction in schools. Trump is seeking to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education and has already madesweeping cuts to the agency, which will have widespread implications across the island. Even if federal funds — which last year made up more than two thirds of funding for the Puerto Rican Department of Education, or PRDE — were transferred directly to the local government, it would likely lead to worse outcomes for the most vulnerable children, say educators and policymakers. The PRDE has historically been plagued by political interference, widespread bureaucracy and a lack of transparency.
And the local education department is not as technologically advanced as other state education departments, nor as able to disseminate best practices. For example, Puerto Rico does not have a “per pupil formula,” a calculation commonly used on the mainland to determine the amount of money each student receives for their education. Robert Mujica is the executive director of the Puerto Rico Financial Oversight and Management Board, first convened under President Barack Obama in 2016 to deal with the island’s financial morass. Mujica said Puerto Rico’s current allocation of education funds is opaque. “How the funds are distributed is perceived as a political process,” he said. “There’s no transparency and there’s no clarity.”
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In 2021, Miguel Cardona, Biden’s secretary of education, promised “a new day” for Puerto Rico. “For too long, Puerto Rico’s students and educators were abandoned,” he said. During his tenure, Cardona signed off on almost $6 billion in federal dollars for the island’s educational system, leading to a historic pay increase for teachers, funding for after-school tutoring programs, hiring of hundreds of school mental health professionals and the creation of a pilot program to decentralize the PRDE.
Cardona designated a senior adviser, Chris Soto, to be his point person for the island’s education system to underscore the federal commitment. During nearly four years in office, he made more than 50 trips to the island. Carlos Rodriguez Silvestre, the executive director of the Flamboyan Foundation, a nonprofit in Puerto Rico that has led children’s literacy efforts on the island, said the level of respect and sustained interest felt like a partnership, not a top-down mandate. “I’ve never seen that kind of attention to education in Puerto Rico,” he said. “Soto practically lived on the island.”
Soto also worked closely with Victor Manuel Bonilla Sánchez, the president of the teachers union, Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico, or AMPR, which resulted in a deal in which educators received $1,000 more a month to their base salary, a nearly 30 percent increase for the average teacher.“It was the largest salary increase in the history of teachers in Puerto Rico,” Bonilla said, though even with the increase, teachers here still make far less money than teachers on the mainland.
One of the biggest complaints Soto said he heard was how rigid and bureaucratic the Puerto Rico Department of Education was, despite a 2018 education reform law that allows for more local control. The education agency — the largest unit of government on the island, with the most employees and the biggest budget — was set up so that the central office had to sign off on everything. So Soto created and oversaw a pilot program in Ponce, a region on the island’s southern coast, focusing on decentralization.
For the first time, the local community elected an advisory board of education, and superintendent candidates had to apply rather than be appointed, Soto said. The superintendent was given the authority to sign off on budget requests directly rather than sending them through officials in San Juan, as well as the flexibility to spend money in his region based on individual schools’ needs.
In the past, that wasn’t a consideration: For example, Yadira Sanchez, a psychologist who has worked in Puerto Rican education for more than 20 years, remembers when a school got dozens of new air conditioners even though it didn’t need it. “They already had functioning air conditioners,” she said, “so that money was lost.”
The pilot project also focused on increasing efficiency. For example, children with disabilities are now evaluated at their schools rather than having to visit a special center. And Soto says he tried to remove politics and increase transparency around spending in the PRDE as well. “You can improve invoices, but if your political friends are getting the work, then you don’t have a good school system,” he said.
A school bus under a tree that fell during Hurricane Maria, which hit the island of Puerto Rico in September 2017. More than a year later, it had not been removed. Credit: Al Bello/Getty Images for Lumix
Under Biden, Puerto Rico also received a competitive U.S. Department of Education grant for $10.5 million for community schools, another milestone. And the federal department started including data on the territory in some education statistics collected. “Puerto Rico wasn’t even on these trackers, so we started to dig into how do we improve the data systems? Unraveling the data issue meant that Puerto Rico can properly get recognized,” Soto said.
But already there are plans to undo Cardona’s signature effort in Ponce. The island’s newly elected governor, Jenniffer González Colón, is a Republican and a Trump supporter. The popular secretary of education, Eliezer Ramos Parés, returned earlier this year to head the department after leading it from April 2021 to July 2023 when the governor unexpectedly asked him to resign — not an unusual occurrence within the island’s government, where political appointments can end suddenly and with little public debate. He told The Hechinger Report that the program won’t continue in its current form, calling it “inefficient.”
“The pilot isn’t really effective,” he said, noting that politics can influence spending decisions not only at the central level but at the regional level as well. “We want to have some controls.” He also said expanding the effort across the island would cost tens of millions of dollars. Instead, Ramos said he was looking at more limited approaches to decentralization, around some human resource and procurement functions. He said he was also exploring a per pupil funding formula for Puerto Rico and looking at lessons from other large school districts such as New York City and Hawaii.
While education has been the largest budget item on the island for years, it’s still far less than any of the 50 states spend on each student. Puerto Rico spends $9,500 per student, compared with an average of $18,600 in the states.
The U.S. Department of Education, which supplements local and state funding for students in poverty and with disabilities, has an outsized role in Puerto Rico schools. On the island, 55 percent of children live below the poverty line, compared with 17 percent in the 50 states; for students in special education, the figures are 35 percent and 15 percent, respectively. In total, during fiscal year 2024, more than 68 percent of the education budget on the island comes from federal funding, compared to 11 percent in U.S. states. The department also administers Pell Grants for low-income students — some 72 percent of Puerto Rican students apply — and supports professional development efforts and initiatives for Puerto Rican children who move back and forth between the mainland and territory.
Linda McMahon, Trump’s new education secretary, has reportedly said that the government will continue to meet its “statutory obligations” to students even as the department shuts down or transfers some operations and lays off staff. The U.S. Department of Education did not respond to requests for comment.
Some say the Biden administration’s pouring billions of dollars into a troubled education system with little accountability has created unrealistic expectations and there’s no plan for what happens after money is spent. Mujica, the executive director of the oversight board, said the infusion of funds postponed tough decisions by the Puerto Rican government. “When you have so much money, it papers over a lot of problems. You didn’t have to deal with some of the challenges that are fundamental to the system.” And he said there is little discussion of what happens when that money runs out. “How are you going to bridge that gap? Either those programs go away or we’re going to have to find the funding for them,” Mujica said.
He said efforts like the one in Ponce to bring decision making closer to where the students’ needs are is “vitally important.” Still, he said he’s not sure the money improved student outcomes. “This was a huge opportunity to make fundamental changes and investments that will yield long-term results. I’m not sure that we’ve seen the metrics to support that.”
Puerto Rico is one of the most educationally impoverished regions, with academic outcomes well below the mainland. On the math portion of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, a test that students across the U.S. take, just 2 percent of fourth graders in Puerto Rico were proficient, the highest score ever recorded for the island, and zero percent of eighth graders were. Puerto Rican students don’t take the NAEP for reading because they learn in Spanish, not English, though results shared by Ramos at a press conference in 2022 showed only 1 percent of third graders were reading at grade level.
There are some encouraging efforts. Flamboyan Foundation, the nonprofit in Puerto Rico, has been leading an island-wide coalition of 70 partners to improve K-3 literacy, including through professional development. Teacher training through the territory’s education department has often been spotty or optional.
The organization now works closely with the University of Puerto Rico and, as part of that effort, oversees spending of $3 million in literacy training. Approximately 1,500 or a third of Puerto Rico’s K-5 teachers have undergone the rigorous training. Educators were given $500 as an incentive for participating, along with books for their classrooms and three credit hours in continuing education. “It was a lot of quality hours. This was not the ‘spray and pray’ approach,” said Silvestre. That effort will continue, according to Ramos, who called it “very effective.”
A new reading test for first through third graders the nonprofit helped design showed that between the 2023 and 2024 school years, most children were below grade level but made growth in every grade. “But we still have a long way to go so that this data can get to teachers in a timely manner and in a way that they can actually act on it,” Silvestre said.
Kristin Ehrgood, Flamboyan Foundation’s CEO, said it’s too soon to see dramatic gains. “It’s really hard to see a ton of positive outcomes in such a short period of time with significant distrust that has been built over years,” she said. She said they weren’t sure how the Trump administration may work with or fund Puerto Rico’s education system but that the Biden administration had built a lot of goodwill. “There is a lot of opportunity that could be built on, if a new administration chooses to do that.”
Another hopeful sign is that the oversight board, which was widely protested when it was formed, has cut the island’s debt from $73 billion to $31 billion. And last year board members increased education spending by 3 percent. Mujica said the board is focused on making sure that any investment translates into improved outcomes for students: “Our view is resources have to go into the classroom.”
Betty A. Rosa, education commissioner and president of the University of the State of New York and a member of the oversight board, said leadership churn in Puerto Rico drives its educational instability. Every new leader is invested in “rebuilding, restructuring, reimagining, pick your word,” she said. “There is no consistency.” Unlike her New York state position, the Puerto Rican education secretary and other positions are political appointments. “If you have permanent governance, then even when the leadership changes, the work continues.”
Ramos, who experienced this instability when the previous governor unexpectedly asked to resign in 2023, said he met McMahon, the new U.S. secretary of education, in Washington, D.C., and that they had a “pleasant conversation.” “She knows about Puerto Rico, she’s concerned about Puerto Rico, and she demonstrated full support in the Puerto Rico mission,” he said. He said McMahon wanted PRDE to offer more bilingual classes, to expose more students to English. Whether there will be changes in funding or anything else remains to be seen. “We have to look at what happens in the next few weeks and months and how that vision and policy could affect Puerto Rico,” Ramos said.
Ramos was well-liked by educators during his first stint as education secretary. He will also have a lot of decisions to make, including whether to expand public charter schools and close down traditional public schools as the island’s public school enrollment continues to decline precipitously. In the past, both those issues led to fierce and widespread protests.
Soto says he’s realistic about the incoming administration having “different views, both ideologically and policywise,” but he’s hopeful the people of Puerto Rico won’t want to go back to the old way of doing things. “Somebody said, ‘You guys took the genie out of the bottle and it’s going to be hard to put that back’ as it relates to a student-centered school system,” Soto said.
Cardona, whose grandparents are from the island, said Puerto Rico had seen “academic flatlining” for years. “We cannot accept that the students are performing less than we know they are capable of,” he told The Hechinger Report, just before he signed off as the nation’s top education official. “We started change; it needs to continue.”
Principal Carabello’s small school of 150 students and 14 teachers has been slated for closure three times already, though each time it has been spared in part because of community support. She’s hopeful that Ramos, with whom she’s worked previously, will turn things around. “He knows the education system,” she said. “He’s a brilliant person, open to listen.”
Escuela de la Communidad Jaime C. Rodriguez is a Montessori school in Yabucoa, Puerto Rico, that did not have any sports facilities for its students. It recently began work on a multipurpose sports center, made possible by federal funds under former President Joe Biden. Credit: Kavitha Cardoza for The Hechinger Report
But the long hours of the past several years have taken a toll on her. She is routinely in school from 6:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. “You come in when it’s dark and you leave when it’s dark,” she said. There have been many new platforms to learn and new projects to implement. She wants to retire but can’t afford to. After decades of the local government underfunding the pension system, allowances that offset the high price of goods and services on the island were cut and pension plans were frozen.
Now instead of retiring with 75 percent of her salary, Carabello will receive only 50 percent, $2,195 a month. She is entitled to Social Security benefits, but it isn’t enough to make up for the lost pension. “Who can live with $2,000 in one month? Nobody. It’s too hard. And my house still needs 12 years more to pay.”
Carabello, who is always so strong and so optimistic around her students, teared up. But it’s rare that she allows herself time to think about herself. “I have a great community. I have great teachers and I feel happy with what I do,” she said.
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.
The layoffs of half of the employees of the U.S. Department of Education clearly demonstrate the Trump administration’s follow-through on one of Project 2025’s mandates, which intends to eliminate the resources, protections and opportunities that millions of children and families across this nation rely on.
It is evident that the White House will not stop until it wipes out the most basic protections and supports for the American people, including the youngest children. The first step was the attempt to defund Head Start and Early Head Start, impacting 800,000 young children across the nation. This order was halted by a federal judge in Washington, thanks to the lawsuits filed by Democracy Forward and attorneys general from 23 states.
The mass layoffs will severely hamper the department’s ability to execute on its core responsibilities. This move is a direct assault on millions of students, teachers and families. It is clearly a precursor to dismantling the department without congressional consent, which would have an even more devastating impact. The department serves and protects the most vulnerable children and young adults, ensuring that they have equal access to education. This includes:
26 million students from low-income backgrounds — more than half of all K-12 students — who rely on the department for reasonable class sizes; school meals; tutoring; afterschool and summer programs; school supplies such as laptops and books; parent engagement programs; and, in some cases, transportation
9.8 million students enrolled in rural schools
7.4. million students with disabilities
5 million English learners
1.1 million students experiencing homelessness
87 million college students who receive Pell Grants and student loans
The department was created in 1980 with a single, crucial purpose: to ensure equal access to education and to promote educational excellence throughout the nation. Its creation followed decades of systemic inequities that left children in disadvantaged communities without the same learning opportunities as their more privileged peers. The department’s work has been a critical safeguard against discrimination in schools, whether on the basis of race, disability, gender or income.
Without the federal government’s intervention and oversight, the more than 13 million children who live in poverty would be even more vulnerable to systemic inequities. The department ensures that federal dollars are distributed to those students most in need, ensuring that underserved children have the same opportunities for success as their wealthier peers. Without the federal oversight and the department’s support, these students will fall even further behind, and the national achievement gap will grow wider.
The federal government is the only entity that can ensure a baseline level of educational equity across the entire nation. The department holds states accountable for ensuring that all children, regardless of where they live or what their socioeconomic status may be, receive a quality education. If this accountability is removed, the children most at risk — those in underfunded schools, children of color, children with disabilities, English learners and those experiencing homelessness — will be the first to suffer. These children would be denied the critical services and protections they need to succeed in school and in life.
Moreover, the president’s plan to turn education policy over to the states would completely dismantle the federal safety net that ensures that the most vulnerable children are not left behind. Each of the 50 states has different priorities, resources and political climates. While some might be able to provide excellent educational opportunities, others will leave children behind, particularly in rural or economically disadvantaged areas. Inequities between states could widen to an intolerable degree, and the resulting lack of uniform educational standards would only further disadvantage the children who need the most help.
To be clear, the department cannot be dissolved at the whim of a sitting president. Under the Constitution, only an act of Congress can create or dismantle a federal agency. The president does not have the unilateral power to eliminate an entire federal institution that serves the educational needs of millions of children across this country. Attempting to do so would not only undermine the law, but also inflict tremendous harm to the very foundation of America’s educational system.
The idea that dismantling the department could somehow improve that system is not only misguided, but dangerously naïve.
It’s vital that we, as a nation, recognize the long-term damage this action would cause. The attempt to dismantle the Department of Education is not just an attack on a government agency — it is an attack on the future of America’s children.
To parents across the country: This policy is not only unconstitutional — it is a grave threat to your children’s future. Whether your child is in a classroom in New York, Los Angeles or a small town in the Midwest, the U.S. Department of Education has worked to ensure that their educational opportunities are protected, funded and regulated. A president who seeks to eliminate this essential agency is jeopardizing the future of every single student in America.
This is why we must all rise up and make our voices heard. We must demand that our leaders stop this dangerous plan in its tracks, that they fix what isn’t working and that they use this opportunity to reimagine public education and invest in a more effective, equitable system that gives all children the opportunity to succeed.
When I was 12, my family lived adjacent to a small farm. Though I was not old enough to work, the farm’s owner, Mr. Hall, hired me to man his roadside stand on weekends. Mr. Hall had one rule: no calculators. Technology wasn’t his vibe.
Math was my strong suit in school, but I struggled to tally the sums in my head. I weighed odd amounts of tomatoes, zucchini and peppers on a scale and frantically scribbled calculations on a notepad. When it got busy, customers lined up waiting for me to multiply and add. I’m sure I mischarged them.
I was thinking about my old job as I read a quirky math study published this month in the journal Nature. Nobel Prize winning economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, a husband and wife research team at MIT, documented how teenage street sellers who were excellent at mental arithmetic weren’t good at rudimentary classroom math. Meanwhile, strong math students their same age couldn’t calculate nearly as well as impoverished street sellers.
“When you spend a lot of time in India, what is striking is that these market kids seem to be able to count very well,” said Duflo, whose primary work in India involves alleviating poverty and raising the educational achievement of poor children. “But they are really not able to go from street math to formal math and vice versa.”
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Ina series of experiments, Duflo’s field staff in India pretended to be ordinary shoppers and purposely bought unusual quantities of items from more than 1,400 child street sellers in Delhi and Kolkata. A purchase might be 800 grams of potatoes at 20 rupees per kilogram and 1.4 kilograms of onions at 15 rupees per kilogram. Most of the child sellers quoted the correct price of 37 rupees and gave the correct change from a 200 rupee note without using a calculator or pencil and paper. The odd quantities were to make sure the children hadn’t simply memorized the price of common purchases. They were actually making calculations.
However, these same children, the majority of whom were 14 or 15 years old, struggled to solve much simpler school math problems, such as basic division. (After making the purchases, the undercover shoppers revealed their identities and asked the sellers to participate in the study and complete a set of abstract math exercises.)
The market sellers had some formal education. Most were attending school part time, or had previously been in school for years.
Duflo doesn’t know how the young street sellers learned to calculate so quickly in their heads. That would take a longer anthropological study to observe them over time. But Duflo was able to glean some of their strategies, such as rounding. For example, instead of multiplying 490 by 20, the street sellers might multiply 500 by 20 and then remove 10 of the 20s, or 200. Schoolchildren, by contrast, are prone to making lengthy pencil and paper calculations using an algorithm for multiplication. They often don’t see a more efficient way to solve a problem.
Lessons from this research on the other side of the world might be relevant here in the United States. Some cognitive psychologists theorize that learning math in a real-world context can help children absorb abstract math and apply it in different situations. However, this Indian study shows that this type of knowledge transfer probably won’t happen automatically or easily for most students. Educators need to figure out how to better leverage the math skills that students already have, Duflo said. Easier said than done, I suspect.
Duflo says her study is not an argument for either applied or abstract math. “It would be a mistake to conclude that we should switch to doing only concrete problems because we also see that kids who are extremely good at concrete problems are unable to solve an abstract problem,” she said. “And in life, at least in school life, you’re going to need both.” Many of the market children ultimately drop out of school altogether.
Back at my neighborhood farmstand, I remember how I magically got the hang of it and rarely needed pencil and paper after a few months. Sadly, the Hall farm is no longer there for the town’s children to practice mental math. It’s now been replaced by a suburban subdivision of fancy houses.
This story about applied math was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.
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.
Imagine a classroom in which young students are excitedly discussing their future aspirations and a career in medicine feels like a tangible goal rather than a distant dream. Now, imagine that most of the students come from historically marginalized communities — Black, Hispanic and Indigenous populations — that disproportionately face higher rates of chronic illness, shorter life expectancies and poorer health outcomes.
For many students from underrepresented backgrounds, a medical career feels out of reach. The path to becoming a doctor is daunting, full of obstacles like financial hardship, lack of mentorship and systemic inequities in education. Many students are sidelined long before they consider medical school, while those who persist face an uphill battle competing against peers with far more resources and support.
To mitigate these disparities, we must look beyond our hospitals and medical schools and into the places where young minds are shaped: our K-12 classrooms. Early exposure to health care careers can ignite curiosity and show students that they belong in places where they have historically been excluded.
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Organizations like the Florida State University College of Medicine, with its “Science Students Together Reaching Instructional Diversity and Excellence” (SSTRIDE) program, are leading the way in breaking down barriers to medical careers for underrepresented students. SSTRIDE introduces middle and high school students to real-world medical environments, giving them firsthand exposure to health care settings that might otherwise feel distant or inaccessible. Then, the program threads together long-term mentorship, academic enrichment and extracurricular opportunities to build the confidence and skills students need to reach medical school.
The 15 White Coats program in Louisiana takes a complementary but equally meaningful approach: transforming classroom environments by introducing culturally relevant imagery and literature that reflect the diversity of the medical profession. For many students, seeing doctors who look like them — featured in posters or books — can challenge internalized doubts and dismantle societal messages that suggest they don’t belong in medicine. Through fundraising efforts and scholarships, other initiatives from 15 White Coats tackle the financial barriers that disproportionately hinder “minority physician aspirants” from pursuing medical careers.
The impact of these programs can be profound. Research shows that students exposed to careers in science or medicine at an early age are far more likely to pursue these fields later in life. And medical students who belong to underrepresented groups are the most likely to return to underserved communities to practice. Their presence can improve communication, foster patient trust and drive innovation in addressing health challenges unique to those communities.
These programs can even have a ripple effect on families and entire communities. When young people pursue careers in medicine, they become role models for siblings, friends and neighbors. This creates a culture of aspiration in which success feels both possible and accessible, shifting societal perceptions and inspiring future generations to aim higher.
But programs like 15 White Coats and SSTRIDE cannot thrive without sustained investment. We need personal and financial commitments to dismantle the systemic barriers that prevent students from underrepresented groups from entering medicine.
Policymakers and educators must step up. Federal and state educational funding should prioritize grants for schools that partner with hospitals, medical schools and health care organizations. These partnerships should offer hands-on experiences like shadowing programs, medical summer camps and health care-focused career fairs. Medical professionals also have a role to play — they can volunteer as mentors or guest speakers, offering valuable guidance and demystifying the path to a medical career.
As a medical student, I know how transformative these experiences can be. They can inspire students to envision themselves in roles they might never have imagined and gain the confidence to pursue dreams that once seemed out of reach.
Let’s be clear, representation in medicine is not about optics. It’s about improving health outcomes and driving meaningful change. Building a stronger, more diverse pipeline to the medical profession is not just an educational priority. It’s a public health imperative.
An investment in young minds today is an investment in a health care system that represents, understands and serves everyone. Equity in health care starts long before a patient walks into a doctor’s office. It begins in the classroom.
Surya Pulukuri is a member of the class of 2027 at Harvard Medical School.
This story about health equity was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
SUPAI, Ariz. — Kambria Siyuja always felt like the smartest kid in Supai.
Raised by educators in this tribal village at the base of the Grand Canyon, she started kindergarten a little ahead of her peers. Her teachers at Havasupai Elementary School often asked Siyuja to tutor younger students and sometimes even let her run their classrooms. She graduated valedictorian of her class.
But once she left the K-8 school at the top of her grade, Siyuja stopped feeling so smart.
“I didn’t know math or basic formulas,” she said. “Typing and tech? Nonexistent.”
Siyuja, now 22, wiped tears from her face as she sat alongside her mother and grandmother — the educators of the family — one afternoon last year in the Havasupai Tribal Council chambers. The trio wept as they recalled Siyuja’s move as a teenager to a private boarding school 150 miles away in Sedona, Arizona, which she’d chosen to attend because the federal agency that runs Havasupai Elementary, the only school in her village, provides no options for high school.
Kambria Siyuja, right, plans to teach in Supai, like her mother, Jackie Siyuja, middle, who teaches at the tribe’s preschool program. Grandmother and Havasupai Tribal Council chair Bernadine Jones, left, previously taught at the elementary school. Their tribe’s seal is reflected from a window onto a wall in the council chambers. Credit: Matt Stensland for The Hechinger Report
Once there, however, Siyuja discovered how little she’d learned at the Supai school. She had only superficial familiarity with state and U.S. history, and knew none of the literature her peers had read years earlier. She was the only freshman who’d never taken pre-algebra.
Last year, eight years after Siyuja graduated, the K-8 school still did not offer pre-algebra, a course that most U.S. public school students take in seventh or eighth grade, if not earlier. It had no textbooks for math, science or social studies. The school’s remoteness — on a 518-acre reservation the government forcibly relocated the Havasupai people to more than 150 years ago — makes it a challenge to staff, and chronic turnover required the few educators who remained to teach multiple grades at once. Only 3 percent of students test proficiently in either English language arts or math.
“I know they struggle a lot because of how few resources we have down here,” said Siyuja of Supai, which visitors must reach either by an 8-mile hike or helicopter. “But what are they teaching here?”
In 2017, six Havasupai families sued the federal government, alleging that the Bureau of Indian Education, which operates Havasupai Elementary and is housed within the Interior Department, deprived their children of their federal right to an education. The tribe, in a brief supporting the lawsuit, argued that the bureau had allowed Havasupai Elementary to become “the worst school in a deplorable BIE system” and that court intervention was required to protect students from the agency.
The families eventually secured two historic settlements that fueled hopes across Indian Country that true reform might finally improve outcomes both in Supai and perhaps also at BIE schools throughout the U.S.
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So far, the settlements have brought new staff to Supai, and the BIE had to reconstitute the school board. Teachers now must use lesson plans, and they finally have a curriculum to use in English, science and math classes. A new principal pledged to stay longer than a school year.
“We now have some teachers and some repairs to the building that are being done,” said Dinolene Kaska, a mother to three former students and a new school board member. “It has been a long time just to get to this point.”
Valencia Stinson leads a kindergarten class through a lesson matching lowercase letters with their corresponding uppercase letters. Credit: Matt Stensland for The Hechinger Report
The legal wins followed an effort to reform the BIE as a whole. In 2014, federal officials unveiled a sweeping plan to overhaul the beleaguered bureau, which had long struggled to deliver better student outcomes with anemic funding. If the BIE were a state, the schools it operates would rank at or very near the bottom of any list for academic achievement.
But in the past decade, and after a nearly doubling of its budget, the BIE has finally started to make some progress. Graduation rates have improved, staff vacancies are down and the bureau built its own data system to track and support student achievement across its 183 campuses in 23 different states. Now, those milestones could be at risk.
President Donald Trump, in his seismic restructuring of the federal government, laid off thousands of workers that will trigger deep cuts to the BIE, among other agencies that work directly on Indian Country. The White House in January also issued an executive order to turn the BIE into a school choice program, draining the bureau of funding and, according to some advocates in Washington, D.C., threatening the government’s long-established trust responsibility to tribal nations. It also remains unclear how the policy would benefit families in isolated communities like Supai where other schooling options are scant or nonexistent.
“Tribes in rural areas don’t have a lot of school choice,” said Quinton Roman Nose, executive director of the Tribal Education Departments National Assembly, a nonprofit that works with tribal education agencies. “For Native students, that’s not a good model. I don’t think it’s going to work for so many.”
Brian Schatz, a Hawaii Democrat and vice chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, said the Trump administration’s actions are devastating. “What Trump is doing to the federal government isn’t just reckless — it’s arson,” he said in a statement to The Hechinger Report. “We will do everything we can to ensure that this manufactured chaos does not have lasting impacts on our trust and treaty responsibilities to Native communities.”
Last fall, as conservative critics called for dismantling the BIE and converting its funding into vouchers, longtime director Tony Dearman defended the bureau. He also pitched a new, five-year strategic direction that will emphasize tribal sovereignty and cultural education — both promises the bureau made in its reform agenda more than a decade ago.
“We have really built the capacity of the BIE,” Dearman said. “It’s just taken a while. Anything in the government does.”
Still, he insisted that the BIE could fulfill the government’s obligation to deliver a quality education to tribal nations. “I truly believe that we can handle the trust responsibility with the support from Congress through appropriations,” Dearman said.
For decades, the Department of the Interior, which manages natural resources and wildlife, placed control of schools on tribal reservations within its Bureau of Indian Affairs. The agency oversees law and justice across Indian Country, as well as agriculture, infrastructure, economic development and tribal governance. The agency’s poor management of schools, meanwhile, had been well documented, and in 2006, an internal shakeup resulted in the creation of the BIE.
Almost from the start, the new bureau faced criticism.
In 2008, the Government Accountability Office dinged the BIE for stumbling in its early implementation of the No Child Left Behind education law. A year later, the Nation’s Report Card found Native students in traditional public schools performed much better than those in BIE schools. (About 92 percent of Native students attend traditional public schools and 8 percent attend BIE schools.) Senators scolded the bureau after only 1 in 4 of its schools could meet the new federal education standards. A 2011 report, “Broken Promises, Broken Schools,” cataloged the deterioration of BIE schools, estimating it would cost $1.3 billion to bring every educational facility to an “acceptable” condition.
In 2013, then-Interior Secretary Sally Jewell assembled a study group to diagnose the root causes of academic failures in BIE schools. A year later, the group released the Blueprint for Reform. At its unveiling, Arne Duncan, then the federal education secretary, had damning words for why the BIE needed to change, calling it “the epitome of broken” and “utterly bankrupt.”
The blueprint, issued through a formal secretarial order, called for dramatically restructuring the BIE over two years, starting with its management of tribally controlled schools. In 1988, as part of a renewed focus on tribal sovereignty, Congress had created a grant program to help tribes take control of their respective BIE schools, and as of 2014, a full two-thirds of campuses had already converted.
The 70-page blueprint proposed transforming the agency from a top-down operator of schools into more of an educational services and support center. It would create a division within the BIE to focus on assisting principals with the day-to-day operation of schools. New regional directors and offices would oversee tribally controlled schools, BIE-operated campuses and schools on the sprawling Navajo Nation.
The plan also pitched the addition of “school support solutions teams” at each regional office that would assist with teacher and principal recruitment, school facilities, financial management and technology. A new Office of Sovereignty and Indian Education would help tribes convert their schools to local control and encourage them to shape culture and language classes. Other proposed changes included allowing tribes to tie staff pay to student performance and creating incentives to replicate successful tribally controlled schools.
The study group, however, did not address whether the bureau needed additional funding to pull off the reforms. And without additional funding, the BIE faced deep cuts as budget negotiations pressured then-President Barack Obama to require all federal agencies to reduce their spending by 20 percent.
That essentially tasked the BIE with achieving a turnaround of its failing schools with a fifth less funding. By the time of the blueprint, those cuts were already phasing in: Between 2011 and 2014, for example, the number of full-time administrators located on or near Indian reservations to oversee school spending fell from 22 to 13, leaving the remaining staff to still split 64 reservations among them.
“It was a terrible set up,” said one former top agency official who worked at the BIE during the blueprint’s release. The official, like many of the more than 75 interviewed by The Hechinger Report for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the DOI’s large role in tribal communities and worries that criticizing the agency could cost them jobs or contracts.
Famous for its turquoise waterfalls — Havasupai means “people of the blue-green water” — Supai village greets visitors at the banks of Havasu Creek.
The creek and waterfalls feed a hidden canyon oasis here. Trees bursting with blooms of apricot and pomegranate offer much-welcome shade for backpacking tourists and the mules carrying their gear. Tribal elders wind their way through Supai’s unmarked dusty roads as children on the preschool playground shield their eyes from sand swirling around the adjacent helipad. Benches, some made from milk crates, ring the town square at the front gate of Havasupai Elementary.
Eight years ago, lawyer Alexis DeLaCruz sat on one of those benches in Supai town square. She had recently started working at the Native American Disability Law Center, a firm based in Farmington, New Mexico, that represents Native Americans with disabilities. The firm had recently hosted a training on special education law for parents, and several from Supai, incensed about their kids’ education, traveled out of the canyon to attend. They convinced DeLaCruz and two colleagues to book a helicopter ride into the village to hear directly from parents about their experiences with the BIE.
Parents described how their children couldn’t tell the difference between North and South America and, despite BIE regulations requiring Native culture in all curriculum areas, the students never had a class in Havasupai culture, history or language. Because of a teacher shortage, children learned in classes that combined students from three or even four grades. The school had 10 principals in as many years. The BIE closed Havasupai Elementary for nearly a month in 2015 because of insufficient staffing.
About 100 students each year enroll in Havasupai Elementary School, one of 183 schools that the Bureau of Indian Education manages on 64 tribal reservations across the U.S. Credit: Matt Stensland for The Hechinger Report
Siyuja, who graduated from the school in 2016, remembered cooks and janitors stepping in as teachers — and then having to leave class midday to check on school lunch or plumbing problems.
Until Siyuja reached the fourth grade, Havasupai Elementary, which serves about 80 students, had two tribal members on staff. They led culture and language classes, and Siyuja still owns a copy of the Havasupai dictionary they gifted her as a child. But then they left, and most of the other teachers soon followed, during the 2011-12 school year, she recalled.
That’s when Obama tasked federal agencies with cutting a fifth of their administrative budgets, hollowing out the BIE’s ability to support its schools. In Supai, the already revolving door of educators suddenly started spinning much faster, Siyuja said.
“We were just in this constant loop of relearning the same thing over and over,” she said.
It wasn’t until college, at Fort Lewis College in Colorado, where Siyuja chose to study education, that she learned it was not normal for a school to lump so many grades together in one classroom. “That’s one of the major big no-nos,” she said. (In an email, a BIE spokesperson said, “Many schools implement implement multi-grade instruction as an intentional and effective educational model,” particularly in rural and remote locations, “to enhance individualized learning, maximize resources and promote peer collaboration.”)
In January 2017, nine students from six families sued the BIE and the Interior Department, naming as defendants Dearman, Jewell — who did not respond to interview requests — her deputy assistant secretary and the Havasupai Elementary School principal. The lawsuit listed all plaintiffs under pseudonyms to protect their identity, and the two families involved in the lawsuit who spoke with The Hechinger Report for this story asked to remain anonymous even after the settlements were signed. Some of the students still attend BIE schools, and parents remain worried about exposing any of their children’s privacy, even as adults.
The families hinged their case on a well-established federal right to education for Native American children.
There is no federal right to education in the Constitution, according to a landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision. But for Native Americans, congressional statutes, executive orders, treaties and other Supreme Court opinions dating back virtually to this nation’s founding have cemented education as a major component of the government’s trust responsibility — a set of legal and moral obligations to protect tribal sovereignty and generally look out for the welfare of tribal members. In 1972, lawmakers made it even more clear with the Indian Education Act, which says that the “federal government has the sole responsibility for the operation and financial support” of tribal schools. They also required the BIA — the BIE had not yet been established — to work with tribes to create a system of schools of “the highest quality.” To this day, the BIE pitches itself as a provider of a “world class education.”
DeLaCruz, not long after filing the Havasupai case, started imagining what impact it could have beyond that tiny community.
“Most cases in our legal system end in money,” she said. “This isn’t the same calculus. We’re weighing what we think we can get in place that won’t just make a difference for students now but frankly for generations to come.”
The lead plaintiff in the case was a sixth grader described in the lawsuit as Stephen C. Diagnosed with ADHD, he had never received counseling as mandated in his Individualized Education Program, or IEP, a legal document detailing the interventions and supports that a student with a disability will get from their school. None of the fifth grade teachers the school hired stayed more than two weeks, the lawsuit said, and Stephen C. was taught in a combined sixth, seventh and eighth grade class.
His teacher’s attention split among kids across three grades, Stephen C. started to act out. The school sent him home three to four times a week for behavior issues related to his disability, the lawsuit alleged. Even as an eighth grader, he could barely read or write.
In its friend-of-the-court brief, the Havasupai Tribe said its “people have been isolated at the bottom of one of the world’s most rugged canyons and for more than a century have been forced to depend on the federal government to educate their children.
“Although the days of forced removal and assimilation are over,” the brief continued, “the BIE is still failing its students.”
The federal government didn’t entirely dispute the claims of Stephen C. and his co-plaintiffs.
The BIE and DOI, in June 2017, formally petitioned the U.S. District Court of Arizona to dismiss the case, arguing that the students couldn’t prove the BIE failed or refused to comply with its regulations for what counts as a “basic” education. Also, by that point Stephen C. and four other plaintiffs all had graduated or transferred from Havasupai Elementary, making them ineligible to pursue compensatory educational services, according to the government.
But Lisa Olson, an attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, also acknowledged the BIE’s shortcomings.
“We are not saying there’s no accountability here. We are just saying that it’s for Congress and the executive to resolve these problems,” Olson said during a November 2019 hearing before U.S. District Judge Steven Logan. “The agency doesn’t dispute that its efforts have been unsatisfactory and they have fallen short.”
Olson asked Logan to consider the many challenges of providing instruction in Supai: There was no funding for an agency helicopter to transport teachers in and out, for example, and new hires often failed their background checks or took other positions before the FBI checks were completed.
“There’s nothing we can do to change that,” she said.
Passengers load into a helicopter at a landing zone next to the preschool’s playground in a central part of Supai village. Credit: Matt Stensland for The Hechinger Report
Logan seemed unmoved. “So what you are basically saying, counsel, is it is the problem of the parents, and they need to make better decisions about where they have children so they can be properly educated?” he said. Olson responded, saying, “It is not the parents’ fault, but we need the cooperation of the parents and the community.” She continued, “I’m saying that BIE is doing its best and tries to enlist the support of parents and the tribe.”
The families also presented a secondary argument — that the complex trauma of Native American children qualifies them for services and protections of the sort that are guaranteed for students with disabilities. They argued that exposure to adversity — specifically, the long-lasting trauma from this nation’s official policy to separate Native children from their families in order to eradicate their cultures and seize tribal land — limited their ability to access the benefits of a public education. To this day, Havasupai families must ship their children away to attend high school, often in other states, and the BIE has no plans to open one in the canyon.
The government warned Logan against following that line of logic, cautioning that it would set a dangerous precedent linking childhood adversity to a student’s ability to learn. The families filed their lawsuit under the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which prevents discrimination against people with disabilities in federal programs. It does not include adversity or trauma on its list of qualifying conditions, and its applicable regulations expressly note that social disadvantage, such as homelessness or family violence, do not count as impairments, the government noted.
Expanding that definition would threaten to impose “unwieldy” obligations on high-poverty schools across the U.S., the government’s attorneys argued.
“The alleged ‘forced relocation, loss of homes, families and culture,’ and poverty within the Havasupai community … do not constitute a physical or mental impairment,” the motion to dismiss reads.
In August 2020, the federal court issued a mixed decision. Logan allowed the case to continue for students with disabilities. The families also persuaded the court that complex trauma — including interaction with juvenile justice systems, extreme poverty and a denial of access to education — qualifies as a protected disability in the rehabilitation law. But he dismissed the general education claims, deciding that the older students, including Stephen C., had aged out of the school and no potential remedy would be precise enough for a court to enforce.
The Havasupai families cheered Logan’s ruling, but only in part. As they continued to pursue the special education claims, the Havasupai families challenged his decision to dismiss the rest of the case. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which includes Arizona, heard their arguments in February 2022.
“The agency is attempting to comply,” Laura Myron, a Justice Department attorney, told the judges. There are, she added, “numerous, practical obstacles to operating a school at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.”
Kathryn Eidmann, president and CEO of Public Counsel, a pro bono public interest law firm, represented the Havasupai families and argued that their ancestors never chose to permanently live in such an isolated location. The government restricted the tribe to the reservation to make way for Grand Canyon National Park.
Hoai-My Winder, new principal at Havasupai Elementary Schools, holds a student’s hand while walking with him during recess. Credit: Matt Stensland for The Hechinger Report
“The obstacles that the government is pointing to that make compliance hard are entirely problems of the government’s own making,” Eidmann said.
In a short five-page decision, the 9th Circuit panel allowed the older students to continue their lawsuit against the BIE. They clarified that judges — namely, Logan — could indeed compel an agency to comply with its own regulations.
The three judges also ruled that the students could seek monetary compensation for the educational services they never received.
Tara Ford, also a pro bono attorney on the Stephen C. case, said at the time that the ruling would reverberate across Indian Country: “Students who have been harmed by the Bureau of Indian Education’s broken promises now have a path to hold the federal government accountable for its failures.”
By then, the students and government had settled the special education claims. Their deal provided each student with $20,000 for compensatory services and required the BIE to follow anti-discrimination provisions of the Rehabilitation Act while creating its first-ever complaint process for parents to challenge suspected discrimination. After the 9th Circuit ruling, however, negotiations to settle the rest of the Stephen C. case stretched beyond a year.
The eventual deal, signed in May 2023, established an $850,000 compensatory education fund for any student who attended Havasupai Elementary since 2011. The BIE estimates about 215 kids could qualify to use that money, meaning each child would receive roughly $4,000, less than some families had hoped for. It also agreed to pay stipends to help recruit and retain teachers in Supai, build additional housing for staff and hire a cultural instructor from the community. The BIE also had to form a new school board.
A year after the case closed, Breanna Bollig, a fellow at the California Tribal Families Coalition, wrote in a legal publication that it could change Native education far beyond Supai.
“The BIE could be held accountable at every other BIE school through similar lawsuits,” Bollig wrote. “Perhaps the federal right to education for Indian children can even be used to improve inadequate and inequitable state public schools that Indian children attend.”
Billy Vides stopped counting at 19.
That’s how many principals he worked with in his first three years as a teacher at Havasupai Elementary. He stayed two more years, submitting his resignation in June.
A longtime educator in Phoenix public schools, Vides first heard of Supai from a pair of grandmothers at an early learning conference. He had considered retiring, but knew he would miss working with kids. Vides searched online for Havasupai, bookmarked an article calling it “America’s Worst Tribal School” and sent in his application.
“I wanted to make a difference,” he said.
The BIE hired Vides in 2019 as a kindergarten and first grade teacher. On his first day, the interim principal assigned him to a combined kindergarten, first, third and fourth grade class. The ages didn’t mix well, he said, and the older kids bullied and sometimes assaulted the younger children.
Joy Van Est, a special education teacher who quit in June, said many of her students’ IEPs had not been updated for several years. It took her four months, the entirety of her tenure there, to update every child’s support plan.
As part of the settlement, an independent monitor every six months must visit Supai and inspect whether the BIE has complied with its own regulations at the school. The monitor must review 104 specific requirements covering student-to-teacher ratios, curriculum taught in each subject, textbooks, grading rules and more. In its first report following a January 2024 visit, the monitor found the bureau in violation of 72 of those requirements.
The school had a curriculum for just one subject — English language arts — and no textbooks for math, science and social studies, the compliance report reads. Teachers used no lesson plans, in any subject, and the school had no librarian. Only one tribal member taught at the school, leading culture and language classes once a week for 45 minutes.
The compliance officer granted the BIE some credit for hiring a school counselor and physical education teacher. However, once-a-week P.E. classes only happened if the part-time teacher could catch a helicopter flight. The counselor started in November 2023, but staff shortages required her to cover teachers’ classrooms too often for her to do any counseling work, the compliance officer found.
The compliance report seemed to have some impact: In the spring, the BIE went on a hiring spree to replenish the beleaguered staff in Supai. A second counselor and special education teacher — Van Est — plus a few additional teachers meant Havasupai Elementary was fully staffed for the first time in years.
A more recent work plan for the school, updated in December, documented further changes: The bureau hired enough staff to meet class size caps. Teachers now submit weekly lesson plans, and the school selected a curriculum and purchased computers for all grades.
The recent recruits include Hoai-My Winder, the school’s new principal. Winder had been working for the Department of Defense, as an administrator at an elementary school in Japan. She previously taught and worked as an assistant principal in Las Vegas, where her family settled after fleeing Vietnam during the fall of Saigon.
Havasupai Elementary School enrolls students from kindergarten through eighth grade. The Bureau of Indian Education directly operates the campus in Supai village, which visitors must reach via an 8-mile hike or helicopter ride. Credit: Matt Stensland for The Hechinger Report
“Day Six!” Winder hollered one afternoon this past May as she entered the spiked gates that separate Havasupai Elementary from the rest of the village. It was her tally of the number of days she’d been principal — both at Havasupai Elementary and ever.
While her husband unpacked boxes in their new home, Winder took inventory at her new school. She discovered 40-year-old math textbooks on classroom shelves. Havasupai teachers at some point had created a Supai dictionary and draft curriculum for language instruction; Winder found it collecting dust in a box.
As she met with parents and tribal members during her first week, ahead of the eighth grade graduation ceremony that afternoon, Winder repeated a pledge to stay at Havasupai Elementary for at least five years, maybe 10.
Felicia Siyuja, the longtime school secretary, stood next to Winder as families packed into the cafeteria for the ceremony. As the aroma of frybread wafted from the kitchen, Siyuja tapped the mic before addressing the 13 students sitting in the front row.
“I also want to apologize,” she told the soon-to-be freshmen. “All the teachers and principals rotating for all these years. It was hard for me as a grown-up. I can’t imagine how it was for you.”
Eighth graders wearing turquoise-and-gold colored gowns prepare for their graduation ceremony at Havasupai Elementary School. The tribal village, at the base of the Grand Canyon, is famous for its turquoise waterfalls. Credit: Matt Stensland for The Hechinger Report
Aside from Winder and her supervisor, the BIE would not allow The Hechinger Report to interview school staff on the record. But six current or former Havasupai teachers, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity, placed blame on the bureau for Havasupai Elementary’s dysfunction.
“The BIE is the problem,” said one teacher. “The BIE lacks humility.”
The educator, who now works at another BIE school, said he never received cultural training to prepare him for working with Native children and families. Several colleagues resigned before winter break his first year in Supai, making him the most veteran teacher on staff.
“I had no curriculum. No student names, no mentor, no oversight or guidance,” he said. “You don’t want to be yet another teacher who comes and goes. After three years, it gets old. It’s just exhausting.”
In a February 10 email, a BIE spokesperson wrote that cultural training, including language preservation, had been scheduled for later that month.
Van Est, who joined the bureau specifically to support its mission of uplifting tribal communities, said last summer that she no longer believed it was capable of doing that job. “The entity that has most recently oppressed the Havasupai people is making absolutely no effort to use education as a tool for repair, as a gold mine for building their future,” she said.
The BIE blames Havasupai Elementary School’s isolation and lack of housing for its troubles.
Even before the Stephen C. lawsuit, the BIE offered lucrative stipends to lure educators to Supai. It also guarantees housing, in theory, but in a pinch has forced teachers to room together. And a recent hiring spree, to satisfy the settlement, has made housing even tighter.
Dearman said a recent housing needs analysis determined the BIE now needs 30 beds in Supai, but has only 12. One teacher simply didn’t return to their position this fall when the bureau couldn’t secure housing for more than a few weeks.
“That puts a major strain on us being able to keep staff there,” Dearman said about the housing shortage. “We have housing needs at other locations as well. However, Havasupai is so isolated that if you’re not able to stay in our quarters there, there’s no other options.”
He said that it’s hard for some educators to uproot their lives to live in Supai. “It’s a difficult place to come in and out of. It really is,” Dearman said.
Poverty surrounds many BIE schools on tribal reservations, largely as a result of former government policies to eradicate Native peoples. In Supai, nearly 40 percent of the tribe lives in poverty, almost four times the national average. Tourism provides an economic bedrock for the Havasupai economy, though many families rely on government assistance.
Vides, the teacher, struggled with his decision to quit. His wife had remained 300 miles away in Phoenix, raising their 3-year-old daughter without him. He missed a lot of her firsts, and felt torn between her and the Havasupai children.
“It was difficult. I was grieving for the future of these students,” Vides said.
“Either the system is continually broken,” he added, “or the system is working successfully to slowly eradicate this tribe.”
Long before Trump’s executive order in January, some conservatives had pushed school choice as a solution to the BIE’s troubles. In 2016, the right-wing Heritage Foundation proposed turning the BIE into an education savings account, or ESA, which would grant families a portion of their child’s per-pupil funding to spend on private school tuition, home-school supplies and other educational expenses. That same year, the late Arizona Sen. John McCain introduced legislation offering ESAs equal to 90 percent of what the BIE spends on each student.
The bill didn’t advance, but Heritage resurrected the idea last year in its Project 2025 transition plan for the next president. Notably, the conservative think tank — despite citing the BIE’s poor track record as justification for converting much of its funding into vouchers — also proposed granting it even more authority over the education of all Native American students, in all U.S. public schools.
In his January order, Trump required the BIE to identify “any available mechanisms” for families to tap federal funding for private and faith-based schools, as well as to report on the performance of its schools and identify alternatives for families to consider. The agency has until April to submit its plan, for implementation this fall. The White House did not respond to several requests for comment.
In certain tribal communities across Arizona, some parents have started to consider opting out of the BIE system. The state passed a universal school voucher program in 2022, giving any family who wants roughly $7,400 to spend on private or parochial schools or other options. Christian academies on the Gila River Indian Community, a reservation near Phoenix, have already used the program to recruit students.
The walls of Havasu Canyon surround the village of Supai, where water from Havasu Creek later connects to the Colorado River at the Grand Canyon. Credit: Matt Stensland for The Hechinger Report
But in Supai, some residents worry the ESA option is meaningless. The closest private schools, in Kingman, are more than two hours away. Internet access in the village is virtually nonexistent, a hurdle for any parents trying to teach their kids at home.
The National Indian Education Association, an advocacy group, has yet to issue a position on Trump’s order but said in a statement that it’s “closely monitoring” potential impact on cultural preservation and access to education for Native students. In the past, the group has said BIE is the best option to fulfill the federal government’s responsibility to educate Native students. It blames its poor results on Congress — the branch of government holding the purse strings.
“The BIE in general, they just have a difficult time,” said Roman Nose, with the national group for tribal education departments. He noted that Department of Defense schools — the only other K-12 system run by the federal government — receive more funding. And Roman Nose worried how the recent federal layoffs and school choice proposal could further erode BIE’s ability to fulfill the trust responsibility.
The BIE lost dozens of employees in the recent layoffs, sources told ICT. Among those laid off were approximately 30 from non-school positions in the BIE agency offices, excluding kindergarten through 12th grade schools.
“There won’t be any progress made during this administration,” Roman Nose said. “It’s a difficult job, but these are treaty obligations.”
Dearman, the bureau’s longtime director, insisted that the BIE could fulfill the government’s obligation to deliver a quality education to tribal nations.
Under his leadership, the BIE has secured some financial wins for its schools. Lawmakers now funnel about $235 million into the bureau for school construction – it has asked for more than $400 million – and $150 million for replacing older campuses, according to the agency. Counselors and teachers now make the same amount as their counterparts in Department of Defense schools. And Dearman, a longtime champion of early childhood education, has expanded the bureau’s popular preschool program into more schools.
Traditional beadwork decorates an eighth grader’s graduation cap at a Havasupai Elementary School ceremony. The school’s mascot is the eagle. Credit: Matt Stensland for The Hechinger Report
Graduation rates have also climbed. Last year, according to the bureau, 75 percent of its high schoolers earned a diploma on time — a 31 percentage point jump since 2014 and slightly above the national average for Native American students. As of 2021, the last time the BIE reported achievement data, 17 percent of students tested on grade level in English language arts, and 11 percent in math. For three states where the BIE runs two-thirds of its schools, students have posted 8 percentage point increases on English exams and 13-point increases on math exams since 2016, according to the bureau.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office, which has tracked the BIE’s “systemic management weaknesses” since 2013, recently reported that it had achieved substantial progress on school construction and safety. The bureau’s oversight of special education, distance learning and school spending remain open problems, the GAO found, while also noting in its report — released just days before Trump’s recent layoffs — that meager staffing “has been a challenge for BIE for over a decade.”
DeLaCruz left the Native American Disability Law Center in October to work on education litigation for the Tulalip Tribe in northern Washington state. A little more than a year after closing the Havasupai case, she hesitated to call either settlement a win.
Still, she noted in an email that the creation of a school board at Havasupai Elementary had been a big step forward: “The fact there is a community-led School Board to ask questions and voice concerns to the BIE is vital to improving education at Havasupai Elementary School.”
Kambria Siyuja works during her summer break at Supai’s preschool program. Siyuja graduated from Havasupai Elementary School down the road and plans to teach there after graduating from Fort Lewis College next year. Credit: Matt Stensland for The Hechinger Report
The morning after the eighth grade graduation ceremony, Kambria Siyuja walked past her old elementary school as the sun crawled over the rust-red walls of Supai Canyon.
She greeted parents dropping off their sleepy toddlers at the federal Head Start preschool. Siyuja has worked there every summer break in college, hoping to decide whether to pursue a job in early learning or teaching down the road, at Havasupai Elementary.
Her grandmother, Bernadine Jones, attended Havasupai Day School in the 1960s, when it only offered K-2 classes, before attending and graduating from a Phoenix high school. She eventually returned to Supai and taught at her old school and the village preschool for 20 years. Siyuja’s mother teaches at the tribal Head Start program.
Academically, Siyuja finally feels prepared to be a teacher.
“It’s really weird taking a class in college and learning stuff they should have taught me at that elementary school,” she said. “Now I’m really able to understand math, and also teach math.”
This winter, Siyuja returned home for break with big news. Not only had she finally finished remedial math and qualified for a math class this past semester that would earn her full college credit, she’d passed it, receiving a B.
Siyuja also recently learned she qualified for about $3,500 from the Stephen C. settlement. She said she had planned to use the money to pay for her spring semester of college, but as of February, had not heard back from a BIE representative about the payment.
She graduates from Fort Lewis College, the former site of a notorious Indian boarding school, in 2026.
Despite her misgivings about the BIE, she said she views becoming an educator at the school as the best way possible to help her community. “I just want the younger kids to have a much better education than we got.”
Contact staff writer Neal Morton at 212-678-8247 or morton@hechingerreport.org.
This story about the Bureau of Indian Education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, in collaboration with ICT (formerly Indian Country Today). Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter. Sign up for the ICT newsletter.
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