by Jill Barshay, The Hechinger Report January 19, 2026
Lynette Duncan didn’t expect to spend 20 hours over the past two weeks digging through a mothballed computer system, trying to retrieve admissions data from 2019.
Duncan is the director of institutional research at John Brown University, a small Christian university in northwest Arkansas, an hour’s drive from Walmart’s headquarters. She runs a one-person office that handles university data collections and analyses, both for internal use and to meet government mandates. Just last year, she spent months collecting and crunching new data to comply with a new federal rule requiring that colleges show that their graduates are prepared for good jobs.
Then, in mid-December, another mandate abruptly arrived — this one at the request of President Donald Trump. Colleges were ordered to compile seven years of admissions data, broken down by race, sex, grades, SAT or ACT scores, and family income.
“It’s like one more weight on our backs,” Duncan said. “The workload – it’s not fun.”
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John Brown University is one of almost 2,200 colleges and universities nationwide now scrambling to comply by March 18 with the new federal reporting requirement, formally known as the Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement, or ACTS. By all accounts, it’s a ton of work, and at small institutions, the task falls largely on a single administrator or even the registrar. Failure to submit the data can bring steep fines and, ultimately, the loss of access to federal aid for students.
After the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision banning affirmative action in college admissions, the Trump administration suspected that colleges might covertly continue to give racial preferences. To police compliance, the White House directed the Department of Education to collect detailed admissions data from colleges nationwide.
The data collection was unusual not only in its scope, but also in its speed. Federal education data collections typically take years to design, with multiple rounds of analysis, technical review panels, and revisions. This one moved from announcement to launch in a matter of months.
A rush job
One tiny indication that this was a rush job is in the Federal Register notice. Both enforce and admissions are misspelled in a proposal that’s all about admissions enforcement. Those words are spelled “admssions” and “enforece.”
A December filing with the Office of Management and Budget incorrectly lists the number of institutions that are subject to the new data collection. It is nearly 2,200, not 1,660, according to the Association for Institutional Research, which is advising colleges on how to properly report the data. Community colleges are exempt, but four-year institutions with selective admissions or those that give out their own financial aid must comply. Graduate programs are included as well. That adds up to about 2,200 institutions.
In another filing with the Office of Management and Budget, the administration disclosed that none of the five remaining career Education Department officials with statistical experience had reviewed the proposal, including Matt Soldner, the acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. Most of the department’s statistical staff were fired earlier this year as a first step to eliminating the Education Department, one of Trump’s campaign promises. RTI International, the federal contractor in North Carolina that already manages other higher education data collections for the Education Department, is also handling the day-to-day work of this new college admissions collection.
During two public comment periods, colleges and higher-education trade groups raised concerns about data quality and missing records, but there is little evidence those concerns substantially altered the final design. One change expanded the retrospective data requirement from five to six years so that at least one cohort of students would have a measurable six-year graduation rate. A second relieved colleges of the burden of making hundreds of complex statistical calculations themselves, instead instructing them to upload raw student data to an “aggregator tool” that would do all the math for them.
The Trump administration’s goal is to generate comparisons across race and sex categories, with large gaps potentially triggering further scrutiny.
Missing data
The results are unlikely to be reliable, experts told me, given how much of the underlying data is missing or incomplete. In a public comment letter, Melanie Gottlieb, executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, warned that entire years of applicant data may not exist at many institutions. Some states advise colleges to delete records for applicants who never enrolled after a year. “If institutions are remaining compliant with their state policies, they will not have five years of data,” Gottlieb wrote.
The organization’s own guidance recommends that four-year colleges retain admissions records for just one year after an application cycle. One reason is privacy. Applicant files contain sensitive personal information, and purging unneeded records reduces the risk of exposing this data in breaches.
In other cases, especially at smaller institutions, admissions offices may offload applicant data simply to make room for new student records. Duncan said John Brown University has all seven years of required data, but a switch to a new computer system in 2019 has made it difficult to retrieve the first year.
Even when historical records are available, key details may be missing or incompatible with federal requirements, said Christine Keller, executive director of the Association for Institutional Research, which previously received a federal contract to train college administrators on accurate data collection until DOGE eliminated it. (The organization now receives some private funds for a reduced amount of training.)
Standardized test scores are unavailable for many students admitted under test-optional policies. The department is asking colleges to report an unweighted grade-point average on a four-point scale, even though many applicants submit only weighted GPAs on a five-point scale. In those cases, and there may be many of them, colleges are instructed to report the GPA as “unknown.”
Some students decline to report their race. Many holes are expected for family income. Colleges generally have income data only for students who completed federal financial-aid forms, which many applicants never file.
Ellen Keast, a spokeswoman for the Education Department, said in an email, “Schools are not expected to provide data they don’t have.” She added, “We know that some schools may have missing data for some data elements. We’ll review the extent of missing data before doing further calculations or analyses.”
Male or female
Even the category of sex poses problems. The Education Department’s spreadsheet allows only two options: male or female. Colleges, however, may collect sex or gender information using additional categories, such as nonbinary.
“That data is going to be, in my estimation, pretty worthless when it comes to really showing the different experiences of men and women,” Keller said. She is urging the department to add a “missing” option to avoid misleading results. “I think some people in the department may be misunderstanding that what’s needed is a missing-data option, not another sex category.”
The new “aggregator tool” itself is another source of anxiety. Designed to spare colleges from calculating quintile buckets for grades and test scores by race and sex, it can feel like a black box. Colleges are supposed to fill rows and rows of detailed student data into spreadsheets and then upload the spreadsheets into the tool. The tool generates pooled summary statistics, such as the number of Black female applicants and admitted students who score in the top 20 percent at the college. Only the aggregated data will be reported to the federal government.
At John Brown University, Duncan worries about what those summaries might imply. Her institution is predominantly white and has never practiced affirmative action. But if high school grades or test scores differ by race — as they often do nationwide — the aggregated results could suggest bias where none was intended.
“That’s a concern,” Duncan said. “I’m hopeful that looking across multiple years of data, it won’t show that. You could have an anomaly in one year.”
The problem is that disparities are not anomalies. Standardized test scores and academic records routinely vary by race and sex, making it difficult for almost any institution to avoid showing gaps.
A catch-22 for colleges
The stakes are high. In an emailed response to my questions, the Education Department pointed to Trump’s Aug. 7 memorandum, which directs the agency to take “remedial action” if colleges fail to submit the data on time or submit incomplete or inaccurate information.
Under federal law, each violation of these education data-reporting requirements can carry a fine of up to $71,545. Repeated noncompliance can ultimately lead to the loss of access to federal student aid, meaning students could no longer use Pell Grants or federal loans to pay tuition.
That leaves colleges in a bind. Failing to comply is costly. Complying, meanwhile, could produce flawed data that suggests bias and invites further scrutiny.
The order itself contradicts another administration goal. President Trump campaigned on reducing federal red tape and bureaucratic burden. Yet ACTS represents a significant expansion of paperwork for colleges. The Office of Management and Budget estimates that each institution will spend roughly 200 hours completing the survey this year — a figure that higher-education officials say may be an understatement.
Duncan is hoping she can finish the reporting in less than 200 hours, if there are no setbacks when she uploads the data. “If I get errors, it could take double the time,” she said.
For now, she is still gathering and cleaning old student records and waiting to see the results… all before the March 18 deadline.
This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-admissions-data-collection-strains-colleges/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>
by Kathryn Joyce, The Hechinger Report January 6, 2026
The West Shore school board policy committee meeting came to a halt almost as soon as it began. As a board member started going over the agenda on July 17, local parent Danielle Gross rose to object to a last-minute addition she said hadn’t been on the district’s website the day before.
By posting notice of the proposal so close to the meeting, charged Gross, who is also a partner at a communications and advocacy firm that works on state education policy, the board had violated Pennsylvania’s open meetings law, failing to provide the public at least 24 hours’ notice about a topic “this board knows is of great concern for many community members interested in the rights of our LGBTQ students.”
The committee chair, relentlessly banging her gavel, adjourned the meeting to a nonpublic “executive session.” When the committee reconvened, the policy was not mentioned again until the meeting’s end, when a lone public commenter, Heather Keller, invoked “Hamlet” to warn that something was rotten in the Harrisburg suburbs.
The proposed policy, which would bar trans students from using bathrooms and locker rooms aligned with their gender identity, was a nearly verbatim copy of one crafted by a group called the Independence Law Center — a Harrisburg-based Christian right legal advocacy group whose model policies have led to costly lawsuits in districts around the state.
“Being concerned about that, I remembered that we don’t partner with the Independence Law Center,” Keller said. “We haven’t hired them as consultants. And they’re not our district solicitor.”
To those who’d followed education politics in the state, Keller’s comment would register as wry understatement. Over the past several years, ILC’s growing entanglement with dozens of Pennsylvania school boards has become a high-profile controversy. Through interviews, an extensive review of local reporting and public documents, In These Times and The Hechinger Report found that, of the state’s 500 school districts, at least 20 are known to have consulted with or signed formal contracts accepting ILC’s pro bono legal services — to advise on, draft and defend district policies, free of charge.*
But over the last year, it’s become clear ILC’s influence stretches beyond such formal partnerships, as school districts from Bucks County (outside Philadelphia) to Beaver County (west of Pittsburgh) have proposed or adopted virtually identical anti-LGBTQ and book ban policies that originated with ILC — sometimes without acknowledging any connection to the group or where the policies came from.
In districts without formal partnerships with ILC, such as West Shore, figuring out what, exactly, their board’s relationship is to the group has been a painfully assembled puzzle, thanks to school board obstruction, blocked open records requests and reports of backdoor dealing.
Although ILC has existed for nearly 20 years, its recent prominence began around 2021 with a surge of “parents’ rights” complaints about pandemic-era masking, teaching about racism, LGBTQ representation and how library books and curricula are selected. In many districts where such debates raged, calls to hire ILC soon followed.
In 2024 alone, ILC made inroads of one kind or another with roughly a dozen districts in central Pennsylvania, including West Shore, which proposed contracting ILC that March and invited the group to speak to the board in a closed-door meeting the public couldn’t attend. (ILC did not respond to multiple interview requests or emailed questions.)
On the night of that March meeting, Gross organized a rally outside the school board building, drawing roughly 100 residents to protest, even as it snowed. The board backed down from hiring ILC, but that didn’t stop it from introducing ILC policies. In addition to the proposed bathroom policy, that May the board passed a ban on trans students joining girls’ athletics teams after they’ve started puberty and allowed district officials to request doctors’ notes and birth certificates to enforce it.
To Gross, it’s an example of how West Shore and other school boards without formal relationships with ILC have still found ways to advance the group’s agenda. “They’re waiting for other school boards to do all the controversial stuff with the ILC,” Gross said, then “taking the policies other districts have, running them through their solicitors, and implementing them that way.” (A spokesperson for West Shore stated that the district had not contracted with ILC and declined further comment.)
“It’s like a hydra effect,” said Kait Linton of the grassroots community group Public Education Advocates of Lancaster. “They’ve planted seeds for a vine, and now the vine’s taking off in all the directions it wants to go.”
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ILC was founded in the wake of a Pennsylvania lawsuit that drew nationwide attention and prompted significant local embarrassment.
In October 2004, the Dover Area School District — situated, like West Shore, in York County, south of Harrisburg — changed its biology curriculum to introduce the quasi-creationist theory of “intelligent design” as an alternative to evolution. Eleven families sued, arguing that intelligent design was “fundamentally a religious proposition rather than a scientific one.” In December 2005, a federal court agreed, ruling that public schools teaching the theory violated the U.S. Constitution’s establishment clause.
During the case, an attorney named Randall Wenger unsuccessfully tried to add the creationist Christian think tank he worked for — which published the book Dover sought to teach — to the suit as a defendant, and, failing that, filed an amicus brief instead. When the district lost and was ultimately left with $1 million in legal fees, Wenger found a lesson in it for conservatives moving forward.
Speaking at a 2005 conference hosted by the Pennsylvania Family Institute — part of a national network of state-level “family councils” tied to the heavyweight Christian right organizations Family Research Council and Focus on the Family — Wenger suggested Dover could have avoided or won legal challenges if officials hadn’t mentioned their religious motivations during public school board meetings.
“Give us a call before you do something controversial like that,” Wenger said, according to LancasterOnline. Then, in a line that’s become infamous among ILC’s critics, Wenger invoked a biblical reference to add, “I think we need to do a better job at being clever as serpents.” (Wenger did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
The following year, in 2006, the Pennsylvania Family Institute launched ILC with Wenger as its chief counsel, a role he remains in today, in addition to serving as chief operating officer. ILC now has three other staff attorneys and has worked directly as plaintiff’s attorneys on two Supreme Court cases: one was part of the larger Hobby Lobby decision, which allows employers to opt out of employee health insurance plans that include contraception coverage; the other expanded religious exemptions for workers.
ILC has financial ties and a history of collaborating with Christian right legal advocacy behemoth Alliance Defending Freedom, including on a 2017 lawsuit against a school district outside Philadelphia that allowed a trans student to use the locker room aligned with their gender. ILC has filed amicus briefs in support of numerous other Christian right causes, including two that led to major Supreme Court victories for the right in 2025: Mahmoud v. Taylor, which limited public schools’ ability to assign books with LGBTQ themes; and United States v. Skrmetti, which affirmed a Tennessee ban on gender-affirming care for minors. In recent months, the group filed two separate amicus briefs on behalf of Pennsylvania school board members in anti-trans cases in other states. In both cases, which were brought by Alliance Defending Freedom and concern school sports and pronoun usage, ILC urged the Supreme Court to “resolve the issue nationwide.”
In lower courts, ILC has worked on or contributed briefs to lawsuits seeking to start public school board meetings with prayer and to allow religious groups to proselytize public school students, among other issues. More quietly, as the local blog Lancaster Examiner reported — and as one ILC attorney recounted at a conference in 2022 — ILC has defended “conversion therapy,” the broadly discredited theory that homosexuality is a disorder that can be cured.
To critics, all of these efforts have helped systematically chip away at civil rights protections for LGBTQ students at the local level, seeding the policies that President Donald Trump’s administration is now trying to make ubiquitous through executive orders. And while local backlash is building in some areas, activists are hindered by the threat that the ILC’s efforts are ultimately aimed at laying the groundwork for a Supreme Court case that could formalize discrimination against transgender students into law nationwide.
But ILC’s greatest influence is arguably much closer to its Harrisburg home, in neighboring Lancaster and York counties, where nine districts have contracted ILC and at least three more have adopted its model policies.
The rural hillside and farmland in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, are seen on Aug. 15, 2025. The local school district, Penn Manor, adopted anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ policies presented by the Independence Law Center, a Harrisburg-based Christian-right legal advocacy group.
A sign is seen in a residential neighborhood in Holtwood, Pennsylvania.
In Lancaster’s Hempfield district, it started with a 2021 controversy over a trans student joining the girls’ track team. School board meetings that had already grown tense over pandemic masking requirements erupted in new fights about LGBTQ rights and visibility. In the middle of one meeting, recalled Hempfield parent and substitute teacher Erin Small, a board member abruptly suggested hiring ILC to write a new district policy. The suddenness of the proposal caused such public outcry, said Small, that the vote to hire ILC had to be postponed.
But within a few months, the district signed a contract with ILC to write what became Pennsylvania’s first school district ban on trans students participating in sports teams aligned with their gender identity. Other ILC policy proposals followed, including a successful 2023 effort to bar the district from using books or materials that include sexual content, which immediately prompted an intensive review of books written by LGBTQ and non-white authors. (The Hempfield district did not respond to requests for comment.)
In nearby Elizabethtown, the path to hiring ILC began with a fraudulent 2021 complaint, when a man claimed, during a school board meeting, that his middle schooler had checked out an inappropriate book from the school library. Although it later emerged that the man had reportedly used a fake name and officials found no evidence he had children attending the school, his claim nonetheless sparked a long debate over book policies, which eventually led to the district contracting ILC as special legal counsel in 2024. Two anti-trans policies were subsequently passed in January 2025, and a ban on “sexually explicit” books, also based on ILC’s models, was discussed this past spring but has not moved forward to date. (The Elizabethtown district did not respond to requests for comment.)
Across the Susquehanna River in York County — where five districts have contracted ILC and two more have considered or passed its policies — the group’s influence has been broad and sometimes confounding. In one instance, as the York Dispatch discovered, ILC not only authored four policy proposals for the Red Lion Area School District, but ILC senior counsel Jeremy Samek, a registered Pennsylvania lobbyist, also drafted a speech for the board president to deliver in support of three anti-trans policies, all of which passed in 2024. (The Red Lion district did not respond to requests for comment.)
The same year, South Western School District, reportedly acting on ILC advice, ordered a high school to cut large windows into the walls of two bathrooms that had been designated as “gender identity restrooms,” allowing passersby in the hallway to see inside, consequently discouraging students from using them. (The district did not respond to requests for comment, but in a statement to local paper the Evening Sun, school board President Matt Gelazela cited student safety and said the windows helped staff monitor for vaping, bullying and other prohibited activities.)
In many districts, said Lancaster parent Eric Fisher, ILC’s growing relationships with school boards has been eased by the ubiquitous presence around the state of its sister organizations within the Pennsylvania Family Institute, including the institute’s lobbying arm, voucher group, youth leadership conference and Church Ambassador Network, which brings pastors from across Pennsylvania to lobby lawmakers in the state Capitol.
As a result, said Fisher, when ILC shows up in a district, board members often are already familiar with them or other institute affiliates, “having met them at church and having their churches put their stamp of endorsement on them. I think it makes it really easy for [board members] to say yes.”
But in nearly every district that has considered working with ILC, wide-scale pushback has also followed — though often to no avail. In June 2024, in Elizabethtown — where school board fights have been so fractious that they inspired a full-length documentary — members of the public spoke in opposition to hiring ILC at a ratio of roughly 5 to 1 before the board voted unanimously to hire the group anyway.
In the Upper Adams district in Biglerville, southwest of Harrisburg, the school board voted to contract ILC despite a cacophony of public comments and a 500-signature petition in opposition.
In Lancaster’s Warwick district, the school board’s vote to hire ILC prompted the resignation of a superintendent who had served in her role for 15 years and who reported that the district’s insurance carrier had warned the district might not be covered in future lawsuits if it adopted ILC’s anti-trans policies.
Since then, Warwick resident Kayla Cook noted during a public presentation about ILC this past summer, the mood in the district has grown grim. “We do not have any students at the moment trying to participate [in sports] who are trans. However, we have students who simply have a short haircut being profiled as being trans,” Cook said. “It’s tipped far into fear-based behaviors, where we are dipping our toes into checking the student’s body to make sure that they’re identifying as the appropriate gender.” (A district spokesperson directed interview requests to the school board, which did not respond to requests for comment.)
But perhaps nowhere was the fight as fraught as in Lancaster’s Penn Manor School District, which hired ILC to draft new policies about trans students just months after the suicide of a trans youth from Penn Manor — the fifth such suicide in the Lancaster community in less than two years.
Before the Penn Manor school board publicly proposed retaining ILC, in June 2024 — scheduling a presentation by and a vote on hiring ILC for the same meeting — district Superintendent Phil Gale wrote to the board about his misgivings. In an email obtained by LancasterOnline, Gale warned the board against policies “that will distinguish one group of students from another” and passed along a warning from the district’s insurance carrier that adopting potentially discriminatory policies might affect the district’s coverage if it were sued by students or staff.
In a narrow 5-4 vote, the all-Republican board declined to hire ILC that June. But after one board member reconsidered, the matter was placed back on the agenda for two meetings that August.
Members of the community publicly presented an open letter, signed by roughly 80 Penn Manor residents, requesting that, if policies about trans students were truly needed, the district establish a task force of local experts to draft them rather than outsource policymaking to ILC. One of the letter’s organizers, Mark Clatterbuck, a religious studies professor at New Jersey’s Montclair State University, said the district never acknowledged it or responded. (Maddie Long, a spokesperson for Penn Manor, said the district could not comment because of the litigation.)
That February, Clatterbuck’s son, Ash — a college junior and transgender man who’d grown up in Penn Manor — had died by suicide, shortly after the nationally publicized death of Nex Benedict, a nonbinary 16-year-old in Oklahoma who died by suicide the day after being beaten unconscious in a high school girls’ bathroom.
In the first August meeting to reconsider hiring ILC, Clatterbuck told the Penn Manor board, through tears, how “living in a hostile political environment that dehumanizes them at school, at home, at church and in the halls of Congress” was making “life unlivable for far too many of our trans children.”
Two weeks later, at the second meeting, Ash’s mother, Malinda Harnish Clatterbuck, pleaded for board members talking about student safety to consider the children these policies actively harm.
“ILC does not even recognize trans and gender-nonconforming children as existing,” said Harnish Clatterbuck, a pastor whose family has lived in Lancaster for 10 generations. “That fact alone should preclude them from even being considered by the board.”
A painted portrait of Ash Clatterbuck in his parents’ home in Holtwood, Pennsylvania.
Malinda Harnish-Clatterbuck walks a labyrinth made in 2023 by her late son, Ash, on their property in Holtwood.
Hand-painted signs that once hung on the walls of Ash’s dorm room
Her husband spoke again as well, telling the board how Ash had frequently warned about the spread of policies that stoke “irrational hysteria around” trans youth — “the kind of policies,” Mark Clatterbuck noted, “that the Pennsylvania-based Independence Law Center loves to draft.”
Reminding the board that five trans youth in the area had died by suicide within just 18 months, he continued, “Do not try to tell me that there is no connection between the kind of dehumanizing policies that the ILC drafts and the deaths of our trans children.”
But the board voted to hire ILC anyway, 5-4, and in the following months adopted two of ILC’s anti-trans policies.
In anticipation of such public outcry, some school boards around Pennsylvania have taken steps to obscure their interest in ILC’s agenda.
Kristina Moon, a senior attorney at the Education Law Center of Pennsylvania, a legal services nonprofit that advocates for public school students’ rights, has watched a progression in how school boards interact with ILC.
When her group first began receiving calls related to ILC, around 2021, alarmed parents told similar stories of boards proposing book bans targeting queer or trans students’ perspectives, or identical packages of policies that included restrictions about bathrooms, sports and pronouns.
“At first, we would see boards openly talking about their interest in contracting with ILC,” said Moon. But as local opposition began to grow, “board members stopped sharing so publicly.”
Instead, Moon said, reports began to emerge of school boards discussing or meeting with ILC in secret.
In Hempfield, in 2022, the board moved some policy discussions into committee sessions less likely to be attended by the public, and held a vote on an anti-trans sports policy without announcing it publicly, possibly in violation of Pennsylvania’s Sunshine Act, as Mother Jones reported.
Across the state, in Bucks County, one Central Bucks school board member recounted in an op-ed for the Bucks County Beacon how her conservative colleagues had stonewalled her when she asked about the origins of a new book ban policy in 2022, only to have the board later admit ILC had performed a legal review of it “pro bono,” as PhillyBurbs reported.
Subsequent reporting by the York Daily Record and Reuters revealed the board’s relationship with ILC was more involved and included discussions about other policies related to trans student athletes and pronoun policy. (Both Central Bucks’ books and anti-LGBTQ policies were later cited in an ACLU federal complaint that cost the district $1.75 million in legal fees, as well as in a related Education Department investigation into whether the district had created a hostile learning environment for LGBTQ students.)
But the sense of backroom dealing reached an almost cartoonish level in York County, where, in March 2024, conservative board members from 12 county school districts were invited to a secret meeting hosted by a right-wing political action committee, along with specific instructions about how to keep their participation off the public radar. According to the York Dispatch, the invitation came from former Central York school board member Veronica Gemma, who (after losing her seat) was hired as education director for PA Economic Growth, a PAC that had helped elect 48 conservatives to York school boards the previous fall. (Gemma did not respond to interview requests.)
Gemma’s invitation was accompanied by an agenda sent by the PAC, which included a discussion about ILC and how board members could “build a network of support” and “advance our shared goals more effectively countywide.” The invitation also included the admonition that “confidentiality is paramount” and that each district should only send four board members or fewer — to avoid the legal threshold for a quorum that would make the meeting a matter of public record.
“Remember, no more than 4 — sunshine laws,” Gemma wrote.
In the wake of stories like these, Wenger’s 2005 suggestion that conservatives “become as clever as serpents” in concealing their intentions became ubiquitous in coverage of and advocacy against ILC — showing up in newspaper articles, in editorials and even on a T-shirt for sale online.
“I think it’s very obvious,” reflected Moon, “but if something has to be taking place in secrecy, I’m not sure it can be good for our students.”
But the lack of transparency shows up in subtler ways too, in the spreading phenomenon of districts adopting ILC policies without admitting where the policies come from. That was the case in Eastern York in 2025, where board members who had previously lobbied for an ILC pronoun policy later directed their in-house attorney to write an original policy instead, following the same principles but avoiding the baggage an ILC connection would bring.
In Elizabethtown (which did contract ILC), one policy was even introduced erroneously referencing clauses from another district’s code, in an indication of how directly districts are copy-pasting from one another.
In 2025, ILC attorney Jeremy Samek even seemed to acknowledge the trend, predicting that fewer districts might contract ILC going forward, since the combination of Trump’s executive orders on trans students and the general spread of policies similar to ILC’s meant “it’s going to be a lot easier for other schools to do that without even talking to us.”
In the face of what appears like a deliberate strategy of concealment, members of the public have increasingly turned to official channels to compel boards to disclose their dealings with ILC. Mark Clatterbuck did so in 2024 and 2025, filing 10 Right-to-Know requests with Penn Manor for all school board and administration communications with or about ILC and policies ILC consulted on and any records related to a set of specific keywords.
Thirty miles north, three Elizabethtown parents sued their school board in the spring of 2025, alleging it deliberately met and conferred with ILC in nonpublic meetings and private communications to “circumvent the requirements of the Sunshine Act.”
In both cases, and more broadly in the region, ILC critics are keenly aware that, by bringing complaints or lawsuits against the group or the school boards it works with, they might be doing exactly what ILC wants: furthering its chances to land another case before the Supreme Court, where a favorable ruling could set a dangerous national precedent, such as ruling that Title IX protections don’t cover trans students.
“They’re itching for a case,” said Clatterbuck. To that end, he added, his pro bono attorneys — at the law firm Gibbel Kraybill & Hess LLC, which also represents the Elizabethtown plaintiffs pro bono — have been careful not to do ILC’s work for it.
Largely, that has meant keeping the cases narrowly focused on Sunshine Act violations.
But in both cases, there are also hints of the larger issue at hand — of whether, in a repeat of the old Dover “intelligent design” case, ILC’s policies represent school boards imposing inherently religious viewpoints on public schools. After all, ILC’s parent group, the Pennsylvania Family Institute, clearly states its mission is to make Pennsylvania “a place where God is honored” and to “strengthen families by restoring to public life the traditional, foundational principles and values essential for the well-being of society.” And in 2024, the institute’s president, Michael Geer, told a Christian TV audience that much of ILC’s work involves working with school boards “on the transgender issue, fighting that ideology that is pervasive in our society.”
In the Elizabethtown complaint, the plaintiffs argue that district residents must “have the opportunity to observe Board deliberations regarding policies that will affect their children in order to understand the Board members’ true motivation and rationale for adopting policies — particularly when policies are prepared by an outside organization seeking to advance a particular religious viewpoint and agenda.”
The public has ample cause to suspect as much. Five current and former members of Elizabethtown’s school board are connected to a far-right church in town, where the pastor joined 150 other locals in traveling to Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021. Among them were current board members Stephen Lindemuth — who once preached a sermon at the church arguing that “gender identity confusion” doesn’t “line up with what God desires” — and his wife, Danielle Lindemuth, who helped organize the caravan of buses that went to Washington. (Stephen Lindemuth replied by email, “I have no recollection of making any judgmental comments concerning LGBTQ in my most recent preaching the past few years.” Neither he nor his wife were accused of any unlawful acts on Jan. 6.)
Another board member until this past December, James Emery, went through the church’s pastoral training program and in 2022 served as a member of the security detail of far-right Christian nationalist gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano.
School board meetings in Elizabethtown have also frequently devolved into religious battles, with one local mother, Amy Karr, board chair of Elizabethtown’s Church of the Brethren, recalling how local right-wing activists accused ILC’s opponents of being possessed by demonic spirits or a “vehicle of Satan.”
In Penn Manor, Clatterbuck similarly hoped to lay bare the “overtly religious nature” of the board’s motivation by including in his Right-to-Know requests a demand for all school board communications about ILC policies containing keywords like “God,” “Christian,” “Jesus,” “faith” and “biblical.”
For nearly a year, the district sought to avoid fulfilling the requests, with questionable invocations of attorney-client privilege (including one board member’s claim that she had “personally” retained ILC as counsel), sending back obviously incomplete records and protestations that Clatterbuck’s keyword request turned up so many results that it was too burdensome to fulfill. Ultimately, Clatterbuck appealed to the Pennsylvania Office of Open Records to compel the board to honor the request.
This fall, Clatterbuck received a 457-page document from the board containing dozens of messages that suggest his suspicions were correct.
In response to local constituents writing in support of ILC — decrying pronoun policies as a violation of religious liberty, claiming “the whole LGBTQ spectrum is rooted in the brokenness of sin” and calling for board members to rebuke teachers unions in “the precious blood of Jesus” — at least three board members wrote back with encouragement and thanks. In one example, board member Anthony Lombardo told a constituent who had written a 12-page message arguing that queer theory is “inherently atheistic” that “I completely agree with your analysis and conclusions.”
When another community member sent the board an article from an evangelical website arguing that using “transgendered pronouns … falsifies the gospel” and “tramples on the blood of Christ,” board member Donna Wert responded, “Please know that I firmly agree with the beliefs held in [this article]. And please know that heightened movement is finally being made concerning this, as you will see.”
To Clatterbuck, such messages demonstrate the school board’s religious sympathies, as well as how Christian nationalism plays out at the local level. While national examples of Christian right dominance, like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Crusader tattoos or Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s “Appeal to Heaven” flag, get the most attention, Clatterbuck said, “this is what it looks like when you’re controlling local school boards and passing policies that affect people directly in their local community.”
But the local level might also be the place where advocates have the best chance of fighting back, said Kait Linton of Public Education Advocates of Lancaster.
Speaking ahead of a panel discussion on ILC at Elizabethtown’s Church of the Brethren last June — one of several panels PEAL hosted around Lancaster in the run-up to November’s school board elections — Linton emphasized the importance of focusing on the “hyperlocal.”
“With everything that’s happening at the national level,” Linton said, “we find a lot of folks get caught up in that, when really we have far less opportunity to make a difference up there than we do right here.”
PEAL’s efforts have been matched by other groups at the district level, like Elizabethtown’s Etown Common Sense 2.0, which local parent and former president Alisha Runkle said advocates against the sort of policies ILC drafts and also seeks to support teachers “being beaten down and needing support” in an environment of relentless hostility and demands to police their lesson plans, libraries and language.
They’re also reflected in the work of statewide coalitions like Pennsylvanians for Welcoming and Inclusive Schools, which helps districts share information about ILC policies — including a searchable map of ILC’s presence around the state — and resources like the Education Law Center, which has sent detailed demand or advocacy letters to numerous school districts considering adopting ILC-inspired policies.
This past November, that local-level work resulted in some signs for cautious hope. In Lancaster County’s Hempfield School District — one of the first districts in the state to hire ILC — the school board flipped to Democratic control. Among the new board members are Kait Linton and fellow PEAL activist Erin Small.
Across the river, in West Shore, the departure of three right-wing board members — one who resigned and two who lost their elections — left the board with a new 5-4 majority of Democratic and centrist Republican members. After the election, the board promptly moved to table three contentious policy proposals, including the anti-trans bathroom policy the board had copied from ILC and a book ban policy that drew heavily on ILC’s work.
While in other Lancaster districts — including Elizabethtown, Warwick and Penn Manor — school boards remained firmly in conservative control, there are also signs of growing pushback, as in Elizabethtown, where Runkle noted the teachers union has recently begun challenging the board during public meetings and local students have gotten active protesting book bans.
Similar trends have happened statewide, said the Education Law Center’s Kristina Moon, who noted that voters “were so concerned about the extremist action they saw on the boards that it was kind of a wake-up call: that we can’t sleep on school board elections, and we need to have boards that reflect a commitment to all of the students in our schools.”
While reports of ILC’s direct involvement with school boards seem to have waned in recent months, said Moon, that “does not mean the threat to our public schools is over. We see continued use of those discriminatory policies by school boards just copying the policy exactly as it was adopted elsewhere. And it causes the same harm in a district, whether the district is publicly meeting with ILC or not.”
Plus there are now Trump’s anti-trans executive orders, which have spread confusion statewide. And just this December, a legal challenge brought by another Christian right law firm, the Thomas More Society, is challenging the authority of Pennsylvania’s civil rights commission to apply anti-discrimination protections to trans students in public schools.
As a consequence, the Education Law Center has spent much of the past year trying to educate school and community leaders that executive orders are not the law itself, and they cannot supersede case law supporting the rights of LGBTQ students.
“We’re trying to cut through the noise,” Moon said, “to ensure that schools remain clear about their legal obligations to provide safe environments for all students … so they can focus on learning and not worrying about identity-based attacks.”
*Correction: At least 20 of Pennsylvania’s 500 school districts are known to have consulted with or signed formal contracts accepting the ILC’s pro bono legal services. This story previously reported 21.
Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at [email protected].
This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/clever-as-serpents-how-a-legal-groups-anti-lgbtq-policies-took-root-in-school-districts-across-a-state/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>
by Nosakhere Griffin-EL, The Hechinger Report January 5, 2026
Across the U.S., public school districts are panicking over test scores.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress, or the Nation’s Report Card, as it is known, revealed that students are underperforming in reading, with the most recent scores being the lowest overall since the test was first given in 1992.
The latest scores for Black children have been especially low. In Pittsburgh, for example, only 26 percent of Black third- through fifth-grade public school students are reading at advanced or proficient levels compared to 67 percent of white children.
This opportunity gap should challenge us to think differently about how we educate Black children. Too often, Black children are labeled as needing “skills development.” The problem is that such labels lead to educational practices that dim their curiosity and enthusiasm for school — and overlook their capacity to actually enjoy learning.
As a result, without that enjoyment and the encouragement that often accompanies it, too many Black students grow up never feeling supported in the pursuit of their dreams.
Narrowly defining children based on their test scores is a big mistake. We, as educators, must see children as advanced dreamers who have the potential to overcome any academic barrier with our support and encouragement.
As a co-founder of a bookstore, I believe there are many ways we can do better. I often use books and personal experiences to illustrate some of the pressing problems impacting Black children and families.
One of my favorites is “Abdul’s Story” by Jamilah Thompkins-Bigelow.
It tells the tale of a gifted young Black boy who is embarrassed by his messy handwriting and frequent misspellings, so much so that, in erasing his mistakes, he gouges a hole in his paper.
He tries to hide it under his desk. Instead of chastening him, his teacher, Mr. Muhammad, does something powerful: He sits beside Abdul under the desk.
Mr. Muhammad shows his own messy notebook to Abdul, who realizes “He’s messy just like me.”
In that moment, Abdul learns that his dream of becoming a writer is possible; he just has to work in a way that suits his learning style. But he also needs an educator who supports him along the way.
It is something I understand: In my own life, I have been both Abdul and Mr. Muhammad, and it was a teacher named Mrs. Lee who changed my life.
One day after I got into a fight, she pulled me out of the classroom and said, “I am not going to let you fail.” At that point, I was consistently performing at or below basic in reading and writing, but she didn’t define me by my test scores.
Instead, she asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“Because he’s smart and he always interviews famous people and presidents,” I said.
Mrs. Lee explained that Mr. Gumbel was a journalist and encouraged me to start a school newspaper.
So I did. I interviewed people and wrote articles, revising them until they were ready for publication. I did it because Mrs. Lee believed in me and saw me for who I wanted to be — not just my test scores.
If more teachers across the country were like Mrs. Lee and Mr. Muhammad, more Black children would develop the confidence to pursue their dreams. Black children would realize that even if they have to work harder to acquire certain skills, doing so can help them accomplish their dreams.
Years ago, I organized a reading tour in four libraries across the city of Pittsburgh. At that time, I was a volunteer at the Carnegie Library, connecting book reading to children’s dreams.
I remember working with a young Black boy who was playing video games on the computer with his friends. I asked him if he wanted to read, and he shook his head no.
So I asked, “Who wants to build the city of the future?” and he raised his hand.
He and I walked over to a table and began building with magnetic tiles. As we began building, I asked the same question Mrs. Lee had asked me: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“An architect,” he replied.
I jumped up and grabbed a picture book about Frank Lloyd Wright. We began reading the book, and I noticed that he struggled to pronounce many of the words. I supported him, and we got through it. I later wrote about it.
Each week after that experience, this young man would come up to me ready to read about his dream. He did so because I saw him just as Mr. Muhammad saw Abdul, and just like Mrs. Lee saw me — as an advanced dreamer.
Consider that when inventor Lonnie Johnson was a kid, he took a test and the results declared that he could not be an engineer. Imagine if he’d accepted that fate. Kids around the world would not have the joy of playing with the Super Soaker water gun.
When illustrator Jerry Pinkney was a kid, he struggled with reading just like Freelon. If he had defined himself as “basic” and “below average,” children across America would not have been inspired by his powerful picture book illustrations.
Narrowly defining children based on their test scores is a big mistake.
Each child is a solution to a problem in the world, whether it is big or small. So let us create conditions that inspire Black children to walk boldly in the pursuit of their dreams.
Nosakhere Griffin-EL is the co-founder of The Young Dreamers’ Bookstore. He is a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project in partnership with the National Black Child Development Institute.
This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/opinion-instead-of-defining-black-children-by-their-test-scores-we-should-help-them-overcome-academic-barriers-and-pursue-their-dreams/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>
Thirty states now limit or ban cellphone use in classrooms, and teachers are noticing children paying attention to their lessons again. But it’s not clear whether this policy — unpopular with students and a headache for teachers to enforce — makes an academic difference.
If student achievement goes up after a cellphone ban, it’s tough to know if the ban was the reason. Some other change in math or reading instruction might have caused the improvement. Or maybe the state assessment became easier to pass. Imagine if politicians required all students to wear striped shirts and test scores rose. Few would really think that stripes made kids smarter.
Two researchers from the University of Rochester and RAND, a nonprofit research organization, figured out a clever way to tackle this question by taking advantage of cellphone activity data in one large school district in Florida, which in 2023 became the first state to institute school cellphone restrictions. The researchers compared schools that had high cellphone activity before the ban with those that had low cellphone usage to see if the ban made a bigger difference for schools that had high usage.
Indeed, it did.
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Student test scores rose a bit more in high cellphone usage schools two years after the ban compared with schools that had lower cellphone usage to start. Students were also attending school more regularly.
The policy also came with a troubling side effect. The cellphone bans led to a significant increase in student suspensions in the first year, especially among Black students. But disciplinary actions declined during the second year.
“Cellphone bans are not a silver bullet,” said David Figlio, an economist at the University of Rochester and one of the study’s co-authors. “But they seem to be helping kids. They’re attending school more, and they’re performing a bit better on tests.”
Figlio said he was “worried” about the short-term 16 percent increase in suspensions for Black students. What’s unclear from this data analysis is whether Black students were more likely to violate the new cellphone rules, or whether teachers were more likely to single out Black students for punishment. It’s also unclear from these administrative behavior records if students were first given warnings or lighter punishments before they were suspended.
The data suggest that students adjusted to the new rules. A year later, student suspensions, including those of Black students, fell back to what they had been before the cellphone ban.
“What we observe is a rocky start,” Figlio added. “There was a lot of discipline.”
The study, “The Impact of Cellphone Bans in Schools on Student Outcomes: Evidence from Florida,” is a draft working paper and has not been peer-reviewed. It was slated to be circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research on Oct. 20 and the authors shared a draft with me in advance. Figlio and his co-author Umut Özek at RAND believe it is the first study to show a causal connection between cellphone bans and learning rather than just a correlation.
The academic gains from the cellphone ban were small, less than a percentile point, on average. That’s the equivalent of moving from the 50th percentile on math and reading tests (in the middle) to the 51st percentile (still close to the middle), and this small gain did not emerge until the second year for most students. The academic benefits were strongest for middle schoolers, white students, Hispanic students and male students. The academic gains for Black students and female students were not statistically significant.
I was surprised to learn that there is data on student cellphone use in school. The authors of this study used information from Advan Research Corp., which collects and analyzes data from mobile phones around the world for business purposes, such as figuring out how many people visit a particular retail store. The researchers were able to obtain this data for schools in one Florida school district and estimate how many students were on their cellphones before and after the ban went into effect between the hours of 9 a.m. and 1 p.m.
The data showed that more than 60 percent of middle schoolers, on average, were on their phones at least once during the school day before the 2023 ban in this particular Florida district, which was not named but described as one of the 10 largest districts in the country. (Five of the nation’s 10 largest school districts are in Florida.) After the ban, that fell in half to 30 percent of middle schoolers in the first year and down to 25 percent in the second year.
Elementary school students were less likely to be on cellphones to start with and their in-school usage fell from about 25 percent of students before the ban to 15 percent after the ban. More than 45 percent of high schoolers were on their phones before the ban and that fell to about 10 percent afterwards.
Average daily smartphone visits in schools, by year and grade level
Average daily smartphone visits during regular school days (relative to teacher workdays without students) between 9am and 1pm (per 100 enrolled students) in the two months before and then after the 2023 ban took effect in one large urban Florida school district. Source: Figlio and Özek, October 2025 draft paper, figure 2C, p. 23.
Florida did not enact a complete cellphone ban in 2023, but imposed severe restrictions. Those restrictions were tightened in 2025 and that additional tightening was not studied in this paper.
Anti-cellphone policies have become increasingly popular since the pandemic, largely based on our collective adult gut hunches that kids are not learning well when they are consumed by TikTok and SnapChat.
This is perhaps a rare case in public policy, Figlio said, where the “data back up the hunches.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
After a three-year pause prompted by the pandemic, the clock on student loan repayments suddenly started ticking again in September 2023, and forbearance ended last September. For millions of borrowers like Shauntee Russell, the resumption of payments marked a harsh return to financial reality.
Russell, a single mother of three from Chicago, had received $127,000 in student loan forgiveness through the SAVE program, and had experienced profound relief at having that $632 monthly payment lifted from her shoulders. SAVE exemplified both the transformative power of debt relief and the urgent need to continue this fight — but now SAVE has been suspended.
Such setbacks cannot be the end of our story, as I document in my forthcoming book. The resumption of loan payments, while painful, must serve as a rallying cry rather than a surrender. We stand at a critical juncture. The Supreme Court’s devastating blow to former President Biden’s initial forgiveness plan and the ongoing legal challenges to programs like SAVE have left 45 million borrowers in a state of financial limbo. The fundamental inequities of our higher education system have never been more apparent.
Black students graduate with nearly 50 percent more debt than their white counterparts, while women hold roughly two-thirds of all outstanding student debt — a staggering $1.5 trillion that continues to grow. These aren’t just statistics; they represent systemic barriers that prevent entire communities from achieving economic mobility.
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The students I interviewed while reporting on this crisis reveal the human cost of inaction. They include Maria Sanchez, a nursing student in St. Louis who skips meals to save money and can only access textbooks through library loans.
Then there is Robert Carroll, who gave up his dorm room in Cleveland and now alternates between friends’ couches just to stay in school.
These students represent the millions who are working multiple jobs, sacrificing basic needs and seeing their dreams deferred under the weight of financial pressure.
Yet what strikes me most is their resilience and determination. Despite these overwhelming obstacles, these students persist, driven by the same belief that motivated civil rights leaders like Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. — that education is the pathway to economic empowerment and social justice.
The current political landscape, with Donald J. Trump’s return to the presidency and a Republican-controlled Congress, presents unprecedented challenges. Plans to dismantle key borrower protections and efforts to eliminate the Department of Education signal a dark period ahead for student debt relief.
But history teaches us that progress often comes through sustained grassroots organizing and innovative policy solutions at multiple levels of government and society.
Universities must step up with institutional relief programs, as my own institution, Trinity Washington University, did when it settled $1.8 million in student balances during the pandemic.
The Black church, which has long understood the connection between education and liberation, continues to provide crucial support through scholarship programs. Organizations like the United Negro College Fund, the Thurgood Marshall College Fund and the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education remain vital pillars in making higher education accessible.
Still, individual, institutional and state efforts, while necessary, are not sufficient. We need comprehensive federal action that treats student debt as what it truly is: a civil rights issue and a moral imperative. The magnitude of the crisis — it affects Americans across every congressional district — creates unique opportunities for bipartisan coalition building.
Smart advocates are already reframing the narrative by replacing partisan talking points with economic arguments that resonate across ideological lines: workforce development, entrepreneurship and American competitiveness on the world stage.
When student debt prevents nurses from serving rural communities, teachers from working in underserved schools and young entrepreneurs from starting businesses, it becomes an economic drag that affects everyone.
The path to federal action may require creative approaches — perhaps through tax policy, regulatory changes or targeted relief for specific professions — but the political mathematics of 45 million impacted voters ultimately makes comprehensive action not just morally necessary, but politically inevitable.
Student debt relief is not about handouts — it’s about honoring the promise that education should be a ladder up, not an anchor weighing down entire generations; it’s about ensuring that Shauntee Russell’s relief becomes the norm, not the exception. The fight is far from over.
The young activists I met at the March on Washington 60th anniversary understood something profound: Their debt is not their fault, but their fight is their responsibility. They carry forward the legacy of those who came before them who believed that access to education should not depend on one’s family wealth, and that crushing debt should not be the price of pursuing knowledge.
The arc of history still bends toward justice — but in this era of political resistance, we must be prepared to bend it ourselves through sustained organizing, innovative policy solutions and an unwavering commitment to the principle that education is a right, not a privilege reserved for the wealthy.
The resumption of payments is not the end of this story. It’s the beginning of the next chapter in our fight for educational equity and economic justice. And this chapter, like those before it, will be written by the voices of the millions who refuse to let debt define their destiny.
Jamal Watson is a professor and associate dean of graduate studies at Trinity Washington University and an editor at Diverse Issues In Higher Education.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
Across the country, Black fathers are too often seen as a threat when they speak up and advocate for their children. And it’s not just in courtrooms and on sidewalks — it’s happening in classrooms, daycares and schools.
I’ve spent my career in education and equity leadership, and I know this is part of a larger, troubling pattern. When Black parents — especially men — assert themselves in spaces not designed for them, they are too often perceived as “aggressive.”
Their advocacy is sometimes interpreted as “rude,” and their presence is framed as disruption rather than partnership, something that has played out in my own experience as a proud Black father of three.
This isn’t about one parent or teacher or even one moment. It’s about what happens when systems designed to support children carry embedded racial assumptions.
I’ll never forget picking my kids up from daycare during a lice outbreak. My wife and I had no experience dealing with lice, and I asked a few questions — just trying to understand what to expect. Instead of getting reassurance or guidance, I was met with suspicion, even subtle blame.
Or the time I raised a safety concern about an emotional child in my son’s class who had a pattern of throwing chairs. Rather than treating my concern as legitimate, it was brushed off — as if I were overreacting.
In both cases, my presence and voice weren’t welcomed. They were managed.
In a society in which Black men are still fighting to be seen as full participants in their children’s lives, we cannot ignore the role that bias plays in shaping who gets welcomed, who gets questioned and who gets believed. Daycares, schools, courts and society at large must actively affirm and restore the voices of Black fathers, rather than dismiss them.
Too often, Black men are portrayed as threats or criminals — rather than as nurturers and protectors. These images become mentally entrenched, shaping public attitudes and institutional responses. This persistent framing contributes to a cultural blind spot that brings confusion to the presence of Black fathers and negatively affects how they are treated in schools, courts and communities.
Despite this anti-Black bias, Black fathers defy stereotypes every day. Black dads, on average, are actually more involved in daily caregiving than fathers of other racial backgrounds, the National Health Statistics Reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes. Yet media representation has not caught up with this reality.
As a student pursuing a doctorate in education leadership and policy, I study how identity shapes access to opportunity. And I know that bias against Black men starts early — when we are boys. A 2016 Yale Child Study Center report found that preschool teachers, regardless of race, were more likely to monitor Black boys for misbehavior — even when no misbehavior was apparent.
And in Indiana, studies highlight that nearly four out of every five Black children in the state will be investigated for suspected maltreatment.
These are not just statistical disparities — they’re stories of fractured trust between families and the institutions meant to serve them.
I have explored the concept of “mega-threats” introduced by researchers Angelica Leigh and Shimul Melwani — high-profile, identity-relevant events that trigger lasting psychological stress for people who share that identity. Though typically used to describe major public tragedies, these threats can be individual and personal, too. When a Black father sees himself reduced to a stereotype — his parenting undercut, his words distorted — it becomes an embodied threat, one that lingers and works to fulfill the myth that Black fathers are absent. These corrosive interactions run counter to the heroic influence and legacy that Black men have within their communities as warm demanders — men who emphatically build relationships and uphold high expectations.
If we want to support children, we must support their families. That means ensuring that early childhood professionals are trained not just in child development but in cultural competence and anti-bias practices. It means separating assumptions from observations when writing reports.
And it means reflecting on how language like “rude” or “aggressive” can carry racial undertones that reinforce long-standing stereotypes.
In my work as an educator, leader and former coach, I’ve partnered with countless families across race and class lines. What all parents want — especially those from marginalized communities — is the assurance that when they show up, they’ll be heard, not judged. That their questions will be met with respect, not suspicion.
If we truly believe in family engagement, we must be honest about the ways our systems still punish the very people we say we want more of. Black fathers are showing up.
The question is: are we ready to see them clearly?
Craig Jordan is an educator and doctoral student at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College. A native of Gary, Indiana, he writes about equity, identity and systemic change in education. His work has been featured in IndyStar and Yahoo News.
This story about Black fathers was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
In the race to help students recover from pandemic-related learning loss, education leaders have overlooked one of the most powerful tools already at their disposal: experienced teachers.
For decades, a myth has persisted in education policy circles that after their first few years on the job, teachers stop improving. This belief has undercut efforts to retain seasoned educators, with many policymakers and administrators treating veteran teachers as replaceable cogs rather than irreplaceable assets.
But that myth doesn’t hold up. The evidence tells a different story: Teachers don’t hit a plateau after year five. While their growth may slow, it doesn’t stop. In the right environments — with collaborative colleagues, supportive administrators and stable classroom assignments — teachers can keep getting better well into their second decade in the classroom.
This insight couldn’t come at a more critical time. As schools work to accelerate post-pandemic learning recovery, especially for the most vulnerable students, they need all the instructional expertise they can muster.
That means not just recruiting new teachers but keeping their best educators in the classroom and giving them the support they need to thrive.
In a new review of 23 longitudinal studies conducted by the Learning Policy Institute and published by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, all but one of the studies showed that teachers generally improve significantly during their first five years. The research review also found continued, albeit slower, improvement well into years 6 through 15; several of the studies found improvement into later years of teaching, though at a diminished pace.
These gains translate into measurable benefits for students: higher test scores, fewer disciplinary issues, reduced absenteeism and increased postsecondary attainment. In North Carolina, for example, students with highly experienced English teachers learned more and were substantially less likely to skip school and more likely to enjoy reading. These effects were strongest for students who were most at risk of falling behind.
While experience helps all teachers improve, we’re currently failing to build that experience where it’s needed most. Schools serving large populations of low-income Black and Hispanic students are far more likely to be staffed primarily by early career teachers.
And unfortunately, they’re also more likely to see those teachers leave after just a few years. This churn makes it nearly impossible to build a stable, experienced workforce in high-need schools.
It also robs novice teachers of the veteran mentors who could help them get better faster and robs students of the opportunity to learn from seasoned educators who have refined their craft over time.
To fix this, we need to address both sides of the equation: helping teachers improve and keeping them in the classrooms that need them most.
Research points to several conditions that support continued teacher growth. Beginning teachers are more likely to stay and improve if they have had high-quality preparation and mentoring. Teaching is not a solo sport. Educators who work alongside more experienced peers improve faster, especially in the early years.
Teachers also improve more when they’re able to teach the same grade level or subject year after year. Unfortunately, those in under-resourced schools are more likely to be shuffled around, undermining their ability to build expertise.
Perhaps most importantly, schools that have strong leadership and which foster time for collaboration and a culture of professional trust see greater gains in teacher retention over time.
Teachers who feel supported by their administrators, who collaborate with a team that shares their mission and who aren’t constantly switching subjects or grade levels are far more likely to stay in the profession.
Pay matters too, especially in high-need schools where working conditions are toughest. But incentives alone aren’t enough. Short-term bonuses can attract teachers, but they won’t keep them if the work environment drives them away.
If we’re serious about improving student outcomes, especially in the wake of the pandemic, we have to stop treating teacher retention as an afterthought. That means retooling our policies to reflect what the research now clearly shows: experience matters, and it can be cultivated.
Policymakers should invest in high-quality teacher preparation and mentoring programs, particularly in high-need schools. They should create conditions that promote teacher stability and collaboration, such as protected planning time and consistent teaching assignments.
Principals must be trained not just as managers, but as instructional leaders capable of building strong school cultures. And state and district leaders must consider meaningful financial incentives and other supports to retain experienced teachers in the classrooms that need them most.
With the right support, teachers can keep getting better. In this moment of learning recovery, a key to success is keeping teachers in schools and consciously supporting their growing effectiveness.
Linda Darling-Hammond is founding president and chief knowledge officer at the Learning Policy Institute. Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution and an executive editor of Education Next.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
This story was produced by The 19th and reprinted with permission.
On July 4, Nory Sontay Ramos stepped off a flight from San Antonio into a country she hardly recognized: Guatemala.
The summer wasn’t supposed to start this way. The 17-year-old had plans. In early June, she wrapped up 11th grade on a high note, having made the honor roll and represented her Los Angeles high school in the city finals for track. With track season over, she turned her attention to cross-country, showing up to campus for practice after the school year ended.
Everything changed when she and her mother, Estela Ramos — both undocumented — appeared at what they thought was a standard check-in visit with immigration officials on June 30.
“ICE took us to a room, and they ended up telling my mom, ‘Your case is over, so we have to take you guys with us,’” Sontay Ramos told The 19th. Over the objections of their attorney, federal agents led them away.
The next day, she and her mother were shipped to Texas. And by July 4, they were on a plane to Guatemala, a country where neither of them have lived for over a decade. On Independence Day — an occasion associated with freedom, with hope — their American dream shattered. Sontay Ramos has no idea what will become of the friends, family members and school community her deportation forced her to leave behind in Los Angeles.
A lawyer hired after she and her mother were detained said Monday that a motion to reopen the case has been filed with the Board of Immigration Appeals but provided no other information to The 19th.
A year shy of becoming a high school graduate in the United States, the teen’s life — and opportunities — completely changed in the span of five days.
“I’m confused,” Sontay Ramos said, her voice breaking. “I don’t know. I’m just really sad about everything.”
President Donald Trump campaigned for a return to office with the promise of mass deportations, characterizing undocumented immigrants as criminals and threats to women and girls. But as his administration has ramped up enforcement of his policy priority, undocumented people with no criminal backgrounds have made up the largest share of immigrants targeted. Those who are pursuing legal status through the proper channels have also become vulnerable — showing up to check-ins, like Sontay Ramos and her mother — only to be detained. These developments, recent polls reveal, have led to public disapproval of the Trump administration’s strategies.
Civil liberties and advocacy groups have raised concerns that undocumented immigrants are being removed so quickly they have been denied the right to due process. With Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act directing $150 billion more toward mass deportations, expedited removals of undocumented immigrants will almost certainly increase — and those immigrants who arrived in the United States as children like Sontay Ramos stand to get caught in the middle.
The Trump administration deported more than 93,800 people from January 20 to June 11, with ICE more than doubling its arrests compared with the same period in 2024, revealed an analysis by the Washington Post based on information from the Deportation Data Project. (The data does not reflect arrest and removal numbers from Customs and Border Protection.) Of those, 61 percent did not have criminal records and almost 90 percent were men, underscoring how relatively uncommon it is for a mother and daughter to be removed.
The Trump administration has not provided a tally of how many minors have been deported this year, but The 19th’s review of figures from the Deportation Data Project found that only about 3 percent of removals involved children. When ICE targets juveniles, the incidents often make national headlines, such as when a 9-year-old boy and his father living in Torrance, California, were detained in May and swiftly deported to Honduras. In states including Michigan, Massachusetts and New York, the detainment of teenagers, including those who are technically legal adults, have also garnered widespread media attention this year.
But when Sontay Ramos and her mother exited their Guatemala-bound flight on Friday, they weren’t met with fanfare. None of their family members in the Central American nation knew to expect them. With the help of an internet connection, they managed to contact one of Sontay Ramos’ older sisters, with whom they’re now living. The teenager isn’t sure which part of Guatemala she’s in, though she describes the area as rural.
Just six when she left Guatemala, Sontay Ramos struggles to recall what life there was like. But she remembers the emotion she felt as a small child: fear.
“I was scared because there’s gangsters here, and they tried to kill my mom,” she said. A family member involved in a gang threatened her mother, once attacking her so badly she needed to be hospitalized, she said. “My mom was scared.”
A research study exploring the root causes of immigration from Guatemala from 2012 to 2019 found violence, poverty, climate change and corruption to be among the driving factors and that many such migrants hail from rural parts of the country.
“The two major reasons, especially if we look at families, have to do with violence and drought,” said David Leblang, a coauthor of that study and politics professor at the University of Virginia. “It has been drought and then flood, hurricane and then drought that has just decreased the ability for families to put food on the table, so you see a combination of economic insecurity, but more so for families, food insecurity — because when you can’t feed your kids, that’s when families are going to pick up and they’re going to move first to more urban areas and then out of the country.”
About 11 years ago, Sontay Ramos and her mother headed by car to the United States in search of safety and opportunity. There, other family members awaited them and they hoped to be granted asylum, she said.
The transition was not easy. They left behind three of Sontay Ramos’ older siblings who did not want to come to the United States, she said. Her father remained in Guatemala, too. His death from illness shortly after she moved away was devastating.
“Unfortunately, her dad passed away at a young age, just like two weeks after her arrival to the States,” recalled Jennifer Ramos, Sontay Ramos’ 22-year-old cousin who lives in Los Angeles. “She grew up with her dad, so that also hit her at such a young age, just coming to a new country at six years old and not knowing the language here and losing her father. It was definitely hard for her.”
Getting accustomed to life in Los Angeles also wasn’t easy. Sontay Ramos and her mother are Indigenous Guatemalans, fluent in K’iche’. Few resources in their native tongue made assimilation more challenging in a city where English and Spanish are the primary languages.
Jennifer Ramos helped her little cousin learn to speak English. “She would come over, and I would help her with her homework. When she first came to the States, my younger sister was kind of her only friend in school because she didn’t know anybody and, again, the language barrier. She actually does struggle speaking Spanish.”
In time, Sontay Ramos and her mother adjusted to life in California. Her mother ultimately became a garment worker, employed as a seamstress until physical setbacks — illness and surgery — sidelined her earlier this year. Her deportation has separated her from her life partner, with whom she and her daughter shared an apartment in the Westlake District of Los Angeles, the neighborhood where an ICE raid at a Home Depot close to an elementary school in June panicked families, and days of demonstrations in nearby downtown escalated after Trump deployed 4,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines.
Los Angeles is a deeply blue city in a liberal state, with the nation’s highest concentration of immigrants — a place that the president has made ground zero for his immigration raids. In November, the City Council voted unanimously to make L.A. a sanctuary city, which bars it from using resources for immigration enforcement. Last week, the Trump administration filed suit, challenging the law. Meanwhile, advocacy groups including the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and Public Counsel are suing the Trump administration for what it describes as a pattern of federal violations during immigration raids in Greater Los Angeles.
Before Trump’s immigration policies roiled her neighborhood and upended her life, Sontay Ramos was indistinguishable from her peers born in the United States. She grew up on the Netflix shows “Stranger Things” and “Cobra Kai,” enjoys the music of Lana Del Rey and The Weeknd and dotes on her cat, Max, who turned one on May 15. He is black — one of her two favorite colors. In her spare time, Sontay Ramos practices taekwondo, which she’s been learning for nearly four years.
“I just liked it,” she said of the martial art. Knowing how to fight, she added, helps her feel protected.
Sontay Ramos never sensed she was in danger before the immigration check-in that would push her out of the United States.
But her cousin Jennifer Ramos worried. The night before, Ramos’ father invited the family over to have Sunday dinner with his wife and three daughters. The evening was largely festive. Her father made shrimp ceviche and was eager for his family to enjoy the tangy, citrusy dish — especially Estela Ramos, who had just celebrated her 45th birthday. But when Estela mentioned that she and her daughter had an immigration check-in scheduled, everyone fell quiet.
“We were kind of scared,” Jennifer Ramos said. “We were like, ‘Are you sure you should go?’”
Estela Ramos poses for a picture with Jennifer Ramos at her quinceanera in 2017. Credit: COURTESY OF JENNIFER RAMOS
But her aunt tried to reassure them by letting them know their lawyer said it would be fine. After all, they had shown up for previous check-ins without incident, and if they didn’t appear, immigration officials would just find them at home.
Now, Jennifer Ramos doesn’t know when she’ll see her aunt and cousin again.
“It is unfair that a young student like her has been detained,” she said. “She’s the most deserving person. This should be the least of her worries.”
Sontay Ramos couldn’t help but tear up when she described what she was looking forward to about senior year — graduation, her friends, track-and-field and cross-country.
Although excited to reunite with family members they hadn’t seen in years, she and her mother have been weeping off and on since they arrived in Guatemala.
“I was happy, but I was expecting to see them in another way,” she said of her relatives. “Not like this.”
Sleeping and eating have been tough as has the constant feeling of disorientation. She doesn’t know where she is. In K’iche’, she asked her mother for the name of the town they’re in, but it didn’t register.
She also continues to feel blindsided about why she and her mother were deported at all. She doesn’t understand how or why their case was closed.
Recent polls, particularly those conducted after the immigration raids in Los Angeles, reveal that the Trump’s administration’s immigration crackdowns may be unpopular with the majority of the public. A PBS News/NPR/Marist poll released July 1 found that just 43 percent of Americans support Trump’s tactics.
Sixty-four percent of registered voters support giving most undocumented immigrants in the United States a pathway to legal status, with 31 percent preferring deportation for most of them, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released June 26. Six months ago, only 55 percent of voters supported giving unauthorized immigrants a path to legal status, while 36 percent backed deportation.
Leblang, the politics professor, said that ultimately the economy will sway the public to take a stand on immigration.
“All of those people who are being deported, they’re consuming goods that are produced by natives,” he said. “So, what the evidence suggests is that’s going to affect native workers’ wages, so across the board, this is going to have a negative effect on the economy.”
For Manuel Guevara — a physical education teacher and coach at the Miguel Contreras Learning Complex, where Sontay Ramos is enrolled as a student — immigration isn’t an economic issue but a personal one. He came to the United States at 11 months in the mid-1980s amid El Salvador’s horrific 12-year civil war, becoming a citizen as a teenager. He fears that more deportations of youth from his school are imminent. He knows some families skipped school graduations in the area due to their concerns over raids. Some are so worried they refuse to let their children attend football practice. He’s heard that other families intend to self deport.
“This is not normal,” Guevara said. “Our whole community is beyond vulnerable. A lot of their [students’] parents, sad to say, don’t know how to read and write. Their kids need to do that for them. If they’re presented with [immigration] paperwork, they might not even be able to read it because that’s not their primary language.”
Before her deportation, Nory Sontay Ramos was recognized at school for her academic and athletic achievements. Credit: COURTESY OF JENNIFER RAMOS
He can hardly believe that Sontay Ramos, whom he taught for most of her high school years, is gone.
“She was smiling, happy-go-lucky,” Guevara said. He’s astounded that she was detained and deported in less than a week. “Nory is going into her senior year, which is another thing that’s just killing me. She was going into her senior year with all this momentum.”
Guevara fondly recalled the teen’s high-pitched voice that gets even higher when she’s excited.
“You could tell when she’s coming from down the hallway, for sure,” he said. But her trademark voice is now subdued due to her deportation ordeal. Through tears, she expressed gratitude for how her teachers, classmates and other supporters have donated nearly $7,000 to her GoFundMe campaign.
“I just want to thank everybody for the support and tell them to just be safe out there and be strong no matter what’s going to happen,” she said.
If she can’t return to the United States, she will figure out how to finish her education in Guatemala, Sontay Ramos said.
Guevara is certain she has the aptitude for greatness. Her academics and extracurricular activities are just hints of what she’s capable of, he said.
“She was about to reach cruising altitude,” he said. “Some of our students are capable of reaching the clouds up there and doing some great things. And I really believe that she was on her way.”
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
In the nearly two years since the U.S. Supreme Court struck down race-conscious admissions, there have been repeatedcalls for universities to address the resulting decline in diversity by recruiting from community colleges.
On the surface, encouraging students to transfer from two-year colleges sounds like a terrific idea. Community colleges enroll large numbers of students who are low-income or whose parents did not attend college. Black and Latino students disproportionately start college at these institutions, whose mission for more than 50 years has been to expand access to higher education.
But while community colleges should be an avenue into high-value STEM degrees for students from low-income backgrounds and minoritized students, the reality is sobering: Just 2 percent of students who begin at a community college earn a STEM bachelor’s degree within six years, our recent study of transfer experiences in California found.
There are too many roadblocks in their way, leaving the path to STEM degrees for community college students incredibly narrow. A key barrier is the complexity of the process of transferring from a community college to a four-year institution.
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Many community college students who want to transfer and major in a STEM field must contend with three major obstacles in the transfer process:
1. A maze of inconsistent and often opaque math requirements. We found that a student considering three or four prospective university campuses might have to take three or four different math classes just to meet a single math requirement in a given major. One campus might expect a transfer student majoring in business to take calculus, while another might ask for business calculus. Still another might strongly recommend a “calculus for life sciences” course. And sometimes an institution’s website might list different requirements than a statewide transfer site. Such inconsistencies can lengthen students’ times to degrees — especially in STEM majors, which may require five- or six-course math sequences before transfer.
2. Underlying math anxiety. Many students interviewed for the study told us that they had internalized negative comments from teachers, advisers and peers about their academic ability, particularly in math. This uncertainty contributed to feelings of anxiety about completing their math courses. Their predicament is especially troubling given concerns that required courses may not contribute to success in specific fields.
3. Course scheduling conflicts that slow students’ progress. Two required courses may meet on the same day and time, for example, or a required course could be scheduled at a time that conflicts with a student’s work schedule. In interviews, we also heard that course enrollment caps and sequential pathways in which certain courses are offered only once a year too often lengthen the time to degree for students.
To help, rather than hinder, STEM students’ progress toward their college and professional goals, the transfer process needs to change significantly. First and foremost, universities need to send clear and consistent signals about what hoops community college students should be jumping through in order to transfer.
A student applying to three prospective campuses, for example, should not have to meet separate sets of requirements for each.
Community colleges and universities should also prioritize active learning strategies and proven supports to combat math anxiety. These may include providing professional learning for instructors to help them make math courses more engaging and to foster a sense of belonging. Training for counselors to advise students on requirements for STEM pathways is also important.
Community colleges must make their course schedules more student-centered, by offering evening and weekend courses and ensuring that courses required for specific degrees are not scheduled at overlapping times. They should also help students with unavoidable scheduling conflicts take comparable required courses at other colleges.
At the state level, it’s critical to adopt goals for transfer participation and completion (including STEM-specific goals) as well as comprehensive and transparent statewide agreements for math requirements by major.
States should also provide transfer planning tools that provide accurate and up-to-date information. For example, the AI Transfer and Articulation Infrastructure Network, led by University of California, Berkeley researchers, is using artificial intelligence technology to help institutions more efficiently identify which community college courses meet university requirements. More effective tools will increase transparency without requiring students and counselors to navigate complex and varied transfer requirements on their own. As it stands, complex, confusing and opaque math requirements limit transfer opportunities for community college students seeking STEM degrees, instead of expanding them.
We must untangle the transfer process, smooth pathways to high-value degrees and ensure that every student has a clear, unobstructed opportunity to pursue an education that will set them up for success.
Pamela Burdman is executive director of Just Equations, a California-based policy institute focused on reconceptualizing the role of math in education equity. Alexis Robin Hale is a research fellow at Just Equations and a graduate student at UCLA in Social Sciences and Comparative Education.
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.
I recently stood before hundreds of young people in California’s Central Valley; more than 60 percent were on that day becoming the first in their family to earn a bachelor’s degree.
Their very presence at University of California, Merced’s spring commencement ceremony disrupted a major narrative in our nation about who college is for — and the value of a degree.
Many of these young people arrived already balancing jobs, caregiving responsibilities and family obligations. Many were Pell Grant-eligible and came from communities that are constantly underestimated and where a higher education experience is a rarity.
These students graduated college at a critical moment in American history: a time when the value of a bachelor’s degree is being called into question, when public trust in higher education is vulnerable and when supports for first-generation college students are eroding. Yet an affordable bachelor’s degree remains the No. 1 lever for financial, professional and social mobility in this country.
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A recent Gallup poll showed that the number of Americans who have a great deal of confidence in higher education is dwindling, with a nearly equal amount responding that they have little to none. In 2015, when Gallup first asked this question, those expressing confidence outnumbered those without by nearly six to one.
There is no doubt that higher education must continue to evolve — to be more accessible, more relevant and more affordable — but the impact of a bachelor’s degree remains undeniable.
And the bigger truth is this: America’s long-term strength — its economic competitiveness, its innovation pipeline, its social fabric — depends on whether we invest in the education of the young people who reflect the future of this country.
There are many challenges for today’s workforce, from a shrinking talent pipeline to growing demands in STEM, healthcare and the public sector. These challenges can’t be solved unless we ensure that more first-generation students and those from underserved communities earn their degrees in affordable ways and leverage their strengths in ways they feel have purpose.
Those of us in education must create conditions in which students’ talent is met with opportunity and higher education institutions demonstrate that they believe in the potential of every student who comes to their campuses to learn.
UC Merced is a fantastic example of what this can look like. The youngest institution in the University of California system, it was recently designated a top-tier “R1” research university. At the same time, it earned a spot on Carnegie’s list of “Opportunity Colleges and Universities,” a new classification that recognizes institutions based on the success of their students and alumni. It is one of only 21 institutions in the country to be nationally ranked for both elite research and student success and is proving that excellence and equity can — and must — go hand in hand.
In too many cases, students who make it to college campuses are asked to navigate an educational experience that wasn’t built with their lived experiences and dreams in mind. In fact, only 24 percent of first-generation college students earn a bachelor’s degree in six years, compared to nearly 59 percent of students who have a parent with a bachelor’s. This results in not just a missed opportunity for individual first-generation students — it’s a collective loss for our country.
The graduates I spoke to in the Central Valley that day will become future engineers, climate scientists, public health leaders, artists and educators. Their bachelor’s degrees equip them with critical thinking skills, confidence and the emotional intelligence needed to lead in an increasingly complex world.
Their future success will be an equal reflection of their education and the qualities they already possess as first-generation college graduates: persistence, focus and unwavering drive. Because of this combination, they will be the greatest contributors to the future of work in our nation.
This is a reality I know well. As the Brooklyn-born daughter of Dominican immigrants, I never planned to go away from home to a four-year college. My father drove a taxi, and my mother worked in a factory. I was the first in my family to earn a bachelor’s degree. I attended college as part of an experimental program to get kids from neighborhoods like mine into “top” schools. When it was time for me to leave for college, my mother and I boarded a bus with five other students and their moms for a 26-hour ride to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.
Like so many first-generation college students, I carried with me the dreams and sacrifices of my family and community. I had one suitcase, a box of belongings and no idea what to expect at a place I’d never been to before. That trip — and the bachelor’s degree I earned — changed the course of my life.
First-generation college students from underserved communities reflect the future of America. Their success is proof that the American Dream is not only alive but thriving. And right now, the stakes are national, and they are high.
That is why we must collectively remove the obstacles to first-generation students’ individual success and our collective success as a nation. That’s the narrative that we need to keep writing — together.
Shirley M. Collado is president emerita at Ithaca College and the president and CEO ofCollege Track, a college completion program dedicated to democratizing potential among first-generation college students from underserved communities.
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.
