Category: Top

  • Trump’s national school voucher program could mean a boom in Christian education

    Trump’s national school voucher program could mean a boom in Christian education

    by Anya Kamenetz, The Hechinger Report
    January 22, 2026

    LACONIA, N.H. — Three dozen 4- and 5-year-olds trooped out onto the stage of the ornate, century-old Colonial Theatre of Laconia in this central New Hampshire town. Dressed in plaid, red, green and sparkles, some were grinning and waving, some looked a bit shell-shocked; a tiny blonde girl sobbed with stage fright in her teacher’s arms. 

    No sooner did the children open their mouths to sing, “Merry Christmas! … This is the day that the Lord was born!” than the house lights came up and a fire alarm went off. 

    It was an unusually eventful annual Christmas concert for Laconia Christian Academy. Then again, it’s been an unusually eventful year. In a small, aging state, where overall school enrollment has been dropping for more than two decades, Laconia reported a 130 percent increase in enrollment in its elementary school since 2020 — and began a three-quarter-million-dollar campus expansion on its 140 acres outside town.

     “We are in a season of incredible growth,” the school’s website reads. 

    One reason for the season: Almost every student at the academy is enrolled in New Hampshire’s Education Freedom Account program, said Head of School Rick Duba. Regardless of their family income, they receive thousands of dollars each in taxpayer money to help pay their tuition.   

    In June, New Hampshire became the 18th state to pass a universal private school choice program. After signing the bill into law, Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte announced, “Giving parents the freedom to choose the education setting that best fits their child’s needs will help every student in our state reach their full potential.” 

    Yet, as these programs proliferate, with significant expansion since the pandemic, Democrats, teachers unions and other public school advocates are raising the alarm about accountability, transparency and funding. And with President Donald Trump passing a federal voucher program to start in 2027, some are concerned about the future of public education as a whole. 

    “I think these programs are the biggest change in K-12 education since Brown v. Board of Ed,” said Douglas Harris, a scholar at Tulane who recently published two papers on the impact of universal private school choice programs. He argues that vouchers were originally introduced in the 1950s in part to resist desegregation by funding white families to attend private schools.

    According to his October 2025 paper, private school choice “allows schools to discriminate against certain students, entwines government with religion, involves a large fiscal cost, and has shown fairly poor, or at best inconclusive, academic results.” Harris said in an interview, “It changes fundamentally all the basic traditions of the education system.” 

    New Hampshire could be a harbinger of that fundamental change. Experts say the state has one of the broadest and least regulated universal school choice programs in the country. “Universal” refers to the fact that families, regardless of income, are eligible for an average $5,200 a year from the government to pay tuition at a private school or supplement the cost of homeschooling. The number of recipients reached 10,510 this year, and it’s likely to grow again next year.

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

    “Universal” also describes the fact that any type of school — or nonschools, such as an unaccredited storefront microschool, an online curriculum provider, a music camp or even a ski slope — can be eligible for these funds. 

    These schools and organizations don’t have to abide by state or federal laws, like those requiring accommodation for students with disabilities or other antidiscrimination laws. A 2022 Supreme Court decision, Carson v. Makin, affirmed the right of parents to use public money, in the form of voucher and education savings account funds, specifically for religious schools. 

    And indeed, it seems that in New Hampshire, as nationally, a disproportionate amount of the funding is going to small Christian schools, particularly to evangelical Protestant schools like Laconia. The Concord Monitor found that in the past four years, 90 percent of the revenue from the previous, income-capped EFA program went to Christian schools. This was true even though most of the state’s private schools are not religious. The Concord Monitor found in the first five years of the program, the top 10 recipients grew in enrollment by 32 percent. With the exception of Laconia, none of these schools responded to repeated requests for comment from The Hechinger Report. 

    But state officials have stopped releasing data on exactly where recipients of the Education Freedom Accounts are using those dollars. They told the Concord Monitor that the data is not subject to public record requests because it’s held by the nonprofit that administers the funds, the Children’s Scholarship Fund of New Hampshire. State officials did not respond to Hechinger queries. The Children’s Scholarship Fund directed The Hechinger Report to its website, which features a partial accounting of less than 10 percent of 2025-26 student. This accounting, which may or may not be representative, showed 671 of these students currently attend Christian schools, 64 attend non-Christian private schools and 50 are homeschooled. 

    A national analysis released in September by Tulane’s Harris of publicly available data showed that in New Hampshire and ten other states with similar policies, vouchers have boosted private school enrollment by up to 4 percent. The increases were concentrated at small Protestant religious schools like Laconia. The federal tax credit scholarship program will allow even more funds in additional states to be directed to these schools. 

    One reason that Christian schools are coming out on top, Harris said, is that this type of school tends to have lower tuition than independent private schools, meaning a $5,000 subsidy can make the difference for more families. The schools do this in part by paying teachers less.

    “ Typically, Christian school teachers see their work as a ministry and are willing to work for significantly less than their public counterparts,” said Duba, Laconia’s leader. He added that he is working with his board to try to pay a “living wage” of $55,000. 

    Related: The new reality with universal school vouchers: Homeschoolers, marketing, pupil churn

    At the Christmas concert in Laconia, after the fire department gave the all clear and the performance resumed, the little ones were tuckered out from the extra excitement. In the theater lobby, Nick Ballentine cradled his kindergartner, Perna, who wore two big red bows in her hair and a dress that read “Merry” on the front in cursive. 

    Ballentine said his family chose Laconia because “it was local and it wasn’t a public school.” He also liked that it was Christian and had small class sizes, but his opposition to public school is staunch: “I don’t like public schools, nor the policies that guide them, because they come from the government.” 

    Duba said that families come to Laconia for the small class sizes, the TimberNook outdoor program that has elementary school students spending five hours each week of class time in the woods, and “ for faith.”

    “They don’t want their kids in public schools where their kids are being taught by people who don’t express faith in Christ,” he said. While the school doesn’t require students to have a “profession of faith” to attend, there are lessons about the life of Jesus in preschool, daily prayers and service mission trips for the high school students as far away as Rwanda. 

    Duba said the biggest “social issue” that drives families away from public schools and toward schools like his is “ sexuality and gender identity.” The Concord Monitor previously reported that many of the schools that are the top recipients of aid in New Hampshire won’t admit students who have anyone in their family who is openly LGBTQ+ or supports gay or trans rights. Laconia Christian Academy’s nondiscrimination policy says it does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national and ethnic origin, but it doesn’t mention sexual orientation or gender identity. Asked about the policy, Duba declined to comment. 

    Like other private schools, these schools also aren’t required by law to serve students who have disabilities. The state says 8.47 percent of EFA recipients are in special education, compared to 20 percent in the state’s public schools. 

    Adam Laats, an education historian at Binghamton University, said these universal school choice programs are part of a long history of conservative evangelical Protestants seeking to make existing public schools more Christian in character on the one hand and divert public money to explicitly Christian schools on the other. 

    “For 100 years, public schools have been the sort of litmus test of whether the U.S. is a Christian nation,” he said, citing battles over teaching evolution, sex education, prayer in schools and more recently climate change, the treatment of race and American history, LGBTQIA rights and book banning. 

    Alongside the culture wars in public schools, said Laats, there have been successive waves of founding and expansion of Christian private schools: “There’s a burst in the 1920s, the next big bump comes in the ’50s and a huge spike in the 1970s, during the height of busing, when for a while there was one new school opening a day in the U.S. of these conservative evangelical schools.” 

    Laats agrees with Harris that the 1950s and 1970s booms were in part responses to desegregation efforts. But, he said, previous enrollment booms have eventually faded, because “it’s expensive” to educate students and offer amenities like sports and arts education. “That’s why the Christians have pushed hard for vouchers.” 

    Related: Arizona gave families public money for private school. Then private schools raised tuition 

    Funding fairness is a hot-button issue right now in New Hampshire. 

    In the summer of 2025, the State Supreme Court found that New Hampshire’s schools are officially inadequately funded. School funding in the low-tax, live-free-or-die state depends heavily on local property taxes, which vary radically area to area. The state spends an average of 4,182 per head; the court found it should spend at least $7,356. 

    So far, the overall percentage of New Hampshire students enrolled in public schools has remained steady at 90 percent. That implies most of the ESA money, so far, is subsidizing families who already were choosing private schools or homeschooling, rather than fueling a mass exodus from public schools. 

    Yet some districts are feeling the bite. According to recently released data from the state, in the small town of Rindge, 29 percent of students are EFA recipients — the highest of any community in the state. 

    “It is taking money away from public education,” said Megan Tuttle, president of New Hampshire’s state teacher union. “If you have a couple kids that are leaving the classroom to take the money, that doesn’t change the staffing that we have at the schools, heat, oil, electricity, all those types of things. And so, what’s happening is the money’s leaving, but the bills aren’t.”

    Duba looks at the math differently, pointing out that the EFA doesn’t equal the full cost of educating a student. “Let’s say I took 30 kids from Laconia. I did not, but for the sake of argument,” he said. “ They don’t have to do anything with those 30 kids anymore. They’re gone.”  

    This year, the advocacy group Reaching Higher NH calculated that the education savings account program will siphon $50 million from the state’s $2.61 billion education trust fund, and it will grow from there. “We’re functionally trying to fund two systems,” said Alex Tilsley, the group’s policy director. “And we couldn’t even fund one system fully.” 

    As the program grows in New Hampshire, the opposition is growing too. 

    “There’s broad opposition to EFAs from the teacher unions, from public school groups and from voters,” sums up Tilsley.* “It’s not generally speaking a highly favored policy across the state.” But with a Republican trifecta in control of state government, school choice in New Hampshire is not going anywhere. And with a national education tax credit program in the offing, more states will soon face these debates. As in New Hampshire, the federal money will be able to be used for private schools, homeschooling costs or anything in between. 

    *Correction: This sentence has been updated to correct the spelling of Alex Tilsley’s last name.

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

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

    This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/trumps-national-school-voucher-program-could-mean-a-boom-in-christian-education/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>

    <img id=”republication-tracker-tool-source” src=”https://hechingerreport.org/?republication-pixel=true&post=114348&amp;ga4=G-03KPHXDF3H” style=”width:1px;height:1px;”><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: “https://hechingerreport.org/trumps-national-school-voucher-program-could-mean-a-boom-in-christian-education/”, urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id=”parsely-cfg” src=”//cdn.parsely.com/keys/hechingerreport.org/p.js”></script>

    Source link

  • The schools where even young children change classes 

    The schools where even young children change classes 

    by Ariel Gilreath, The Hechinger Report
    January 13, 2026

    BATON ROUGE, La. — About two dozen second graders sat on the carpet at the front of Jacquelyn Anthony’s classroom, reviewing how to make tens. “Two needs eight!” the students yelled out together. “Six needs four!” 

    “The numbers may get a little trickier,” Anthony told them next. “But remember, the numbers we need to make 10 are still there.” The students then turned confidently to bigger calculations: Forty-six needs four ones to make a new number divisible by 10; 128 needs two to make 13 tens. 

    At the end of the hour, the second graders slung on their backpacks, gathered their Chromebooks and lined up at the door before heading to English and social studies class across the hall. While most schools wait until middle school to transition students from one class to another, kids at Louisiana’s Baton Rouge Center for Visual and Performing Arts do so starting at age 6 or 7. It’s part of a strategy known as departmentalizing, or platooning. 

    Anthony, rather than teaching all four core subjects, specializes in math. The school’s new facility, built in 2025, was designed with departmentalizing in mind: The classrooms have huge glass windows, so teachers can see their next class preparing to line up in the hallway.

    “Teaching today is so different than it was a long time ago, and there are so many demands on them. And the demand to be an expert in your content area is very high,” said Sydney Hebert, magnet site coordinator for the art-focused public school in the East Baton Rouge Parish school district. “We want to make sure that our teachers are experts in what they’re teaching so that they can do a good job of teaching it to the kids.”

    As schools contend with a decades-long slump in math scores — exacerbated by the pandemic — some are turning to this classroom strategy even for very young students. In recent years, more elementary schools have opted to departmentalize some grade levels in an attempt to boost academic achievement. The share of fourth and fifth grade classrooms operating on this schedule has doubled since the year 2000, from 15 percent to 30 percent in 2021. Often, that means educators will specialize in one or two subjects at most, such as fourth grade English language arts and social studies, or fifth grade math and science. The theory is that teachers who specialize will be more familiar with the content and better able to teach it. 

    That may be particularly important for math: Studies have shown that some early elementary school teachers experience anxiety about the subject and question their ability to teach it. Educators also say that the curriculum and standards for math and English in the early grades are changing rapidly in some districts and have become more complicated over time. In a departmentalized setup, it’s also far less likely that math instruction will get shortchanged by an educator who prefers spending time on other subjects.  

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

    But while some schools swear by this model, the research on it is mixed.

    One prominent 2018 study on the practice in Houston public schools found it had a negative effect on test scores, behavior and attendance. The study doesn’t explain why that was the case, but the researcher said it could be because teachers on this schedule spend less time with individual students.

    Another study published in 2024 analyzing Massachusetts schools had different outcomes: Researchers found moderate gains in academic achievement for ELA and a significant boost to science scores for students in departmentalized classes. The results in math, however, showed few gains. 

    Generally, teachers specialize in the subject they are most comfortable teaching. When a school departmentalizes for the first time, principals typically look at each educator’s test score data over time to determine whether they should specialize in math or reading.

    “There are some arguments that, at least if it’s someone who likes the subject, who is passionate about the subject, you have a greater chance of them doing a better job of delivering instruction,” said Latrenda Knighten, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. “But you’ll find mixed reviews.”

    Yet there are a few reasons why the strategy is typically reserved for students in older grades, according to school leaders: Spending all day with one teacher increases the bond between the teacher and student, which is important for younger children. In Baton Rouge, Anthony teaches 50 students throughout the day instead of the same 25 students all day.

    “Teachers want to get to know their students,” said Dennis Willingham, superintendent of Walker County Schools in Alabama. The district departmentalized some fifth grade classrooms decades ago, but recently added third and fourth grade classes on this schedule. “You tend to see less departmentalization below third grade because of the nurturing element.” 

    It’s also generally more challenging for young students to quickly change classrooms, even for electives, which means lost instructional time. Smaller elementary schools may also struggle to hire enough teachers to schedule all of them on a departmentalized setup. 

    Related: These school districts are bucking the national math slump

    But increasingly, schools that are satisfied with this approach for older grade levels are trying it out with their younger grades, too. 

    After the pandemic, the San Tan Heights Elementary School in Arizona changed its curriculum to one that was more rigorous, and it became harder for the third grade educators to master the standards of all four subject areas, said Henry Saylor-Scheetz, principal at the time.

    He proposed that third graders be taught by separate math, English language arts and reading teachers. “I told them, let’s try it for a semester. If it doesn’t work at the end of the year, we’ll go back,” Saylor-Scheetz said.

    Ten days into the experiment, teachers told him they never wanted to return to the old schedule. In the subsequent years, the school added more classrooms on this model until, by 2023, all K-8 students were departmentalized. For the last few years, teacher retention at the school was 95 percent, according to Saylor-Scheetz.

    Saylor-Scheetz, who last year became principal of a nearby middle school, credited the change for helping the school improve from a C rating on its state report card — a rating it had stagnated at every year since 2018 — to a B rating as of 2022. Since then, more schools in his Arizona school district have shifted to this schedule. 

    “I’d love to see this become something we do as a nation, but it is a paradigm shift,” Saylor-Scheetz said. “There’s merit in doing it, but there has to be a commitment to it.”

    At Baton Rouge Center for Visual and Performing Arts, students in first through third grades have two partner teachers, one for math and science and another for ELA and social studies. The school has been operating on this schedule for third through fifth grade students for more than a decade. Eight years ago, its leaders decided to try it for first and second grade students, too, and were pleased with the results. 

    On a December morning at the school, young students talked quietly with each other in the hall as they lined up to go from math class to English language arts. All told, the switch took less than five minutes. “We’re at the end of the second nine weeks, so we’ve had a lot of practice,” said GiGi Boudreaux, the assistant principal. 

    The strategy has not always been successful, though.

    During the pandemic, administrators also attempted to departmentalize its kindergarten classes. It didn’t work as they’d hoped: It was a challenge to get the 5-year-olds to quickly change classes and focus on classwork again once they did. Parents also didn’t like it. The school then tried moving teachers from classroom to classroom instead of moving students, but the educators hated it. 

    “It was too much, so we didn’t do it after that,” said Hebert.

    The Baton Rouge school doesn’t have comparison data to show that students perform better in a departmentalized setup, but most educators in the school prefer it, Hebert said. Third grade test scores from 2015 — before the school departmentalized its younger grade levels — showed 73 percent scored “advanced” and “mastery” level on the state ELA test, and 56 percent scored advanced or mastery on the math test. In 2025, 80 percent of third grade students scored advanced or mastery in ELA and 55 percent in math.

    “I know that the teachers like it better, and the kids have adapted to it,” Hebert said. 

    Teachers meet weekly with their partner teachers and grade-level counterparts to discuss their classes and progress on the state standards. Once a quarter, all of the math teachers across the grades meet to talk about strategies and student performance. 

    Related: Teachers conquering their math anxiety 

    At Deer Valley Unified School District in Arizona, departmentalizing some classrooms has helped reduce teacher turnover, said Superintendent Curtis Finch, particularly for early career educators, who can find it challenging to master the content and standards of all four subjects.

    “If you’re not confident in your subject, then you don’t have good examples off the top of your head. You can’t control the room, can’t pull the students in,” Finch said. 

    There are drawbacks though, Finch acknowledged. In a self-contained classroom, teachers can more easily integrate their different lessons, so that a math lesson might refer back to a topic covered in reading.

    And even though Anthony, the second grade math and science teacher in Baton Rouge, loves teaching math, she also misses the extra time she could spend with each student when she had the same 25 children in her class all day for the entire school year. 

    “It was a joy for me to be self-contained and to build that little family,” Anthony said. “I think the social emotional needs of students are best met in that type of environment. But being solely a math teacher, I do get to just dig in and focus on the nuance of the content.” 

    For Anthony’s partner teacher across the hall, Holley McArthur, teaching 50 students ELA and social studies is easier than having to teach 25 students math. 

    “This is my thing: reading books, comprehending and finding answers, meeting their goals,” said McArthur, who has taught in both kinds of classrooms over three decades in education.  

    While McArthur’s kids were at recess this mid-December day, the veteran teacher was grading their reading worksheets. A new student had transferred in from out of state midyear, and she was still evaluating his reading skills. 

    “I think you still get to know the kids, even if you just have them for three hours a day, because I’m not doing the hard math with them.” 

    Contact staff writer Ariel Gilreath on Signal at arielgilreath.46 or at [email protected].

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

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

    <img id=”republication-tracker-tool-source” src=”https://hechingerreport.org/?republication-pixel=true&post=114257&amp;ga4=G-03KPHXDF3H” style=”width:1px;height:1px;”><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: “https://hechingerreport.org/the-schools-where-even-young-children-change-classes/”, urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id=”parsely-cfg” src=”//cdn.parsely.com/keys/hechingerreport.org/p.js”></script>

    Source link

  • Conservatives see married parents as a solution to low student achievement. It’s not that simple

    Conservatives see married parents as a solution to low student achievement. It’s not that simple

    by Jill Barshay, The Hechinger Report
    January 12, 2026

    Conservatives have long argued that unwed motherhood and single parenting are major drivers of poor student achievement. They contend that traditional two-parent families — ideally with a married mother and father — provide the stability children need to succeed in school. Single-parent households, more common among low-income families, are blamed for weak academic outcomes.

    That argument has resurfaced prominently in Project 2025, a policy blueprint developed by the conservative Heritage Foundation that calls for the federal government to collect and publish more education data broken out by family structure.

    Project 2025 acknowledges that the Education Department already collects some of this data, but asserts that it doesn’t make it public. That’s not true, though you need expertise to extract it. When I contacted the Heritage Foundation, the organization responded that the family-structure data should still be “readily available” to a layman, just like student achievement by race and sex. Fair point.

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

    With some help, I found the figures and the results complicate the conservative claim.

    Since 2013, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often called the Nation’s Report Card, has asked students about who lives in their home. While the question does not capture every family arrangement, the answers provide a reasonable, albeit imperfect, proxy for family structure and it allows the public to examine how a nationally representative sample of students from different types of households perform academically. 

    I wanted to look at the relationship between family structure and student achievement by family income. Single-parent families are far more common in low-income communities and I didn’t want to conflate achievement gaps by income with achievement gaps by family structure. For example, 43 percent of low-income eighth graders live with only one parent compared with 13 percent of their high-income peers. I wanted to know whether kids who live with only one parent perform worse than kids with the same family income who live with both parents.

    To analyze the most recent data from the 2024 NAEP exam, I used the NAEP Data Explorer, a public tool developed by testing organization ETS for the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). I told an ETS researcher what I wanted to know and he showed me how to generate the cross-tabulations, which I then replicated independently across four tests: fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math. Finally, I vetted the results with a former senior official at NCES and with a current staff member at the governing board that oversees the NAEP assessment.

    The analysis reveals a striking pattern.

    Among low-income students, achievement differs little by family structure. Fourth- and eighth-grade students from low-income households score at roughly the same level whether they live with both parents or with only one parent. Two-parent households do not confer a measurable academic advantage in this group. Fourth-grade reading is a great example. Among the socioeconomic bottom third of students, those who live with both parents scored a 199. Those who live with just mom scored 200. The results are almost identical and, if anything, a smidge higher for the kids of single moms. 

    As socioeconomic status rises, however, differences by family structure become more pronounced. Among middle- and high-income students, those living with both parents tend to score higher than their peers living with only one parent. The gap is largest among the most affluent students. In fourth grade reading, for example, higher-income kids who live with both parents scored a 238, a whopping 10 points higher than their peers who live with only their moms. Experts argue over the meaning of a NAEP point, but some equate 10 NAEP points to a school year’s worth of learning. It’s substantial.

    Family structure matters less for low-income student achievement

    Still, it’s better to be rich in a single-parent household than poor in a two-parent household. High-income students raised by a single parent substantially outperform low-income students who live with both parents by at least 20 points, underscoring that money and the advantages it brings — such as access to resources, stable housing, and educational support — matter far more than household composition alone. In other words, income far outweighs family structure when it comes to student achievement.

    Despite the NAEP data, Jonathan Butcher, acting director of the center for education policy at the Heritage Foundation, stands by the contention that family structure matters greatly for student outcomes. He points out that research since the landmark Coleman report of 1966 has consistently found a relationship between the two. Most recently, in a 2022 American Enterprise Institute-Brookings report, 15 scholars concluded that children “raised in stable, married-parent families are more likely to excel in school, and generally earn higher grade point averages” than children who are not. Two recent books, Brad Wilcox’s “Get Married” (2024) and Melissa Kearney’s “The Two-Parent Privilege” (2023), make the case, too, and they point out that children raised by married parents are about twice as likely to graduate from college as children who are not. However, it’s unclear to me if all of this analysis has disaggregated student achievement by family income as I did with the NAEP data.

    Related: Trump administration makes good on many Project 2025 education goals

    Family structure is a persistent theme for conservatives. Just last week the Heritage Foundation released a report on strengthening and rebuilding U.S. families. In a July 2025 newsletter, Robert Pondiscio, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, wrote that “the most effective intervention in education is not another literacy coach or SEL program. It’s dad.” He cited a June 2025 report, “Good Fathers, Flourishing Kids,” by scholars and advocates. (Disclosure: A group led by one of the authors of this report, Richard Reeves, is among the funders of The Hechinger Report.)

    That conclusion is partially supported by the NAEP data, but only for a relatively small share of students from higher-income families (The share of high-income children living with only their mother ranges between 7 and 10 percent. The single-parent rate is higher for eighth graders than for fourth graders.)  For low-income students, who are Pondiscio’s and the scholars’ main concern, it’s not the case. 

    The data has limitations. The NAEP survey does not distinguish among divorced families, grandparent-led households or same-sex parents. Joint custody arrangements are likely grouped with two-parent households because children may say that they live with both mother and father, if not at the same time. Even so, these nuances are unlikely to alter the core finding: For low-income students, academic outcomes are largely similar regardless of whether they live with both parents all of the time, some of the time or only live with one parent. 

    The bottom line is that calls for new federal data collection by family structure, like those outlined in Project 2025, may not reveal what advocates expect. A family’s bank account matters more than a wedding ring. 

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

    This story about family structure and student achievement was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

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

    <img id=”republication-tracker-tool-source” src=”https://hechingerreport.org/?republication-pixel=true&post=114283&amp;ga4=G-03KPHXDF3H” style=”width:1px;height:1px;”><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: “https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-family-structure-student-achievement/”, urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id=”parsely-cfg” src=”//cdn.parsely.com/keys/hechingerreport.org/p.js”></script>

    Source link

  • School closures are accelerating in rural America. But research on whether they help students is mixed

    School closures are accelerating in rural America. But research on whether they help students is mixed

    by Chris Berdik, The Hechinger Report
    January 5, 2026

    PEACHAM, Vt. — Early on a chilly fall morning in this small Vermont town, Principal Lydia Cochrane watched a gaggle of kids chase one another and a soccer ball around their school recess yard. Between drop-off and first bell, they were free, loud and constantly moving. 

    With only about 60 students in prekindergarten through sixth grade, Peacham Elementary is the sort of school where all the kids know one another and locals regularly respond to calls for supplies and volunteers for field trips and other school activities. Cochrane gestured at the freshly raked wood chips around the swings and climbing structures, one of many tasks Peacham families completed at a recent community workday.

    “With a small school, the families know how crucial it is to support it and ensure it succeeds, and so they show up for it,” said Cochrane. 

    Peacham is also a type of school that’s disappearing nationwide, as education systems grapple with plunging enrollments and rising costs. Amid declining birth rates and growing competition from private-school voucher programs, the number of students in U.S. public schools dropped about 2.5 percent between 2019 and 2023, according to the most recent federal data. Fewer students leads to higher per-pupil spending, because district staffing and other expenses largely remain in place despite enrollment drops, and states are increasingly trying to escape the education budget crunch via school consolidation: In the past three years alone, at least 10 states have considered measures to mandate or incentivize district mergers. 

    These pressures are especially keen in rural areas where the smallest schools predominate and play an outsized role in community life. Vermont, the nation’s most rural state, has lost about 20 percent of its K-12 public school student population in the past two decades. That’s helped push per-pupil costs and property taxes to the breaking point. Early in 2025, the state’s governor and education secretary released a plan to overhaul Vermont education, proposing massive district consolidation as the foundation for sweeping changes in school funding, curricula and academic standards. 

    The Legislature responded with its own comprehensive plan, which passed last summer as Act 73, calling for a minimum of 4,000 students per district, a threshold now met by only 1 of the state’s 119 districts. 

    District mergers are not the same as school closures, but one invariably leads to the other, as they have in Vermont’s other recent waves of district consolidations. The scope of Act 73’s proposals have ignited intense pushback from people fearing the loss of local control over education, even from a majority of the task force created to map options for bigger districts. 

    This month, the state Legislature will consider whether to push forward or completely rethink the process, a debate that will be closely watched by rural education advocates nationwide. Backers of school consolidation maintain that the crises of declining enrollment, falling test scores and tight education budgets demand a bold response and that consolidating schools is necessary to control costs and more equitably distribute resources and opportunities. 

    Opponents say the evidence that widespread school consolidation saves money — or helps students — is mixed at best, and that success depends highly on local context. They want any mergers and closings to be voluntary and done with a clear-eyed accounting of what’s to be gained and lost. 

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

    Vermont’s student-teacher ratio of 11 to 1 is the lowest in the nation, and the state now spends nearly $27,000 per student, second only to New York State. That has triggered spikes in local taxes: In 2024, Vermonters facing double-digit property tax increases subsequently rejected nearly one-third of school budgets when they next went to the polls.

    The school budget revolts led Republican Gov. Phil Scott and his recently appointed education secretary, Zoie Saunders, to propose an education overhaul in January 2025 that would have divided the state into five regional districts serving at least 10,000 kids each. That plan was then superseded by Act 73, which created a redistricting task force of lawmakers and education leaders to map options for the Legislature to consider when it returns to work this month. 

    Saunders argues that school consolidation is key to the broader education transformation that Vermont needs in order to tackle several interconnected challenges, including rising student mental health issues, falling test scores and stubborn achievement gaps. “Many of these issues are hard to solve unless we address our issues around scale and funding,” she said in an interview. “We had to think about reform in a way that was going to focus on funding, quality and governance, because they’re all connected.”

    The state has consolidated schools several times before. Most notably, in 2015, Act 46 triggered several years of mergers — first voluntary, then required — that eliminated dozens of districts and led many small schools to close. 

    Jessica Philippe, a Peacham parent who was on the school board at the time, recalled the worry that the district and its elementary school would be swallowed up. Many of Vermont’s smallest districts, including Peacham, operate only an elementary school and cover the higher grades by paying tuition for students to attend public or certain private schools outside the district. 

    “It seems like this is a cycle we have to go through,” she said. “Every five or 10 years, we have to fight to keep this place, because people from away think, oh, that’s just a few kids we have to disperse.”

    The Peacham school board fended off that threat by showing the state board of education ample data that Peacham Elementary was viable and that there wasn’t much money to be saved from a merger. In fact, the state has never done a full financial analysis of Act 46. At the very least, the mergers failed to stem the spending and tax hikes that triggered Act 73.  

    The only comprehensive accounting of Act 46 was done by a Vermont native, Grace Miller, for her 2024 undergraduate thesis at Yale University where she studied economics and education. In her analysis of 109 districts between 2017 and 2020, she found that mergers did yield some savings, but it was soaked up by new spending such as higher salaries in newly combined districts and higher costs to bus students to and from schools farther away.

    Meanwhile, some of the fastest-growing educational costs in Vermont are arguably outside school and district control, such as skyrocketing health care premiums, which account for about 15 percent of district spending. According to data from KFF (formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation), Vermonters pay the highest “benchmark” health care premiums of any state, nearly $1,300 a month, almost double what they paid just five years ago. The state has also shifted other financial burdens onto districts, such as capital construction costs for schools, which the state hasn’t funded in nearly two decades.

    “We need to be focused on those core cost drivers,” said Rebecca Holcombe, a Vermont state representative and member of the redistricting task force, “not because there aren’t small schools that are inefficient and might not make it, but because even if we addressed them, we’d barely touch the real problem.” 

    Holcombe, who was the state’s education secretary when Act 46 passed, believes some school consolidation makes sense for Vermont, but not mandated mergers, especially at the scale proposed by Act 73. She was among the eight of 11 task force members who voted not to include maps of new, bigger district options in their final report in early December.  

    Instead they proposed a 10-year plan to create five regional “cooperative education service areas” where districts would pool resources to coordinate services — such as transportation, special education and professional development — and generate savings through scale. It also proposed that the state offer financial incentives to districts that voluntarily merge, centered on creating or strengthening high schools to serve students from combined districts and beyond. 

    Speaking to reporters, Gov. Scott admonished the task force a few days after its members voted to forward only the shared services plan to the state Legislature without mapping options for consolidating districts. “They didn’t redraw the lines,” he said. “They failed.” 

    When lawmakers reconvene on Jan. 6, it’s unclear how they’ll handle recommendations from a task force that arguably rebuked its founding legislation. They could ignore the task force and create their own maps of 4,000-student districts. They might amend Act 73 to fit the task force’s proposal. 

    Or they might start fresh. 

    Related: A school closure cliff is coming. Black and Hispanic students are likely to bear the brunt

    Seated in her office at Doty Memorial School in Worcester, a small Vermont town north of Montpelier, Principal Gillian Fuqua choked up when explaining her change of heart — from opposing to supporting a plan to close the school she’s overseen since 2019. Doty has about 60 K-6 students this year, and Fuqua slides a paper across her desk showing projections based on town birth records that enrollment could drop to 40 by the fall of 2028. 

    “It’s absolutely heartbreaking to me,” she said. “But we have to think about what we want for our kids, and we’re not in a good place right now.”

    Worcester is one of five towns merged into a single district by Act 46 in 2019. For two years in a row, the district has considered closing Doty, which would require voter approval. Last year, the plan was shelved without a vote after residents protested. But now a vote has been scheduled for February 10. 

    This past fall, when the district restarted consolidation discussions, Fuqua joined the “configuration committee” and dropped her previous opposition to closing the school. It already must combine two grades in classrooms to meet state minimums for class size. Fuqua worried that if classes shrink further, teachers might struggle to foster soft skills such as teamwork, collaborative problem solving and navigating a diversity of opinions. A larger school, she continued, could also support a full-time instrumental music teacher instead of the one-day-a-week instructor that Doty kids get, as well as a full-time librarian. 

    Indeed, there is ample evidence from Vermont and other states that merged schools can expose students to more and varied learning opportunities. A report released in 2024 by the Vermont Agency of Education, based on surveys and superintendent interviews from seven districts that merged early in the Act 46 era, highlighted merged districts saving, adding or restarting school offerings such as literacy intervention services, world languages and after-school extracurricular activities. 

    Nevertheless, education researchers stress that sending students to a bigger school with more resources doesn’t necessarily mean improved academic achievement or well-being. “These students are often experiencing an enormous transition, and there are a whole bunch of factors that can affect that,” said Mara Tieken, an education professor at Bates College who studies school consolidation. 

    School closings tend to be in more disadvantaged areas, for instance, and students there now take longer bus rides that cut into time for studying, sleep and after-school programs. Another variable is whether students from a closed school all transfer to the same new school, or are “starburst” out because no single school can accommodate them all. Tieken said it takes serious planning “to smooth that transition for new students, to create a culture that’s welcoming.”

    Research on student outcomes following school mergers reflects this tangle of factors. Some studies indicate that consolidation improves test scores, especially when students move to higher-performing schools. Others find little academic impact or lower performance in the first years after merging, more missed school days and behavioral issues and longer-term disadvantages in college graduation, employment and earnings as young adults. 

    “The answer to virtually every question about school consolidation is: It depends,” said Jerry Johnson, director of the Rural Education Institute and professor of educational leadership at East Carolina University, who has researched school consolidation for decades. 

    Related: Merger madness? When schools close — forever 

    Whatever might be gained from a merger, many Doty parents (and students) remain opposed. In interviews, several said their tiny school provides something incredibly valuable and increasingly rare: human connection and community. In places like Worcester, a local school is one of the few spaces that regularly brings folks together and serves as a magnet for the young families that sustain small-town life.

    Rosie Close, a fifth grader at Doty, described a tradition of students making and serving  soup at the town’s free “community lunch” held every Wednesday at the town hall. “If they closed Doty,” she said, “that would kind of take away part of the town, too.”

    While some Doty families had deep roots in the area, others moved to town more recently, including Caitlin Howansky, mother of a third grader. Howansky grew up in New York City, where she went to an elementary school with more than 30 kids per class.

    “Nobody outside of that classroom necessarily knew my name or knew me as a whole person. I was just one of the crowd,” she said. 

    By contrast, Howansky said, the teachers at Doty “know every kid’s strengths and weaknesses across the whole building.”

    That doesn’t mean that she and her neighbors are blind to demographic or economic realities, especially when housing, health care and so much else is getting more expensive. Early in December, for instance, Vermonters learned that property taxes would likely be spiking again next year, by nearly 12 percent on average.

    “A lot of people are saying, if we fight this again, are they just going to come back and try again next year?” Howansky said. “And is it fair to the children to live under this constant threat and this constant stress of not knowing?”

    She still thinks the fight against a merger is worth it, but said, “Everyone has to figure out where to draw their individual line.”

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

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

    This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/schools-are-closing-across-rural-america-heres-how-a-battle-over-small-districts-is-playing-out-in-one-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&amp;ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>

    <img id=”republication-tracker-tool-source” src=”https://hechingerreport.org/?republication-pixel=true&post=114097&amp;ga4=G-03KPHXDF3H” style=”width:1px;height:1px;”><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: “https://hechingerreport.org/schools-are-closing-across-rural-america-heres-how-a-battle-over-small-districts-is-playing-out-in-one-state/”, urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id=”parsely-cfg” src=”//cdn.parsely.com/keys/hechingerreport.org/p.js”></script>

    Source link

  • What parents, teachers say about Trump’s policies on education

    What parents, teachers say about Trump’s policies on education

    by Caroline Preston, The Hechinger Report
    December 18, 2025

    Child care workers, students and teachers shared dismay over Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids that are disrupting learning. School superintendents and college presidents described how uncertainty around federal funding is making their jobs far trickier. 

    Others — including a charter school leader and a for-profit college president — told The Hechinger Report they were grateful for recent changes to education policy, including a new emphasis on school choice and on the importance of workforce education. 

    Those were just a few of the many reactions we heard from 17 parents, students, educators and others around the country when we asked about the impact of President Donald Trump’s actions this year on their schools and communities. Several people told us that with the federal government stepping back from many of its long-standing responsibilities in education, they and their communities were taking on new roles. 

    Below are excerpts from the interviews, which have been lightly edited for clarity and length.      

    Sylvelia Pittman, math interventionist, Henry H. Nash Elementary School, Chicago Public Schools 

    Under this administration we have witnessed ICE being in our neighborhoods. ICE detained two parents of our students. The husband of one of my colleagues was detained and deported to Mexico. The husband of another colleague was questioned at work because he’s half Latino, half white. So it’s hit hard. And then with the cuts that have been made to the Education Department, those have hit my school. We have a large population of special education students. We are about 35 percent Latino and the rest of our students are Black. Many of our families receive SNAP benefits and they were affected. Trump withheld $8 million from our schools because of the mayor’s Black Student Success Plan, for students to continue to learn their history and bring more Black teachers into schools. It’s almost like we’ve taken hit after hit. It’s just as stressful as when we had Covid. We have had to come to grips with the idea that we must take care of our own. It’s going to be up to us, to city officials. Homelessness, health care, mental health — all of these things have to be addressed at the state and local level, because we can’t wait for the federal government to get it right. 

    — Caroline Preston

    TJ Katz, sophomore at Columbia University in New York, which reached a deal with the Trump administration restoring $400 million in federal funding frozen due to allegations of discriminatory conduct, including a failure to protect Jewish students during protests over the Israel-Hamas war

    Campus feels completely different than two years ago. All of the protests have stopped. The Trump administration effectively eliminated them. Whether you want to say Columbia cares about antisemitism, they definitely fear what it would mean to have $400 million stripped away from their budget. As a Jewish student on campus, I would absolutely say I’m glad that the change happened. As someone who’s a massive proponent of democracy and free speech, I have qualms about it. What if there was an administration that didn’t align with what I think is just? We now have a precedent set where the administration could snap their fingers and say this is what has to happen on campuses now. It is slightly scary the precedent that’s been set and the power a president now has over higher education in America. 

    — Meredith Kolodner 

    Ian Rowe, founder of Vertex Partnership Academies, a charter school in New York City, which Linda McMahon toured earlier this year in her first public school visit as education secretary 

    In the Trump administration, there’s a greater affinity for the concept of school choice. That alone is a huge breath of fresh air. There are other things, too — for example, the federal tax credit scholarship. On the surface, it may not seem like that would benefit charter schools, but it does. The money could pay for tuition for a student to attend a private religious school or it could cover SAT prep, tutoring — and that goes to any kind of parent. You could have parents in a public charter school who now have the additional resources to be able to pay for the kinds of things that a lot of middle- and upper-class families are doing to supplement education for their kids. 

    With the Department of Education already heavily gutted, it’s had zero impact on us — literally zero impact. But even if there’s not a formal federal Department of Education, there are a couple of different functions that are important. One is as the scorekeeper: There absolutely needs to be an assessment, annual or biannual, where you can consistently compare 2026 to 2024 to 2022 to 2020. That’s crucial because we do need, every couple years, a sense of what percent of our kids are reading against a common standard. I also think there is value in having kind of a best practices reservoir so that the federal government can be the place to show, ‘Here’s some innovative work going on in Indiana vs. New York.’ But in general, there’s a very limited number of things that I think could really add value in education at the federal level. 

    — Nirvi Shah

    Meka Mo, millennial comedian and nonprofit worker in New York City who took out student loans for undergraduate and graduate school  

    I’m one of the people who should be receiving public service loan forgiveness, but that’s in limbo and tied up in court right now. We don’t know what’s going to happen. So honestly, it’s kind of a mess, and no one’s paying attention to it, because everyone has, like, one thousand other things going on. Basically all our financial futures are being fought out in the courts right now. It’s like they’re not trying to have social upward mobility in the country. 

    — Marina Villeneuve 

    Leticia Wiggins, librarian at the Center for Ethnic Studies at Ohio State University, which closed its Office of Diversity and Inclusion and Center for Belonging and Social Change in response to the Trump administration’s threats to withhold funding from schools that use race-conscious practices in programs, scholarships and other areas of campus life 

    Those were places where people could go and feel a sense of community and that they belonged somewhere, and now those spaces no longer exist. Some of the student communities have been sort of dissolved — students feel at a loss for where to go. We’re still trying to conduct business as usual and make up for what’s lacking, but everything is just getting more threatened in terms of what we’re even able to talk about. 

    — Meredith Kolodner 

    Todd Dugan, superintendent of Bunker Hill Community Unit School District 8 in Illinois, which saw roughly $22,000 in Title II federal funds frozen for services to recruit, retain and train teachers

    I’ve been a superintendent for 14 years. It’s definitely getting harder. It’s taking a job that’s already hard and getting harder, and making it harder still. And it appears that it’s being done needlessly. The freezing and clawing back of Title II was announced on June 30, when usually we apply for it on July 1. And then they finally released it the second week of August. It was a lot of extra work making things difficult for a job that is already difficult. I don’t know what the game was, because Title II funding didn’t get clawed back. It just made everybody anxious. 

    — Ariel Gilreath

    Michael A. Elliott, president of Amherst College, in Massachusetts 

    I see an impact in the growing anxiety of our international students, faculty and staff members. Many are questioning whether there is a safe and stable place for them on our campus or in this country. These uncertainties touch every part of their lives — academic, personal and professional. They influence decisions about research, travel and connections with family, and they undermine the sense of belonging and security that is essential to a place like Amherst. When members of our community carry this kind of persistent fear, the effects are felt by all of us who care about them and want to support them as extraordinary classmates and colleagues. 

    — Lawrie Mifflin 

    Kyshanna Patman, a North Carolina mother of four children who works from home

    It’s been a crazy year, especially since he’s been in office, with the food stamp benefits being delayed, Medicaid — it’s crazy. And then the things they’re saying about autism. My 4-year-old is autistic and it’s really, really crazy how they’re making the assumption about women taking Tylenol and causing autism. It has not been a good experience since he’s been in office.

    When SNAP benefits were delayed, I was struggling trying to come up with the money to keep food in the house. I have four kids in the house and they need to eat. I mainly made sure they had enough before I tried to eat anything myself.

    And with the Medicaid work requirements, I just don’t understand. It shouldn’t have to be a requirement for people to have Medicaid. People have preexisting conditions. You’re talking about a work requirement just for people to be seen. It doesn’t make any sense. 

    There’s too many changes he’s trying to do. They’re not trying to listen to what people have to say. People put you in [office]. He’s supposed to be listening to us and working for us instead of being stricter. You’re supposed to be helping and he’s not doing that. He’s doing the complete opposite. 

    — Jackie Mader 

    Leslie Cornick, provost and vice president of academic affairs at California State University, Chico, which lost funding for teacher training after the Trump administration canceled two grant programs of roughly $600 million, citing diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives

    One of the challenges we are still continuing to follow up on is the loss of the Teacher Quality Partnership and SEED grants that support stipends for students who are going into teacher education programs and becoming teachers in rural counties and communities. Many of those students are Latinx and are coming to Chico State to become teachers so they can go back into their rural communities that desperately need teachers.

    We lost $700,000 or so. We couldn’t run the entire fall cohort of that program this year because access to those grants is still being litigated. We’re making the case for why these grants are so important and why they should not be discontinued. But in the meantime, we don’t have the money and so we can’t support the students. That means we are losing students that we will never get back. And there’s an impact not only on that individual student, but on that student’s family, generationally, and on our economy in the state of California because we’re not getting those teachers out into those rural communities that need them.

    From my perspective, it’s critically important that we continue to engage the administration in dialogue and help them understand especially the value of the regional public institutions. 

    — Olivia Sanchez

    Nicole Greene, a special education teacher at Scarsdale Middle School, in New York

    The landscape of special education has changed dramatically in the 13 years that I’ve been teaching, and that’s thanks to the ample research and the amount of effort that can go into advancing the field, advancing the profession. Without that, how do teachers get better? How do we learn more about how students learn best? Maybe we can agree that grants are good for furthering the field.

    A child should be able to go to any state in the country and their needs should be supported based on federal law in equal measure. At the end of the day, the argument that we are going to leave it up to the states just means that they can interpret IDEA however they see fit, without anyone ensuring that that’s in compliance with what was written. That’s a dangerous place to leave kids. 

    — Christina A. Samuels

    Daniel Cordova, junior at Edmonds-Woodway High School in the Edmonds School District in Washington state, which enrolls many children of migrant parents who work on nearby farms

    It’s scary times right now. You leave school, and you don’t know if you’re going to see your friends the next day because they might have some orders from the government to go back to their country. One of my friends is an immigrant. He’s worried like crazy about being deported. My friend’s mother has a deportation order. They’re struggling a lot right now. We feel it across the whole school. 

    It kind of changes the atmosphere. There’s less trust. It doesn’t feel safe, I would say. 

    — Neal Morton

    Brad Kuykendall, CEO of the for-profit Western Technical College, in El Paso, Texas 

    I point back to the executive order issued in April that dealt with preparing Americans for high-paying skilled trade jobs for the future. For far too long, there’s been a lack of acknowledgement of the importance of career, technical and trade schools. We were looked at as a lesser option for students, and to a degree, that’s still the case. But I think we’re starting to see that change a bit. The refocus and reemphasis — not as the only option, but as one of the many options — is very healthy for our economy as a whole and for our nation to continue to grow.

    Under the Biden administration, we did feel like there was definitely not as friendly of an environment [for for-profit colleges] to operate in. I did feel that we were underrepresented in many of the negotiated rulemaking sessions in the previous administration on regulations that impacted us far more than any other institution. We were one or two out of 15 seats at the table, so trying to come to consensus about a regulation in that environment was just very difficult. Going into negotiated rulemaking [to develop regulations under the ’big, beautiful bill’], I think there’s more fair representation at the table, and it’s a more balanced approach. 

    — Meredith Kolodner 

    Mike Shaver, president and CEO at Brightpoint, an Illinois nonprofit that operates child-focused programs, including free, federally funded Head Start centers and home-based Early Head Start services 

    It’s impossible to escape that this administration has not exactly done a great job at supporting poor families when you look at what happened with the struggle over SNAP benefits. And in our state, the increased ICE enforcement activities have had a profound impact. We have seen attendance levels drop.

    In November, an early learning employee — not someone in our program — got out of her vehicle, was walking into the facility where she was an instructor, and ICE agents followed her in, removed her from the building and detained her. It’s really hard to overstate what that kind of image does, not only for the staff who show up every day to meet the needs of these families, but also the families themselves. This is just a lot of added stressors for families, in addition to the challenges that already brought them to our Head Start programs. 

    — Jackie Mader

    Tiffany Tangel, a disability advocate and parent of three — including two children with dyslexia and other learning differences — in western New York 

    I’m closely watching what’s happening with IDEA. Trump said he was going to move it to Health and Human Services. A lot of people are worried about that. There’s a lot of disabilities that have nothing to do with health in that way. My kids have dyslexia. When it was newly diagnosed for my oldest, I went to our pediatrician and asked for resources on dyslexia, for places I could go for help, and they said we don’t know and the school should be helping you.

    I’m also working to restart our school’s special education PTA. Our school had one, but it closed in 2020. With so much unknown in terms of what’s next for our kids, a group of us just felt like now it was needed more than ever. Our hope is to be a place for the parents, because when you have kids in special education, it can be very lonely, and you feel very isolated. And then we really do want to focus on the teachers, because we know as soon as resources are cut, the teachers are feeling it.

    You’ve got to keep advocating at a federal level, at a state level, but it’s going to come down to your individual level, too. 

    — Christina A. Samuels

    Aiden Sirk, high school senior, Lawrenceburg, Indiana

    Conservatives, they’re not about, ‘We don’t want kids to have an education,’ — it’s that we want to make sure that we’re doing it in the most efficient way possible. And with the Department of Education cut, what they’re making sure they’re doing is that we are still going to have Pell Grants, we’re still going to have FAFSA, I can see that’s OK. There is a lot of bureaucracy at the Department of Education.

    A lot of these workers, they’re getting paid and they’re not even coming into the office like they were pre-pandemic. So we didn’t really need all that workforce. But then again, there is a proper way to do things. You can’t just dictate: ‘We’re shutting it down.’ You have to go through Congress. You have to go through the courts. And you have to do it the right way. So yes, I see it’s reasonable, but the way they’re doing it is not reasonable. 

    — Christina A. Samuels

    Heather Shotton, new president of Fort Lewis College, in rural Durango, Colorado, where nearly 40 percent of students are Native American. The college is a Native American-Serving, Nontribal Institution. Shotton is an enrolled citizen of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes 

    Fort Lewis lost $2.27 million in Title III money for Native American-serving institutions. The money paid for academic success initiatives: summer bridge programs, peer educators, various academic supports. That impacts our entire campus. Yes, it helped Indigenous students, but it also helped all of our students. It’s part of the federal government trust responsibility to support Native students. The majority of our Native students are not at tribal colleges and universities. And the majority of tribal colleges are two-year colleges. The shifting of money from Native-serving institutions to tribal colleges — itʼs one-time money, spread across 36 institutions. 

    — Nirvi Shah

    Sevan Minassian-Godner, third-year student at the University of California, Irvine and president of Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi and Jewish campus organization Hillel 

    Oct. 7 was a really big event on our campuses, and there was a lot of antisemitism floating around. But that kind of petered off after the first year, and we’re now at a point where it’s much less than it was my first year. But I wouldn’t necessarily attribute that to the Trump administration. I just think we’re further from the incident and from the encampments. I will say that we have experienced an uptick in right-leaning antisemitism recently; there are more groups on campus now that are participating in right-leaning antisemitism. I think that’s become more OK with the Trump administration in office. And I actually do attribute it a lot to Charlie Kirk’s death, too. I think that that ignited a lot of people early on in the year. People are more openly antisemitic, and especially on the right, and this kind of far-right white supremacist ideology, I think, has found its way into a lot more people’s hearts recently. 

    — Meredith Kolodner 

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

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

    This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/fear-fatigue-gratitude-students-parents-and-educators-on-the-new-trump-administrations-first-year/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>

    <img id=”republication-tracker-tool-source” src=”https://hechingerreport.org/?republication-pixel=true&post=113967&amp;ga4=G-03KPHXDF3H” style=”width:1px;height:1px;”><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: “https://hechingerreport.org/fear-fatigue-gratitude-students-parents-and-educators-on-the-new-trump-administrations-first-year/”, urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id=”parsely-cfg” src=”//cdn.parsely.com/keys/hechingerreport.org/p.js”></script>

    Source link

  • As Justice Department priorities shift, concerns about protection of students’ civil rights escalate

    As Justice Department priorities shift, concerns about protection of students’ civil rights escalate

    by Sarah Butrymowicz, The Hechinger Report
    December 14, 2025

    The 10-year-old was dragged down a school hallway by two school staffers. A camera captured him being forced into a small, empty room with a single paper-covered window. 

    The staffers shut the door in his face. Alone, the boy curled into a ball on the floor. When school employees returned more than 10 minutes later, blood from his face smeared the floor.

    Maryland state lawmakers were shown this video in 2017 by Leslie Seid Margolis, a lawyer with the advocacy group Disability Rights Maryland. She’d spent 15 years advocating for a ban on the practice known as seclusion, in which children, typically those with disabilities, are involuntarily isolated and confined, often after emotional outbursts. 

    Even after seeing the video, no legislators were willing to go as far as a ban. Nor were they when Margolis tried again a few years later.

    In 2021, however, the federal Justice Department concluded an investigation into a Maryland school district and found more than 7,000 cases of unnecessary restraint and seclusion in a two-and-a-half-year period. 

    Four months later, Maryland lawmakers passed a bill prohibiting seclusion in the state’s public schools, with nearly unanimous support.

    “I can’t really overstate the impact that Justice can have,” said Margolis. “They have this authority that is really helpful to those of us who are on the ground doing this work.”

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

    Within the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division is a small office devoted to educational issues, including seclusion, as well as desegregation and racial harassment. The division intentionally chooses cases with potential for high impact and actively monitors places it has investigated to ensure they’re following through with changes. When the Educational Opportunities Section acts, educators and policymakers take notice.

    Now, however, the Trump administration is wielding the power of the Justice Department in new and, some say, extreme ways. Hundreds of career staffers, including most of those who worked on education cases, have resigned. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights also has been decimated, largely through layoffs. The two offices traditionally have worked closely together to enforce civil rights protections for students. The result is a potentially lasting shift in how the nation’s top law enforcement agency handles issues that affect public school students, including millions who have disabilities. 

    “There are those who would say that this is an aberration, and that when it’s over, things will go back to the way they were,” said Frederick Lawrence, a lecturer at Georgetown Law and former assistant U.S. attorney under President Ronald Reagan. “My experience is that the river only flows in one direction, and things never go back to the way they were.”

    Related: Tracking Trump: His actions to dismantle the Education Department, and more

    The Justice Department’s lawyers historically have worked on a few dozen education cases at once, concentrating on combating sexual harassment, racial discrimination against Black and Latino students, restraint and seclusion, and failure to provide adequate services to English learners. 

    In the last 11 months, however, the agency has sued over and opened investigations into concerns about antisemitism, transgender policies and bias against white people at schools. It sued at least six states for offering discounted tuition to undocumented immigrants and pressured the president of the University of Virginia to resign as part of an investigation into the school’s diversity, equity and inclusion policies. And it joined other federal departments to form a special Title IX investigations team to protect students from what the administration called the “pernicious effects of gender ideology in school programs and activities.”  

    As the Educational Opportunity Section’s mission shifted, it shrunk in size. In January, before President Donald Trump took office, about 40 lawyers tackled education issues. In the spring, the U.S. Senate confirmed Harmeet Dhillon as leader of the Civil Rights Division. Dhillon founded the conservative Center for American Liberty, which describes itself as “defending civil liberties of Americans left behind by civil rights legacy organizations.”

    After her confirmation, staff who weren’t political appointees began resigning en masse, concerned Dhillon would promote only the administration’s agenda. 

    By June, no more than five of the 40 lawyers were left, according to former employees. Some new staff have been hired or reassigned to the section, but the head count remains well below usual. It’s far from enough to sustain the typical workload, said Shaheena Simons, who was chief of the Educational Opportunities Section until she resigned in April. “There’s just no way the division can function with that level of staffing. It’s just impossible,” said Simons, who took over the section in 2016. “The investigations aren’t going to happen. Remedies aren’t going to be sought.” 

    Department officials responded to a list of questions from The Hechinger Report about changes to their handling of student civil rights protection with “no comment.” 

    The Department of Justice, including its educational work, has always been somewhat subject to White House interests, said Neal McCluskey, director of the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom. During President Joe Biden’s term, for example, the agency pursued allegations of discrimination against transgender students, reflecting administration priorities. 

    McCluskey added, though, that the Trump administration is more aggressive in how it is pursuing its goals and is bypassing typical protocols, noting that in many cases “it’s like they’ve already decided the outcome.”  

    Related: Which schools and colleges are being investigated by the Trump administration?

    An investigation into allegations of antisemitism at the University of California, Los Angeles, for instance, took just 81 days before the department concluded the school had violated federal law. DOJ investigations typically have taken years, not months, to complete. 

    Lawrence, who also serves as president of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society, said he could not speak to specific investigations, but the UCLA timeline “does suggest a rather accelerated process.”

    A federal judge recently ruled that the administration could not use the findings from its UCLA investigation as a reason to fine the university $1.2 billion, which if paid would have unlocked frozen federal research funding. She wrote that the administration was using a playbook “of initiating civil rights investigations of preeminent universities to justify cutting off federal funding.” 

    As new investigations are opened, older ones remain unresolved, including one of practices in Colorado’s Douglas County Public Schools.

    In 2022, Disability Law Colorado submitted a complaint to the Justice Department about the district’s use of seclusion, as well as restraint, where school employees physically restrict a student’s movement.

    The following year, three other families sued the school system, alleging racial discrimination against their children. The students were repeatedly called monkeys and the N-word, threatened with lynchings and “made by teachers to argue the benefits of Jim Crow laws,” according to the complaint.

    Related: Red school boards in a blue state asked Trump for help — and got it

    The Department of Justice decided to investigate both issues. Four staffers were assigned to the restraint and seclusion investigation, said Emily Harvey, co-legal director at Disability Law Colorado.  

    As part of the inquiry, Justice officials visited the district twice. The second time was during the final week of Biden’s presidency. 

    After that visit, Douglas County didn’t hear anything about the investigation from the Trump administration until a mid-May email. “Good morning,” it read. “We are having some staffing changes.”

    The email, which The Hechinger Report obtained through a public records request, said that going forward, the district could contact two staffers on the restraint and seclusion case. The racial harassment case would be reduced to only one employee until another Justice staffer returned from leave in the fall. 

    One Douglas County parent, who asked her name be withheld because she is afraid of retaliation from the district, said that although she knew the investigation could take a couple of years, the longer it goes without a resolution, the more children could be harmed. 

    “The justice system is just moving so incredibly slow,” she said. 

    The parent said she knows of dozens of families who have dealt with restraint and seclusion issues in the district. Her own son, she said, was secluded in kindergarten. “He was scared of the person who put him in there. He kept saying, ‘I can’t go back,’” she said. “I never envisioned, until my son was secluded, a world where the school would not care about my child.” 

    When Harvey, of Disability Law Colorado, first contacted the Department of Justice, she hoped for statewide reform. She wanted to see a ban on seclusion, like Margolis had helped secure in Maryland, and for the state to commit to more accurate tracking of use of restraints. The way Colorado law is written, restraints must be recorded only if they last more than a minute. Douglas County, the second largest in the state with 62,000 students, reported 582 restraints to the Colorado Department of Education in the 2023-24 school year. The number of shorter-term restraints, however, is unknown. 

    “We believe this is an arbitrary distinction,” Harvey said. “My hope was that the Department of Justice would potentially weigh in on that as a violation” of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

    Related: How Trump 2.0 upended education research and statistics in one year

    Douglas County school administrators said in a statement to The Hechinger Report that their “focus is on taking care of each and every one of our students” and that they take all concerns seriously. 

    They have worked with the federal government to set up school visits and interviews during their visits, according to emails from January. 

    Subsequent emails between district and federal officials describe a phone call over the summer and requests for additional documents. Another DOJ employee was included in the messages.

    There are signs that the Justice Department is not abandoning restraint and seclusion work, said Guy Stephens, founder of the national advocacy group Alliance Against Seclusion and Restraint. A webpage about previous cases that was removed after Trump took office has been restored, and in July, the DOJ announced a settlement with a Michigan district over these issues.

    Yet Stephens has concerns. “There are still people very, very dedicated to this work and the mission of this work, but it’s very hard to work in a system that is shifting and reprioritizing,” he said.

    Former DOJ employees worry that it might not only be future investigations that are markedly different. The department has historically monitored places where it has reached agreements that demand corrective action, rewriting them if districts or colleges fail to live up to their promises. It also provides support to achieve the new goals. Now, provisions written into past resolutions might be at odds with Trump administration actions, and oversight of some settlements is ending early.

    Take, for instance, a DOJ investigation into Vermont’s Elmore-Morristown Unified Union School District over allegations of race-based harassment against Black students. Investigators found that the district didn’t have a way to handle harassment or discrimination not targeted at a specific person, according to David Bickford, the school board chairman. 

    As part of a settlement agreement signed two weeks before Trump was inaugurated, the district agreed to provide staff training on implicit bias. A Trump executive order, however, calls for eliminating federal funding for anyone that discusses such a concept in schools. 

    Bickford said that the district has complied with everything the settlement called for, including professional development. 

    The investigation itself, he said, was extremely thorough, and required handing over nearly a thousand pages of documentation. Since then, the district has sent regular reports to the department but has not received any lengthy response or input, Bickford said. He also noted there had been staffing changes in who the district reports to. 

    Related: Federal policies risk worsening an already dire rural teacher shortage

    Justice officials decided to end supervision of a 2023 settlement early following a racial harassment investigation in another Vermont district, Twin Valley. The original plan was to monitor the district for three years. In October 2024, investigators visited the district to check in. In a letter two months later, officials noted that while Twin Valley had made significant progress, they still had several areas of concern, including how the district investigated complaints, as well as “persistent biased language and behavior on the basis of multiple protected classifications; a pervasive culture of sexism; and lack of consistent and effective adult response to biased language and behavior.” 

    Even so, the department was pleased overall with its visit, said Bill Bazyk, superintendent of Windham Southwest Supervisory Union, which includes Twin Valley. “But things certainly sped up after the election,” said Bazyk, who started his job after the case had been settled.

    Throughout the spring, Bayzk and his staff checked in with the department, and in May the district was told oversight of the settlement would end a year early, as Twin Valley had fully complied with the terms. 

    “We were doing all the right things,” Bayzk said, noting that the district’s work on diversity and equity is ongoing. “We took the settlement very seriously.”

    The investigation began in 2021 after the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont filed a complaint. Legal Director Lia Ernst said it is possible that Twin Valley resolved those lingering problems between December and May, stressing that it’s impossible to know from the outside. But still, she said, there is a larger pattern of ambivalence to the Justice Department’s approach to civil rights complaints.  

    “It is disappointing to see that one ending early,” she said. “It is my hope that it is ending early because Twin Valley has made so much progress, but it is my fear that it is ending early because DOJ just doesn’t care.” 

    Contact investigations editor Sarah Butrymowicz at [email protected] or on Signal: @sbutry.04.

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

    This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/under-trump-protecting-students-civil-rights-looks-very-different/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>

    <img id=”republication-tracker-tool-source” src=”https://hechingerreport.org/?republication-pixel=true&post=113866&amp;ga4=G-03KPHXDF3H” style=”width:1px;height:1px;”><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: “https://hechingerreport.org/under-trump-protecting-students-civil-rights-looks-very-different/”, urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id=”parsely-cfg” src=”//cdn.parsely.com/keys/hechingerreport.org/p.js”></script>

    Source link

  • Trump’s attacks on DEI may hurt men in college admission  

    Trump’s attacks on DEI may hurt men in college admission  

    by Jon Marcus, The Hechinger Report
    December 4, 2025

    Brown University, one of the most selective institutions in America, attracted nearly 50,000 applicants who vied for just 1,700 freshman seats last year.

    The university accepted nearly equal numbers of male and female prospects, even though, like some other schools, it got nearly twice as many female applicants. That math meant it was easier for male students to get in — 7 percent of male applicants were admitted, compared to 4.4 percent of female applicants, university data show.

    The Trump administration’s policies may soon end that advantage that has been enjoyed by men, admissions and higher education experts say.

    While much of the president’s recent scrutiny of college admissions practices has focused on race, these experts say his ban on diversity, equity and inclusion is likely to hit another underrepresented group of applicants: men, and particularly white men — the largest subset of male college applicants.

    “This drips with irony,” said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, or ACE, the nation’s largest association of universities and colleges, who said he expects that colleges and universities are ending consideration of gender in admission. “The idea of males, including white males, being at the short end of the stick all of a sudden would be a truly ironic outcome.”

    Related: Interested in more news about colleges and universities? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter.

    For years universities and colleges have been trying to keep the number of men and women on campuses evened out at a time when growing numbers of men have been choosing not to go to college. Some schools have tried to attract more men by adding football and other sports, promoting forestry and hunting programs and launching entrepreneurship competitions. 

    Nationwide, the number of women on campuses has surpassed the number of men for more than four decades, with nearly 40 percent more women than men enrolled in higher education, federal data show.

    Efforts to admit applicants at higher rates based on gender are legal under a loophole in federal anti-discrimination law, one that’s used to keep the genders balanced on campuses.

    But the Trump administration has consistently included gender among the characteristics it says it does not want schools to consider for admissions or hiring, along with race, ethnicity, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, gender identity or religious associations. The White House has so far largely not succeeded in its campaign to press a handful of elite schools to agree to the terms and sign a wide-ranging Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education in exchange for priority consideration for federal funding.

    “The racial parts have gotten a lot more attention, but I know from having spoken with practitioners who work in college admissions, they have read very clearly that it says ‘race and gender,’” in the administration’s pronouncements about ending preferences in admission, said Shaun Harper, founder and chief research scientist at the University of Southern California Race and Equity Center.

    “What I think they don’t understand is that taking away the ability of colleges and universities to balance the gender composition of their incoming classes will ultimately have an impact on the college enrollment rates of white males,” Harper said. “It is likely to impact them the most, as a matter of fact.” 

    At some private colleges, male applicants are more likely to get in

    School % of males admitted % of females admitted
    Brown University 7.0 4.4
    University of Chicago 5.6 3.7
    Yale University 4.6 3.4
    University of Miami 22.5 16.5
    Middlebury College 12.2 9.6
    Baylor University 56.8 47.9
    Pomona College 7.6 6.7
    Tulane University 14.9 13.4
    Vassar College 20.4 17.6

    SOURCE: Hechinger Report calculations from universities’ Common Data Sets

    Agreements that the administration has reached with Brown, Columbia and Northwestern universities to settle allegations of antisemitism discrimination also include language about gender.

    In a statement announcing the Brown deal in July, Education Secretary Linda McMahon promised that “aspiring students will be judged solely on their merits, not their race or sex.”

    Asked if that meant male applicants would no longer be admitted at higher rates than female applicants — which has helped Brown keep its undergraduate enrollment at almost exactly 50-50, even with twice as many female applicants — spokesman Brian Clark said, “We have made no changes to our admissions practices in this regard.” 

    The Trump administration has also vowed to make all higher education institutions submit details about the students they admit, including their gender, to find out whether they’re “discriminating against hard working American” prospective students, McMahon said in another statement.

    Spokespeople for the Department of Education did not respond to questions about whether advantages in admission based on gender will be scrutinized in the same way as purported advantages based on race.

    Related: Inaccurate, impossible: Experts knock new Trump plan to collect college admissions data

    Universities are looking at the administration’s edicts “and they’re saying, ‘Well, we’d rather be cautious than stick our neck out’” by continuing to give advantages to male applicants, said ACE’s Mitchell, who was undersecretary of education under President Barack Obama. “I think we will see people dropping gender preferences, even though it is still within the law.”

    Colleges that have been accepting men at higher rates are trying to avoid a marketing problem they fear will happen if their campuses become too female, said Madeleine Rhyneer, who headed admissions offices at four private universities and colleges and is now vice president of consulting services and dean of enrollment management for the education consulting firm EAB. Colleges worry, “Will men look at that and think, ‘That’s essentially a women’s college, and I don’t want to go there’?”

    Related: Universities and colleges search for ways to reverse the decline in the ranks of male students

    “For the Browns and Columbias and highly selective and very competitive institutions, it is a problem,” Rhyneer said. “They want to create what feels like a balanced climate.”

    The results of ending this practice could be dramatic, experts predict. In 2023, the most recent year for which the figure is available, 817,035 more women than men applied to universities and colleges, federal data show.  Boys also have lower mean scores on the SAT in reading and writing, score lower overall on the ACT and have lower grade point averages in high school.

    “If we were going to eliminate preferences for men, the undergraduate population would skew to 65 percent female overnight,” Mitchell said.

    Rick Hess, director of education policy studies at the right-leaning think-tank the American Enterprise Institute, pointed out that similar predictions were made after the 2023 Supreme Court decision effectively ending affirmative action based on race.

    At the time, he said, colleges spoke “in apocalyptic terms of the implications for the racial composition of student bodies.” But the number of Black and Hispanic students enrolled at universities and colleges the next year rose, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Then, said Hess, “there was a lot of, ‘Never mind.’” 

    The country’s top 50 private colleges and universities have 2 percentage points more male undergraduates than the top 50 flagship public universities, which do not consider gender in admission, according to research by Princeton economist Zachary Bleemer. He said this suggests that at least some are putting a thumb on the scale for male applicants.

    Columbia took 3 percent of women applicants last year and 4 percent of men. At the University of Chicago, 5.6 percent of male applicants were accepted last year, compared to 3.7 percent of female applicants. The ratio at the University of Miami was 22.5 percent to 16.5 percent; and at Vassar College, 20.4 percent to 17.6 percent. 

    Besides Brown, none of these universities would respond when asked if they will continue to accept higher percentages of men than women, Neither would others that do it, including Yale, Baylor and Tulane universities and Pomona College.

    Private institutions are allowed to consider gender in admission under Title IX, the federal law otherwise banning discrimination by universities and colleges that get federal funding. That’s due to a loophole dating from when the law was passed, in 1971.

    At the time, the gender ratio was exactly reversed, and men outnumbered women on campuses by nearly three to two. One of the universities’ congressional allies, Rep. John Erlenborn, R-Illinois, successfully amended the measure to let private colleges and universities continue to consider gender in admission.

    Erlenborn said at the time that forcing colleges to stop considering gender would be “one more giant step toward involvement by the federal government in the internal affairs of institutions of higher education.” 

    There’s little ambiguity for admissions offices now, said USC’s Harper.

    “It says here, in writing, ‘no discrimination on the basis of race and gender,’” he noted. “It says that explicitly.”

    Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, [email protected] or jpm.82 on Signal.

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

    This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/an-unexpected-target-of-federal-college-admissions-scrutiny-men/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>

    <img id=”republication-tracker-tool-source” src=”https://hechingerreport.org/?republication-pixel=true&post=112505&amp;ga4=G-03KPHXDF3H” style=”width:1px;height:1px;”><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: “https://hechingerreport.org/an-unexpected-target-of-federal-college-admissions-scrutiny-men/”, urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id=”parsely-cfg” src=”//cdn.parsely.com/keys/hechingerreport.org/p.js”></script>

    Source link

  • 5 cheat sheets for parents of preschoolers

    5 cheat sheets for parents of preschoolers

    by Jackie Mader, The Hechinger Report
    November 27, 2025

    When my oldest child was a 2-year-old, we relocated to a new state and I found myself back at square one with my search for child care. In my new city, I now had a very good problem: There was an abundance of programs with availability, and I had a choice of where to enroll my son. As I toured a half-dozen of them, however, I worried that even as an early childhood reporter, I wasn’t asking the right questions or paying attention to the right thing. 

    A few months later, our early childhood team at Hechinger launched a project digging into the elements of a high-quality preschool. That article and the corresponding video became a quick and easy guide as I looked at options for my second child. It’s what I sent to friends who asked me for advice while navigating their own searches. 

    While I love telling stories from the field, my colleagues and I are also passionate about providing helpful tools and guides for teachers and caregivers. Here are a few of my favorite early ed “cheat sheets” from our decade of reporting on early childhood.

    1.  The five elements of a good preschool: What should you look for when you step inside a preschool classroom? What clues can you find on the walls or bookshelves? What questions should you ask teachers and school administrators? This video and article break it down. While classrooms and programs will vary by setting, many of these elements, like the way teachers talk to children and an emphasis on play, apply everywhere.

    2. Cracking down on unsafe sleep products: As an anxious new parent, nothing scared me more than hearing about infant deaths due to unsafe sleep products. Still, when desperate and exhausted, I tried several items that I heard would help my babies sleep, including some that the American Academy of Pediatrics later discouraged in updated safe sleep guidelines in 2022. While reporting this article, I was stunned by the lack of evidence and oversight of products that many parents like myself believe are tested before they are available to buy.

    3. How to boost math skills by talking about math with your kids: Most parents know how important it is to read to children. But did you know that there are easy ways caregivers can develop math skills? Earlier this year, my colleague Jill Barshay looked at a wave of research from the past dozen years on simple things adults can do to lay an early foundation in math. 

    4. How to answer tough questions about race and racism with your children: Research shows racial stereotypes start early, and that’s why it’s important to talk to young children about different races and read books and offer toys that have diverse characters. Many parents feel ill equipped for these conversations, however. In 2020, I asked three experts how they would respond to real questions from young kids about race and racism so adults feel better prepared for the questions that children inevitably ask.

    5. How parents can support their kids with play: With all the challenges of being a parent, it can be hard to hear there’s yet another thing we should be doing. But this 2023 conversation with researcher Charlotte Anne Wright helped me reframe the way I think about play and my role in it with my own children. While it’s important to give children opportunities for free play, Wright’s research shows “guided play,” or play with a learning goal in mind and light support from a parent, can have benefits for children, too. It’s not as heavy of a lift as it sounds, and Wright provides simple ways parents can engage in playful learning with their children on bus rides and trips to the laundromat.

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

    This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/5-cheat-sheets-for-parents-of-preschoolers/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>

    <img id=”republication-tracker-tool-source” src=”https://hechingerreport.org/?republication-pixel=true&post=113560&amp;ga4=G-03KPHXDF3H” style=”width:1px;height:1px;”><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: “https://hechingerreport.org/5-cheat-sheets-for-parents-of-preschoolers/”, urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id=”parsely-cfg” src=”//cdn.parsely.com/keys/hechingerreport.org/p.js”></script>

    Source link

  • As the supply of applicants declines, college admissions gets kinder and gentler

    As the supply of applicants declines, college admissions gets kinder and gentler

    by Jon Marcus, The Hechinger Report
    November 18, 2025

    PLEASANTVILLE, N.Y. — As she approached her senior year in high school, the thought of moving on to college was “scary and intimidating” to Milianys Santiago — especially since she would be the first in her family to earn a degree.

    Once she began working on her applications this fall, however, she was surprised. “It hasn’t been as stressful as I thought it would be,” she said.

    It’s not that Santiago’s anxiety was misplaced: The college admissions process has been so notoriously anxiety inducing that students and their parents plan for it for years and — if social media is any indication — seem to consider an acceptance as among the greatest moments of their lives.

    It’s that getting into college is in fact becoming easier, with admissions offices trying to lure more applicants from a declining pool of 18-year-olds. They’re creating one-click applications, waiving application fees, offering admission to high school seniors who haven’t even applied and recruiting students after the traditional May 1 cutoff.

    The most dramatic change is in the odds of being admitted. Elite universities such as Harvard and CalTech take as few as 1 applicant in 33, but they are the exception. Colleges overall now accept about 6 in 10 students who apply, federal data show. That’s up from about 5 out of 10 a decade ago, the American Enterprise Institute calculates.

    “The reality is, the overwhelming majority of universities are struggling to put butts in seats. And they need to do everything that they can to make it easier for students and their families,” said Kevin Krebs, founder of the college admission consulting firm HelloCollege.

    This has never been as true as now, when the number of high school graduates entering higher education is about to begin a projected 15-year drop, starting with the class now being recruited. That’s on top of a 13 percent decline over the last 15 years.

    Santiago, who lives in Hamilton, New Jersey, was waiting for a tour to start at Pace University as a video on repeat showed exuberant students and drone footage of the leafy, 200-acre grounds about 30 miles north of New York City, where the university also has a campus. 

    Related: Interested in more news about colleges and universities? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter.

    Pace was one of 130 New York state colleges and universities that during October waived their application fees of from $50 to $90 per student, per school. That’s just one of the ways it’s trying to make admissions easier. 

    “That was a little eye-opening, when we received that letter,” Sueane Goodreau of Ithaca, New York, said about the free application offer as she waited for a tour of Pace’s campus with her high school senior son, Will. Compared to when her older daughter applied to college just three years ago, said Goodreau, “it does feel a little more receptive.”

    There was an even bigger incentive offered by Pace: Prospects such as Santiago and Goodreau who visit are promised an additional $1,000 a year of financial aid if they enroll. Applicants who come to visit a campus are twice as likely to enroll as those who don’t, research has found.

    The students’ names awaited them on a welcome sign at the reception desk in the office where tours depart. “You Belong Here,” pronounced another placard, on an easel in the waiting area. There was a QR code they could scan if they wanted to chat one-on-one with an admissions officer — who, in earlier times at many schools, were often unapproachable.

    “I feel like I’m already a student here,” Santiago quipped.

    The reason the university encourages that feeling? It’s simple, said Andre Cordon, dean of admission, in the distinctive pink Choate House at the center of the campus: “We want more students to apply. We don’t want to put up hurdles.”

    So many hurdles previously stood along the route to college admission, it’s become a part of popular culture. “Everyone thinks we’re sadists — that we like saying no,” noted Tina Fey in her role as a Princeton admissions officer in the 2013 movie “Admission.” 

    Related: The number of 18-year-olds is about to drop sharply, packing a wallop for colleges — and the economy 

    Perceptions such as those are hard to change. Not only do young Americans aged 18 to 29 believe it isn’t any easier to get into college than it was for people in their parents’ generation, 45 percent of them think it’s harder, a Pew Research Center survey found. More than three-quarters say the admissions process is complex, and more than half that it’s more stressful than anything else they’ve done during their time in elementary, middle or high school, according to a separate survey, by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, or NACAC.

    “People have that notion that all campuses are in the same category as MIT, Harvard, Stanford” with their impossibly low acceptance rates, said Cordon. (Pace took 76 percent of its applicants last year, university statistics show.) And “teenagers are still teenagers. There’s anxiety no matter what. They overthink things, and they overthink the admissions process.”

    There’s also still a lot of genuine emotion in the process, he said. For many parents, “It’s a pride thing. It’s a status thing. It’s showing off. Or from the student’s side, it’s, ‘I want to make my parents proud.’ ”

    In the new world of university admissions, however, that no longer necessarily even requires filling out an application.

    “Congratulations! You’ve been admitted,” a new California State University website tells prospective students, before they enter a single piece of information about themselves. 

    Cal State is the latest system to deploy so-called direct admission: They will automatically accept any student who earns at least a C in a list of required high school courses, starting in January for students in some and expanding the following year to every high school in the state.

    Related: To fill seats, more colleges offer credit for life experience

    Public universities or systems in Alabama, Arizona, Connecticut, Georgia, Hawai’i, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Washington and Wisconsin also now offer various forms of direct admission — some beginning this fall — accepting students automatically if they meet certain high school benchmarks.

    Several systems now allow students to apply to several public universities and colleges with a single application, avoiding the time-consuming process of completing different forms, writing essays, collecting letters of recommendation or paying fees. 

    Through Illinois’s new One Click College Admit, for instance, high school students can have their transcripts provided instantly to 10 of the state’s 12 four-year public universities and all of its community colleges and get back a guaranteed offer of admission to at least one, depending on their grades.

    “Especially first-generation students, they don’t have that knowledge of how to apply to college,” said José Garcia, spokesman for the Illinois Board of Higher Education. “That’s among the people we’re trying to reach — those who might be intimidated by the name of an institution or not feel confident in their academic abilities or their grades.”

    Several of these programs have been advocated for public institutions by governors and legislatures worried about a continued supply of college-educated workers in their states as the proportion of high school graduates going on to get degrees declines.

    “Basically we need to have a bigger pipeline,” said David Troutman, deputy commissioner for academic affairs at the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. “We have to do everything we can to open that door to all students, not just a few. So we have to make sure we’re making the process as painless as we can.”

    Now private colleges are jumping aboard the direct-admission bandwagon. More than 210 have arranged through the Common App — an online application used by about 1,100 institutions nationwide — to extend offers of direct admission for the coming academic year to students who filed the Common App but have not applied. That’s almost twice as many as signed on last year, when Common App says 119 institutions in 35 states made more than 733,000 unsolicited offers. 

    It’s still early to definitively know the effect of this on whether students ultimately enroll. In Idaho, which in 2015 became the first state to try direct admission, enrollment of first-time undergraduates at participating public universities rose 11 percent. 

    Direct admission by itself does not resolve the other reasons students forgo college, however, said James Murphy, director of postsecondary policy at the nonprofit Education Reform Now, which advocates for more access to and diversity in higher education.

    “It’s the furthest thing from a panacea,” Murphy said. “How do we know? Because colleges embraced it so quickly. Any reform taken up so quickly by colleges is likely to have more benefit to colleges than to students.”

    While direct admission might help colleges get closer to enrollment targets, for example, he said, “it works best when it’s paired with financial aid and other resources that actually make it easier” to pay.

    Waiving application fees has driven increases in applications, some research has shown. During the month that fees were waived last fall in New York state, a quarter of a million students applied to the public State University of New York, up 41 percent from the same period the year before, according to the state’s Higher Education Services Corporation, or HESC. 

    Related: After years of quietly falling, college tuition is on the rise again

    While college applications may not seem expensive, at around $50 each, many students “aren’t just paying one application fee. They can be paying multiple fees,” which add up, said Angela Liotta, HESC’s director of communication. 

    Universities and colleges are trying other ways to ease the process. More than 2,000 continue to make submitting the results of SAT and ACT scores optional, for instance, something many started doing during the pandemic. More have extended their deadlines or recruited after the traditional May 1 cutoff, when incoming classes were previously considered locked in. 

    Students are noticing. One way is through the massive amount of marketing materials they’re getting, begging them to apply. The median high school student gets more than 100 letters and emails from colleges and universities each month, a survey by the education technology company CollegeVine found — an old-style approach that CollegeVine found turns out for this generation to be generally ineffective.

    Will Goodreau, who was visiting Pace, for instance, got “so many emails and texts,” he said, laughing. “I must have given somebody my number for something.”

    All of these things appear to be slowly changing students’ perception of admission. In that NACAC survey, fewer of those who had already gone through the process — while they still found it challenging — considered it as challenging as students who hadn’t started yet.

    There could be more changes ahead. A lawsuit was filed in August against 32 colleges and universities that practice so-called early decision, under which students who apply before the usual admission period are more likely to get in, but are obligated to enroll. The practice, which the lawsuit seeks to end, helps colleges fill their classes, but prevents students from shopping around for better offers of financial aid.

    Whatever happens, students and their parents should know that “they’re actually the ones in control of this process,” said Krebs, of HelloCollege. “The reality is that at a lot of schools, if you have the grades, you’re going to get in.”

    Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, [email protected] or jpm.82 on Signal.

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

    This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/colleges-ease-the-dreaded-admissions-process-as-the-supply-of-applicants-declines/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>

    <img id=”republication-tracker-tool-source” src=”https://hechingerreport.org/?republication-pixel=true&post=113378&amp;ga4=G-03KPHXDF3H” style=”width:1px;height:1px;”><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: “https://hechingerreport.org/colleges-ease-the-dreaded-admissions-process-as-the-supply-of-applicants-declines/”, urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id=”parsely-cfg” src=”//cdn.parsely.com/keys/hechingerreport.org/p.js”></script>

    Source link

  • Do male teachers make a difference? Not as much as some think

    Do male teachers make a difference? Not as much as some think

    by Jill Barshay, The Hechinger Report
    November 17, 2025

    The teaching profession is one of the most female-dominated in the United States. Among elementary school teachers, 89 percent are women, and in kindergarten, that number is almost 97 percent.

    Many sociologists, writers and parents have questioned whether this imbalance hinders young boys at the start of their education. Are female teachers less understanding of boys’ need to horse around? Or would male role models inspire boys to learn their letters and times tables? Some advocates point to research that lays out why boys ought to do better with male teachers.

    But a new national analysis finds no evidence that boys perform or behave better with male teachers in elementary school. This challenges a widespread belief that boys thrive more when taught by men, and it raises questions about efforts, such as one in New York City, to spend extra to recruit them.

    “I was surprised,” said Paul Morgan, a professor at the University at Albany and a co-author of the study. “I’ve raised two boys, and my assumption would be that having male teachers is beneficial because boys tend to be more rambunctious, more active, a little less easy to direct in academic tasks.”

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

    “We’re not saying gender matching doesn’t work,” Morgan added. “We’re saying we’re not observing it in K through fifth grade.”

    Middle and high school students might see more benefits. Earlier research is mixed and inconclusive. A 2007 analysis by Stanford professor Thomas Dee found academic benefits for eighth-grade boys and girls when taught by teachers of their same gender. And studies where researchers observe and interview a small number of students often show how students feel more supported by same-gender teachers. Yet many quantitative studies, like this newest one, have failed to detect measurable benefits for boys. At least 10 since 2014 have found zero or minimal effects. Benefits for girls are more consistent.

    This latest study, “Fixed Effect Estimates of Teacher-Student Gender Matching During Elementary School,” is a working paper not yet published in a peer-reviewed journal.* Morgan and co-author Eric Hu, a research scientist at Albany, shared a draft with me.

    Morgan and Hu analyzed a U.S. Education Department dataset that followed a nationally representative group of 8,000 students from kindergarten in 2010 through fifth grade in 2017. Half were boys and half were girls. 

    More than two-thirds — 68 percent — of the 4,000 boys never had a male teacher in those years while 32 percent had at least one. (The study focused only on main classroom teachers, not extras like gym or music.)

    Among the 1,300 boys who had both male and female teachers, the researchers compared each boy’s performance and behavior across those years. For instance, if Jacob had female teachers in kindergarten, first, second and fifth grades, but male teachers in third and fourth, his average scores and behavior were compared between the teachers of different genders.

    Related: Plenty of Black college students want to be teachers, but something keeps derailing them

    The researchers found no differences in reading, math or science achievement — or in behavioral and social measures. Teachers rated students on traits like impulsiveness, cooperation, anxiety, empathy and self-control. The children also took annual executive function tests. The results did not vary by the teacher’s gender.

    Most studies on male teachers focus on older students. The authors noted one other elementary-level study, in Florida, that also found no academic benefit for boys. This new research confirms that finding and adds that there seems to be no behavioral or social benefits either.

    For students at these young ages, 11 and under, the researchers also didn’t find academic benefits for girls with female teachers. But there were two non-academic ones: Girls taught by women showed stronger interpersonal skills (getting along, helping others, caring about feelings) and a greater eagerness to learn (represented by skills such as keeping organized and following rules).

    When the researchers combined race and gender, the results grew more complex. Black girls taught by women scored higher on an executive function test but lower in science. Asian boys taught by men scored higher on executive function but had lower ratings on interpersonal skills. Black boys showed no measurable differences when taught by male teachers. (Previous research has sometimes found benefits for Black students taught by Black teachers and sometimes hasn’t.)**

    Related: Bright black students taught by black teachers are more likely to get into gifted-and-talented classrooms

    Even if data show no academic or behavioral benefits for students, there may still be compelling reasons to diversify the teaching workforce, just as in other professions. But we shouldn’t expect these efforts to move the needle on student outcomes.

    “If you had scarce resources and were trying to place your bets,” Morgan said, “then based on this study, maybe elementary school isn’t where you should focus your recruitment efforts” to hire more men.

    To paraphrase Boyz II Men, it’s so hard to say goodbye — to the idea that young boys need male teachers.

    *Clarification: The article has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal but has undergone some peer review.

    **Correction: An earlier version incorrectly characterized how researchers analyzed what happened to students of different races. The researchers focused only on the gender of the teachers, but drilled down to see how students of different races responded to teachers of different genders. 

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

    This story about male teachers was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters.

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

    <img id=”republication-tracker-tool-source” src=”https://hechingerreport.org/?republication-pixel=true&post=113362&amp;ga4=G-03KPHXDF3H” style=”width:1px;height:1px;”><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: “https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-male-teachers-elementary-school/”, urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id=”parsely-cfg” src=”//cdn.parsely.com/keys/hechingerreport.org/p.js”></script>

    Source link