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  • Making grants and the levy work

    Making grants and the levy work

    Opinions vary about the desirability of the levy on international student fees, and the value of the promised return of targeted maintenance grants.

    Rightly so. The announcement and the descriptions of policies within, were political in nature. They were made at a party conference rather than a ministerial statement or consultation document – they were designed to please some, challenge others, and above all to start a debate.

    And as such, all these opinions are valuable. The government will listen to representations, seek commentary and challenge, and eventually start to spell out some more of the detail and implementation.

    Implementation couldn’t care less about opinions or political expediency. Implementation is a matter of whether something can actually be done, and how.

    My number one priority

    Let’s take the simplistic approach, and call the income the government gets from the levy something around £620m (more on that later).

    In the grand scheme of things that’s not a huge amount of money – we paid out more than £8bn on maintenance loans in 2023-24. However, the much-maligned magic money twig (the OfS’ funding for student access and success) is currently just £273m, and it is ostensibly doing part of the same job as the proposed grants – helping non-traditional students access and succeed in higher education. Of course, it mostly goes on hardship grants these days, which is neither what it is designed for nor any meaningful remedy for a student maintenance system that is not fit for purpose. But that makes the parallel even clearer.

    Any extra money going to students, in this economy and with this level of unwillingness to do anything truly radical about student hardship, is welcome. But the kicker is that it is not enough to be from a deprived background to get the new money – you also need to be studying the right subjects. As we’ve already noted, these are the same “priority subjects” as have been set within the Lifelong Learning Entitlement: vaguely STEMish, but with no medicine but added architecture and economics.

    You survived all you been through

    At the end of every cycle UCAS published data on acceptances using a fine-grained (CAH level 3) subject lens, separated by level of deprivation – which in England means the IMD quintile. From this we learn that in the most recent data (2024 cycle) just under 42 per cent of all England domiciled accepted applicants from IMD quintile 1 (the most deprived group) were accepted onto a “priority subject”.

    [Full screen]

    This is a substantially higher proportion than in any other IMD quintile – it is also a substantially higher number: 39,870. We don’t get quite the same level of subject fidelity for offers and applications, but it appears that quintile 1 applicants are also much more likely to apply to priority subjects than any other group, and slightly more likely to receive an offer.

    In other words, as far as we can tell with the available data, there is not really a problem recruiting disadvantaged young people onto courses in subjects that the government is currently keen on.

    It is possible ministers may be thinking that adding the grants into the mix would drive these already encouraging numbers up even higher (and away from mere dilettante whims like, er, studying medicine, law, or biology). This would appear to ignore a rather expensive and lengthy experiment that has demonstrated that financial concerns (in the form, back then, of the sticker price) do not actually affect applicant behavior all that much, and when applicant behaviour is already trending in the way you might hope there’s maybe not a lot needs to be done.

    But if you assume that the entire annual levy covers a single year of grants for everyone in IMD quintile 1 in a priority subject – and let’s use the exact numbers here – we get 39,870 students sharing £620.52m: £15,560 each.

    That is baking in a bunch of assumptions around the way the levy is implemented, the way grant allocations are determined (is IMD, an area based measure, really the best way to allocate individual grants?), and even whether the entire levy is to be spent directly on grants and nothing else. But if these rather optimistic assumptions are right, we’re slightly above the current maximum loan (£13,762), and beginning to approach the government’s National Living Wage for those aged 18 to 20 (currently just under £18k). It’s not quite enough to live as a student for a year without working at all, but it would mean someone without any other means of support might not have to “work every hour god sends.”

    I’ll let you be my levy

    Let’s say you are an international student looking to study an integrated (4-5 year) Masters’ course in biomedical engineering at the University of Leicester. You’d be charged £25,100 a year (plus £6,275 if you do a year overseas, or £3,765 if you do a year in industry). As you are resident outside of the UK, you’d pay a deposit of £3,000 up front to secure your place. These figures will vary vastly depending on your choice of course and provider, but that gives you an idea of a ballpark figure.

    If you secured your place via an agent, you may have paid a fee up front to them. Your chosen university would also pay a fee to the agent for each successful application – these vary hugely, but let’s say it is 20 per cent of your first year of fees. In some cases, your university would also pay a direct fee to the agent, over and above their percentage of fee income. Combined, these can get pretty intense – far into the millions for providers that use agents, with some pushing £30m

    If you don’t quite meet some of the academic or English language requirements for your course, you may be accepted onto an international foundation year – often offered by another provider, either on behalf of your university or as a stand alone course. There will be fees for this too.

    Of course, before you are accepted onto your course, you’ll need a Tier 4 Student Visa. For all but a handful of countries, you’ll need evidence (the example given by the Foreign Office is a bank statement) that you currently have enough money to cover your fees for your first year plus nine months of living costs. Your visa will cost £524, plus you need to pay a healthcare surcharge (each year) of £776 each year.

    Let’s imagine for a moment that you never made a name for yourself

    If you are looking to design a levy, the first decision that you make will be what constitutes international fee income. Should it be the sticker price – as promoted to students? Should it, for example, include the fees an institution pays to an international agent? Should it include fees that the student pays to another institution for a co-branded international foundation year? Should you factor in that students are already paying a levy of sorts to cover the cost of issuing a visa or of providing access to the NHS? Should it include accommodation fees (or additional course fees) when these are paid directly to the provider?

    Or should a provider pay a proportion of everything it declares as (and auditors agree that is) international student fee income? At what point – when the fee is paid, when the course starts, when it is declared? And is there not a case to look at a levy on agents fees – there is big money to be made by agents, and unlike with providers no counter arguments about the student experience?

    The modelling I’ve done so far is deliberately simplistic – 6 per cent (or whatever is decided on) of declared fee income in the most recent HESA Finance Data. That’s a valid answer, but it is limited – it is not the same effect as you would get if a university had to pay 6 per cent of every international student’s fee at one of the points above. The Home Office modelling noted that in some cases fees themselves may rise to cover the levy, which may have a knock on effect on recruitment – and that in other cases providers themselves would swallow the cost.

    If you think about it like that – and also bear in mind the Public First angle on the types of students more likely to be dissuaded by higher fees – it is difficult not to see the regressive nature of the levy: well-off providers, who recruit well-heeled middle class students from countries where salaries are high, will pay more but will be able to pass the costs on to students. Providers newer to international recruitment, at the price sensitive end of the market, will lose out either way, and will have to work out whether the recruitment drop of a 6 per cent fee hike is worth more than 6 per cent of their current income.

    Such a funny thing for me to try to explain

    What if we don’t take the accountant’s way out? What if we calculate a levy based on what individual students actually pay?

    As noted above we don’t know – either generally or individually – what international students pay as fees. We also don’t really know how many students are currently paying them – HESA student data turns up after a quite considerable lag, and not all undergraduates (and no postgraduates!) show up in UCAS data.

    The closest we get to international student numbers, at all levels, in-year has historically been OfS’ HESES collection (which it uses to allocate OfS grant funding). I say historically because, from 2025-26 the information on domicile (previously used “for planning purposes”) will no longer be collected.

    If you want a levy based on what students actually pay, you need a new data collection covering the students involved and how much they have paid that year (perhaps separated out into qualifying and non-qualifying payments – with all of the early iteration problems that such things bring. Data Futures may eventually get there, but not for a good few years yet.

    Designing a new data collection is not for the faint of heart – we scrapped an entire section of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act (the bit dealing with income from overseas) primarily because it is a million times easier to torturously audit other data than to collect something new. It would be expensive, both centrally and for individual providers – and it would be commercially sensitive (not all international students pay the same fee for the same course at the same university).

    Know we’re jumping the gun

    At every point in this article, I’ve tried to get across just how broad brush the current details of this policy are. As my colleague Michael notes elsewhere, there is not even clarity that these two halves of an announcement are a part of the same policy, or that it is possible to irrevocably link an income stream with an outgoing like this in the public accounts.

    It is a political announcement, and as such leaping straight to implementation slightly misses the point – like with the “scrapping” of the “fifty per cent participation target” it might well be that how it lands is more important than how it works.

    But as I’ve also tried to show, implementation has no time for political expediency. Real decisions need to be taken, and the current configuration of the sector, of the application cycle, and of the various data collections need to be taken into account. And there’s a need to consider whether the behavioural changes you are trying to make would undermine the funding flows that you are intending will do so – the more parts to a policy the more unintended consequences there could be.

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  • Texas Teachers, Parents Fear STAAR Overhaul Doesn’t Do Enough – The 74

    Texas Teachers, Parents Fear STAAR Overhaul Doesn’t Do Enough – The 74


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    Texas public school administrators, parents and education experts worry that a new law to replace the state’s standardized test could potentially increase student stress and the amount of time they spend taking tests, instead of reducing it.

    The new law comes amid criticism that the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness, or STAAR, creates too much stress for students and devotes too much instructional time to the test. The updated system aims to ease the pressure of a single exam by replacing STAAR with three shorter tests, which will be administered at the beginning, middle and end of the year. It will also ban practice tests, which Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath has said can take up weeks of instruction time and aren’t proven to help students do better on the standardized test. But some parents and teachers worry the changes won’t go far enough and that three tests will triple the pressure.

    The law also calls for the TEA to study how to reduce the weight testing carries on the state’s annual school accountability ratings — which STAAR critics say is one reason why the test is so stressful and absorbs so much learning time — and create a way for the results of the three new tests to be factored into the ratings.

    That report is not due until the 2029-30 school year, and the TEA is not required to implement those findings. Some worry the new law will mean schools’ ratings will continue to heavily depend on the results from the end-of-year test, while requiring students to start taking three exams. In other words: same pressure, more testing.

    Cementing ‘what school districts are already doing’

    The Texas Legislature passed House Bill 8 during the second overtime lawmaking session this year to scrap the STAAR test.

    Many of the reforms are meant to better monitor students’ academic growth throughout the school year.

    For the early and mid-year exams, schools will be able to choose from a menu of nationally recognized assessments approved by the TEA. The agency will create the third test. Under the law, the three new tests will use percentile ranks comparing students to their peers in Texas; the third will also assess a student’s grasp of the curriculum.

    In addition, scores will be required to be released about two days after students take the exam, so teachers can better tailor their lessons to student needs.

    State Sen. Paul Bettencourt, R-Houston, one of the architects behind the push to revamp the state’s standardized test, said he would like the first two tests to “become part of learning” so they can help students prepare for the end-of-year exam.

    But despite the changes, the new testing system will likely resemble the current one when it launches in the 2027-28 school year, education policy experts say.

    “It’s gonna take a couple of years before parents realize, to be honest, that you know, did they actually eliminate STAAR?” said Bob Popinski with Raise Your Hand Texas, an education advocacy nonprofit.

    Since many schools already conduct multiple exams throughout the year, the law will “basically codify what school districts are already doing,” Popinski said.

    Lawmakers instructed TEA to develop a way to measure student progress based on the results from the three tests. But that metric won’t be ready when the new testing system launches in the 2027-28 school year. That means results from the standardized tests, and their weight in the state’s school accountability ratings system, will remain similar to what they are now.

    Every Texas school district and campus currently receives an A-F rating based on graduation benchmarks and how students perform on state tests, their improvement in those areas, and how well they educate disadvantaged students. The best score out of the first two categories accounts for most of their overall rating. The rest is based on their score in the last category.

    The accountability ratings are high stakes for school districts, which can face state sanctions for failing grades — from being forced to close school campuses to the ousting of their democratically elected school boards.

    Supporters of the state’s accountability system say it is vital to assess whether schools are doing a good job at educating Texas children.

    “The last test is part of the accountability rating, and that’s not going to change,” Bettencourt said.

    Critics say the current ratings system fails to take into account a lot of the work schools are doing to help children succeed outside of preparing them for standardized tests.

    “Our school districts are doing a lot of interesting, great things out there for our kids,” Popinski said. “Academics and extracurricular activities and co-curricular activities, and those just aren’t being incorporated into the accountability report at all.”

    In response to calls to evaluate student success beyond testing, HB 8 also instructs the TEA to track student participation in pre-K, extracurriculars and workforce training in middle schools. But none of those metrics will be factored into schools’ ratings.

    “There is some other interest in looking at other factors for accountability ratings, but it’s not mandated. It’s just going to be reviewed and surveyed,” Bettencourt said.

    Student stress worries

    Even though many schools already conduct testing throughout the year, Popinski said the new system created by HB 8 could potentially boost test-related stress among students.

    State Rep. Brad Buckley, R-Salado, who sponsored the testing overhaul in the Texas House, wrote in a statement that “TEA will determine testing protocols through their normal process.” This means it will be up to TEA to decide whether to keep or change the rules that it currently uses for the STAAR test. Those include that schools dedicate three to four hours to the exam and that administrators create seating charts, spread out desks and manage restroom breaks.

    School administrators said the worst-case scenario would be if all three of the new tests had to follow lockdown protocols like the ones that currently come with STAAR. Holly Ferguson, superintendent of Prosper ISD, said the high-pressure environment associated with the state’s standardized test makes some of her students ill.

    “It shouldn’t be that we have kids sick and anxiety is going through the roof because they know the next test is coming,” Ferguson said.

    The TEA did not respond to a request for comment.

    HB 8 also seeks to limit the time teachers spend preparing students for state assessments, partly by banning benchmark tests for 3-8 grades. Bettencourt told the Tribune the new system is expected to save 22.5 instructional hours per student.

    Buckley said the new law “will reduce the overall number of tests a student takes as well as the time they spend on state assessments throughout the school year, dramatically relieving the pressure and stress caused by over-testing.”

    But some critics worry that any time saved by banning practice tests will be lost by testing three times a year. In 2022, Florida changed its testing system from a single exam to three tests at the beginning, middle and end of the year. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said the new system would reduce test time by 75%, but the number of minutes students spent taking exams almost doubled the year the new system went into effect.

    Popinski added that much of the stress the test induces comes from the heavy weight the end-of-year assessment holds on a school’s accountability rating. The pressure to perform that the current system places on school district administrators transfers to teachers and students, critics have said.

    “The pressures are going to be almost exactly the same,” Popinski said.

    What parents, educators want for the new test

    Retired Fort Worth teacher Jim Ekrut said he worries about the ban on practice tests, because in his experience, test preparations helped reduce his students’ anxiety.

    Ekrut said teachers’ experience assessing students is one reason why educators should be involved in creating the new end-of-year exam.

    “The better decisions are going to be made with input from people right on that firing line,” Ekrut said.

    HB 8 requires that a committee of educators appointed by the commissioner reviews the new test that TEA will create. Some, like Ferguson and David Vinson, former superintendent of Wylie ISD who started at Conroe this week, said they hope the menu of possible assessments districts can pick for the first two tests includes a national program they already use called Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP.

    The Prosper and Wylie districts are some that administer MAP exams at the beginning, middle and end of the year. More than 4,500 school districts nationwide use these online tests, which change the difficulty of the questions as students log their answers to better assess their skill level and growth. A 2024 study conducted by the organization that runs MAP found that the test is a strong indicator of how students perform on the end-of-year standardized test.

    Criteria-based tests like STAAR measure a student’s grasp on grade-level skills, whereas norm-based exams like MAP measure a student’s growth over the course of instruction. Vinson described this program as a “checkup,” while STAAR is an “autopsy.”

    Rachel Spires, whose children take MAP tests at Sunnyvale ISD, said MAP testing doesn’t put as much pressure on students as STAAR does.

    Spires said her children’s schedules are rearranged for the month of April, when Sunnyvale administers the STAAR test, and parents are barred from coming to campus for lunch. MAP tests, on the other hand, typically take less time to complete, and the school has fewer rules for how they are administered.

    “When the MAP tests come around, they don’t do the modified schedules, and they don’t do the review packets and prep testing or anything like that,” Spires said. “It’s just like, ‘Okay, tomorrow you’re gonna do a MAP test,’ and it’s over in like an hour.”

    For Ferguson, the Prosper ISD superintendent, a relaxed environment around testing is key to achieving the new law’s goal of reducing student stress.

    “If it’s just another day at school, I’m all in,” Ferguson said. “But if we lock it down, and we create a very compliance-driven system that’s very archaic and anxiety- and worry-inducing to the point that it starts having potential harmful effects on our kids … our teachers and our parents, I’m not okay with that.”

    This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2025/09/24/texas-staar-replacement-map-testing/. The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.


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  • Championing Teachers in High-Conflict Contexts

    Championing Teachers in High-Conflict Contexts

    Myssan Al Laysy Stouhi

    For Myssan Al Laysy Stouhi, the path to a Ph.D. has been anything but conventional. Born and raised in Lebanon, she has witnessed firsthand the challenges that educators face when teaching becomes an act of resilience rather than routine. Now, as she prepares to graduate this December from Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s Composition and Applied Linguistics program, Stouhi is transforming her lived experience into groundbreaking research that amplifies the voices of teachers working in crisis contexts.

    “I always had this interest because, I mean, I’m Lebanese at the end of the day,” Stouhi reflects. “Since I was born, I always lived and worked in a context, in a high conflict context. So, I wanted to do research that would bring more visibility and attention to what things are like for a teacher in Lebanon.”

    Stouhi’s academic journey began at the American University of Beirut, where she earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in linguistics. After teaching there for several years, she moved to the United Arab Emirates in 2014, spending a decade as a faculty member at the University of Sharjah in Dubai. It was during this time that she began envisioning a doctoral program that would allow her to continue working while pursuing advanced research.

    “I needed a Ph.D. program that was low residency,” she explains. “I spoke to professors at IUP and found scholars there who work on teacher identity, teacher emotions, teacher psychology, and teaching in crisis contexts, which was always my interest.”

    Her timing proved prescient. Between October 2019 and October 2023, Lebanon experienced what Stouhi describes as “probably the darkest period of time that Lebanon witnessed in its modern history.” The country endured a revolution against government corruption, a currency collapse that wiped out 90% of the Lebanese pound’s value, COVID-19 lockdowns, the devastating Beirut port explosion, war threats, and even earthquakes.

    “It was unbelievably bad,” she recalls.

    These concerns became the foundation for her dissertation: “English as an Additional Language (EAL) Teachers Navigate Lebanese Educational System as a Crisis Context: Challenges and Resources.” Through interviews, focus group discussions, autoethnographies, and field artifacts, she spoke with nine teachers to understand how they navigated professional and personal challenges during this unprecedented period.

    “Students’ classes were suspended in Lebanon before the quarantine, because of the revolution,” she notes. “The students weren’t going regularly to school anyway. I wanted to see what their classrooms were like, what resources they were able to draw on, what resources were absent.”

    Her research philosophy extends beyond documenting hardship.

    “Lebanon is not the only crisis context on earth,” she emphasizes. “We live in a globe of crises. Every country is subject to crises, whether it’s a natural disaster, political thing, financial thing. My ultimate goal: what can the international academic community learn from Lebanese teachers about navigating teaching in a very high-conflict context?”

    Dr. Gloria Park, her dissertation advisor, recognizes Stouhi’s unique contribution to the field.

    “Myssan is one of the most resilient and strong doctoral students I have worked with in the past 17 years at Indiana University of Pennsylvania,” Park states. “Yes, the fact that she is in a Ph.D. program in the U.S. is a form of cultural and symbolic capital, yet her continuous teaching while matriculating in a Ph.D. program to send money to her family in Lebanon as well as help the needy teachers who teach in crisis context is a testament of her commitment and desire to give back to her home country.”

    Stouhi’s non-traditional path through graduate school reflects broader changes in higher education. She participated in IUP’s summers-only high residency program, taking intensive coursework during eight-week summer sessions while maintaining her full-time teaching position. This model allowed her to balance family obligations with academic aspirations — a juggling act she began contemplating as early as 2003.

    Looking ahead, Stouhi plans to join the academic job market while pursuing activist work supporting teachers in underrepresented contexts. She’s already connected with colleagues developing capacity-building programs for Middle Eastern educators and is considering additional training in AI skills and educational leadership.

    Her message to prospective graduate students reflects the pragmatic optimism that has carried her through years of balancing crisis and opportunity. “If your dream is to get a Ph.D., then start a Ph.D. and see what it’s like, and then you can decide if this is for you or not. We make things a lot harder in our heads.”

    As Stouhi prepares to defend her dissertation, she remains connected to her Lebanese roots, visiting family annually and maintaining her commitment to educational justice. Through her research, she is working to ensure that the voices of Lebanese teachers — and by extension, educators facing crises globally — will not be forgotten but celebrated as examples of professional courage in the face of unprecedented challenges. 

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  • ANNE D’ALLEVA | The EDU Ledger

    ANNE D’ALLEVA | The EDU Ledger

    Anne D’Alleva has been named president of Binghamton University. D’Alleva is currently the provost and executive vice president for academic affairs at the University of Connecticut.

    D’Alleva has led UConn’s academic enterprise, including strategic planning, budgetary management, faculty development and curriculum innovation across the university’s 14 schools and colleges. She leads initiatives that support student success, faculty excellence and institutional impact.

    D’Alleva is the first woman to serve as provost in UConn’s history and previously served as dean of the School of Fine Arts since 2015 and first joined the UConn faculty as a joint appointment to Art History and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies in 1999. D’Alleva holds a bachelor’s degree in art histo- ry from Harvard University, and her master’s and Ph.D. in art history from Columbia University with a graduate certificate in feminist theory.

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  • How We Outperformed National Reading Scores – And Kept Students at Grade Level – The 74

    How We Outperformed National Reading Scores – And Kept Students at Grade Level – The 74


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    As reading scores remain a top concern for schools nationwide, many districts are experimenting with ability-based grouping in the early grades. The idea is to group students in multiple grade levels by their current reading level — not their grade level. A classroom could have seven kindergartners, 10 first graders, and three second graders grouped together for reading because they all read at the same level.

    While this may work for some schools, in our district, Rockwood School District in Missouri, we’ve chosen a different path. We keep students together in their class during whole-class instruction — regardless of ability level — and provide support or enrichment by creating flexible groups based on instructional needs within their grade level.

    We’re building skilled, confident readers not by separating them, but by growing them together.

    Children, like adults, learn and grow in diverse groups. In a Rockwood classroom, every student contributes to the shared learning environment — and every student benefits from being part of it.

    Our approach starts with whole-class instruction. All students, including English multilingual learners and those working toward grade-level benchmarks, participate in daily, grade-level phonics and comprehension lessons. We believe these shared experiences are foundational — not just for building literacy, but for fostering community and academic confidence.

    After our explicit, whole-group lessons, students move into flexible, needs-based small groups informed by real-time data and observations. Some students receive reteaching, while others take on enrichment activities. During these blocks, differentiation is fluid: A student may need decoding help one day and vocabulary enrichment the next. No one is locked into a static tier. Every day is a new opportunity.

    Students also engage in daily independent and partner reading. In addition, reading specialists provide targeted, research-based interventions for striving readers who need additional instruction.

    We build movement into our instruction, as well — not as a brain break, but as a learning tool. We use gestures for phonemes, tapping for spelling and jumping to count syllables. These are “brain boosts,” helping young learners stay focused and engaged.

    We challenge all students, regardless of skill level. During phonics and word work, advanced readers work with more complex texts and tasks. Emerging readers receive the time and scaffolded support they need — such as visual cues and pre-teaching or exposing students to a concept or skill before it’s formally taught during a whole-class lesson. That can help them fully participate in every class. A student might not yet be able to decode or encode every word, but they are exposed to the grade-level standards and are challenged to meet the high expectations we have for all students.

    During shared and interactive reading lessons, all students are able to practice fluency and build their comprehension skills and vocabulary knowledge. Through these shared experiences, every child experiences success.

    There’s a common misconception that mixed-ability classrooms hold back high achievers or overwhelm striving readers. But in practice, engagement depends more on how we teach rather than who is in the room. With well-paced, multimodal lessons grounded in grade-level content, every learner finds an entry point.

    You’ll see joy, movement, and mutual respect in our classrooms — because when we treat students as capable, they rise. And when we give them the right tools, not labels, they use them.

    While ability grouping may seem like a practical solution, research suggests it can have a lasting downside. A Northwestern University study of nearly 12,000 students found that those placed in the lowest kindergarten reading groups rarely caught up to their peers. For example, when you group a third grader with first graders, when does the older child get caught up? Even if he learns and progresses with his ability group, he’s still two grade levels behind his third-grade peers.

    This study echoes what researchers refer to as the Matthew Effect in reading: The rich get richer, and the poor get poorer. Lower-track students are exposed to less complex vocabulary and fewer comprehension strategies. Once placed on that path, it’s hard to catch up. Once a student is assigned a label, it’s difficult to change it — for both the student and educators.

    In Rockwood, we’re confident in what we’re doing. We have effective, evidence-based curricula for Tier I phonics and comprehension, and every student receives the same whole-class instruction as every other student in their grade. Then, students receive intervention or enrichment as needed.

    At the end of the 2024–25 school year, our data affirmed what we see every day. Our kindergarteners outperformed national proficiency averages in every skill group — in some cases by more than 17 percentage points, according to our Reading Horizons data. Our first and second graders outpaced national averages across nearly every domain. We don’t claim to have solved the literacy crisis — or know that our model will work for every district, school, classroom or student — but we’re building readers before gaps emerge.

    We’ve learned that when every student receives strong Tier I instruction, no one gets left behind. The key isn’t separating kids by ability. It’s designing instruction that’s universally strong and strategically supported.

    We recognize that every community faces distinct challenges. If you’re a district leader weighing the trade-offs of ability grouping, consider this: When you pull students out of the room during critical learning moments, the rich vocabulary, the shared texts and the academic conversation, you are not closing the learning gap, but creating a bigger one. Those critical moments build more than skills; they build readers.

    In Rockwood, our data confirms what we see every day: students growing not only in skills, but also in confidence, stamina and joy. We’re proving that inclusive, grade-level-first instruction can work — and work well — for all learners.


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  • Small District to Pay $7.5 Million to Settle Lawsuit Over Sexual Abuse Decades Ago – The 74

    Small District to Pay $7.5 Million to Settle Lawsuit Over Sexual Abuse Decades Ago – The 74


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    On the eve of what was expected to be a long and gut-wrenching trial, a small school district in Santa Barbara County has settled a sexual abuse lawsuit for $7.5 million with two brothers, now 65 and 68 years old, who claimed a long-dead principal molested them in the 1970s.  

    The brothers had sought $35 million for the harm they said they suffered, an attorney for the youngest brother said.

    The settlement equals about 40% of the 350-student district’s 2025-26 budget, although the district did not disclose the terms and timetable for the payment. The district’s superintendent acknowledged in a statement that there would be an impact on the budget. 

    Board members of the Montecito Union School District announced the settlement over the weekend. The trial was scheduled to start Monday.

    The case was brought under a 2019 state law, Assembly Bill 218, that removed a statute of limitations for filing claims that employees of public agencies, including school districts and city and county governments, sexually abused children placed in their care.

    Estimates suggest settlements and jury awards could cost California school districts as much as $3 billion by one projection, and possibly a lot more. Los Angeles County alone has agreed to pay $4 billion to settle abuse claims with more pending, mostly involving plaintiffs who were once in foster care.

    With many larger lawsuits with multiple victims yet to be settled or go to trial, the financial impacts are hard to predict. Small districts are worried that multimillion-dollar verdicts could devastate budgets, if not lead to insolvency. Insurance costs, meanwhile, have soared by more than 200% in five years, according to a survey of districts.

    In the Montecito case, the brothers were seeking $35 million in damages combined, John Richards, a lawyer representing one of them, said outside of court Monday.

    Montecito is not alone in facing decades-old accusations. The San Francisco Unified School District is embroiled in an ongoing suit involving a teacher who allegedly molested a student in the mid-1960s, records show.

    School boards association helps with legal fees

    The Montecito case drew the attention of the California School Boards Association, which gave the district a $50,000 grant to help with legal costs, said spokesman Troy Flint.

    Flint said Montecito Union Superintendent Anthony Ranii has “been a staunch advocate for AB 218 reform because he understands how this well-intentioned law carries such significant unintended consequences that compromise the educational experience of current and future students.”

    Montecito Union “is just one example of what potentially awaits school districts and county offices of education statewide,” Flint added.

    The settlement came just weeks after state Assembly members let a measure that would have restored a statute of limitations to such cases, Senate Bill 577, go without a vote in the final days of the legislative session. Its sponsor, Sen. John Laird, D-Santa Cruz, said he would bring it back next year.

    At a brief hearing Monday, Santa Barbara County Superior Court Judge Thomas P. Anderle called the Montecito matter “a case of real consequence.” He had scheduled 17 days for trial, court records show. The district’s lawyers did not attend the hearing.

    The brothers’ lawsuit was filed in 2022 and alleged that Montecito Union’s former superintendent and principal, Stanford Kerr, molested them in the early 1970s, including raping one of them. Kerr died in 2013 at 89. He never faced criminal charges.

    A third plaintiff who also claimed Kerr abused him settled earlier with the district for $1 million. He had described a full range of abuse covering many types of conduct, which included rape, court filings state.

    Just recompense for years of suffering

    The brothers, identified in court documents as John Doe 1 and John Doe 2, pushed forward, Richards said, hoping to be compensated for years of agony. The younger of the two, Richards said, has suffered a lifetime of substance abuse, which is blamed on Kerr’s assaults. 

    “The money is nice,” Richards said, but the younger brother also seeks “social acknowledgment that what happened to (him) was terrible. He has a long way to go,” in recovering.

    The district admitted no liability in making the settlement.

    Montecito Union has no insurance coverage going back to the period the brothers said the abuse occurred — 1972 to 1978, Ranii said in a statement.

    “We were prepared to mount a vigorous defense,” he said. But the possibility of a jury awarding far more than the district could afford pushed the idea of a settlement after years of pretrial maneuvering.

    The superintendent’s statement did not directly address the brothers’ claims. It also did not mention Kerr.

    “We are deeply mindful of the enduring pain caused by sexual abuse and feel for any person who has experienced such abuse,” Ranii said in the statement.

    A large award in the event of a trial would have “diminished our ability to serve students now and well into the future,” Ranii said. “Continued litigation created exceptional financial vulnerability. Settling now allows us to stabilize operations and remain focused on today’s students.”

    Montecito is an unincorporated oceanfront community just south of Santa Barbara in the shadows of the Santa Ynez Mountains. Its residents include Oprah Winfrey and Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. The district is one of the state’s richest, with more than $40,000 per student in funding due to tax receipts from high-value properties. 

    The district will manage the costs through a hiring freeze, staff reductions “when natural attrition occurs,” and redirecting “funds previously designated for capital repair,” Ranii said. The settlement allows the district to avoid layoffs, he said.

    The brothers’ case was built around the testimony they would have given about Kerr’s abuses, Richards said. There was no physical evidence. At one point, a district employee went to the brothers’ home and forced their parents to sign a document requiring them to make sure the boys came right home after school and avoided Kerr, according to court filings.

    Richards said the district did not produce such a document in discovery. It had no records that the boys ever attended the school, he said, although their photos appear in yearbooks. The district also had no records that Kerr ever faced accusations of abuse or sexual misconduct.

    Two school board members from Kerr’s time as superintendent said in depositions taken for the brothers’ suit that they would have taken action had they known he was abusing students, Richards said. But with the case settled, the elderly former members won’t be called to testify.

    All that remains is a final hearing that the judge scheduled for Nov. 19 to make sure the payment has been received “and that the check’s been cashed,” he said.

    Editor-at-Large John Festerwald contributed to this story.

    This story was originally published by EdSource. Sign up for their daily newsletter.


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  • ICE Nabs Iowa School Leader – The 74

    ICE Nabs Iowa School Leader – The 74

    School (in)Security is our biweekly briefing on the latest school safety news, vetted by Mark Keierleber. Subscribe here.

    The top campus security story this week is the resignation of Iowa’s largest school district superintendent, who was detained by federal immigration authorities on allegations he was living and working in the U.S. without authorization. 

    In a “targeted enforcement operation” a week ago, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Ian Roberts, a 54-year-old native of Guyana, who has led Des Moines Public Schools since 2023.

    The fast-moving chain of events raises questions about why ICE agents specifically sought the arrest of the public official and the city’s first Black schools superintendent, whom federal officials said had a previously unreported final order of removal issued by an immigration judge on May 29. Yesterday, he was accused of federal firearm charges for possessing a gun at the time of his arrest.

    The Trump administration has already tied Roberts’ detainment to the president’s broader crackdown on affirmative action. The Justice Department announced Tuesday it would investigate Des Moines Public Schools to determine if it engaged in race-based hiring. 

    In 2021, the district’s former human resources manager said that out of Des Moines Public Schools’ 4,000 staff members, some 400 were Black. His comments were made as the district reflected on hiring Iowa’s first Black teacher 75 years earlier.

    The unraveling of Roberts’ career is also a story of purported deception. The school board, whose vetting practices have come under scrutiny, released a letter this week saying it is “also a victim,” after Roberts was accused of falsifying records about his immigration status and academic credentials.

    Roberts, an Olympic runner for his native Guyana who came to the U.S. in 1999 on a student visa, previously served in leadership roles at school districts in Pennsylvania and Missouri and at a major charter school network. 

    Get up to speed with this step-by-step explainer by the Des Moines Register.

    In the news

    A TikTok post led to the arrest of a Kennewick, Washington, 14-year-old who officials say had guns, a color-coded map of his high school and a manifesto outlining plans to carry out a campus shooting. | Tri-City Herald

    In California, authorities say an anonymous tip thwarted a potential school shooting after a student posted “detailed threats” on social media including a “mapped-out plan.” | NBC News
    The Education Department announced it would withhold more than $65 million in federal grants to the New York City, Chicago and Fairfax, Virginia, school districts for upholding equity policies designed to support transgender and Black youth. | The New York Times

    Campus speech at the forefront: More than 350 complaints have been submitted to the Texas education department against public school employees accused of publishing social media posts that praised the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. | Fort Worth Report

    • The Los Angeles Unified School District faces accusations that its social media policy, which allows educators to ban parents from campus for making threatening or racist online comments about school officials, violates the First Amendment. | LAist
    • ‘Truly scandalous’: The Trump administration engaged in the “unconstitutional suppression of free speech” when federal immigration enforcement officials arrested and sought to deport international college students for their pro-Palestinian activism. | The Washington Post
    • A new PEN America report warns of a “disturbing normalization of censorship” in public schools where book bans have risen sharply in the last few years. The 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess topped the list. | NPR 
    • Lawrence, Kansas, school officials were accused of censoring high school journalists and intimidating their adviser in violation of state law after current and former students filed a federal lawsuit alleging the district’s use of a digital student surveillance tool violated their privacy and press freedom rights. | Student Press Law Center
      • The student activity monitoring tool Gaggle, which flags keywords like “kill” and “bomb,” “has helped our staff intervene and save lives,” the Lawrence district says. But students say the system subjected them to false allegations. | The Washington Post
      • The 74 throwback: Meet the gatekeepers of students’ private lives. | The 74

    ‘Places of care, not chaos’: California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law new rules that require federal immigration enforcement officers to show a warrant or court order before entering a school campus or questioning students. | EdSource

    Minnesota’s red flag gun law, which allows authorities to confiscate firearms from people with violent plans, has been used to prevent school shootings but its use is inconsistent, an investigation found. | The Minnesota Star Tribune

    A middle school boy from New York was arrested on allegations of catfishing classmates by impersonating a girl online, convincing male classmates to send him sexually revealing photographs and extorting them for cash or gift cards. | The New York Times

    Sign-up for the School (in)Security newsletter.

    Get the most critical news and information about students’ rights, safety and well-being delivered straight to your inbox.

    The Trump administration plans to overhaul a student loan forgiveness program for employees at nonprofits that officials claim are engaged in “illegal activities” — a justification that could be used to target organizations that serve immigrants and transgender youth. | The Associated Press

    A Michigan school district, where four elementary school girls said they were groped by a classmate on the playground, is accused of waiting eight days to report the incident to the police. | Lansing State Journal

    ICYMI @The74

    As the LGBTQ Youth Population Doubles, Number of Bills Targeting Them Triples

    Goblins AI Math Tutoring App Clones Your Teacher’s Looks and Voice

    From Screen Time to ‘Green Time’: Going Outside to Support Student Well-Being

    Emotional Support

    The 74 will meet for a company summit in Minneapolis next week. Matilda wasn’t invited, but she couldn’t care less.


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  • Weekend Reading: How will universities respond to the 6 per cent international student levy?  

    Weekend Reading: How will universities respond to the 6 per cent international student levy?  

    Author:
    Vincenzo Raimo

    Published:

    This guest blog was kindly authored by Vincenzo Raimo, an independent international higher education consultant 

    The UK government’s proposed 6 per cent levy on international tuition fees has added yet another layer of complexity to the already fragile international student recruitment landscape. The levy is intended to fund the introduction of targeted maintenance grants for home students, but for universities it represents an additional cost that could reshape recruitment strategies and, in some cases, make international activity unviable. 

    Higher education providers will not all respond in the same way. Their choices will be shaped by their position in the market, their pricing power, and their cost of acquisition (CoA) – the real cost of recruiting through to enrolment of each international student. 

    In a previous blog I set out five institutional archetypes in international student recruitment: Prestige Players, Volume Hunters, Strategists, Opportunists, and Outsourcers. These archetypes can help us think through the likely responses to the levy, and where the risks and opportunities lie. 

    Levy Responses: From Resilience to Retreat 

    • Pass-throughs (High Brand, Low CoA): These are the strong Prestige Player institutions with the brand power to raise fees by 6 per cent (or more) without losing applicants. For them, the levy will likely be passed straight on to students. In fact, some may look back and wonder why they had not already increased fees earlier. The impact on recruitment will be minimal. 
    • Squeezed Prestige (High Brand, High CoA): Some universities occupy a less comfortable position. They may have strong brands, but their recruitment costs are high often due to heavy scholarship spending and dependence on expensive marketing and recruitment strategies. They can pass on some of the levy, but margins will erode. Expect this group to look carefully at their agent portfolios, renegotiate commission deals, and cut back on scholarships. Opportunists often sit here, swinging between good years and bad. 
    • Absorbers (Low Brand, Low CoA): A number of institutions will choose to absorb the levy, keeping international fees flat to remain competitive. Margins will tighten, but recruitment volumes are likely to remain stable. These are often Strategists or Outsourcers, who have already kept their CoA under control through efficiency or partnerships. They will see absorbing the levy as a necessary cost of staying in the game. 
    • Exits (Low Brand, High CoA): For some, the levy may be the final straw. Institutions already dependent on discounting and agent commissions who charge low international fees to chase volume, may no longer see international recruitment as viable. Volume Hunters are the most exposed here. Their models are built on fragile margins, and the levy risks pushing them into unsustainable territory. For some, exit will not mean giving up on international students altogether. But it may mean dramatically scaling back, consolidating markets, and retreating from high-risk geographies. 

    Alternative Paths 

    Alongside these responses, two further groups are worth highlighting. 

    • Innovators: Some universities will take the levy as a trigger to rethink their model entirely. Expect more to explore transnational education, offshore hubs, or pathway partnerships as a way of diversifying income and reducing exposure to UK-based fee inflation. Innovation may prove the most sustainable long-term response, if vice-chancellors and governing bodies have the stomach for it. 
    • Niche/Selective Recruiters: For specialist institutions – arts, theology, agriculture, or mission-driven providers – international student recruitment has never been about volume. For them, the levy is simply the cost of doing business. They will continue to recruit selectively, valuing diversity and global presence more than surplus. 

    What Does This Mean for the Sector? 

    The archetype framework helps us see that there is no single sector response. Institutions will react in line with their pricing power, cost base, and strategic orientation. Prestige Players may pass through the levy with little concern. Absorbers will hold their nerve and tighten margins. Volume Hunters, by contrast, risk being forced out of the game altogether. 

    For these institutions, scaling back international recruitment will not just be a strategic shift but a financial shock. The loss of international fee income raises an uncomfortable question of how they will fill the gap – whether by yet more cost cutting, chasing riskier sources of income, or considering more fundamental changes to their operating models.   

    The levy therefore brings the deeper issue into sharp focus: the sustainability of international student recruitment. Chasing volume is no longer enough. Institutions must use this moment to confront the costs of recruiting and support these students, rethink pricing, and reconsider the value they offer. Those that do so will be far better placed to build resilient, sustainable futures in international education.  

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  • Newsom vows to pull state funding from California colleges that sign Trump’s compact

    Newsom vows to pull state funding from California colleges that sign Trump’s compact

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    Dive Brief:

    • California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday threatened to pull state funding from colleges that signed a proposed compact from the Trump administration seeking to impose sweeping policy changes in return for priority in research funding. 
    • “If any California university signs this radical agreement, they’ll lose billions in state funding,” Newsom said in a statement. “California will not bankroll schools that sell out their students, professors, researchers, and surrender academic freedom.”
    • First reported by the Wall Street Journal, federal officials offered the compact to the University of Southern California and eight other high-profile research universities this week.

    Dive Insight:

     Since taking office, President Donald Trump and his administration have waged a legal and financial campaign against colleges in an effort to transform them ideologically. It comes after Trump on the campaign trail described colleges as “dominated by Marxist maniacs and lunatics” and full of academics “obsessed with indoctrinating America’s youth.” 

    With the compact, the administration has gone from using mainly sticks — typically in the form of civil rights investigations and canceled research grants — to using carrots as a means of pushing institutions to make reforms.

    The Trump administration offered to prioritize colleges for research grants and other funding if they agree to give the government unprecedented control over internal institutional decisions and governance. 

    That includes:

    • Taking a position of institutional neutrality on events that don’t directly impact the college.
    • Committing not to consider race, gender, religion and other characteristics “explicitly or implicitly” in admissions. (The compact would grant exceptions for religious and single-sex institutions to limit admissions based on religious belief and gender, respectively.)
    • Conducting broad, public assessments of the viewpoints of employees and students.
    • Changing governance structures and potentially dissolving or taking over departments that “purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.”
    • Adopting policies that recognize “academic freedom is not absolute” and prevent “discriminatory, threatening, harassing, or other behaviors that abridge the rights of other members of the university community.”
    • Capping international undergraduate enrollment at 15% of the broader student body while screening out “students who demonstrate hostility to the United States, its allies, or its values.”
    • Freezing tuition for five years.
    • Requiring applicants to take standardized tests such as the SAT.
    • Committing to using “lawful force” and “swift, serious, and consistent sanctions” to handle protests that “delay or disrupt class instruction or disrupt libraries or other traditional study locations.”

    The compact would also require colleges with endowments worth $2 million or more per student to waive tuition for students studying hard sciences, though the memo didn’t define the field. 

    Along with USC, eight other colleges received the administration’s memo detailing the compact: the University of Arizona, Brown University, Dartmouth College, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Texas, Vanderbilt University and the University of Virginia.

    The compact has drawn alarm and stern rebukes throughout the higher education world. 

    “College and university presidents cannot bargain with the essential freedom of colleges and universities to determine, on academic grounds, whom to admit and what is taught, how, and by whom,” the American Association of Colleges and Universities said in a statement Friday.

    Denise Forte, president and CEO of the policy analysis and advocacy organization EdTrust, described the compact in a statement as an “existential threat to all institutions of higher learning and the latest example of the federal government overexerting its power to intimidate colleges and universities viewed as ideological enemies.”

    In a joint statement Thursday, top leaders of the American Association of University Professors and the American Federation of Teachers described the compact as offering preferential treatment “in exchange for allegiance to a partisan ideological agenda” and said that it “stinks of favoritism, patronage, and bribery.” They urged all governing boards and administrators to reject the agreement.

    American Council on Education President Ted Mitchell in an interview with The New York Times described the compact as a power play “designed to divide the higher education community.” 

    And then there is Newsom, who has been among the most vocal Democrats opposing Trump, especially since the president sent the National Guard into Los Angeles this summer, a move that a judge later ruled illegal.

    In a press release, Newsom’s office described the compact as tying access to federal research funding to “radical conservative ideological restrictions on colleges and universities.” The governor also specifically threatened to “instantly” pull colleges’ eligibility for Cal Grants, a form of state aid for students from low- and middle-income families.

    USC on Friday confirmed it had received and was reviewing the administration’s letter, but the university did not offer further comment.

    Most of those institutions have remained quiet about their plans, if any, to sign or reject the agreement. A leader from one, however, voiced enthusiastic openness to the compact. 

    In a widely shared statement, Kevin Eltife, chair of the University of Texas Board of Regents, said that the system was “honored” that its flagship in Austin was selected among the nine to receive the compact. 

    “We enthusiastically look forward to engaging with university officials and reviewing the compact immediately,” said Eltife, a former Republican state senator.  

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