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  • One Approach High-Performing Public and Charter Schools Share – And How to Do It – The 74

    One Approach High-Performing Public and Charter Schools Share – And How to Do It – The 74


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    US News & World Report released its latest ranking of public elementary schools. The results exposed the key component to student success, even if the topmost schools approached it in vastly different ways.

    For New York City, Lower Lab, an Upper East Side Gifted & Talented school was ranked number one by US News. Also in the top 10 were four citywide G&T programs. Each school exclusively accepts students who have been designated as “gifted.”

    Rounding out the top 10, however, are Success Academy – Bushwick and Success Academy – Bensonhurst, public charter schools that accept students by lottery, while also prioritizing English Language Learners (ELL).

    On the surface, these schools couldn’t be more different. Number one, Lower Lab, has only 13% of students qualifying for Free or Reduced Price Lunch (FRL), and 1% ELLs. Number 10, Success Academy Charter School – Bensonhurst, conversely,  has 65% of its students qualifying for free or reduced price lunch, and 26% who are English language learners. 

    But the selective G&T schools and the unscreened charter schools have one characteristic in common: An expectation that their students can succeed.

    The book, “Science of Learning: 99 Studies That Every Teacher Needs to Know,” describes an experiment where “researchers falsely told teachers some of their students had been identified as potential high achievers. The students were in fact chosen at random.”

    At the end of the year, the “students that were chosen were more likely to make larger gains in their academic performance,” with those “7-8 years old gaining an average of 10 verbal IQ points.”

    This study concluded that “when teachers expected certain children would show greater intellectual development, those children did show greater intellectual development.”

    At the G&T schools, teachers have every reason to believe their students are capable of performing at the highest levels.

    Parents have seen this firsthand.

    “I strongly believe that when teachers are told their students are gifted, they begin to treat them as gifted — and this changes everything,” asserts mom Natalya Tseytlin. “In a gifted classroom, if a student struggles, teachers don’t assume it’s because of laziness or inability; they respond with patience and extra attention. In a regular class, that student might not receive the same support or challenge, because the teacher sees the child as average. 

    Tseytlin said her son started his first grade gifted and talented program with limited English skills. But because his teacher offered consistent support and believed in him, he excelled. 

    “Today he is performing at the same level as his peers,” she said.

    “I don’t think the expectations at (my child’s) G&T school are so high that only gifted kids can meet them,” another parent, who only asked to be identified as M.K. opined. “Regular schools don’t ‘push’ kids enough to reach their potential. Those G&T schools that do push, get results because most kids are capable of this level of learning without being ‘gifted.’ If teachers treat students as capable, students will indeed meet expectations.”

    The belief that all students can perform at a “gifted” level is sacrosanct at Success Academy.

    “Success Academy is Gifted for All,” CEO Eva Moskowitz affirms. “When adult expectations are high, our scholars — mostly low-income, Black and Hispanic — can meet the highest academic standards.”

    The same is true at Harlem Academy, a kindergarten through 8th grade private school for students whose potential might otherwise go unrealized. 

    “It’s tough to decouple the influence of high-quality programming from high expectations,” concedes Head of School Vinny Dotoli, “but authentically challenging students is central to the ethos of our school. When great teachers set ambitious goals and provide the structure and support to reach them, it almost always makes a lasting difference in student achievement.”

    Parents with children in schools where high expectations aren’t the norm would love to see changes. 

    “I have a daughter in a dual language program in East Harlem,” Maria McCune relates. “A neighbor who used to attend our school changed his daughter to a G&T program at another school in East Harlem. He immediately noticed a difference in the quality of instruction and in his daughter’s performance (MUCH improved). I participate in my daughter’s School Leadership Team and I have seen the apathy teachers there exhibit. It is concerning. When I tried to provide feedback about improving the educational experience, teachers/staff often became defensive. It is this that leads me to want to pursue G&T for my daughter.”

    For Tiffany Ma, the solution is obvious. “Our second grader that transferred into G&T writes much neater and does her homework much more happily since she’s in an environment where academics and homework is valued by other classmates and parents. We should expand G&T programs. It’s regular programming that shouldn’t exist.”

    Yet New York City seems headed in the opposite direction. Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani has vowed to get rid of elementary school G&T programs  that begin in kindergarten. He would wait until students enter third grade, even though the research referenced above specifically mentioned children 7 and 8 years of age( i.e. second graders), as being the biggest beneficiaries of high expectations. He is against charter schools, as well. 

    This move would lower the academic standards and expectations of all schools, which deeply concerns parents like McCune. She fears “Children like my daughter may be left as collateral damage of an educational experience that falls short of setting them up for significant academic success.”

    The top schools in NYC have repeatedly demonstrated that high expectations are key to helping all students reach their full potential.

    We need more such schools, be they public G&T, charter, or private. And more teachers who believe in all our kids.


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  • The Link Between Greed and Efficiency

    The Link Between Greed and Efficiency

    In the mythology of American capitalism, “efficiency” is the magic word that justifies austerity for workers, rising tuition for students, and ever-expanding wealth for administrators, financiers, and institutional elites. It is framed as neutral, technocratic, and rational. In reality, efficiency in higher education has become inseparable from greed, functioning as a mask for extraction and consolidation.

    Universities and their sprawling medical centers have become some of the largest landowners and employers in the cities they inhabit. As Devarian Baldwin has shown, these institutions operate as urban empires, expanding aggressively into surrounding neighborhoods, raising housing costs, displacing long-time residents, and reshaping cities to suit institutional priorities. University medical centers, nominally nonprofit, consolidate smaller hospitals, close services deemed unprofitable, and charge some of the highest healthcare prices in the nation. These operations are justified as efficiency or economic development, yet they often destabilize the communities they claim to serve.

    Endowments, some exceeding fifty billion dollars at elite institutions, have become central to this dynamic. Managed like hedge funds, these pools of capital are heavily invested in private equity, venture capital, real estate, and derivatives. The financial logic of endowment management now shapes university priorities, shifting focus from public service and learning to capital accumulation, investor returns, and risk management. Efficiency is defined not by educational outcomes but by the growth of financial assets.

    This culture of extraction has been amplified by decades of government austerity. Public funding for higher education has steadily declined since the 1980s, forcing institutions to behave like corporations. At the same time, the aging Baby Boomer generation is creating unprecedented financial pressures on Social Security, Medicare, and healthcare systems, leaving public coffers stretched thin and reinforcing a winner-take-all national mentality. In this environment, universities compete fiercely for students, research dollars, donors, and prestige, producing conditions ripe for exploitation.

    Outsourcing has become a standard method to achieve “efficiency.” Universities frequently contract out food service, custodial work, IT, housing management, and security. Workers employed by these contractors often face lower wages, fewer benefits, and higher turnover, while administrators present these arrangements as cost-saving measures. Meanwhile, administrative layers within institutions continue to expand, creating a managerial class that oversees growth and strategy while teaching budgets shrink. As Marc Bousquet has argued, the corporate-style management model displaces faculty governance and treats students and staff as revenue streams rather than participants in a shared educational mission.

    The adjunctification of the faculty exemplifies efficiency as exploitation. Contingent instructors now teach the majority of classes in American higher education, earning poverty-level wages without benefits while juggling multiple teaching sites. Institutions call this “flexibility” and “cost containment,” but in reality it transfers value from instruction to administrative overhead, athletics, real estate, and financial operations, all while reducing the quality of education and undermining academic continuity.

    The rise of Online Program Managers, or OPMs, further illustrates the fusion of greed and efficiency. These companies design, manage, and market entire online degree programs, often taking forty to seventy percent of tuition revenue. While presented as efficiency partners, OPMs aggressively recruit students, inflate costs, and minimize academic oversight. Their business model mirrors the exploitative strategies of for-profit colleges, which pioneered high-cost, low-quality instruction combined with heavy marketing to capture federal loan dollars. The collapse of chains such as Corinthian, ITT, and EDMC left millions of borrowers with debt and no degree, yet the model persists inside nonprofit universities through OPMs and algorithm-driven online programs.

    “Robocolleges” represent the latest evolution of this trend. AI-driven instruction, predictive analytics, automated grading, and digital tutoring promise unprecedented efficiency, but they often replace human educators, reduce pedagogical oversight, exploit student data, and prioritize enrollment growth over educational quality. Efficiency here serves the financial bottom line rather than the learning or well-being of students.

    The result of these extractive practices is a national crisis of student debt, now exceeding one trillion dollars. Students borrow to cover skyrocketing tuition, outsourced services, underpaid instruction, and the costs of programs shaped by OPMs or automated platforms. Debt is not an accident of the system; it is the intended outcome, a mechanism for transferring public resources and student labor into private profit.

    The broader social context intensifies the problem. Higher education exists in a winner-take-all, financialized society, where resources flow upward and the majority of people are told to compete harder, work longer, and borrow more. Universities have internalized this ideology, acting as both symbols and engines of extraction. Efficiency, under this paradigm, is defined not by the effectiveness of teaching or research but by the expansion of institutional power, wealth, and influence.

    True efficiency would look very different. It would invest in educators rather than contractors, stabilize academic labor rather than exploit it, serve surrounding communities rather than displace them, expand learning opportunities rather than debt, and prioritize democratic governance over corporate-style hierarchy. Efficiency should measure how well institutions serve the public good, not how well they protect endowment returns, OPM profits, or administrative salaries.

    Until such a redefinition occurs, efficiency will remain one of the most powerful tools of extraction in American higher education, a rhetorical justification for greed disguised as rational management.

    Sources

    Devarian Baldwin, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower

    Marc Bousquet, How the University Works

    Tressie McMillan Cottom, Lower Ed

    Christopher Newfield, The Great Mistake

    Sara Goldrick-Rab, Paying the Price

    Government reports on for-profit colleges, student debt, and OPMs

    Research on higher education financialization, outsourcing, and austerity policies

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  • Reflections From Six Weeks of Practice – Teaching in Higher Ed

    Reflections From Six Weeks of Practice – Teaching in Higher Ed

    This post is one of many, related to my participation in  Harold Jarche’s Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop.

    I love to walk. Sometimes I do it alone (almost always listening to either music or podcasts), though most often walks these days are facilitated by an invitation from one of our kids to go for an evening walk. I’m at the POD25 conference, so have been missing my night time walks. Right now, I’m holed up in my hotel room, doing some reflecting, writing, and a bit of grading.

    Instead of feeling guilty, I’m overwhelmed with supportive messages about how healthy this is. First, let’s start with walking. Rebecca Solnit writes in Wanderlust: A History of Walking about this practice:

    Thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented society — and doing nothing is hard to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.

    The pull to keep producing and soaking in every bit of ROI from my university paying for this trip is strong (not because of them, I should say, but because of my own sense of needing to “get the most out of limited budget dollars”). Yet, learning cannot be perfectly quantified in terms of financial metrics, despite corporations’ and governments’ strong desire to do so. Jarche reminds us of the importance of leaving room for time and context to enrich our learning.

    We cannot tap into our innovative capacities without being open to radical departures from the predictable, planned path (an example of which might be the typical professional conference schedule). And yes, sometimes that means not engaging in every planned session at a conference, like the one I’m participating in this week.

    Jarche writes:

    Creative work is not routine work done faster. It’s a whole different way of work, and a critical part is letting the brain do what it does best — come up with ideas. Without time for reflection, most of those ideas will get buried in the detritus of modern workplace busyness.

    As we wrap up our time together, Jarche invites those of us participating in his Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop to reflect on our experience these past six weeks. Here I go, in responding to his questions:

    Q. What was the most useful concept I learned from this workshop?

    A. It wasn’t really a concept, rather a practice. I benefitted by committing to a regular writing practice throughout the workshop, which provided opportunities for rich reflection and deepened learning. The structure of the workshop allowed for that to take place (plus me being a person who is a bit of a completist and wanting to blog through all 18 of the opportunities for reflection and activity that Harold provided).

    Q. What was the most surprising concept that has changed my thinking about PKM?

    A. I had seen Jarche write about McLuhan’s media tetrad in the past, but didn’t slow myself down enough to absorb much of anything, at the time. However, given my commitment to practice PKM throughout this experience, I wrote about the concept for the first time, and even shared the framework as a part of a keynote I gave a month or so ago.

    A diamond-shaped diagram illustrating McLuhan’s media tetrad. The center diamond is labeled “Medium.” Four surrounding diamonds describe its effects: the top says “Obsolesces — a previous medium,” the right says “Retrieves — a much older medium,” the bottom says “Reverses — its properties when extended to its limits,” and the left says “Extends — a human property.” The image is adapted from jarche.com

    During the keynote, I couldn’t remember the word “tetrad,” when the idea came up later in the talk (as in after the slide had long since disappeared). I had attempted to come up with a word association on the plane ride out to Michigan, but it had failed me, in that moment.

    “Think of the old arcade game, Tetris, plus something being “rad” (like in the 80s)”, I told myself. I was definitely learning out loud and performing retrieval practice in real time, as I eventually cobbled together audience participation input and finally got myself there.

    A few things I’ve learned about myself, cognitive science, and other human beings remind me of these principles. For starters, my embarrassment in not knowing, but still struggling through and reaching the side of knowing means I’m unlikely to forget the word in the future. Plus, people aren’t looking for other humans to be perfect. It is through our vulnerability and relatability that we might most often have an opportunity to make an impact on others. At least I believe that may be the case for me… as I wasn’t meant to be the expert, as my primary role in this world, I don’t think. I would rather be known as someone who is curios, which I’ve heard enough times to start to believe that it is true.

    Q. What will be the most challenging aspect of PKM for me?

    A. I still need to learn more about the concepts and frameworks involving navigating complexity, including one I’ve come across in the past, but never got much further than confusion, previously: cynefin. Jim Luke (who I met a gazillion years ago at an OpenEd conference) has offered to share his wisdom about cynefin with Kate Bowles and I sometime in the next couple of months. He replied to me on Mastodon about cynefin:

    I find it a very useful heuristic in thinking about community, higher ed, any activities that are organized and care-centered, etc.

    This exchange wouldn’t have occurred, had it not been for Harold structuring the PKM workshop around engaging on Mastodon, by the way. This is going to be a gift that keeps on giving, I believe. While my connections there are still small in number, they are strong with competence, care, and creativity.

    I’m glad that I can now pronounce cynefin without first locating an audio clip of someone else saying it. I’m useless at phonetic spelling, so that stuff doesn’t often help me in the slightest. I do still have to look up how to spell it each time. My brain feels slower with the learning when a word is pronounced differently than it is spelled. I still have to occasionally slow myself way down when spelling my own last name, so I won’t let myself feel too bad about still not being able to spell cynefin without help.

    Q. Where do I hope to be with my PKM practice one year from now?

    A. I would like to be in a more regular practice of blogging a year from now. I tend to save up blog post ideas that are super laborious for me (at least the way I approach the task, in those cases). I like doing posts for Jane Hart’s Top Tools 4 Learning votes (like my top ten votes from 2025). But given how extensively I write and link in those posts, they take many hours to complete. I also have enjoyed doing top podcast posts, drawing inspiration from Bryan Alexander’s wonderful posts, like this one about the podcasts he was listening to in late 2024.

    My post from late 2024 about what Overcast told me I had listened to the most that year was less time consuming to write, than ones I had done in the past. But I felt weird only going from the total minutes listened as my barometer, when I think that other podcasts are far more worthy of acknowledgement than some of the ones I wound up having listened to the most that year. This 2021 Podcast Favorites post took forever to write and curate, but is more emblematic of the ways I would most like to celebrate all the incredible podcasts that are out there (or at least were publishing, at the time I wrote it).

    If I put some creative constraints on myself, in terms of the time I would allow myself to commit to any individual post, I suspect I would have a lot more success with this aspect of PKM. I so appreciate the way that Alan Levine, Maha Bali, and Kate Bowles write in more reflective, informal ways. I’ve been pushing myself throughout this workshop to just get the ideas I’m having in the moment out there, to tell stories that are snapshots of my sensemaking processes, and to be human and allow myself to show up in the messiness that is indicative of the learning process.

    Gratitude

    My deepest gratitude goes to Harold Jarche for such a well-designed, impactful learning experience through his Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop. I had been telling myself that I would do it at some point for years, now, and finally realized that there wasn’t really ever going to be a “good time” for there to be six weeks without something big happening (conferences, speaking gigs, etc.). So Harold has been able to travel with me on airplanes, sat with me in airports, and is currently in my hotel room in San Diego at the POD 2025 conference. This is only metaphorically speaking, of course. As far as I know, he is in Canada right now. Though I am not surveilling him and he does seem to travel a lot, at least as it compares to me.

    I’m also feeling thanks for those people who allow themselves to learn out loud and take the risks of being openly curious and worrying less about being “right” or “perfect” all the time.

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  • The Gap – Teaching in Higher Ed

    The Gap – Teaching in Higher Ed

    This post is one of many, related to my participation in  Harold Jarche’s Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop.

    I’ve been thinking a lot about the elements that prevent us from most deeply practicing Personal Knowledge Mastery (PKM) in our lives. A big piece involves fear, the worries that we couldn’t possibly know enough, or being talented enough, to contribute anything to the discourse. I’m at the POD Conference this week in San Diego and have been thinking about my own, long-term desire to get better at sketchnotes, while realizing that the only way you do something like that is to start out not-so-good, and establish a regular practice that could contribute to you getting better.

    People often use the metaphor of a gap existing between where we are and where we want to be… We forget the value we might possess along the way. Daniel Sax starts out his video called THE GAP by Ira Glass with text that appears on the screen, in the form of a dedication of sorts. The words initially say:

    For everyone in doubt

    After a few seconds, an additional line of text appears:

    Especially for myself

    How many of us can relate to those feelings of doubt?

    How often do we ponder what they prevent us from achieving?

    After that compelling two-line introduction, Sax shows what I think is a printing press in action, though I’m not entirely sure what I’m looking at, during the first part of the video. Ironically, I wrote in my last post about how Bryan Alexander embodied PKM at a dinner, recently, but I didn’t write much about the other people who were there. However, I realize now that one of the people is working on her doctoral research and it is on Black women who were printmakers in the 1930s, I believe it was. My mind flashed, as I revisited watching Sax’s video, thinking that this doctoral researcher would surely know if what I think I’m seeing here is actually that.

    Before now, I hadn’t really paid much attention to Sax’s video description on Vimeo. However, my curiosity was rewarded, by getting to discover that Sax made this video, because he was inspired by another one and wanted to experiment with his own creation. He writes:

    I made it for myself and for anybody who is in doubt about his/her creative career. I also think that Ira Glass’ message isn’t only limited to the creative industry. It can be applied to everyone who starts out in a new environment and is willing to improve.

    I encourage you to stop and watch Sax’s video: THE GAP by Ira Glass and reflect on the different ways he conveys his messages and ideas, throughout. I wonder how long it took him to do the spoon full of noodle letters, spelling out his thoughts for that 2-3 second part.

    Back to Sax’s video description, he ends with a series of expressions of gratitude, to all of those who got him to the point of creating his piece. He thanks David Shiyang Liu, who has a graphical, text-based depiction of Ira’s words about storytelling (which really could be about any new pursuit). Sax continues to thank the people who made his video possible (I suggest going to the video description and witness a wonderful example of giving credit where credit is due).

    As Jarche begins to wind down the PKMastery Workshop and invites us to start our PKM practice (if we haven’t, already), he quotes Tim Kastelle:

    The biggest gap is between those doing nothing and those doing something.

    Jarche uses his book reviews and Friday’s Finds as examples of his PKM practice lived out. He’s been at that for such a long time now, I look forward to each post, as they get released and show up in my RSS feeds. Despite having learned so much over the 10+ years I’ve been following his work, taking this PKM workshop has accelerated my learning exponentially. There’s nothing like doing all the sensemaking and sharing that I set myself up to do when I committed to blogging publicly throughout the six weeks of the workshop.

    My PKM

    While I’ve got a ways to go and it is still quite early in my practice, I’m enjoying revisiting books from authors I have interviewed for Teaching in Higher Ed via a new video series I’m calling Between the Lines. This series is helping me experiment more with video as a medium, as well as supporting my ongoing learning about teaching and learning. I also have a playlist of me practicing Mike Caulfield’s SIFT framework for fact checking. I’m realizing I probably need to do some more thinking about the playlists as categories of different types of videos, but I also have this playlist of technology for teaching and learning.

    Of course producing and hosting the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast is a huge part of PKM for me. Here are some unpolished thoughts about how seek-sense-share shows up through this 11-year adventure.

    Seek

    I get new guest ideas from past podcast guests, conferences I attend, books I read, PR people I now know from book publishers, and from things that show up on my RSS feeds. The point I’m at in my seeking process is actually more so that I need to find ways to filter out the vast number of ideas for possible interviews that come my way and be more disciplined and discerning about saying no (either to myself, or to others).

    Sense

    In preparing for interviews, I do a ton of sensemaking, thinking through the themes that are narrow enough to not be all over the place, but also not overly prescriptive, lest I miss what is emerging in the moment. I read digitally and typically highlight way too much of the book. Sometimes I mindmap my ideas, or just type up themes and reorder ideas. Creating the show notes for each episode also helps me extend the learning opportunities from each conversation.

    Share

    The podcast gets shared on all the major podcast directories and services. YouTube recently revised their policies to now allow for RSS feeds from audio-only shows to come through on their site (Teaching in Higher Ed podcast on YouTube). Spotify represents a growing Teaching in Higher Ed audience and has some nice features for more engagement than on other platforms, such as being able to ask listeners a question about what they took away from listening.

    Hope

    My hope is that I’ll forever continue to live in the gap and experience the positive benefits of being willing to be fueled by the vulnerability required to learn out loud.

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  • Have Democrats Lost Voters’ Trust on Education? Not According to Most Polls – The 74

    Have Democrats Lost Voters’ Trust on Education? Not According to Most Polls – The 74


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    Chalkbeat Ideas is a new section featuring reported columns on the big ideas and debates shaping American schools. Sign up for the Ideas newsletter to follow our work.

    Democrats are in disarray on education — according to a growing chorus of Democrats.

    A variety of left-leaning journalists, politicians, and advocates have all recently claimed that voters have become disillusioned with the party’s approach to schools. Often, these commentators cite anger over pandemic-era closures and argue that Democrats need to embrace tougher academic standards or school choice.

    “For decades, when pollsters asked voters which party they trusted more on education, Democrats maintained, on average, a 14-point advantage. More recently that gap closed, then flipped to favor Republicans,” wrote former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel last month.

    Is this emerging conventional wisdom true, though? This assertion has typically relied on one or two surveys, rather than a comprehensive look at the data. So I compiled all publicly available polls I could find that asked voters which party they preferred on education.

    The verdict was clear: In more than a dozen surveys conducted this year by eight different organizations, all but one showed Democrats with an edge on education. This ranged from 4 to 15 points. Among all 14 polls, the median advantage was 9 points. Although Democrats appear to have briefly lost this edge a few years ago, voters again now tend to trust Democrats on the issue of education, broadly defined.

    The narrative that Republicans had wrested the issue of education from Democrats emerged in 2021, after Virginia’s Glenn Youngkin won a come-from-behind victory in the governor’s race after campaigning on parents’ rights.

    Long-running data from the Winston Group, a political consulting firm, showed that in late 2021 and early 2022 Republicans really had eroded Democrats’ lead on education. The parties were even briefly tied for the first time since the early 2000s, when former President George W. Bush was championing No Child Left Behind. Polling commissioned in 2022 and 2023 by Democrats for Education Reform, a group that backs charter schools and vouchers, also showed Democrats falling behind on education.

    Since then, though, Democrats appear to have regained their edge. In the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, the party held at least a 10-point lead, according to Winston Group. Other polls from last year also found that more voters preferred Democrats’ approach on education, even as the party lost the presidency.

    Emanuel pointed me to polling from 2022. “Democrats have not gained ground as much as Trump has cost GOP gains they have made,” he says when asked about the more recent surveys.

    This year in Virginia, Democrat Abigail Spanberger easily won in her bid to replace Youngkin. Education was one of her stronger issues, according to a Washington Post survey.

    Some argue that these election results disprove the idea that Democrats are losing on schools. “That’s not what panned out at all,” says Jennifer Berkshire, a progressive author who writes and teaches about education. She notes that the Republican governor candidate in New Jersey also tried to make schools an issue and lost badly.

    The Winston poll shows Democrats’ advantage is currently below its peak between 2006 and 2009 but is comparable to many other periods, including the tail end of the Obama administration and part of the first Trump administration.

    Keep in mind: These surveys ask about education broadly, not just K-12 schools. When given the option, a good chunk of voters don’t endorse either party’s approach. For instance, a YouGov survey found Democrats up 39%-32% on education with another 29% saying they weren’t sure or that the parties were about the same.

    The one public poll in which Democrats did not have an advantage came from Blue Rose Research, a Democratic-aligned firm. Ali Mortell, its head of research, says different survey methodologies can lead to different results.

    Regardless, she wants to see Democratic politicians lean into the issue more. “Say they do have that trust advantage right now, [education] is still not something that they’re really talking about a lot,” Mortell says.

    One of the top messages that resonates with voters focuses on addressing teachers’ concerns about stagnant pay and large class sizes, Blue Rose polling finds.

    Democrats’ lead on education doesn’t appear to have grown much over the last year, according to surveys from Winston, YouGov, and Ipsos. That’s somewhat surprising since Trump’s approval has sunk generally and is low on education specifically.

    Jorge Elorza, the CEO of Democrats for Education Reform, points to a survey it commissioned showing the two parties tied when it comes to making sure schools emphasize academic achievement. “Democrats should be focused on delivering results,” he says. “When we ask voters about that, it’s a toss up.” A separate DFER poll found the party with only a 1-point lead on who voters trust to ensure “students are prepared for success after high school.”

    Democrats’ overall polling advantage on education does not necessarily speak to the substantive merits of their policies, however. One analysis found that Democratic-leaning states have seen bigger declines in student test scores in recent years. At a national level, Democrats have not offered a particularly clear message on K-12 education, unlike Trump.

    “For the last six years there’s [been] no proactive agenda for Democrats on educational excellence,” says Emanuel.

    The party’s approach to schools has clearly lost a segment of America’s political tastemakers including center-left nonprofit executives, political strategists, and even some Democratic politicians. Yet, despite insistent assertions otherwise, regular voters don’t seem to share this view, at least at the moment.

    I relied on the following polls from this year, with Democrats’ lead in parentheses: Blue Rose Research (February, tied); Fox News (July +15); Ipsos (February +6, April +4, October +7); Napolitan News Service (August +9, October +6); Navigator (August +9); Strength in Numbers (May +11, October +15); YouGov (May +7); Winston (April +15, June +14, August/September +11). To find these surveys, I conducted my own search and asked a variety of large pollsters, as well as a number of advocates. Differences in results between polls can come from random error, as well as differences in sampling and question wording. Although the precise wording varied, each poll asked voters which party they preferred on education.

    Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.


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  • PKM Embodied By Bryan Alexander – Teaching in Higher Ed

    PKM Embodied By Bryan Alexander – Teaching in Higher Ed

    I’m in San Diego at the POD Network conference this week, which means I get to observe myself in action as I attempt to moderate all the wonderful nuggets of potential learning coming my way, while recognizing that I need to keep some type of self restraint, lest I get too overwhelmed with all that is coming at me at one time. This conference brings together people in the field of educational development, who work closely with faculty to heighten teaching effectiveness in a higher education context.

    This topic from Harold Jarche’s PKM workshop focuses on adding value. Jarche shares 14 ways to acquire knowledge from the quintessential PKM practicer, Maria Popova at The Marginalian, and her review _You Can Do Anything_ by James Mangan, written in 1936. He then categorizes the methods in terms of how they align with PKM in this graphic from Jarche:
    PKM and 14 ways to acquire knowledge]

    Much of what I have thought of as the seek part of my PKM practice has to do with receiving (which may be classified here as reading and listening). What I realize I have been doing for more than a decade through podcasting also fits well here: asking. Had you asked me to map out my podcasting adventures on top of the seek-sense-share model, I certainly could have given you a rudimentary framework with examples, but I’m enjoying this far more expansive way of thinking about those practices specific to the work I do for the podcast. The PKM I do more as a solo endeavor (reading RSS feeds and bookmarking a bunch of items each day) compliments the more regular, public sharing I do through the podcast.

    Since I’m at the POD Conference this week, trying to balance out the desire to capitalize on the many opportunities to connect with a need for alone time, as well, I accepted a dinner invitation that I knew would go past my normal bedtime. I tend to wake up super early and therefore head to bed far earlier than most people. However, I had a sense that this dinner would be worth it and it was.

    One of the people I got to sit and talk a long while with was Bryan Alexander. I know him from having interviewed him twice, now, for Teaching in Higher Ed. He brilliantly exemplifies what a long-term PKM habit looks like through his hosting of The Future Trends Forum, the Future Trends in Technology and Education Report (FTTE Report), and his blog. At the dinner, I witnessed Bryan’s voracious curiosity and his embodiment of what it looks like to ask, as part of one’s PKM pursuits.

    Popova writes about asking:

    Every person possessing knowledge is more than willing to communicate what he knows to any serious, sincere person who asks. The question never makes the asker seem foolish or childish — rather, to ask is to command the respect of the other person who in the act of helping you is drawn closer to you, _likes you better_ and will go out of his way on any future occasion to share his knowledge with you.

    Bryan asked questions throughout dinner and peaked my curiosity about the others’ video watching, podcast listening, tv/movie watching, and book reading habits, among other things. I enjoyed adding a couple of items to my Sequel App queue. I wish the app had a listing of items I have added, presented chronologically, as unless I add a note to an item, I don’t wind up remembering who suggested something to me. I’m pretty sure Bryan suggested Pluribus to us, though it also easily could have been Tom Tobin, from earlier in the evening. Actually, now that I think about it, whatever Tom had suggested did get a note added to it, at the time, so I’ve added a h/t note re: Bryan Alexander for Pluribus (h/t = tip of the hat, on internet parlance, as in who do you want to give credit to for suggesting something to you, as you share it).

    It may seem strange that I like remembering who recommended things to me, after the fact. To me, that’s part of my sensemaking and ongoing relationship deepening habits. In this case, Pluribus is a scifi show, which is a genre I used to think that I didn’t like, which I’m quickly realizing was probably never the case, I just didn’t explore it much in the past. Since Bryan is a futurist, I’m intrigued by the sorts of fictional works that shape his thinking on an ongoing basis. Now I’m wondering if it was Tom Tobin who recommended the show, or maybe both of them did. Hmmm…

    As I review all of the ways Mangan articulated for acquiring knowledge, I’m realizing the extent to which Bryan Alexander embodies all of those in his practice. It was such a delight to get to talk to him for an extended period of time, without the normal nerves of getting ready to press record for a podcast interview, or to have just finished talking with him for an episode and then needing to quickly close down the conversation at the end of our scheduled time together (I could talk with him for hours, which was proven this week!). I’m excited to talk to him at the beginning of December for an episode that will air in January about his forthcoming book:

    Peak Higher Ed: How to Survive the Looming Academic Crisis, by Bryan Alexander

    He gave a keynote here at POD25 about the book’s themes, as well, so between reading it in the coming ten days and having heard him share via his address, I feel that much more excited about our upcoming conversation.

    One might think that someone who knows as much as Bryan does would be the person doing the most talking at the dinner table. However, close observation of Bryan’s conversational habits would quickly reveal his heightened curiosity in settings like that, taking in what’s being shared, and setting up even more possibilities for each person to engage in the conversation.

    I’m going to look forward to returning to these 14 ways to acquire knowledge and considering even more the ways in which I get to witness them in practice during events like the one I’m at this week.

    PS. My deep gratitude to Olivia from OneHE who extended the invitation for the wonderful dinner with such curious, interesting people, including Bryan. 

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  • Higher Education Inquirer : Remembering SNCC and CORE

    Higher Education Inquirer : Remembering SNCC and CORE

    To remember SNCC and CORE is to remember a democracy built not by elites but by everyday people—students, sharecroppers, domestic workers, bus drivers, teachers, and the poor and working class across the Jim Crow South and the segregated North. It is to remember Ella Baker’s wisdom, Diane Nash’s determination, Bob Moses’s quiet power, Fannie Lou Hamer’s moral force, James Farmer’s strategic brilliance—and also the thousands of unnamed organizers who risked everything without ever appearing in a textbook, a documentary, or a university lecture hall. Their names may not be widely known, but their work forms the backbone of the freedom struggle.

    SNCC and CORE were never celebrity movements. They were people-powered, grassroots engines of democracy. They were built by individuals who knocked on doors in rural counties where Black voter registration hovered near zero; who faced armed sheriffs, Klan mobs, and white citizens’ councils; who farmed during the day and attended movement meetings at night; who ferried activists to safe houses; who housed Freedom Riders despite threats of arson and lynching; who cooked for mass meetings; who walked into county courthouses where their presence alone was an act of political defiance. These unnamed contributors shaped history as much as the well-known leaders, and their invisibility in public memory is itself a measure of how selectively the United States remembers the struggle for justice.

    Ella Baker insisted from the beginning that the movement’s strength rested in ordinary people discovering their own power. That is why she pushed for “group-centered leadership,” refusing the myth that liberation depends on a single, heroic figure. Her practice of listening deeply—and her belief that the least recognized people held the deepest wisdom—permeated SNCC’s organizing culture. It is a challenge to institutions today, especially universities that still cling to hierarchical models of governance and expertise.

    CORE’s early commitment to interracial, nonviolent direct action emerged from a similar belief in collective action. Its activists—people like James Farmer, Bayard Rustin, and George Houser—helped introduce the tactics that would soon reverberate across the nation: sit-ins, freedom rides, boycotts, and jail-ins. CORE’s work in northern cities also exposed the hypocrisy of institutions—including universities—that claimed moral high ground while upholding segregation in housing, employment, and policing.

    SNCC’s field secretaries—Charles McDew, Ruby Doris Smith Robinson, Prathia Hall, Sam Block, and so many others—did work that higher education still struggles to fully comprehend. Their organizing went far beyond protest; it involved listening to community elders, teaching literacy classes, building independent political organizations, challenging disenfranchisement at every level, and nurturing local leadership. Behind each of those actions were dozens of unnamed individuals who opened their homes, shared their limited resources, and stood guard against retaliation.

    Remembering the unnamed is not sentimental. It is foundational. The freedom struggle was sustained by people whose names were never printed, whose stories never made the evening news, and whose families bore the consequences. Many were fired from their jobs, evicted from their homes, or harassed by police. Some disappeared from public life after the movement years, carrying trauma with little public recognition or support. Their sacrifices made the Civil Rights Movement possible, and higher education owes them a debt it has never acknowledged.

    Today’s universities still wrestle with the structures the movement confronted: racialized inequality, policing, surveillance, donor influence, and hierarchical authority. Many of the same dynamics SNCC and CORE challenged—white paternalism, economic exploitation, authoritarian governance—are alive in campus politics and in the broader “college meltdown,” where austerity, privatization, and predatory actors erode public trust and opportunity.

    To honor SNCC, CORE, and the thousands of unnamed organizers is to affirm that democracy emerges from the ground up. It means recognizing that real change requires more than symbolic gestures or PR-friendly “initiatives.” It demands revisiting Ella Baker’s core insight: strong people do not need strong leaders—they need structures that cultivate collective power.

    Remembering them means acknowledging that the freedoms we now take for granted—voting rights, desegregation, access to education—were won not by institutions, but by people who challenged institutions. And it means seeing the present clearly: that grassroots organizing, from campus movements to community struggles, remains essential to confronting the crises of inequality, debt, climate, surveillance, and governance that define our era.

    To remember SNCC and CORE is to remember not just the famous, but the countless unnamed: the hosts, the watchers, the singers, the marchers, the jailmates, the caretakers, the strategists, the frightened but determined teenagers, the elders who said “yes,” and the ones who insisted that freedom was worth the risk. Their legacy is the true measure of democracy—and a guide for what higher education must become if it is to serve justice rather than power.

    Sources

    Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s.

    Thomas F. Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Struggle for Economic Justice.

    Charles M. Payne, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle.

    James Farmer, Lay Bare the Heart: An Autobiography of the Civil Rights Movement.

    Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years.

    Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement.

    Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street.

    SNCC Digital Gateway, Duke University.

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  • Inside Schools’ Teen Nicotine Crackdown – The 74

    Inside Schools’ Teen Nicotine Crackdown – The 74

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

    It was in physical education class when Laila Gutierrez swapped out self-harm for a new vice: Vaping.

    Like students across the country, Gutierrez got dragged into a nicotine-fueled war between vape manufacturers, who used celebrity marketing and fruity flavors to hook kids on e-cigarettes, and educators, who’ve turned to surveillance tools and discipline to crack down on the youngest users. Gutierrez was suspended for a week after she was nabbed vaping in a crowded school bathroom during her lunch hour. 

    In my latest investigative deep dive, co-published this week with WIRED, I reveal how school districts across the country have spent millions to install vape-detecting sensors in school bathrooms — once considered a digital surveillance no-go. The devices prioritize punishment to combat student nicotine addiction.

    Eamonn Fitzmaurice/The 74

    My analysis of public records obtained from Minneapolis Public Schools reveals the sensors inundated administrators with alerts — about one per minute during a typical school day, on average. Their presence brought a spike in school discipline, records show, with suspensions dwarfing treatment services and younger middle school students facing the harshest consequences. 

    The sheer volume of alerts, more than 45,000 over seven months across four schools, raises questions about whether they’re an effective way to get kids to give up their vape pens. And some students voiced privacy concerns about the sensors, the most high tech of which can now reportedly detect keywords, how many young people are in the bathroom at one time and for how long. 

    “Surveillance is only a diagnosis,” Texas student activist Cameron Samuels told me. “It only recognizes symptoms of a failed system.”  

    In the news

    Charlotte, North Carolina, school officials reported more than 30,000 students absent on Monday, two days after federal immigration agents arrested 130 people there in their latest sweep. That more recent data point underscores the 81,000 school days missed by more than 100,000 students in California’s Central Valley after immigration raids earlier this year, according to a newly peer reviewed Stanford University study. | The 74

    • Los Angeles schools have lost thousands of immigrant students — from 157,619 in the 2018-19 school year to just 62,000 this year — because of the city’s rising prices and falling birth rates. Now, that trend has intensified after the “chilling effect” of recent federal immigration raids, district officials said. | The 74
    • Student enrollment is dropping in school districts across the country amid President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. In Miami, for example, the number of new immigrant students has decreased by more than 10,000 compared to last year. | The Associated Press

    Ten Commandments: Siding with the families of students who argued they infringed on their religious freedom, a federal judge on Tuesday ordered some Texas public school districts to remove Ten Commandment displays from their classroom walls by next month. | The New York Times

    • 28 Bills, Ten Commandments and 1 Source: A Christian Right ‘Bill Mill’. | The 74

    Online gaming platform Roblox announced it will block children from interacting with teens and adults in the wake of lawsuits alleging the platform has been used by predators to groom young people. | The Guardian

    Furry and freaky: “Kumma,” a Chinese-made teddy bear with artificial intelligence capabilities and marketed toward children, is being pulled from shelves after researchers found it could teach its users how to light matches and about sexual kinks. | Futurism

    A teenage girl from New York reported to a police officer at school that her adoptive father had been raping her at home for years. The officer, who didn’t believe her, bungled the case — and she was abused again. | New York Focus

    ‘Brazen cruelty’: A federal judge has ordered the release of a 16-year-old Bronx high schooler who has spent nearly a month in federal immigration custody despite having a protective status reserved for immigrant youth who were abused, neglected or abandoned by a parent. | amNewYork

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    Civil rights groups have decried proposed federal changes to the Education Department’s data collection on racial disparities in special education that could make it more difficult to identify and address service gaps. | K-12 Dive

    ‘Dead-naming’ enforced: A Texas law now requires school employees to use names and pronouns that conform to students’ sex at birth. Several transgender students whose schools are complying say it has transformed school from a place of support to one that rejects who they are. | The Texas Tribune.

    ICYMI @The74

    Education Secretary Linda McMahon has signed agreements with other agencies to take over major K-12 and higher education programs in keeping with President Donald Trump’s effort to shut down the Department of Education. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

    Emotional Support

    “Let’s circle back in 2026.”

    -Taittinger, already


    Did you use this article in your work?

    We’d love to hear how The 74’s reporting is helping educators, researchers, and policymakers. Tell us how

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  • How U.S. Higher Education Helped Create Nick Fuentes

    How U.S. Higher Education Helped Create Nick Fuentes

    In the aftermath of each new outrage involving Nick Fuentes, pundits scramble to explain how a 20-something suburban Catholic kid became one of the most influential white supremacists in America. Many insist Fuentes is an anomaly, a glitch, a fringe figure who somehow slipped through the cracks of democracy and decency. But this narrative is both comforting and false.

    Fuentes is not an anomaly. He is the logical product of the systems that shaped him—especially American higher education.

    While institutions obsess over rankings, fundraising, and branding campaigns, they have quietly abandoned entire generations of young people to debt, alienation, status anxiety, and a digital culture that preys on male insecurity. In this vacuum, extremist networks thrive, incubating figures like Fuentes long before the public notices.

    HEI warned about this trend years ago. Since 2016, the publication tracked the rise of Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA, noting how TPUSA used campus culture wars to radicalize disaffected young men. HEI saw that for-profit-style marketing, donor-driven politics, and relentless culture-war agitation were creating an ecosystem where reactionaries could build both influence and profit. Fuentes did not arise outside that ecosystem—he evolved from it, even as he later turned on Kirk as insufficiently extreme.

    What fuels this pipeline? A generation of young men raised on the promise of meritocracy but delivered a reality of spiraling costs, precarious futures, and institutional betrayal. Many arrive at college campuses burdened by debt, anxious about their place in an unforgiving economy, and deeply online. They bear the psychological bruises of a culture that has replaced community with competition and replaced meaning with metrics.

    This is also the demographic most vulnerable to incel ideology, a misogynistic worldview built around grievance, rejection, humiliation, and resentment. Incel communities overlap heavily with the digital spaces where Fuentes built his early audience. The mix is combustible: sexually frustrated young men who feel mocked by mainstream culture, priced out of adulthood, and invisible to institutions that once guided them. The result is a fusion of white nationalism, male resentment, Christian nationalism, ironic fascism, and livestream entertainment—perfectly tailored to a generation raised on Twitch and YouTube.

    And yet the higher-education establishment insisted for years that white supremacists were primarily rural “rednecks”—poor, uneducated, easily dismissed. This stereotype blinded journalists, academics, and administrators to the reality developing right in front of them. Higher Education Inquirer knew better because we corresponded for years with Peter Simi, one of the country’s leading scholars of extremism. Simi’s research demonstrated clearly that white supremacists were not confined to rural backwaters. They were suburban, middle-class, sometimes college-educated, often tech-savvy, and deeply embedded in mainstream institutions.

    Simi’s work showed that white supremacist movements have always thrived among people with something to lose, people who feel their status slipping. They recruit in fraternities, gaming communities, campus political groups, military circles, and online spaces where young men spend their most lonely hours. They build identities around grievance and belonging—needs that universities once helped students navigate but now too often ignore.

    This is the world that produced Nick Fuentes.

    Fuentes entered higher education during a moment of fragmentation and distrust. Tuition was skyrocketing. Campuses were polarizing. Students were increasingly treated as revenue streams rather than whole human beings. Administrators were more focused on donor relations and culture-war optics than on the psychological welfare of their students. And universities outsourced so many vital functions—to police, to lobbyists, to tech platforms—that they ceded responsibility for the very students they claimed to educate.

    Into that void stepped extremist influencers who offered simple answers to complex problems, validation for resentment, and a community that cared—if only in the performative, transactional sense of internet politics.

    The tragedy is not simply that Fuentes emerged. The tragedy is that the conditions to generate many more like him remain firmly in place.

    American higher education created the environment: hyper-competition, abandonment of the humanities, the collapse of community, the normalization of precarity, and a relentless emphasis on personal failure over systemic dysfunction. It created the audience: anxious, isolated, indebted young men looking for meaning. And it created the blind spot: a refusal to take extremism seriously until it reaches mainstream visibility.

    Fuentes is not a glitch in the system. He is the system’s mirror held up to itself.

    Unless universities confront their complicity in this radicalization pipeline—economically, culturally, and psychologically—the next Nick Fuentes is already in a dorm room somewhere, streaming at 2 a.m., finding thousands of followers who feel just as betrayed as he does.

    Sources

    Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right (2017).

    Peter Simi & Robert Futrell, American Swastika: Inside the White Power Movement’s Hidden Spaces of Hate (2010, updated 2015).

    Kathleen Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America (2018).

    Joan Donovan & danah boyd, “Stop the Presses? The Crisis of Misinformation” (Harvard Kennedy School).

    Cynthia Miller-Idriss, Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right (2020).

    Michael Kimmel, Healing from Hate: How Young Men Get Into—and Out of—Violent Extremism (2018).

    Whitney Phillips, “The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists.”

    Brian Hughes & Cynthia Miller-Idriss, “Youth Radicalization in Digital Spaces.”

    David Futrelle, We Hunted the Mammoth archive on incel ideology.

    Higher Education Inquirer (2016–2024 coverage of TPUSA, Charlie Kirk, and campus extremism).

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  • WEEKEND READING: The teacher training placement crisis

    WEEKEND READING: The teacher training placement crisis

    This blog was kindly authored by Juliette Claro, Lecturer in Education St Mary’s University Twickenham.

    Initial Teacher Education (ITE) providers across England are facing an escalating crisis: a growing inability to secure sufficient school placements for trainee teachers. With an average of 20 to 25% of unplaced trainee teachers, September 2025 has been challenging for universities and ITE providers. Despite policy ambitions to strengthen teacher supply, the reality on the ground is that many trainees’ hopes to start their first school placement in September were shattered due to a lack of school placements, especially in the secondary routes. This bottleneck threatens not only the future workforce but also the integrity of teacher training itself.

    A system under strain

    According to the Teacher Labour Market in England Annual Report 2025 by the National Foundation for Educational Research, recruitment into ITE remains persistently below target, with secondary subjects like Physics and Modern Foreign Languages (MFL) facing the most acute shortages. In 2024/25, Physics recruitment reached just 17% of its target, while MFL hovered at 33%. These figures reflect a long-standing trend, exacerbated by declining interest in teaching and competition from other professions.

    But even when trainees are recruited, sometimes through international routes at considerable expense, placing them in schools has become increasingly difficult. The Department for Education’s Initial Teacher Education Thematic Monitoring Visits Overview Report (2025) highlights that many providers struggle to find schools with sufficient mentor capacity and subject expertise. The report reinforced the point that mentoring pre-service teachers in schools often relies on the goodwill of teachers, and when too many providers operate in one local area, competition becomes unsustainable. This is particularly problematic in shortage subjects, where schools may lack qualified specialists to support trainees effectively, for example, in Physics or Languages.      

    Mentoring is a cornerstone of effective teacher training. Yet research in 2024 from the National Institute of Teaching (reveals that mentors are often overstretched, under-recognised, and inadequately supported. Many people report sacrificing their own planning time or juggling mentoring duties alongside full teaching loads. As a result, there may be a rise in reluctance among teachers to take on mentoring roles, especially in high-pressure environments.

    The government offers funding that aims to support mentor training and leadership, including grants for lead mentors, mentors and intensive training. However, these are often paid in arrears and come with complex conditions, making them less accessible to schools already grappling with budget constraints. Moreover, the funding does not always reflect the true cost of releasing staff from teaching duties to support trainees in schools.

    Routes into teaching: a fragmented landscape?

    The diversity of routes into teaching (School Direct, university-led PGCEs, Teach First, apprenticeships was designed to offer flexibility. But for ITE providers, it has created logistical headaches. Each route comes with its own placement requirements, mentor expectation, and funding mechanisms. Coordinating placements across this fragmented landscape is time-consuming and often leads to duplication or competition for limited school capacity.

    As universities continue to battle through their own funding crises, competition for recruitment and placements clash with other local providers and alliances of School- Centred Initial Teacher Training (SCITT), resulting in a lot of demands but not enough offers for placements.

    The 2024 ITE market reforms, which led to the de-accreditation of 68 providers, further destabilised the system. While many have partnered with accredited institutions to continue offering courses, the disruption has strained relationships between providers and with placement schools, resulting in reducing the overall number of placements available, where too many ITE providers end up saturating the same local areas for school placements.

    The subject specialist shortages

    The shortage of subject specialists is not just a recruitment issue: it is also a placement issue. In their 2025 report and recommendations for recruitment, retention and retraining the Institute of Physics (IoP)  revealed that 58% of GCSE lessons in England are taught by non-Physics specialists.

    When 25% of secondary schools do not have a Physics specialist teacher in-house and 63% of schools struggle to recruit specialist MFL teachers (British Council Language Trends 2025), it is no surprise that priorities for some school leaders is on the teaching of their students and not the mentoring trainee teachers. In many schools, Biology or Chemistry teachers cover Physics content, making it difficult to offer meaningful placements for Physics trainees. The same applies to Modern Foreign Languages, where schools often lack the breadth of language expertise needed to support trainees effectively. As non-core subjects may suffer from reduced curriculum time, finding enough teaching hours to allocate to a trainee teacher can become another challenge for some schools. Finally, as the recruitment crisis becomes more acute in more deprived areas, finding suitable mentors for trainee teachers in these areas become increasingly complex.

    Without subject specialists, trainees may be placed in environments where they cannot observe or practise high-quality teaching in their discipline. This undermines the quality of training and risks having Early Career Teachers feeling ill-prepared for the classroom.

    Teacher workload: the silent barrier

    Teacher workload remains one of the most significant barriers to placement availability. The Working Lives of Teachers and Leaders Wave 3 Report (DfE, 2025) found that 90% of teachers considering leaving the profession cited high workload as a key factor. With rising demands around behaviour management, curriculum delivery and accountability, many teachers simply do not have the bandwidth to mentor trainees. Reduced school funding, less staff and more demands on schoolteachers has meant that it is not uncommon to have weekly meetings between teachers and trainees organised out of school hours, at 8am or at 5pm, after school meetings. This is particularly acute in schools serving disadvantaged communities, where staffing pressures are greatest and the need for high-quality teaching is most urgent. Ironically, these are often the schools where trainees could have the most impact, if only they could be placed there.

    The perfect storm

    As ITE providers navigate the currents and the storms of recruiting and placing trainee teachers into schools, the strain on school funding directly impacts the recruitment of future teachers. If ITE providers cannot provide school placements, teachers and schools cannot recruit. Is it, therefore, time to reconsider and revalue the mentors in schools who are the running engine of the training process whilst on school placement? 

    New for school mentors could include:

    • Streamlining mentor funding to recognise fully and value the time spent by mentors to fulfil their role in supporting with lesson planning, giving feedback to lessons, meeting the trainee weekly and supporting international trainee teachers adapting to new curricula where necessary.
    • Invest in subject specialist development, particularly in Physics and MFL.
    • Reduce teacher workload through policy reform and flexible working arrangements where mentors can co-share the responsibility with colleagues.
    • Clarify and coordinate training routes to ease the burden on providers and schools.
    • Elevate the status of mentoring through formal recognition, qualifications, and career pathways.

    The future of teacher supply depends not just on recruitment, but on the ability to train teachers well. Without sufficient placements and adequate training, we risk building a pipeline that leaks before it flows. It is time for policymakers to recognise the strains on a suffocating system if recruitment targets are to be met.

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