We know how much you do to support your students, and we want to make it easier for you to give them the help they need, when they need it. That’s why we’re releasing improvements to accommodations and extensions in WebAssign — so you can manage student requests efficiently and save time throughout your course.
Let’s dive into what’s coming.
Easily accommodate students who need extended time
It can be challenging to manage accommodation requests for extended time at the start of classes. We’re introducing a new feature that makes this process so much easier, allowing you to grant extra time to one or more students directly from your course roster.
Once applied, this setting will ensure that students who need additional time automatically receive it on all timed assignments. There’s no need for repeated manual adjustments to individual assignments. This change makes it easier to support your students, while saving you time.
Updates to WebAssign accommodations
“These [upgrades] will improve the amount of time I currently spend managing WebAssign each term for hundreds of students. Reducing the number of clicks and tabs I need to open is a huge change. Bulk extensions are a significant advancement in my mind.” – Kathleen Koenig, University of Cincinnati
Manage student requests with extension improvements
But what if your students don’t have an accommodation, but need an extra 10 minutes or an extra day to work on their assignment?
Students often request extensions, extra time, additional submissions or even early access to assignments. To help you manage these requests more efficiently, we’re redesigning the manual extensions process with a more user-friendly interface and added flexibility.
With the new extension improvements, you’ll be able to:
Add extra time to timed assignments (for example: 10 more minutes).
Allow additional attempts on assignments.
Provide bulk extensions for multiple students or assignments.
Issue a penalty to students for any accommodation you made above.
And later, you’ll be able to grant early access to assignments for specific students.
Updates to WebAssign accommodations and extensions
More updates are on the way
These updates to WebAssign accommodations and extensions are just the beginning. We’re committed to continuously improving your experience and will have even more enhancements coming in the next phase of extension updates. We encourage you to stay tuned for what’s to come.
Ready to learn more about what else is new in WebAssign? Check out the latest upgrades in this video.
“Denver Public Schools to close 7 schools, cut grades at 3 others despite heavy resistance.”
“The list is out: These are the SFUSD schools facing closure.”
Such reports can leave the impression that districts are rapidly closing schools in response to declining enrollment and families leaving for charters, private schools and homeschooling.
But the data tells a different story.
School closures have actually declined over the past decade, a period of financial instability that only increased in the aftermath of the pandemic, according to research from the Brookings Institution.
The analysis, shared exclusively with The 74, shows that in 2014-15, the closure rate — the share of schools nationwide that were open one year and closed the next — was 1.3%. In 2023-24, the rate was just .8%, up from .7% the year before.
“I think it’s important for people to realize how rare school closures are,” said Sofoklis Goulas, a Brookings fellow and the study’s author.
Last fall, his research showed how schools that have lost at least 20% of their enrollment since the pandemic are more likely to be low-performing. The Clark County Public Schools, which includes Las Vegas, had the most schools on the list — 19 — but isn’t currently considering closures. In Philadelphia, with 12 schools in that category, district leaders are just beginning to discuss closures.
When it released Goulas’s initial report, leaders of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute argued that low-performing schools should be the first to close. But efforts to do so are often met with pushback from families, teachers and advocacy groups who argue that shutting down schools unfairly harms poor and minority students and contributes to neighborhood blight. Their pleas often push district leaders to retreat. Working in advocates’ favor, experts say, is the fact that many big district leaders are untested and have never had to navigate the emotionally charged waters of closing schools.
“Closing a neighborhood school is probably one of the most difficult decisions a district’s board makes,” said Michael Fine, CEO of the Fiscal Crisis and Management Assistance Team, a California state agency that provides financial oversight to districts. “They are going to avoid that decision as long as they can and at all costs.”
Such examples aren’t hard to find:
Just weeks after announcing closures, the San Francisco district halted plans to shutter any schools this fall.
In September, outgoing Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez pledged to put off school closures for another two years, even though state law allows the city to take action sooner. The district is in the process of absorbing five charter schools to keep them from closing.
In October, Pittsburgh Public Schools recommended closing 14 schools; several others were set to be relocated and reconfigured. About a month later, Superintendent Wayne Walters hit pause, saying the district needed more “thoughtful planning” and community input.
Last May, the Seattle Public Schools announced it would shutter 20 elementary schools next school year in response to a $100 million-plus budget deficit. They later increased the number to 21. By October, the list had dwindled to four schools. Just before Thanksgiving, Superintendent Brent Jones withdrew the plan entirely.
“This decision allows us to clarify the process, deepen our understanding of the potential impacts, and thoughtfully determine our next steps,” Jones wrote to families. While the plan would have saved the district $5.5 million, he said, “These savings should not come at the cost of dividing our community.”
Graham Hill Elementary in Seattle, which fifth grader Wren Alexander has attended since kindergarten, was initially on the list. The Title I school sits on top of a hill in a desirable area overlooking Lake Washington. But it also draws students from the lower-income, highly diverse Brighton Park neighborhood.
Among Wren’s neighbors are students from Ethiopia, Vietnam and Guatemala. Wren, who moves on to middle school this fall, said she looks forward to visiting her former teachers and cried when she heard Graham Hill might close. She wanted her younger brother and sister to develop the same warm connection she had.
“I don’t think I would be who I am if I didn’t go to the school,” she said.
Wren Alexander and her little sister Nico, outside Graham Hill. (Courtesy of Tricia Alexander)
Tricia Alexander, her mother, was among those who opposed the closures, participating in rallies outside the district’s administration building and before board meetings.
“We were really loud,” said Alexander, who’s also part of Billion Dollar Bake Sale, an effort to advocate for more state education funding. She said there was “no real evidence” that closing schools would have solved the district’s budget woes. “In no way would kids win.”
It’s a view shared by many school finance experts, who note that the bulk of school funding is tied up in salaries, not facility costs. Districts may save some money from closing schools, but unless coupled with staff reductions, it’s often not enough to make up for large budget shortfalls.
‘So bad at this’
If enrollment doesn’t pick up, experts say, leaders who delay closures will have to confront the same issues a year later or — perhaps even more likely — pass the problems on to their successors.
“If there continues to be fewer and fewer children …then that doesn’t get better,” said Brian Eschbacher, an enrollment consultant.
One Chicago high school, for example, had just 33 students last year. In Los Angeles, the nation’s second-largest district, 34 elementary schools have fewer than 200 students and 29 of those are using less than half of the building, according to a recent report. The share of U.S. students being educated outside of traditional schools also continues to increase, according to a forthcoming analysis Goulas conducted with researchers at Yale University.
“We don’t see a trajectory of enrollment recovery,” he said. “Things actually got worse in the most recently released data batch.”
But such conditions haven’t stopped advocacy groups from campaigning against closures. One of them, the left-leaning Advancement Project, has joined with local groups in Denver and Pittsburgh to make a case against closures nationally.
“All children deserve to have a local, neighborhood public school in which they and their families have a say,” said Jessica Alcantara, senior attorney for the group’s Opportunity to Learn program. “It’s not just that school closures are hard on families. They harm the full education ecosystem that makes up a school — students, families, school staff and whole communities.”
Last May, Alcantara and other Advancement Project staff urged the U.S. Department of Education to treat school closures as a civil rights issue. Nine of the 10 schools the Denver district planned to close in 2022 had a majority Black or Hispanic student population.
The advocates argued that in cases of enrollment loss, run-down facilities and empty classrooms, there are alternatives to closing schools. They encourage communities to push for renovations and urge district leaders to use vacant spaces for STEM, arts or other programs that might attract families. Opponents of closures also say that districts sometimes underestimate how much of a building is used for non-classroom purposes like special education services, early-childhood programs and mental health.
Eschbacher’s assessment of why districts often back down from closing schools is more blunt.
“Districts are so bad at this,” he said. “If you just do a few things wrong, it could sink the whole effort.”
For one, leaders often target schools with under 300 students for closure, appealing to parents that they can’t afford to staff them with arts programs, a school nurse or a librarian.
But those explanations sometimes fall flat.
“Parents always say, ‘I wanted a small school. I know my teachers and they know my kid. And it’s right down the street,’” Eschbacher said. If they didn’t like their school, he added, they would have likely would have chosen a charter or some other option.
District officials also run into trouble if they try to spin the data. When Seattle officials talked about “right-sizing” the district, they pointed to the loss of 4,900 students since 2019-20.
But Albert Wong, a parent in the district and a lifelong Seattle resident, knew there was more to the story. Not only is the current enrollment higher than it was from 2000 to 2011, the pandemic-related decline seems to have leveled off. In a commentary, he argued that officials presented misleading data “to make current enrollment look exceptionally bad.”
Graham Hill Elementary, fifth-grader Wren’s school, actually saw a slight increase in enrollment this year, including a new class for preschoolers with disabilities. And while Pittsburgh schools are projected to lose another 5,000 students over the next six years, enrollment this year held steady at about 18,400.
To Eschbacher, the “burden of proof is always on the district” to make an airtight case for why students would be better off in larger schools. He has applauded the Denver-area Jeffco Public Schools, which has closed 21 schools since 2021, for having state demographers, not just district officials, explain population trends to families at community meetings.
‘It wasn’t realistic’
Walters, Pittsburgh’s superintendent, can easily rattle off reasons why the district should rethink how it uses its buildings. Early last year, local news reports showed that almost half of the district’s schools were less than 50% full.
“We’ve lost about a fourth of our population, but we have not changed anything to our footprint,” he said.
Meanwhile, the average age of the district’s buildings is 90 years old, and many lack air-conditioning, forcing some schools to send students home in sweltering weather.
But a consulting group’s proposal showed that Black and low-income students and those with disabilities would be disproportionately affected by the changes. Several advocacy groups drew attention to those disparities, calling the effort “rushed.”
412 Justice, an advocacy group, is among the community organizations pushing for alternatives to school closures in Pittsburgh. (412 Justice)
Walters agreed and put the plan on hold last fall, saying he lacked “robust” responses to parents’ tough questions about how schools would change for their kids.
“It doesn’t mean that we don’t see a path forward,” he said. “But it wasn’t realistic that we would have those questions answered within the timeline that we’ve been given.”
In March, parents pushed for another delay, causing the school board to postpone a vote on the next phase in the closure process.
As the Jeffco district demonstrates, some school systems are following through with closures. The school board in nearby Denver unanimously voted in November to close seven schools and downsize three more.
But that’s after community protests pushed the district to put the brakes on a plan to close 19 schools in 2021. Advocates argued that families in low-income areas, who had been heavily impacted by the pandemic, would be most affected. Then the district only closed three in 2023, and now board members are considering a pause on closures for three years.
School boards closing a dozen or more schools are often catching up with work their predecessors let pile up, said Goulas of Brookings.
“Closing a single school allows for easier placement of students and minimizes the political cost and community stress,” he said. “When a district releases a long list of schools to close, it likely indicates that they waited for conditions to improve, but this didn’t happen.”
Angel Gober, executive director of 412 Justice — one of 16 organizations that called on the Pittsburgh district to drop its plan — acknowledged that their fight isn’t over.
“I think we got a temporary blessing from God,” she said. But she wants the district to explore a host of alternatives, like community schools and corporate support, before it shutters and sells off buildings. “We do have very old infrastructure, and that is an equity issue. But can we try five things before we make a drastic decision to close schools for forever?”
A fourth round of cutbacks took place on May 9. NSF observers were still trying to piece together the size and scope of this wave of destruction. A division focused on equity in education was eliminated and all its employees were fired. And the process for reviewing and approving future research grants was thrown into chaos with the elimination of division directors who were stripped of their powers.
Meanwhile, there was more clarity surrounding a third round of cuts that took place a week earlier on May 2. That round terminated more than 330 grants, raising the total number of terminated grants to at least 1,379, according to Grant Watch, a new project launched to track the Trump administration’s termination of grants at scientific research agencies. All but two of the terminated grants in early May were in the education division, and mostly targeted efforts to promote equity by increasing the participation of women and Black and Hispanic students in STEM fields. The number of activegrants by the Division of Equity for Excellence in STEM within the education directorate was slashed almost in half, from 902 research grants to 461.
Related: Our free weekly newsletter alerts you to what research says about schools and classrooms.
Combined with two earlier rounds of NSF cuts at in April, education now accounts for more than half of the nearly 1,400 terminated grants and almost three-quarters of their $1 billion value. Those dollars will no longer flow to universities and research organizations.
Cuts to STEM education dominate NSF grant terminations
… and nearly three-quarters of their $1 billion value are in education
Data source: Grant Watch, May 7, 2025. Charts by Jill Barshay/The Hechinger Report
The cuts are being felt across the nation. Grant Watch also created a map of the United States, showing that both red and blue states are losing federal research dollars.
Source: Grant Watch, May 7, 2025
It remains unclear exactly how NSF is choosing which grants to cancel and exactly who is making the decisions. Weekly waves of cuts began after the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE entered NSF headquarters in mid April. Only 40 percent of the terminated grants were also in a database of 3,400 research grants compiled last year by Sen. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican. Cruz characterized them as “questionable projects that promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) or advanced neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda.” Sixty percent were not on the Cruz list.
Source: Grant Watch, May 7, 2025
Other NSF cuts also affect education. Earlier this year, NSF cut in half the number of new students that it would support through graduate school from 2,000 to 1,000. Universities are bracing to hear this summer if NSF will continue to support graduate students who are already a part of its graduate research fellowship program.
NSF watchers were still compiling a list of the research grants that were terminated on May 9, the date of the most recent fourth round of research cuts. It was unclear if any research grants to promote equity in STEM education remained active.
The Division of Equity for Excellence in STEM, a unit of the Education Directorate, was “sunset,” according to a May 9 email sent to NSF employees and obtained by the Hechinger Report, and all of its employees were fired. According to the email, this “reduction in force” is slated to be completed by July 12. However, later on May 9, a federal judge in San Francisco temporarily blocked the Trump administration from implementing its “reduction in force” firings of federal employees at the NSF and 19 other agencies.
An initial hearing for a group of three legal cases by education researchers against the Department of Education is scheduled for May 16. At the hearing, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., will hear arguments over whether the court should temporarily restore terminated research studies and data collections and bring back fired Education Department employees while it considers whether the Trump administration exceeded its executive authority.
A first hearing scheduled for May 9 was postponed. At the May 16 hearing, the court will hear two similar motions from two different cases: one filed by the Association for Education Finance and Policy (AEFP) and the Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP), and the other filed by National Academy of Education (NAEd) and the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME). A third suit by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and the Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness (SREE) was filed in federal court in Maryland and will not be part of the May 16 hearing.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
“The European Union was formed in order to screw the United States, that’s the purpose of it.” So said U.S. President Donald Trump in February. He repeats this assertion whenever U.S.-European relations are a topic of debate.
Trump voiced his distorted view of the EU in his first term in office and picked it up again in the first three months of his second term, which began on January 20 and featured the start of a U.S. tariff war which up-ended international trade and shook an alliance dating back to the end of World War II.
What or who gave the U.S. president the idea that the EU was “formed to screw” the United States is something of a mystery. If he were a student in a history class, his professor would give him an F.
Trump’s claim does injustice to an institution that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012 in recognition for having, over six decades, “contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe” as the Nobel committee put it.
So, here is a brief guide to the creation of the EU, now the world’s largest trading bloc with a combined population of 448 million people, and the events that preceded its formal creation in 1952.
Next time you talk to Trump, feel free to brief him on it.
Staving off war
With Germans still clearing the ruins of the world war Adolf Hitler had started in 1939, far-sighted statesmen began thinking of ways to prevent a repeat of a conflict that killed 85 million people.
The foundation of what became a 28-country bloc lay in the reconciliation between France and Germany.
In his speech announcing the Nobel Prize, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Thorbjorn Jagland, singled out then French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman for presenting a plan to form a coal and steel community with Germany despite the long animosity between the two nations; in the space of 70 years, France and Germany had waged three wars against each other. That was in May 1950.
As the Nobel chairman put it, the Schuman plan “laid the very foundation for European integration.”
He added: “The reconciliation between Germany and France is probably the most dramatic example in history to show that war and conflict can be turned so rapidly into peace and cooperation.”
From enemies into partners
In years of negotiations, the coal and steel community, known as Montanunion in Germany, grew from two — France and Germany — to six with the addition of Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. The union was formalized with a treaty in Paris in 1951 and came into existence a year later.
The coal and steel community was the first step on a long road towards European integration. It was encouraged by the United States through a comprehensive and costly programme to rebuild war-shattered Europe.
Known as the Marshall Plan, named after U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall, the programme provided $12 billion (the equivalent of more than $150 billion today) for the rebuilding of Western Europe. It was part of President Harry Truman’s policy of boosting democratic and capitalist economies in the devastated region.
From the six-nation beginning, the process of European integration steadily gained momentum through successive treaties and expansions. Milestones included the creation of the European Economic Community and European Atomic Energy Community.
In 1986, the Single European Act paved the way to an internal market without trade barriers, an aim achieved in 1992. Seven years later, integration tightened with the adoption of a common currency, the Euro. Used by 20 of the 27 member states, it accounts for about 20% of all international transactions.
Brexiting out
One nation that held out against the Euro was the United Kingdom. It would later withdraw from the EU entirely after the 2016 “Brexit” referendum led by politicians who claimed that rules made by the EU could infringe on British sovereignty.
Many economists at the time described Brexit as a self-inflicted wound and opinion polls now show that the majority of Britons regret having left the union.
In decades of often arduous, detail-driven negotiations on European integration, including visa-free movement from one country to the other, no U.S. president ever saw the EU as a “foe” bent on “screwing” America. That is, until Donald Trump first won office in 2017 and then again in 2024.
What bothers him is a trade imbalance; the EU sells more to the United States than the other way around; he has been particularly vocal about German cars imported into the United States.
Early in his first term, the Wall Street Journal quoted him as complaining that “when you walk down Fifth Avenue (in New York), everybody has a Mercedes-Benz parked in front of his house. How many Chevrolets do you see in Germany? Not many, maybe none, you don’t see anything at all over there. It’s a one-way street.”
This appears to be one of the reasons why Trump imposed a 25% tariff, or import duty, on foreign cars when he declared a global tariff war on April 2.
His tariff decisions, implemented by Executive Order rather than legislation, caused deep dismay around the world and upended not only trade relations but also cast doubt on the durability of what is usually termed the rules-based international order.
That refers to the rules and alliances set up, and long promoted by the United States. For a concise assessment of the state of this system, listen to the highest-ranking official of the European Union: “The West as we knew it no longer exists.”
So said Ursula von der Leyen, president of the Brussels-based European Commission, the main executive body of the EU. Its top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, a former Prime Minister of Estonia, was even blunter: “The free world needs a new leader.”
Questions to consider:
1. Why was the European Union formed in the first place?
2. How can trade serve to keep the peace?
3. In what ways do nations benefit by partnering with other countries?
When students become literacy influencers, reading transforms from a classroom task into a global conversation.
When teens take the mic
Recent studies show that reading for pleasure among teens is at an all-time low. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), only 14 percent of U.S. students read for fun almost every day–down from 31 percent in 1984. In the UK, the National Literacy Trust reports that just 28 percent of children aged 8 to 18 said they enjoyed reading in their free time in 2023.
With reading engagement in crisis, one group of teens decided to flip the narrative–by turning on their cameras. What began as a simple classroom project to encourage reading evolved into a movement that amplified student voices, built confidence, and connected learners across cultures.
Rather than writing traditional essays or book reports, my students were invited to create short video book reviews of their favorite titles–books they genuinely loved, connected with, and wanted others to discover. The goal? To promote reading in the classroom and beyond. The result? A library of student-led recommendations that brought books–and readers–to life.
Project overview: Reading, recording, and reaching the world
As an ESL teacher, I’ve always looked for ways to make literacy feel meaningful and empowering, especially for students navigating a new language and culture. This video review project began with a simple idea: Let students choose a book they love, and instead of writing about it, speak about it. The assignment? Create a short, personal, and authentic video to recommend the book to classmates–and potentially, to viewers around the world.
Students were given creative freedom to shape their presentations. Some used editing apps like Filmora9 or Canva, while others recorded in one take on a smartphone. I offered a basic outline–include the book’s title and author, explain why you loved it, and share who you’d recommend it to–but left room for personal flair.
What surprised me most was how seriously students took the project. They weren’t just completing an assignment–they were crafting their voices, practicing communication skills, and taking pride in their ability to share something they loved in a second language.
Student spotlights: Book reviews with heart, voice, and vision
Each student’s video became more than a book recommendation–it was an expression of identity, creativity, and confidence. With a camera as their platform, they explored their favorite books and communicated their insights in authentic, impactful ways.
Mariam led the way with a polished and emotionally resonant video review of John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars. Using Filmora9, she edited her video to flow smoothly while keeping the focus on her heartfelt reflections. Mariam spoke with sincerity about the novel’s themes: love, illness, and the fragility of life. She communicated them in a way that was both thoughtful and relatable. Her work demonstrated not only strong literacy skills but also digital fluency and a growing sense of self-expression.
In one of the most touching video reviews, Dana, a student who openly admits she’s not an avid reader, chose to spotlight “Dear Tia,” written by Maria Zaki, her best friend’s sister. The personal connection to the author didn’t just make her feel seen; it made the book feel more real, more urgent, and worth talking about. Dana’s honest reflection and warm delivery highlight how personal ties to literature can spark unexpected enthusiasm.
Farah’s confident presentation introduced her classmates to Utopia, a dystopian novel by Egyptian author Ahmed Khaled Towfik. Through her review, she brought attention to Arabic literature, offering a perspective that is often underrepresented in classrooms. Farah’s choice reflected pride in her cultural identity, and her delivery was clear, persuasive, and engaging. Her video became more than a review–it was a form of cultural storytelling that invited her peers to expand their literary horizons.
Rita’s review of Frostblood, a fantasy novel by Elly Blake, stood out for its passionate tone and concise storytelling. She broke down the plot with clarity, highlighting the emotional journey of the protagonist while reflecting on themes like power, resilience, and identity. Rita’s straightforward approach and evident enthusiasm created a strong peer-to-peer connection, showing how even a simple, sincere review can spark curiosity and excitement about reading.
Literacy skills in action
Behind each of these videos lies a powerful range of literacy development. Students weren’t just reviewing books–they were analyzing themes, synthesizing ideas, making connections, and articulating their thoughts for an audience. By preparing for their recordings, students learned how to organize their ideas, revise their messages for clarity, and reflect on what made a story impactful to them personally.
Speaking to a camera also encouraged students to practice intonation, pacing, and expression–key skills in both oral language development and public speaking. In multilingual classrooms, these skills are often overlooked in favor of silent writing tasks. But in this project, English Learners were front and center, using their voices–literally and figuratively–to take ownership of language in a way that felt authentic and empowering.
Moreover, the integration of video tools meant students had to think critically about how they presented information visually. From editing with apps like Filmora9 to choosing appropriate backgrounds, they were not just absorbing content, they were producing and publishing it, embracing their role as creators in a digital world.
Tips for teachers: Bringing book reviews to life
This project was simple to implement and required little more than student creativity and access to a recording device. Here are a few tips for educators who want to try something similar:
Let students choose their own books: Engagement skyrockets when they care about what they’re reading.
Keep the structure flexible: A short outline helps, but students thrive when given room to speak naturally.
Offer tech tools as optional, not mandatory: Some students enjoyed using Filmora9 or Canva, while others used the camera app on their phone.
Focus on voice and message, not perfection: Encourage students to focus on authenticity over polish.
Create a classroom premiere day: Let students watch each other’s videos and celebrate their peers’ voices.
Literacy is personal, public, and powerful
This project proved what every educator already knows: When students are given the opportunity to express themselves in meaningful ways, they rise to the occasion. Through book reviews, my students weren’t just practicing reading comprehension, they were becoming speakers, storytellers, editors, and advocates for literacy.
They reminded me and will continue to remind others that when young people talk about books in their own voices, with their personal stories woven into the narrative, something beautiful happens: Reading becomes contagious.
Nesren El-Baz, ESL Educator
Nesren El-Baz is an ESL educator with over 20 years of experience, and is a certified bilingual teacher with a Master’s in Curriculum and Instruction. El-Baz is currently based in the UK, holds a Masters degree in Curriculum and Instruction from Houston Christian University, and specializes in developing in innovative strategies for English Learners and Bilingual education.
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WASHINGTON — The momentum for providing all students access to meaningful career and college pathways is growing, but hurdles such as funding, teacher training, reluctance to change and other factors stand in the way, said speakers at the National Pathways Summit on Thursday.
Experiential learning about careers is what students, families and educators want. Industry leaders also want to employ workers with job skills and essential abilities like problem solving, collaboration and resilience, the speakers told the 300 summit attendees.
And these skills and abilities are not just desirable, but critical to the health of the economy, said Stanley Litow, chair of the National Pathways Initiative, a bipartisan federation of students and leaders from education, business, government, politics and advocacy organizations that promote promising K-12 and higher education career and college preparation programs.
“From the business community standpoint, there is an enormous amount of pressure in the labor market around the skills area,” said Litow, a former deputy schools chancellor for New York City Public Schools and former president of the IBM Foundation. He is currently a professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.
Litow said that by 2030, over 70% of the new jobs created will require some form of postsecondary education, which includes credentials, apprenticeships, two-year and four-year degrees, and other continuing learning programs.
But to make career and college preparation successful for students and industries, the education and business communities need to partner to align their needs, Litow said. “We have to break down the barriers, we have to collaborate, we have to work together.”
Successes and challenges
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, and John B. King, Jr., chancellor of the State University of New York and a former U.S. education secretary, both noted that there’s a high level of agreement across the country that workforce preparation in K-12 and higher education is important.
They also pointed to several successful programs that are helping students gain the skills necessary for their chosen occupation. King, for example, highlighted the Real Life Rosies program at Mohawk Valley Community College in Utica, New York — a 12-week pre-apprenticeship program that helps women gain advanced manufacturing skills.
But Weingarten and King also noted obstacles that are stunting students’ access to skill-based learning.
For one, K-12 school systems “are really terrible at change,” Weingarten said, adding that they “only change when an accountability system changes. And so the problem is we have a really outdated accountability system.”
Weingarten also said that school systems tend to be risk-averse. “People get blamed” if an initiative isn’t 100% successful, she said. That’s why school accountability systems need to be revised, “to give people permission to do something different.”
King said one obstacle is that there’s a culture challenge. Some people think that a liberal arts education and career readiness preparation programs are in conflict with each other, he said. “Sometimes people react against talk of careers, because it seems that it is making education just about the job,” he said.
King also said leaders from all industry sectors need to voice support for education and prioritize learning as an investment, as well as work on solutions to barriers. “We need the business community nudging people on both sides of the aisle to stand up for education and stand up for this vision we’ve been talking about today,” he said.
Reo Pruiett, Rashid Ferrod Davis and Don Haddad speak about the P-TECH approach to connecting K-12 students with college and career experiences during a panel at the National Pathways Summit at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., on May 8, 2025.
Permission granted by National Pathways Initiative
Two diplomas by high school graduation
Several speakers during another panel discussion highlighted one approach that is helping high school students graduate with both high school and associate degree diplomas while also gaining career skills and connections to potential employers through mentorships, paid internships, and other on-the-job experiences.
The P-TECH 9-14 school model was created by IBM to encourage public-private partnerships to give high school students specific workplace skills while they earn both diplomas. The first P-TECH school was launched in New York City in 2011.
Reo Pruiett, chief programs and engagement officer at Communities Foundation of Texas, focuses on improving K-12 and higher education outcomes. She calls the P-TECH approach “game changing.”
She said the program has helped students gain upward economic mobility and has “demystified” the college experience for students while they are still being supported as high schoolers.
“I think that’s one thing about P-TECH; It allows us to make sure our students are prepared to dream and not to just settle,” she said.
Don Haddad, superintendent of St. Vrain Valley School District in Colorado, credits the program for increases in the district’s graduation rates and reductions in the dropout rates, which now stands at 0.4%. He also cited an increase in the number of students participating in extracurricular activities. Students in the district have the opportunity to study career pathways for computer information systems, cybersecurity, medical and bio sciences, education and more.
“If you create the opportunities, every child is smart enough to systematically move through that system,” said Haddad, who is in his 17th year as the district superintendent.
But Pruiett, Haddad and Rashid Ferrod Davis, the founding principal of the Pathways in Technology Early College High School in New York City, said there are some pain points.
Pruiett said some Texas rural school districts don’t have access to a variety of business partners that some urban areas do, which can limit P-TECH students’ opportunities for on-the-job skill development. In those instances, some rural districts partner with each other to share industry partnerships and other resources.
Another workaround for the lack of business partners is to coordinate with other industries that may offer similar skill-building opportunities. For example, if there are no nearby hospitals, nursing homes may be able to offer related experiences to students interested in the medical sciences.
Likewise, hospitals may be ideal settings for on-the-job experiences for a variety of careers, such as medical sciences, hospitality and accounting. School districts are also potential partners for hosting interns, Pruiett said.
But the state, Pruiett said, is always looking for more partners to meet the demand for real-world job experiences for students. “So if you know someone in Texas, let us know.”
About three in five college students experienced some level of basic needs insecurity during the 2024 calendar year, according to survey data from Trellis Strategies. Over half (58 percent) of respondents said they experienced one or more forms of basic needs insecurity in the past 12 months.
Student financial challenges can negatively impact academic achievement and students’ ability to remain enrolled. About 57 percent of students said they’ve had to choose between college expenses and basic needs, according to a 2024 report from Ellucian.
While a growing number of colleges and universities are expanding support for basic needs resource centers—driven in part by state legislation that requires more accommodations for students in peril—not every campus dedicates funds to the centers. A 2024 survey by Swipe Out Hunger found that of 300-plus campus pantries, two in five were funded primarily through donations. Only 5 percent of food pantries had a dedicated budget from their institution as a primary source of funding.
Inside Higher Ed compiled four examples of institutions that are considering new or innovative ways to address students’ financial wellbeing and basic needs on campus.
Penn State University—School Supplies for Student Success
Previous research shows that when students have their relevant course materials provided on day one, they are more likely to pass their classes and succeed. Penn State’s Chaiken Center for Student Success launched a School Supplies for Student Success program that offers learners access to free supplies, including notebooks, writing utensils and headphones, to help them stay on track academically.
Students are able to visit the student success center on the University Park campus every two weeks to acquire items, which are also available at two other locations on campus. Learners attending Penn State Altoona and Penn State Hazleton can visit their respective student success center for supplies, as well.
The program is funded by a Barnes & Noble College Grant program and is sustained through physical and monetary donations from the university community.
Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts—Essential Needs Center
The Essential Needs Center was developed from a Service Leadership Capstone course, which required students to complete a community-based service project. One group of students explored rates of basic needs insecurity and established a food pantry to remedy hunger on campus.
“The program started as a drawer at my desk,” said Spencer Moser, assistant dean for Student Growth and Wellbeing, who taught the course. “Then it grew to fill a shelving unit, a closet and eventually its own space on campus.”
The center, now a one-stop shop for basic needs support on campus, provides students with small appliances, storage containers, personal care items and seasonal clothing, as well as resources to address housing and transportation needs, including emergency funding grants. Students can also apply for a “basic needs bundle” to select specific items they may require.
Paid student employees maintain the center but it’s also left “unstaffed” at some hours to address the stigma of seeking help for basic supplies. Between November 2023 and January 2025, over 1,300 students engaged with the center.
University of New Hampshire—Financial Wellness
A lack of financial stability can also have a negative impact on student thriving and success. To support students’ learning and financial wellbeing, the University of New Hampshire created an online digital hub that provides links to a budget worksheet, financial wellness self-evaluation, college cost calculator and loan simulator.
Students can also schedule an appointment to talk with an educator to discuss financial wellness or engage in a financial wellness workshop.
Roxbury Community College—the Rox Box
Most colleges operate on an academic calendar, with available hours and resources falling when class is in session. Roxbury Community College in Massachusetts launched a new initiative in winter 2023 to ensure students who were off campus for winter break didn’t experience food insecurity.
Before the break, staff at the college’s food pantry, the Rox Box, handed out Stop & Shop gift cards and grab-and-go meals, as well as a list of local places students could visit for meals over break.
Do you have a wellness intervention that might help others promote student success? Tell us about it.
Transfer enrollment rose by 4.4 percent this year, according to recent data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. In total, transfers have grown by 8 percent since 2020, signaling a steady rebound from the sharp declines seen during the pandemic. That’s encouraging news for students seeking affordable, flexible pathways to a degree, as well as for institutions focused on expanding access and supporting completion.
Less noticed, however, is just how much progress rural students are making. In fall 2023, rural community colleges experienced a 12.1 percent increase in students transferring to four-year institutions. This progress is even more impressive given the historic underinvestment in rural institutions and the well-documented barriers their students face on their path to a four-year degree.
Many of the country’s small, rural institutions remain on the margins of transfer conversations, partnerships and policy priorities. Here in California, for instance 60 percent of the community colleges with the lowest transfer rates are rural. From low-income students in Appalachia to Latino learners in Texas’s Rio Grande Valley, rural colleges are lifelines for students facing barriers such as poverty, food and housing insecurity, and limited access to transportation and technology. Yet these institutions tend to lack the support, visibility and resources of larger community college systems. They often remain excluded from the design and implementation of transfer initiatives.
Rural students bring tremendous talent, drive and potential to higher education. Many are the first in their families to attend college. They are often deeply rooted in their communities and, in many cases, seek to use their education to give back and contribute to their local economies.
Transferring to a four-year institution can dramatically increase the lifetime earnings of these learners, expand their career paths and help meet the growing demand for a highly skilled workforce. Individuals with a bachelor’s degree earn, on average, nearly 35 percent more per year than those with only an associate degree. Four-year degrees open doors to career advancement, civic engagement and personal growth.
Yet the systemic challenges rural community college students face—from more limited course offerings and degree options to long travel times to campuses to unreliable internet connections—require tailored support and intentional partnership. A one-size-fits-all approach to transfer doesn’t work when rural students are starting from a fundamentally different place than many of their peers.
For example, rural colleges may not have the staff capacity to manage complex articulation agreements or advocate for their students in statewide transfer initiatives. Their advisers may juggle many roles, serving as counselors, career coaches and transfer liaisons all at once. Meanwhile, students themselves may be unaware of transfer opportunities or discouraged by long distances to four-year campuses, especially when those pathways demand sacrifices they can’t afford to make.
The health of both our higher education ecosystem and our economy depends on ensuring that all students, regardless of ZIP code, can move easily between two-year and four-year institutions. If efforts to improve transfer overlook rural colleges, they risk deepening existing educational inequities and missing out on a significant segment of our nation’s talent pool.
Organizations such as the Rural Community College Alliance shine a needed spotlight on how to best collaborate with rural institutions across the country to improve transfer outcomes and better support rural students’ success. Progress starts with listening and taking the time to understand the unique strengths and challenges of rural communities rather than imposing outside solutions.
The policy landscape will need to evolve to support these efforts. This means increasing investment in rural higher education infrastructure, expanding funding for rural-serving institutions, and creating more flexible transfer frameworks that reflect the realities of rural learners, many of whom are working adults, members of the military, parents, or all of the above. Federal, state and higher education leaders should recognize rurality as a key lens through which to view improving student outcomes, on par with class or race.
Transfer rates are rising, and more students are finding affordable on-ramps to bachelor’s degrees. But this progress is incomplete unless it reaches every corner of the country, including the small towns and rural communities that are home to millions of students. In a moment when more students are finally moving forward, we can’t afford to leave these learners behind. When rural students succeed, our entire nation benefits.
Gerardo de los Santos is vice president for community college relations at National University.
The higher education sector had high hopes of a new government last July. Early messaging from ministers suggested that they were justified. The Guardian quoted Peter Kyle, the Science Secretary, declaring an ‘end to the war on universities’. Speaking to the Commons in September 2024, the Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson said that ‘the last Government ..use[d] our world-leading sector as a political football, talking down institutions and watching on as the situation became…desperate. I [want to]…return universities to being the engines of growth and opportunity‘. In November, she announced a rise – albeit for just one year in the first instance – in the undergraduate tuition fee, with the prospect of alleviating pressure on higher education budgets.
Ten months on, the hopes look tarnished as financial, political and policy challenges mount. The scale of the higher education funding challenge is deepening, it seems, by the week. The OfS has reported that four in ten universities will report a deficit this year. Restructuring programmes are underway in scores of universities, with some institutions on their second, third or even fourth round of savings. The post-study graduate visa, an important lifeline for international student recruitment, appears to be under threat.
Policy direction appears to be unclear. The English higher education sector is still largely shaped by the coalition government’s policy decisions between 2010 and 2015. Its key design principles include uncapped student demand since number controls were abolished in 2013, assumed cross-subsidies across and between activity streams allowing for institutional flexibility, access to private capital markets since HEFCE capital funding was removed in 2011, diverse missions but largely homogenous delivery models based around traditional terms and full-time, three-year undergraduate provision, and jealously protected institutional autonomy. Familiar though these principles are in higher education policy, some are in truth relatively recent, and are creating tensions between what the nation wants from its university system, what universities can offer and what the government and others are willing to pay for.
Moreover, the sector we have in 2025 is not the sector which the 2017 Higher Education and Reform Act (HERA) envisaged: HERA was expected to significantly re-shape the sector. The government’s impact assessment of HERA suggested that there would be in the order of 800 HE providers by the mid-2020s. This did not happen, though the impact of private capital, often channelled through established institutions and now rapidly growing for-profit providers, should not be underestimated as a longer-term transformative force in the sector.
We are expecting both a three-year comprehensive spending review and a post-16 White Paper in a couple of months’ time. In my 2024 HEPI paper, ’Four Futures’, I sketched out possible scenarios for a sector facing intense challenges. The near-frozen undergraduate fee was reducing the unit of resource for undergraduate teaching as costs rose. Undergraduate demand seemed to be softening amongst (especially) disadvantaged eighteen-year-olds. International student demand remains volatile and subject to political change in visa regulations. The structural deficit on research funding deepened. ‘Four Futures’ outlined four scenarios, summarised in Table 1.
Of course, we all want a mixture of cost control, thriving universities, regional growth and research excellence, but it is difficult to have all of them. Governments and universities set priorities based on limited resources, so there are choices to be made and trade-offs to be confronted for both policymakers and institutional leaders.
Government needs to make decisions about universities in the context of competing and changing policy imperatives. It needs to balance restoring government finances, allocating resources to other needy sectors, securing economic growth, and, more obviously important than a year ago, protecting sovereign intellectual property assets and growing defence-related R&D. The Secretary of State’s letter to Vice-Chancellors in the Autumn identified growth, engagement with place, teaching excellence, widening participation and securing efficiencies, but did not unpick the tensions between them. That depends on articulating a stronger vision for higher education given the Government’s priorities and resources and the economic challenges facing institutions, and it is a task for the forthcoming White Paper.
But there are urgent choices too for institutions, and those need to be made quickly in many universities. Institutional and sector efficiencies are vital, and a key theme of the UUK Carrington Review, but they need to be considered in the light of sustainable operating models for both academic delivery and professional services. Institutions need a clearly articulated value proposition, communicated strongly and effectively and capable of driving the operating model. In the past, too many universities have tried to do too many things – and with resources scarce, the choices cannot be ducked. That means there is a consideration which links the choices facing government and those facing individual institutions. If a core strength of the English system lies in its diversity and its distributed excellence, individual institutions need to think about their place in, and responsibilities to, the wider HE system. For a sector characterised by intense competition, that is a profound cultural shift, notwithstanding the economic and legal challenges of collaboration.
The higher education sector now is not the sector we have always had, and therefore it won’t be the sector we always have. How the sector collectively, and institutions individually, confront choices is a test for policymakers and institutional leaders.
