By Peter Ainsworth, a consultant and writer on higher education finance, known for advocating structural reform that aligns university incentives with real-world graduate outcomes.
Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” may sound absurd to British ears, but beneath the “very stable genius’s” promotional gloss lies a legislative change designed to reset the relationship between the US Higher Education sector and the state. The bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives on 22 May 2025, includes the Student Success and Taxpayer Savings Act (SSTSA) – which, if passed by the Senate, would be the world’s first statutory implementation of institutional risk-sharing in student loans.
Historically, in both the US and UK, universities have been financially rewarded for their enrollment of students rather than for the practical benefits delivered to their customers. Success arises out of customer acquisition rather than service value-add. Students take out government-backed loans to pay tuition; institutions receive the money upfront regardless of whether or not their degrees lead to economic success. The result is a moral hazard: an incentive (payment) structure for universities that is not aligned with the employability gain that students want and taxpayers need. Systematically falling graduate premiums on both sides of the Atlantic reflect the impact of insulating universities from the employment risk their students face in a rapidly changing economy.
The American reform seeks to realign incentives to better align risks and objectives. It introduces an Earnings-to-Price Ratio (EPR):
EPR = (Median Value-Added Earnings) / (Median Total Price)
Institutions with low EPRs – indicating poor graduate earnings relative to costs – will face a financial penalty in the form of an invoice from the US Treasury to cover the estimated student loan losses for the relevant cohort. If the Senate passes the reform, US universities will have a powerful incentive to transform their offer to ensure meaningful real-world earnings gains for their students.
The SSTSA is an advance on the existing Cohort Default Rate (CDR) system, which merely threatened to deny access to federal loans to students of institutions with very high default rates. But there was no direct financial risk. Congress deemed it ineffective and so now proposes something more market-oriented.
Meanwhile, the UK is two steps behind, only now looking to implement a version of the CDR model which the US is already moving away from. A recent Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) paper proposes regulating universities based on early-career graduate earnings proxies – like the CDR it is recognising the importance of career earnings outcomes but measuring them indirectly and using regulatory sanction rather than financial cost as the stick. The IFS proposes to use earnings in a three- to five-year window post-graduation to drive regulatory response. Like the CDR’s reliance on a technical definition of default, this short, near-term window will create heavily biased statistics, diminishing the value of professions with delayed earnings trajectories such as medicine and academia.
Further, the IFS proposes to exclude from consideration graduates with very low earnings. This favours institutions whose graduates earn just below an arbitrary threshold level. They also rely on UK tax data which omits emigrants, undervaluing universities that succeed in preparing graduates for global careers.
As Friedrich Hayek argued, complex systems cannot be centrally managed through proxies and aggregated metrics. Graduate career trajectories are dynamic, diverse, and unpredictable — precisely the kind of outcomes that defy simple measurement. Accepting that lifetime earnings are the relevant metric leads inevitably to the conclusion that no bureaucratic proxy will suffice.
There is a cleaner alternative. Universities could be required to issue the loans themselves, something that Buckingham, for example, already does on a small scale. Where needed, to support cash flow, the government could lend to institutions rather than students. This would internalise the financial risk: institutions would have a direct, long-term stake in the earnings success of their graduates. Universities could be freed to set fees and loan terms based on the economic value they expect to deliver and would be incentivised to provide ongoing support — career services, retraining, alumni engagement — to minimise loan defaults over the full life of the loan.
Such a model also addresses bigger challenges facing the higher education sector. Edward Peck, the new Chair of the Office for Students, recently argued that AI is making traditional assessment ineffective and universities must move from testing what students know to what they can do. Meanwhile, Diana Beech and André Spicer, writing for HEPI, have highlighted that universities now employ an average of 17.6 staff solely to handle regulatory compliance and warned that regulation is “multiplying and becoming less predictable.” In this context, risk-sharing offers a route back to institutional autonomy: tying funding to real-world success rather than the IFS’s proposal for even more bureaucratic box-ticking.
Finally, political and fiscal realities support this innovation. A shift to institutionally issued loans would remove the student loan portfolio from the government’s balance sheet, reducing annual write-downs by around £15bn per annum – a present value of around £300bn. That would go a long way to address the various fiscal challenges faced by the Labour government. With less bureaucratic interference, more strategic freedom, and appropriate incentives, the sector should be able to make student loans pay, ensuring a sustainable and prosperous future, and letting British universities blow past their American rivals like nobody’s seen before.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Louisiana, spearheading the Senate plan for higher education reform.
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Senate Republicans want to eliminate so-called “inflationary loans,” stop federal aid to degrees that leave students worse off and expand the Pell Grant to workforce training programs as part of a draft plan released late Tuesday evening to overhaul higher education policy.
The 71-page legislation is part of the Senate’s response to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which passed the House last month and is designed to fund President Donald Trump’s tax cuts, his crackdown on immigration and other top agenda items.
The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions committee drafted the higher education portion of the legislation. As expected, the plan mirrors the House bill in many ways as it calls for significant changes to the federal student loan system. For instance, both plans would end the Grad Plus loans and restrict the Parent Plus program.
But the Senate has a different plan to hold colleges accountable, nixing the House’s proposed risk-sharing model, under which colleges would have to pay a fee for their graduates’ unpaid loans, for a measure like gainful employment. Under the Senate plan, colleges would have to report their average postgraduate income levels and could lose access to federal aid, depending on students’ earnings and debt. The Senate bill also omits a provision from the House bill that would exclude part-time students from the Pell grant. Overall, the changes in the Senate bill would save $300 billion over 10 years compared to the House bill, which would save $350 billion.
“American higher education has lost its purpose. Students are graduating with degrees that won’t get them a job and insurmountable debt that they can’t pay back,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy, the Republican chair of the HELP committee, in a news release. “We need to fix our broken higher education system, so it prioritizes student success and ensures Americans have the skills to compete in a 21st century economy. President Trump and Senate Republicans are focused on delivering results for American families and this bill does just that.”
Lawmakers are using the process known as reconciliation to advance the legislation, so it only needs 51 votes to pass the high chamber instead of the typical 60 votes. But before senators can vote, the Senate Budget committee and then the parliamentarian will have to scrutinize the various provisions and ensure they adhere to the reconciliation rules. For example, the policy changes must have a budgetary impact and be within the jurisdiction of the committee that proposed it.
President Donald Trump has set an ambitious July 4 deadline to sign the measure into law, which would require quick action from the Senate.
From the beginning of the Trump administration in January, House Republicans have been pushing a more radical plan with steep cuts to key welfare programs like Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and, most recently, student financial aid like the Pell Grant. Meanwhile, senators have talked about more modest, though still significant, spending cuts.
Now, Republicans from both chambers will have to get on the same page if they want to meet their deadline. All the while, lobbyists, policy analysts and political figures—including ex-Trump advisor, Elon Musk—are expected to come at the bill from every angle with critiques.
Math anxiety isn’t just about feeling nervous before a math test. It’s been well-known for decades that students who are anxious about math tend to do worse on math tests and in math classes.
But recently, some of us who research math anxiety have started to realize that we may have overlooked a simple yet important reason why students who are anxious about math underperform: They don’t like doing math, and as a result, they don’t do enough of it.
We wanted to get a better idea of just what kind of impact math anxiety could have on academic choices and academic success throughout college. In one of our studies, we measured math anxiety levels right when students started their postsecondary education. We then followed them throughout their college career, tracking what classes they took and how well they did in them.
We found that highly math-anxious students went on to perform worse not just in math classes, but also in STEM classes more broadly. This means that math anxiety is not something that only math teachers need to care about — science, technology and engineering educators need to have math anxiety on their radar, too.
We also found that students who were anxious about math tended to avoid taking STEM classes altogether if they could. They would get their math and science general education credits out of the way early on in college and never look at another STEM class again. So not only is math anxiety affecting how well students do when they step into a STEM classroom, it makes it less likely that they’ll step into that classroom in the first place.
This means that math anxiety is causing many students to self-sort out of the STEM career pipeline early, closing off career paths that would likely be fulfilling (and lucrative).
Our study’s third major finding was the most surprising. When it came to predicting how well students would do in STEM classes, math anxiety mattered even more than math ability. Our results showed that if you were a freshman in college and you wanted to do well in your STEM classes, you would likely be better off reducing your math anxiety than improving your math ability.
We wondered: How could that be? How could math anxiety — how you feel about math — matter more for your academic performance than how good you are at it? Our best guess: avoidance.
If something makes you anxious, you tend to avoid doing it if you can. Both in our research and in that of other researchers, there’s been a growing understanding that in addition to its other effects, math anxiety means that you’ll do your very best to engage with math as little as possible in situations where you can’t avoid it entirely.
In some of our other work, we found that math-anxious students were less interested in doing everyday activities precisely to the degree that they thought those activities involved math. The more a math-anxious student thought an activity involved math, the less they wanted to do it.
If math anxiety is causing students to consistently avoid spending time and effort on their classes that involve math, this would explain why their STEM grades suffer.
What does all of this mean for educators? Teachers need to be aware that students who are anxious about math are less likely to engage with math during class, and they’re less likely to put in the effort to study effectively. All of this avoidance means missed opportunities for practice, and that may be the key reason why many math-anxious students struggle not only in math class, but also in science and engineering classes that require some math.
Math anxiety researchers are at the very beginning of our journey to understand ways to make students who are anxious about math stop avoiding it but have already made some promising suggestions for how teachers can help. One study showed that a direct focus on study skills could help math-anxious students.
Giving students clear structure on how they should be studying (trying lots of practice problems) and how often they should be studying (spaced out over multiple days, not just the night before a test) was effective at helping students overcome their math anxiety and perform better.
Especially heartening was the fact that the effects seen during the study persisted in semesters beyond the intervention; these students tended to make use of the new skills into the future.
Math anxiety researchers will continue to explore new ways to help math-anxious students fight their math-avoidant proclivities. In the meantime, educators should do what they can to help their students struggling with math anxiety overcome this avoidance tendency — it could be one of the most powerful ways a math teacher can help shape their students’ futures.
Rich Daker is a researcher and founder of Pinpoint Learning, an education company that makes research-backed tools to help educators identify why their students make mistakes. Ian Lyons is an associate professor in Georgetown University’s Department of Psychology and principal investigator for the Math Brain Lab.
The Hechinger Report provides in-depth, fact-based, unbiased reporting on education that is free to all readers. But that doesn’t mean it’s free to produce. Our work keeps educators and the public informed about pressing issues at schools and on campuses throughout the country. We tell the whole story, even when the details are inconvenient. Help us keep doing that.
This morning I joined Amy Goodman on Democracy Now to talk about the bill that House Republican leadership worked through the night to push toward a vote on the floor.
The more Americans learn about what’s in this bill, the more outrage there will be that House members are willing to vote for cuts that will devastate communities so their billionaire donors can have a massive tax break. (That’s why they’re meeting to talk about the details in the middle of the night.)
We must sharpen our language to make clear what’s at stake in this one big, ugly, and death-dealing bill.
And we must prepare ourselves for moral action.
We are glad to announce that Indivisible, the national organization behind “No Kings Day” on June 14th, has joined our Moral Monday partners to mobilize a mass action on June 2 outside of the US Capitol. We invite you to register here if you can join us for Moral Monday on June 2.
To learn more, plan to join me and Indivisible co-founder Ezra Levin for a Substack Live on Tuesday, May 27, at 12pm ET.
I’m also looking forward to a conversation here on Substack next week with Robert Reich. We will be live Wednesday, May 28, at 5:30pm ET/2:30pm PT.
To join live conversations with us on Our Moral Moment, you just need to download the Substack app, subscribe for free, and turn out notifications. You’ll get a notice on your phone that we are going live.
Extracurricular activities have big benefits for both students and the university – but we could do more to get students involved.
University life for students is busy these days, not just with lectures and assessments but for many students, also the need to work to fund their studies.
Extracurricular activities can not only add value to the student experience and are a key offering of universities which have some surprising benefits for both.
They have a demonstrative effect in reducing depression, boosting employability skills, giving students an opportunity to try new things without pressure of assessment – and participation in extracurricular activities is closely related to increasing alumni donations to the university, a clear sign of happy and successful graduates.
However, in order for us to get the most out of them we need both the benefits, and the activities themselves, to be signposted better within the university as well as ensuring that some groups that would benefit most despite lower engagement are encouraged to get involved.
Competition for student’s time is fierce, with coursework, exams, and projects, but also for those students who need to work in paid employment to fund their studies and living costs. But extracurricular activities have several benefits for the students, and whilst a small number of students find it harder than others to balance activities and academic work, outcomes are generally positive.
The vast majority of studies around the world have found a general correlation between taking part in extracurricular activities and improved academic performance. There are a large range of activities that students could do – activities that complement the curriculum such as the MBA programme having a pitching competition or a weekend hackathon (often called cocurricular activities), whilst there are also activities from outside these boundaries such as sports which are unrelated to the student’s core subject.
Regardless of the actual activity that they do, there are a range of positives. They improve employability skills and leadership skills – giving the student CV-worthy examples, and they are a way to show an employer that you are interested in a specific career.
Employers have suggested extracurricular activities can help determine your cultural fit, and show examples of commitment and interpersonal skills. Involvement in social enterprise or charitable projects are looked upon favourably. Improving students’ employment prospects, especially with extracurricular activities having a “levelling up” effect for those from minority groups and those from lower socio-economic groups – this reflects well on the university and its mission.
Extracurricular activities allow students the opportunity to try more hands-on and experiential activities without the risk and pressure of needing a good grade, or being creative using spaces such as makerspaces. It might also be a rare opportunity to work in a cross disciplinary manner and diversifies your group of friends.
Residential courses and field trips are also valuable, with research showing that they stimulate a sense of togetherness with those on their courses, and with a chance to see their subject in action which helps them put it in context, encourages more enjoyment of it, and allows them to form career plans based on that subject, with those in late adolescence and early adulthood especially attuned for developing career self-efficacy in this way.
These residential activities seem to disproportionally benefit poorer students and those from minority groups, resulting in higher marks, thus making them ideal activities for universities to support. With the Sutton Trust suggesting the number of students in the UK now living at home due to the cost of living to be 34 per cent, rising to 65 per cent from those in poorer socio-economic groups, it is a rare opportunity for some students to escape from living with parents.
Extracurricular activities are seen as adding value by students, especially those overseas students who readily sign up for activities, as we have found with off campus opportunities we offer in entrepreneurship quickly booked up by enthusiastic overseas students, such as our “Enterprise School” in the Lake District with postgraduate groups from mixed subject areas working together late into the night (putting the staff to shame) – and keeping in touch when they return to Manchester and beyond, building a network they would never have otherwise met.
What can we do to improve them?
We can try to engage older and ethnic minorities more as these groups tend to spend less time on extracurricular activities at the university, and make them more friendly for those who may have carer commitments, for example not always having events in the evening.
This might help other groups of students – I have also found as an academic adviser that many students in Manchester live with parents and commute from nearby cities such as Liverpool and Sheffield, with their notoriously bad rail lines – and these students are less likely to take part in extracurricular activities as they prioritise when they travel to university.
Those from lower socio-economic groups also spend less time on extracurricular activities due to the pressure of paid employment, so encouraging them to consider at least some extracurricular activity would be beneficial.
First year males could also be a target for engagement – whilst suicide rates for students overall are considerably lower than that of the general population, for first year males the rate was found to be 7.8 per 100,000 people, significantly higher than males of other years and female students as a whole, which has been attributed to social isolation, alcohol consumption and the general life change of moving to university.
Involvement in extracurricular activities reduces suicidal tendencies by increasing the sense of belonging and lessening the sense of burden a student might feel, and are a relatively low cost option as part of the universities commitment to its duty of care. It has been suggested by the Office for Students that those students who are in several minority categories concurrently are particularly vulnerable from a mental health perspective, so being aware of these students is especially important.
Students partaking in extracurricular activities reported having a depressive mood less often and report the development of a long-lasting social support network – which may well identify problems and help students before the university even becomes aware of anything wrong.
Unfortunately, many that will benefit most from them won’t take part – so we need to encourage them to do so – especially students’ academic advisers who might have a broader picture on how well the student is getting on. Studies have found that female students are more likely than males to undervalue the skills they have gained from extracurricular activities – again academic advisers could reinforce this for all, especially when preparing for job applications.
Alumni speakers could also reference what extracurricular activities they did to focus on how this helped them while at university, and examples of how it helped them find employment and fit into the workplace.
Programme directors might also recommend what co-curricular activities might be useful for the student’s degree, and students themselves such as at the student’s union could communicate more on the benefits of extracurricular activities, especially to engage first years, throughout the year as well as during the whirlwind of welcome week – some students might need time to settle down before they can see how much spare time they can allocate to extracurricular activities.
Ask students when they want activities to run – this might be different for city centre or out of town campuses – but we have found in Manchester a surprising number of students who are prepared to commit to a whole Saturday working on a hackathon, for example.
Interestingly, there is a correlation between the number of extracurricular activities that a student partakes in and alumni donations, with a Wonkhe study suggesting that participation in extracurricular activities was a much stronger indicator of donation to their alma mater even than degree class obtained, showing extracurricular activities strengthen the relationship between students and their university.
There is every reason for universities to provide a full range of opportunities – and to encourage students to get involved.
How do you get someone who lives in India to care about people in Uganda?
That’s the challenge for journalists who try to tell stories about parts of the world that most of the press ignores. Correspondent Enock Wanderema is from Uganda and wants the world to know what happens there.
For a story about the widespread government corruption he focused on one woman, Aloikin Praise Opoloje. Wanderema tells us this story about Opoloje giving birth in a hospital that had been starved of resources because of government corruption. He writes:
…she watched the midwife try to manage multiple births at once. Opoloje could tell she was exhausted. “One of the women was in critical condition, but the surgeon who was supposed to operate was nowhere to be found,” Opoloje said. “We tried calling him, but he wasn’t picking up.”
Wanderema used what we call an anecdote to help bring the complicated story of government corruption to life. Anecdotes are little stories about something that happened to someone. People tell little stories about themselves all the time.
Bring the story to life.
In interviews savvy reporters will focus attention on these little stories and try to get as many details as they can. When did this happen? Where were you exactly? What time of day was it? Were there people around? What did it sound like?
A good reporter knows that the little details help make a story three-dimensional for readers or listeners. It helps place the reader there as it is happening. And if people feel like they are there, they will care.
High school student Helen Milito wrote about her experience spending a year studying in Italy with School Year Abroad. To show how different she felt and how much it took her out of her comfort zone she gave this story:
We were split into two teams scrimmaging against each other. The boys I play with are competitive so there was the usual light trash talking, jersey pulling and agile foot skills.
We were playing friendly rules with no corner kicks. My teammate, Gugu, was fouled in the makeshift goalie box and dramatically fell to the ground yelling for a penalty kick.
None of us expected the coach to listen to him, but surprisingly he gave it to our team on the condition that I take the kick. All the players lined up around the box as I prepared to shoot, choosing to aim for the bottom right corner.
Two things you should know: First this is in Italy and I’m an American teenager who speaks little Italian. Second, I’m the only girl on the team.
The coach blew the whistle. I confidently ran, kicking the ball with all my strength. It went soaring over the crossbar into the fence behind. I wanted to crawl into a hole and hide.
Note how she shows us visually what is happening through action: “there was light trash talking, jersey pulling and agile foot skills.” She includes the sound of the coach’s whistle. And she gives us emotion: “I confidently ran…”, “I wanted to crawl into a hole…”
Telling other people’s stories
Correspondent Leah Pattem felt compelled to report how people in Madrid were suffering from high rents. To do that, like Wanderema, she found one woman whose story she could tell.
Pattem wrote:
Now in her 80s, [Marjorie] Kanter is at the peak of her career, author of three books and an active member of Madrid’s writing community. “I don’t have many more years left, so I really want to enjoy being a successful writer for as long as I can,” she said.
However, Kanter is facing a major setback. In September, a registered letter demanded she vacate her home at the end of October. A Galician vulture fund had purchased her apartment and didn’t offer her a new higher-priced rental contract. She suspects that means they will convert her home into a tourist flat.
The thing is, people don’t offer up anecdotes without prompting. They don’t think reporters are interested in the little stories they tell their friends. And there is a general rule in interviewing that people won’t answer unasked questions. So to get the anecdote you need to tease it out of the person you interview question by question.
Here are some questions that are useful in teasing out a little story:
Can you remember the first time you did that?
Can you remember the scariest time?
Can you think of a time when that happened to you?
Drilling down
Ask questions to jog a person’s memory. They’ll say, “There was this one time that …”
All the time, write down what they say and pester them for details. Imagine that the person is your grandfather and you are five years old. You will keep interrupting him to ask for details he doesn’t think is important but is important to a five-year old: What were you wearing? Was it cold? What did it smell like? Were you scared? Were you hungry? How old were you? How tall were you?
The key is to drill down. When someone says something, ask for specifics. When did that happen exactly? Where was that? Who else was there? No detail is too small or insignificant because to recreate a scene and you need to paint a complete picture.
Anecdotes are great ways to start articles. They grab the attention of readers and get them interested enough to read on.
After all, who doesn’t want to hear a good story?
Three questions to consider:
1. What is an anecdote? 2. How can anecdotes help you tell a complicated story? 3. Can you think of a little story you have told your friends or family about yourself?
If you’re worried about losing your benefits, you’re not alone. With new budget resolutions and lawsuits targeting SNAP, Medicaid, and student loan forgiveness, millions of Americans could be impacted.
HOUSTON — Jefferson Early Learning Center bears little resemblance to elementary schools many adults recall attending in their earliest years. The classrooms have child-sized boats and construction vehicles children can play on, and ceilings painted to resemble outer space. There are no desks — all space is devoted to learning through play. Windows are low to the ground so children can easily look outside. The gym floor is made of “pre-K friendly” layered vinyl, rather than hardwood, to cushion inevitable trips and falls. Hallways are lined with a corrugated plastic for wiggly fingers to touch as children transition to other locations.
Children love coming to the building, said teacher Cathy Delamore. “They feel like they own it.”
Alief Independent School District, which serves about 40,000 children in west Houston, is one of a growing number of districts across the country to pump money into creating a building that is tailor-made for pre-kindergarteners. Its new facility cost about $21 million and enrolls nearly 400 4- and 5-year-olds. By making the investment, school leaders are trying to avoid some of the pitfalls of placing young children in buildings designed for older students, including lost learning time when tiny feet have to meander down long hallways to bathrooms and cafeterias. Research suggests that when designed well, buildings can contribute to better outcomes for children. Creators of the Reggio Emilia approach to early learning, an educational philosophy that emphasizes child-led learning, even refer to the environment as the “third teacher” in a classroom.
A Gulf Coast themed classroom at Jefferson Early Learning Center. The themed classrooms reflect local careers and locations to help children connect what they learn with their local environment. Credit: Jackie Mader/The Hechinger ReportThe “Space City” classroom at Jefferson Early Learning Center is an homage to the local NASA space center. Credit: Jackie Mader/The Hechinger Report
Over the past few years, educators have grown aware of the benefits of a personalized pre-K environment, said Melissa Turnbaugh, a senior principal at the architecture firm PBK, which has designed more than 240 elementary schools nationwide, including Jefferson and several others in Texas. “There’s an openness and willingness to rethink these sites,” Turnbaugh said.
Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues.
Nationally, districts of all sizes have embraced the trend over the past few years, including the Troy School District in Michigan and New York City Public Schools. In some cases, building a specialized facility helps a district with limited resources get “the biggest bang for their buck,” while meeting enrollment needs, said Turnbaugh. Some states and cities are also dedicating money to the efforts, including Illinois, Detroit and San Mateo, California.
That embrace is in part because of a growing recognition nationwide of the importance of play for young children, as well as reports that play time has been increasingly squeezed out of the early grades. States are also seeing record high enrollment in state-funded preschool programs. During the 2022-23 school year, investment in state-funded preschool reached an all-time high. Spending on the programs increased in 29 states, buoyed in part by Covid relief funds. Between 2022 and 2023, for example, Texas saw more than 21,000 additional 3- and 4-year-olds enroll. The state also slightly increased pre-K funding and, beginning in 2019, started requiring districts to offer full-day pre-K programs. The full-day programs have been rolling out in districts since 2020.
Scores of districts are “adding this new grade of 4-year-olds,” said Shelly Masur, vice president of advisory and state policy for the Low Income Investment Fund, which runs an initiative focused on creating and improving high-quality facilities for early learning programs. “They have to figure out where those kids are going to go.”
A facility built for their needs, like Jefferson, is exactly where young children should go, some experts say. The children seem to agree.
On a sunny fall morning, joyful screams could be heard as children chased each other up and down gentle hills on a large playground with natural-looking features meant to replicate the highlands and lowlands of Texas. Pre-K students in elementary schools don’t always have age-appropriate playgrounds, and structures are often designed for children who are older. But Jefferson has multiple large playgrounds and play courtyards, all designed for pre kindergarteners, featuring natural structures and textures, like logs and grass.
A playground at Jefferson Early Learning Center. Credit: Jackie Mader/ The Hechinger Report
In Alief, where more than 83 percent of children qualify as economically disadvantaged, more than 20 percentage points higher than the state average, residents voted in 2015 to approve a property tax increase to help pay for full-day pre-K programs in the district. After touring the Mansfield Independent School District’s early learning facility, Alief’s district leaders decided they wanted to invest in an early learning building with immersive, themed classrooms, instead of simply adding on or repurposing classrooms in elementary schools around the district. Jefferson opened in 2022 as one of two new early learning facilities in the district. About 6 miles away, the second, Maria Del Carmen Martinez Early Learning Center, which has a similar design, serves around 400 students.
A growing body of research shows that not all pre-K classrooms, or the facilities they’re housed in, are appropriate for young kids. Early learning settings in particular should have a warm, homelike environment with ample natural light, research shows. There should be spacious classrooms that allow children to move their bodies and play in a variety of spaces around the room. Facilities should have playgrounds that are appropriate for the littlest learners, and provide ample opportunities to experience and explore nature.
There are also practical details to keep in mind for preschoolers, like having bathrooms adjacent to classrooms, child-sized furniture, tiny toilets, and sinks low to the ground so children can practice routines like hand washing independently. “When we make things more accessible to them, they start to learn the independence that we need them to develop over time,” said Masur. This type of setting isn’t always present in elementary schools, which are built to accommodate a much wider age range of children and are typically designed for instruction rather than play.
Facilities can have a surprisingly large impact on the experiences of teachers and young children. A study of a preschool program in West Hartford, Connecticut, for example, found the amount of children’s time spent interacting with an adult caregiver increased from 3 percent to 22 percent after the program moved from a crowded basement room to a larger classroom with bathrooms, sinks, storage space and phones inside the classroom. Although all other factors remained the same, the teachers reported their students had fewer tantrums, something they attributed to having a larger, brighter and more organized space.
A facility can even affect how satisfied early educators are with their jobs. Delamore, the Jefferson teacher, who has worked in the district for 18 years, said the bright, spacious rooms and hallways help keep her from feeling “confined” during the day. While aimed at 4-year-olds, the building’s “calming atmosphere” helps her enjoy being at work, she said.
A student builds with blocks in a classroom at Jefferson Early Learning Center. The facility was built with 4- and 5-year-olds in mind and unlike elementary schools, revolves mostly around play.
Certain aspects make more sense for children at this age, she added, like the spiral shape of the building, which makes it easier to keep students together as they transition. Students eat family-style meals around circular tables, creating a sense of community, Delamore said, a contrast to the long, rectangular tables often seen in elementary school cafeterias.
Buildings that are not designed to meet childrens’ needs, or that are cramped and outdated, can impede development and learning, experts say.
One of the most recent examples of this comes from a 2016 study of Tennessee’s public preschool classrooms, which are mostly housed in existing elementary schools. That study, conducted by researchers at Vanderbilt University, found 25 percent of each school day was lost transitioning children to another activity, including walking to bathrooms and lining up to go to lunch.
When designing Jefferson, Turnbaugh and her team tried to “think of the campus through the eyes of a 4-year-old.” Delamore, at Jefferson, said the intricately-designed classrooms motivate students to go deeper in their play. On a recent morning in the “veterinary” classroom, a dozen 4- and 5-year-olds busied themselves around the room, immersed in play or small group work with a teacher. Children drew pictures of animals, read books and played animal-themed card games beneath large, colorful pictures of dogs and cats painted on the walls.
On one side of the room, 4-year-old Jaycyon had donned a white lab coat and was inspecting a fluffy gray and white toy cat lying on the counter in front of him. The cat was hurt, Jaycyon announced, likely from a sharp corner of the cage he was kept in.
“I have to give him a shot,” he said bravely. Jaycyon dipped a clear, plastic syringe into an orange medication bottle and confidently injected invisible medication into the cat.
At the end of three weeks, Jaycyon and his classmates will transition to a new classroom, such as “Tinker Town,” where they will learn about construction, or “Space City,” an homage to the nearby NASA space center.
On a daily basis, students have access to one of several outdoor spaces called a “back porch,” where families can also come and eat lunch together. These spaces also act as surrogate back yards for students, many of whom don’t have yards at home or access to parks. Students also have access to a sensory room with toys and soft mats, where they can take a break when they are overstimulated and practice skills to calm down.
Jefferson sits on nearly 20 acres of land, accessible via trails for students to explore with their teachers. (Alief returned the surrounding land back to its natural prairie state to help with climate-change related flooding.)
The educators at Alief say the district’s investment in a facility that encourages play-based learning has paid off. “What I see as a major difference is the children’s self-regulation, but also their confidence,” said the school’s principal, Kim Hammer, now in her 16th year leading an early childhood center. “A traditional pre-K setting is more teacher led and teacher directed,” she said. “Here it’s more teacher facilitated, so you see more of the children taking more initiative,” she added. “Children have autonomy, and children have much more choice.”
Two students play in a veterinary-themed classroom at Jefferson Early Learning Center. Each classroom is designed with a specific theme to encourage deeper play. Credit: Jackie Mader/ The Hechinger Report
There is evidence that the new facility may be helping children progress. During the 2023-24 school year, 49 percent of students came in meeting vocabulary benchmarks. By the end of the year, 73 percent were at that level, Hammer said, a higher rate than previous years when the district’s pre-K programs were in traditional elementary schools. School officials say the themed classrooms help enhance children’s language skills, as children learn the vocabulary specific to that room. Attendance rates are high and holding steady, something that is uncommon in pre-K.
Despite the success and benefits of programs like Jefferson’s, educators agree there are challenges. A pre-K only facility adds an extra transition for students who, in traditional programs, might otherwise attend pre-K at their home elementary school.
Without more funding, revamped pre-K facilities are unlikely to spread fast. Many districts lack the money, partly because state and federal funding for pre-K is often less than for other grades. In Texas, for example, although the state now requires districts to offer full day pre-K, it only provides funding for half a day of pre-K. Alief has to cover the rest from local funds.
Although sustaining the building will be financially challenging in the long run, educators are determined to find a way to make it work for the benefit of the kids.
Back at the veterinary center on that fall morning, Jaycyon finally had a breakthrough. He had discovered something alarming about his patient, or “kitty,” as he had been named by the pre-kindergarteners, that would direct his next veterinary tactics.
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.
As we head towards the federal election, both sides of politics are making a point of criticising universities and questioning their role in the community.
Please login below to view content or subscribe now.
