Tag: #featured

  • InsightsEDU 2026: The Sessions Higher Ed Can’t Afford to Ignore  

    InsightsEDU 2026: The Sessions Higher Ed Can’t Afford to Ignore  

    Higher ed is no longer inching towards change; it’s being forced to confront it. Demographic shifts, economic pressures and the rise of AI have exposed the cracks in legacy systems. The old playbook isn’t just outdated—it’s a liability. Institutions that cling to it risk irrelevance. 

    InsightsEDU 2026, happening February 17-19, 2026 at the Westin Fort Lauderdale, arrives with clear purpose: help higher ed leaders move faster, think bigger and build adaptive strategies that meet the moment. 

    This year’s theme, The Future Unbound, is a call to action. It invites leaders to challenge assumptions, dismantle silos and make bold decisions that drive real transformation. 

    In service of that mission, we’ve curated a speaker lineup and session program built around reinvention, student-centered innovation and the levers of growth that will define the next era. 

    Here’s your first look at the voices and ideas shaping InsightsEDU 2026. 

    Explore the Sessions Reinventing Higher Ed’s Playbook 

    The Great Reinvention 

    A candid fireside conversation with university presidents who are leading from the front. Expect bold perspectives on what higher ed must dismantle, redesign and accelerate to stay relevant in a rapidly shifting landscape. 

    Opening Session: The Modern Learner Intel 

    Get exclusive first-look access to EducationDynamics’ 2026 research on today’s Modern Learners—what they value, how they make decisions and why flexibility, career outcomes and undeniable ROI now drive every enrollment decision. 

    The AI-Powered Marketer: Evolving Your Approach for the ChatGPT Era 

    EducationDynamics’ Vice President of Marketing reveals how AI is rewriting the rules of search, content and digital engagement—and what marketers must do now to stay ahead. Learn how to unify search, social and storytelling into a single, high-performing strategy that meets today’s learners on their terms and moves them from first click to enrollment.  

    Aligning for Impact: Credentialing That Connects Campuses, Students & Employers  

    See how one institution built stackable, employer-aligned credentials that meet workforce demand and create clear career pathways, plus practical strategies any campus can use to deepen employer partnerships and market high-value programs. 

    AI for All Learners: Integrating AI Across Career Pathways 

    Learn how institutions are integrating AI across disciplines through accessible, scalable curriculum design. Attendees will leave with a sample syllabus, implementation roadmap and lessons learned from bringing AI education to diverse learners, including high-barrier communities. 

    Leading After Rapid Transformation: Culture, Clarity, and “What’s Next” in Higher Ed Marketing 

    Leaders from University of Cincinnati Online reflect on how to move forward after organizational transformation, discussing how they rebuilt culture, aligned teams and kept momentum amid ongoing change. Expect honest insights on sustaining creativity, clarity and trust in a world where transformation never stops. 

    Unifying Your Enrollment: Building a Cohesive Strategy for the Modern Learner 

    This session brings together university leaders and EducationDynamics enrollment experts to unpack how to break down silos and build a unified enrollment strategy that strengthens your brand, improves outcomes and meets the diverse needs of today’s Modern Learner. 

    InsightsEDU 2026 brings together changemakers from across the sector—each session designed to spark new thinking, foster connection and fuel collective reinvention. Explore the full, evolving agenda here.  

    Meet the Speakers Disrupting the Status Quo  

    From enrollment innovators to digital trailblazers, this year’s speakers are united by one goal: help institutions evolve faster than the market around them. Here’s a preview of who’s taking the stage. 

    Gregory Clayton

    President of Enrollment Management Services at EducationDynamics
    With over 30 years of experience in the higher education space, Greg brings valuable expertise in enrollment management and performance marketing. As President of Enrollment Management Services at EducationDynamics, he leads a comprehensive team offering agency marketing, enrollment services, strategic consulting, and research, all tailored to the higher ed sector. His leadership and career position him as a visionary strategist, equipped to offer insightful commentary on the higher education landscape and enrollment solutions. Join his session to learn more about how to better serve the Modern Learner and implement strategies that drive institutional success.

    Session: Opening Session,The Modern Learner Intel

    Amanda Serafin

    Associate Vice President of Enrollment at Indiana Wesleyan University 
    With more than twenty years in higher education enrollment, Amanda serves as the Associate Vice President of Enrollment at Indiana Wesleyan University, where she leads strategic initiatives and a high-performing team supporting IWU’s National & Global programs.

    At InsightsEDU, Amanda joins EducationDynamics’ Vice President of Enrollment Management Consulting to unpack three years of competitive research—revealing what secret shopping uncovered about competitor strategies, the depth and quality of student nurturing across the market and how IWU leveraged those insights to strengthen enrollment outcomes.

    Session: Mystery Shopping 2.0

    Alex Minot

    Client Partner Lead at Snapchat
    As Client Partner Lead at Snapchat, Alex helps higher ed institutions and nonprofits modernize their marketing through full-funnel strategies built for Gen Z and Millennial audiences. With experience spanning Snapchat, Reddit, Facebook and Google, he brings a deep understanding of how today’s learners discover, evaluate, and choose their next step.

    At InsightsEDU 2026, Alex will break down why traditional enrollment marketing no longer works—and what it takes to earn trust in a world where Gen Z is curating their own narratives. Joined by EducationDynamics’ Senior Social Media Strategist, Jennifer Ravey, he’ll explore how to design a content ecosystem that creates belonging, builds confidence and inspires advocacy from first touch to final decision..

    Session: From Awareness to Advocacy: Designing a Full-Funnel Strategy for Gen Z Engagement

    Chris Marpo

    Head of Education Partnerships at Reddit
    As Head of Education Partnerships at Reddit, Chris leads the charge in building high-impact collaborations with higher ed institutions and agencies. At InsightsEDU 2026, he’ll share how Reddit’s unique communities—and the behaviors driving them—are reshaping the way universities reach and influence the Modern Learner.

    Drawing on his experience helping scale advertising businesses at LinkedIn, Pinterest and Quora, Chris brings a sharp understanding of the digital landscape and what truly resonates with today’s audiences. Attendees can expect actionable insights on how institutions can meet prospective students where they are and stay relevant in an era of rapid change.

    Session: From Keywords to Conversations: Winning Student Mindshare in the Age of AI Search

    Kevin Halle


    VP of Enrollment at Wayne State College
    With more than a decade of experience leading undergraduate, transfer, graduate, and financial aid teams, Kevin brings a deep understanding of how to build enrollment pipelines that serve diverse learner groups.

    At InsightsEDU, he’ll unpack what it takes to break down the silos separating traditional, graduate and adult learner strategies and how institutions can create one unified approach that works for all students.

    Session: Unifying Your Enrollment: Building a Cohesive Strategy for the Modern Learner

    Katie Tomlinson

    Katie Tomlinson

    Senior Director of Analytics and Business Intelligence at EducationDynamics
    Prepare to unlock insights with Katie Tomlinson. As the Senior Director of Analytics and Business Intelligence, Katie expertly manages data and reporting, uncovering key trends to support EducationDynamics in delivering data-driven solutions for the higher ed community. Learn from her as she discusses findings from EducationDynamics’ latest report, where attendees will gain a deeper understanding of the evolving learning environment and the significant factors that influence Modern Learners’ educational choices.

    Session:  Opening Session, The Modern Learner Intel

    The voices shaping InsightsEDU continue to grow. Check out the full speaker lineup and new additions on our Speakers page. 

    This Isn’t Just a Conference. It’s a Catalyst. 

    Higher ed doesn’t need just another conference. It needs transformation. 

    InsightsEDU 2026 is where bold leaders confront what’s broken, challenge what’s outdated and build what’s next. If you’re ready to lead the future of higher education, this is your moment. 

    Join us in Fort Lauderdale and help rewrite the playbook for what comes next. 

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  • Eviction sets single mom on a quest to keep her kids in their schools

    Eviction sets single mom on a quest to keep her kids in their schools

    by Bianca Vázquez Toness, The Hechinger Report
    November 18, 2025

    This story was produced by the Associated Press and reprinted with permission.

    ATLANTA — It was the worst summer in years. Sechita McNair’s family took no vacations. Her younger boys didn’t go to camp. Her van was repossessed, and her family nearly got evicted — again.

    But she accomplished the one thing she wanted most. A few weeks before school started, McNair, an out-of-work film industry veteran barely getting by driving for Uber, signed a lease in the right Atlanta neighborhood so her eldest son could stay at his high school.

    As she pulled up outside the school on the first day, Elias, 15, stepped onto the curb in his new basketball shoes and cargo pants. She inspected his face, noticed wax in his ears and grabbed a package of baby wipes from her rental car. She wasn’t about to let her eldest, with his young Denzel Washington looks, go to school looking “gross.”

    He grimaced and broke away.

    “No kiss? No hugs?” she called out.

    Elias waved and kept walking. Just ahead of him, at least for the moment, sat something his mother had fought relentlessly for: a better education.

    The link between where you live and where you learn

    Last year, McNair and her three kids were evicted from their beloved apartment in the rapidly gentrifying Old Fourth Ward neighborhood of Atlanta. Like many evicted families, they went from living in a school district that spends more money on students to one that spends less.

    Thanks to federal laws protecting homeless and evicted students, her kids were able to keep attending their Atlanta schools, even though the only housing available to them was in another county 40 minutes away. They also had the right to free transportation to those schools, but McNair says the district didn’t tell her about that until the school year ended. Their eligibility to remain in those schools expired at the end of last school year.

    Still wounded by the death of his father and multiple housing displacements, Elias failed two classes last year, his freshman year. Switching schools now, McNair fears, would jeopardize any chance he has of recovering his academic life. “I need this child to be stable,” she says.

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

    With just one week before school started, McNair drove extra Uber hours, borrowed money, secured rental assistance and ignored concerns about the apartment to rent a three-bedroom in the Old Fourth Ward. At $2,200 a month, it was the only “semi-affordable” apartment in the rapidly gentrifying ward that would rent to a single mom with a fresh eviction on her record.

    On Zillow, the second-floor apartment, built in 2005, looked like a middle-class dream with its granite countertops, crown molding and polished wood floors. But up close, the apartment looked abused and held secrets McNair was only beginning to uncover.

    The first sign something was wrong came early. When she first toured the apartment, it felt rushed, like the agent didn’t want her to look too closely. Then, even as they told her she was accepted, the landlord and real estate agent wouldn’t send her a “welcome letter” laying out the agreement, the rent and deposit she would pay. It seemed like they didn’t want to put anything in writing.

    When the lease came, it was full of errors. She signed it anyway. “We’re back in the neighborhood!” she said. Elias could return to Midtown High School.

    But even in their triumph, no one in the family could relax. Too many things were uncertain. And it fell to McNair — and only McNair — to figure it out.

    The first day back

    Midtown is a high school so coveted that school administrators investigate student residency throughout the year to keep out kids from other parts of Atlanta and beyond. For McNair, the day Elias returned to the high school was a momentous one.

    “Freedom!” McNair declared after Elias disappeared into the building. Without child care over the summer, McNair had struggled to find time to work enough to make ends meet. Now that the kids were back in class, McNair could spend school hours making money and resolving some of the unsettled issues with her new apartment.

    McNair, the first person in her family to attend college, studied theater management. Her job rigging stage sets was lucrative until the writers’ and actors’ strike and other changes paralyzed the film industry in 2023. The scarcity of work on movie sets, combined with her tendency to take in family and non-family alike, wrecked her home economy.

    The family was evicted last fall when McNair fell behind on rent because of funeral expenses for her foster daughter. The teen girl died from an epileptic seizure while McNair and everyone else slept. Elias found her body.

    McNair attributes some of Elias’s lack of motivation at school to personal trauma. His father died after a heart attack in 2023, on the sidelines of Elias’s basketball practice.

    On his first day back at school this August, Elias appeared excited but tentative. He watched as the seniors swanned into school wearing gold cardboard crowns, a Midtown back-to-school tradition, and scanned the sidewalk for anyone familiar.

    If Elias had his way, his mom would homeschool him. She’s done it before. But now that he’s a teenager, it’s harder to get Elias to follow her instructions. As the only breadwinner supporting three kids and her disabled uncle, she has to work.

    Elias hid from the crowds and called up a friend: “Where you at?” The friend, another sophomore, was still en route. Over the phone, they compared outfits, traded gossip about who got a new hairdo or transferred. When Elias’s friend declared this would be the year he’d get a girlfriend, Elias laughed.

    When it was time to go in, Elias drifted toward the door with his head down as other students flooded past.

    The after-school pickup

    Hours later, he emerged. Despite everything McNair had done to help it go well — securing the apartment, even spending hundreds of dollars on new clothes for him — Elias slumped into the backseat when she picked him up after class.

    “School was so boring,” he said.

    “What happened?” McNair asked.

    “Nothing, bro. That was the problem,” Elias said. “I thought I was going to be happy when school started, since summer was so horrible.”

    Of all of the classes he was taking — geometry, gym, French, world history, environmental science — only gym interested him. He wished he could take art classes, he said. Elias has acted in some commercials and television programs, but chose a science and math concentration, hoping to study finance someday.

    After dinner at Chick-fil-A, the family visited the city library one block from their new apartment. While McNair spoke to the librarian, the boys explored the children’s section. Malachi, 6, watched a YouTube video on a library computer while Derrick, 7, flipped through a book. Elias sat in a corner, sharing video gaming tips with a stranger he met online.

    Related: Schools confront a new reality: They can’t count on federal money 

    “Those people are learning Japanese,” said McNair, pointing to a group of adults sitting around a cluster of tables. “And this library lets you check out museum passes. This is why we have to be back in the city. Resources!”

    McNair wants her children to go to well-resourced schools. Atlanta spends nearly $20,000 per student a year, $7,000 more than the district they moved to after the eviction. More money in schools means smaller classrooms and more psychologists, guidance counselors and other support.

    But McNair, who grew up in New Jersey near New York City, also sees opportunities in the wider city of Atlanta. She wants to use its libraries, e-scooters, bike paths, hospitals, rental assistance agencies, Buy Nothing groups and food pantries.

    “These are all resources that make it possible to raise a family when you don’t have support,” she said. “Wouldn’t anyone want that?”

    Support is hard to come by

    On the way home, the little boys fall asleep in the back seat. Elias asks, “So, is homeschooling off the table?”

    McNair doesn’t hesitate. “Heck yeah. I’m not homeschooling you,” she says lightly. “Do you see how much of a financial bind I’m in?”’

    McNair pulls into the driveway in Jonesboro, the suburb where the family landed after their eviction. Even though the family wants to live in Atlanta, their stuff is still here. It’s a neighborhood of brick colonials and manicured lawns. She realizes it’s the dream for some families, but not hers. “It’s a support desert.”

    As they get out of the car, Elias takes over as parent-in-charge. “Get all of your things,” he directs Malachi and Derrick, who scowl as Elias seems to relish bossing them around. “Pick up your car seats, your food, those markers. I don’t want to see anything left behind.” Elias would be responsible for making the boys burritos, showering them and putting them to sleep.

    McNair heads out to drive for Uber. That’s what is necessary to pay $450 a week to rent the car and earn enough to pay her rent and bills.

    But while McNair is out, she can’t monitor Elias. And a few days after he starts school, Elias’s all-night gaming habit has already drawn teachers’ attention.

    “I wanted to check in regarding Elias,” his geometry teacher writes during the first week of school. “He fell asleep multiple times during Geometry class this morning.”

    Elias had told the teacher he went to bed around 4 a.m. the night before. “I understand that there may be various reasons for this, and I’d love to work together to support Elias so he can stay focused and successful in class.”

    A few days later, McNair gets a similar email from his French teacher.

    That night, McNair drives around Atlanta, trying to pick up enough Uber trips to keep her account active. But she can’t stop thinking about the emails. “I should be home making sure Elias gets to bed on time,” she says, crying. “But I have to work. I’m the only one paying the bills.”

    Obstacles keep popping up

    Ever since McNair rented the Atlanta apartment, her bills had doubled. She wasn’t sure when she’d feel safe giving up the house she’d been renting in Clayton County, given the problems with the Atlanta apartment. For starters, she was not even sure it was safe to spend the night there.

    A week after school started in August, McNair dropped by the apartment to check whether the landlords had made repairs. At the very least, she wanted more smoke detectors.

    She also wanted them to replace the door, which looked like someone had forced it open with a crowbar. She wanted a working fridge and oven. She wanted them to secure the back door to the adjoining empty apartment, which appeared to be open and made her wonder if there were pests or even people squatting there.

    But on this day, her keys didn’t work.

    She called 911. Had her new landlords deliberately locked her out?

    When the police showed up outside the olive-green, Craftsman-style fourplex, McNair scrolled through her phone to find a copy of her lease. Then McNair and the officer eyed a man walking up to the property. “The building was sold in a short sale two weeks ago,” he told McNair. The police officer directed the man to give the new keys to McNair.

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

    The next day, McNair started getting emails from an agent specializing in foreclosures, suggesting the new owners wanted McNair to leave. “The bank owns the property and now you are no longer a tenant of the previous owner,” she wrote. The new owner “might” offer relocation assistance if McNair agreed to leave.

    McNair consulted attorneys, who reassured her: It might be uncomfortable, but she could stay. She needed to try to pay rent, even if the new owner didn’t accept it.

    So McNair messaged the agent, asking where she should send the rent, and requested the company make necessary repairs. Eventually, the real estate agent stopped responding.

    Some problems go away, but others emerge

    Finally, McNair moved her kids and a few items from the Jonesboro house to the Atlanta apartment. She didn’t allow Elias to bring his video game console to Atlanta. He started going to bed around 11 p.m. most nights. But even as she solved that problem, others emerged.

    It was at Midtown’s back-to-school night in September that McNair learned Elias was behind in most of his classes. Some teachers said maybe Midtown wasn’t the right school for Elias.

    Perhaps they were right, McNair thought. She’d heard similar things before.

    Elias also didn’t want to go to school. He skipped one day, then another. McNair panicked. In Georgia, parents can be sent to jail for truancy when their kids miss five unexcused days.

    McNair started looking into a homeschooling program run by a mother she follows on Facebook. In the meantime, she emailed and called some Midtown staff for advice. She says she didn’t get a response. Finally, seven weeks after the family’s triumphant return to Midtown, McNair filed papers declaring her intention to homeschool Elias.

    It quickly proved challenging. Elias wouldn’t do any schoolwork when he was home alone. And when the homeschooling group met twice a week, she discovered, they required parents to pick up their children afterward instead of allowing them to take public transit or e-scooters. That was untenable.

    Elias wanted to stay at home and offered to take care of McNair’s uncle, who has dementia. “That was literally killing my soul the most,” said McNair. “That’s not a child’s job.”

    Hell, no, she told him — you only get one chance at high school.

    Then, one day, while she was loading the boys’ clothes into the washing machine at the Atlanta apartment, she received a call from an unknown Atlanta number. It was the woman who heads Atlanta Public Schools’ virtual program, telling her the roster was full.

    McNair asked the woman for her opinion on Elias’s situation. Maybe she should abandon the Atlanta apartment and enroll him in the Jonesboro high school.

    Let me stop you right there, the woman said. Is your son an athlete? If he transfers too many times, it can affect his ability to play basketball. And he’d probably lose credits and take longer to graduate. He needs to be in school — preferably Midtown — studying for midterms, she said. You need to put on your “big mama drawers” and take him back, she told McNair.

    The next day, Elias and his mother pulled up to Midtown. Outside the school, Elias asked if he had to go inside. Yes, she told him. This is your fault as much as it’s mine.

    Now, with Elias back in school every day, McNair can deliver food through Uber Eats without worrying about a police officer asking why her kid isn’t in school. If only she had pushed harder, sooner, for help with Elias, she thought. “I should have just gone down to the school and sat in their offices until they talked to me.”

    But it was easy for her to explain why she hadn’t. “I was running around doing so many other things just so we have a place to live, or taking care of my uncle, that I didn’t put enough of my energy there.”

    She wishes she could pay more attention to Elias. But so many things are pulling at her. And as fall marches toward winter, her struggle continues. After failing to keep up with the Jonesboro rent, she’s preparing to leave that house before the landlord sends people to haul her possessions to the curb.

    As an Uber driver, she has picked up a few traumatized mothers with their children after they got evicted. She helped them load the few things they could fit into her van. As they drove off, onlookers scavenged the leftovers.

    She has promised herself she’d never let that happen to her kids.

    Bianca Vázquez Toness is an Associated Press reporter who writes about the continuing impact of the pandemic on young people and their education.

    The Associated Press’ education coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

    This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/she-wanted-to-keep-her-son-in-his-school-district-it-was-more-challenging-than-it-seemed/”>article</a> first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org”>The Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=”https://i0.wp.com/hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/cropped-favicon.jpg?fit=150%2C150&amp;ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>

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

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

    by Jill Barshay, The Hechinger Report
    November 17, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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  • In Los Angeles, 45 Elementary Schools Beat the Odds in Teaching Kids to Read – The 74

    In Los Angeles, 45 Elementary Schools Beat the Odds in Teaching Kids to Read – The 74

    This article is part of Bright Spots, a series highlighting schools where every child learns to read, no matter their zip code. Explore the Bright Spots map to find out which schools are beating the odds in terms of literacy versus poverty rates.

    This story is part of The 74’s special coverage marking the 65th anniversary of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Read all our stories here.

    When The 74 started looking for schools that were doing a good job teaching kids to read, we began with the data. We crunched the numbers for nearly 42,000 schools across all 50 states and Washington, D.C. and identified 2,158 that were beating the odds by significantly outperforming what would be expected given their student demographics. 

    Seeing all that data was interesting. But they were just numbers in a spreadsheet until we decided to map out the results. And that geographic analysis revealed some surprising findings. 

    For example, we found that, based on our metrics, two of the three highest-performing schools in California happened to be less than 5 miles apart from each other in Los Angeles. 

    The PUC Milagro Charter School came out No. 1 in the state of California. With 91% of its students in poverty, our calculations projected it would have a third grade reading rate of 27%. Instead, 92% of its students scored proficient or above. Despite serving a high-poverty student population, the school’s literacy scores were practically off the charts.  

    PUC Milagro is a charter school, and charters tended to do well in our rankings. Nationally, they made up 7% of all schools in our sample but 11% of those that we identified as exceptional. 

    But some district schools are also beating the odds. Just miles away from PUC Milagro is our No. 3-rated school in California, Hoover Street Elementary. It is a traditional public school run by the Los Angeles Unified School District. With 92% of its students qualifying for free- or reduced-price lunch, our calculations suggest that only 23% of its third graders would likely be proficient in reading. Instead, its actual score was 78%. 

    For this project, we used data from 2024, and Hoover Street didn’t do quite as well in 2025. (Milagro continued to perform admirably.)

    Still, as Linda Jacobson reported last month, the district as a whole has been making impressive gains in reading and math over the last few years. In 2025, it reported its highest-ever performance on California’s state test. Moreover, those gains were broadly shared across the district’s most challenging, high-poverty schools. 

    Our data showed that the district as a whole slightly overperformed expectations, based purely on the economic challenges of its students. We also found that, while Los Angeles is a large, high-poverty school district, it had a disproportionately large share of what we identified as the state’s “bright spot” schools. L.A. accounted for 8% of all California schools in our sample but 16% of those that are the most exceptional. 

    All told, we found 45 L.A. district schools that were beating the odds and helping low-income students read proficiently. Some of these were selective magnet schools, but many were not. 

    INTERACTIVE

    Map of Los Angeles Area Bright Spots

    

    Some of the schools on the map may not meet most people’s definition of a good school, let alone a great one. For example, at Stanford Avenue Elementary, 47% of its third graders scored proficient in reading in 2024. That may not sound like very many, but 97% of its students are low-income, and yet it still managed to outperform the rest of the state by 4 percentage points. (It did even a bit better in 2025.)
    

    Schools like Stanford Avenue Elementary don’t have the highest scores in California. On the surface, they don’t look like they’re doing anything special. But that’s why it’s important for analyses like ours to consider a school’s demographics. High-poverty elementary schools that are doing a good job of helping their students learn to read deserve to be celebrated for their results.
    

                    
    
                                    
    

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  • Can gifted testing spot potential in young children?

    Can gifted testing spot potential in young children?

    by Sarah Carr, The Hechinger Report
    November 13, 2025

    In New Orleans, a few hundred dollars could once help a family buy a “gifted” designation for their preschooler.

    As an education reporter for the city’s Times-Picayune newspaper several years ago, I discovered that there was a two-tiered system for determining whether 3-year-olds met that mark, which, in New Orleans, entitled them to gifted-only prekindergarten programs at a few of the city’s most highly sought-after public schools.

    Families could sit on a lengthy waitlist and have their children tested at the district central office for free. Or they could pay the money for the private test. In 2008, the year that I wrote about the issue, only a few of the more than 100 children tested at the central office were deemed gifted; but dozens of privately tested kiddos — nearly all of them tested by the same psychologist for $300 — met the benchmark.

    Since working on that story, I’ve been interested in the use of intelligence testing for high-stakes decisions about educational access and opportunity — and the ways that money, insider knowledge and privilege can manipulate that process.

    But I knew less about what the research shows about a broader question: Should gifted-only programming for the youngest students exist at all and, if so, what form should it take? When New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani announced in October that he would end long-standing gifted programming for kindergartners (while preserving it for the older grades), I reached out to some leading researchers in search of answers to those questions. Read the story.

    More on gifted education

    Hechinger reporter Jill Barshay, who covers education research, has written several stories about different facets of gifted education, which she captured in a column earlier this month.

    In 2020, The Hechinger Report and NBC News produced a three-part series on the ways that gifted education has maintained segregation in American schools and efforts to diversify gifted classes. 

    More early childhood news

    Federal immigration agents pulled an infant teacher out of her classroom at a Chicago child care, pinning her arms behind her — and traumatizing the families who witnessed the incident, report Molly DeVore and Mack Liederman for Block Club Chicago.

    Growing numbers of child care workers are running for elected office, hoping to work directly on behalf of change and more support for a sector that desperately needs it, writes Rebecca Gale for The 74. 

    Colorado voters approved two sales tax levies to support child care providers and families with young children, reports Ann Schimke with Chalkbeat Colorado.

    Research quick take

    Contrary to perception, there’s little evidence that an increased academic focus in the early elementary years disadvantages boys, write researchers in a new working paper published by Brown University’s Annenberg Institute. The researchers, Megan Kuhfeld and Margaret Burchinal, examined growth in reading and math test scores for a sample of 12 million students at 22,000 schools between 2016 and 2025. They found that boys are surpassing girls in math by the end of elementary school, and that girls maintain an advantage in reading through fifth grade. 

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

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

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  • Advocates warn of risks to higher ed data if Education Department is shuttered

    Advocates warn of risks to higher ed data if Education Department is shuttered

    by Jill Barshay, The Hechinger Report
    November 10, 2025

    Even with the government shut down, lots of people are thinking about how to reimagine federal education research. Public comments on how to reform the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the Education Department’s research and statistics arm, were due on Oct. 15. A total of 434 suggestions were submitted, but no one can read them because the department isn’t allowed to post them publicly until the government reopens. (We know the number because the comment entry page has an automatic counter.)

    A complex numbers game 

    There’s broad agreement across the political spectrum that federal education statistics are essential. Even many critics of the Department of Education want its data collection efforts to survive — just somewhere else. Some have suggested moving the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to another agency, such as the Commerce Department, where the U.S. Census Bureau is housed.

    But Diane Cheng, vice president of policy at the Institute for Higher Education Policy, a nonprofit organization that advocates for increasing college access and improving graduation rates, warns that shifting NCES risks the quality and usefulness of higher education data. Any move would have to be done carefully, planning for future interagency coordination, she said.

    “Many of the federal data collections combine data from different sources within ED,” Cheng said, referring to the Education Department. “It has worked well to have everyone within the same agency.”

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

    She points to the College Scorecard, the website that lets families compare colleges by cost, student loan debt, graduation rates, and post-college earnings. It merges several data sources, including the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), run by NCES, and the National Student Loan Data System, housed in the Office of Federal Student Aid. Several other higher ed data collections on student aid and students’ pathways through college also merge data collected at the statistical unit with student aid figures. Splitting those across different agencies could make such collaboration far more difficult.

    “If those data are split across multiple federal agencies,” Cheng said, “there would likely be more bureaucratic hurdles required to combine the data.”

    Information sharing across federal agencies is notoriously cumbersome, the very problem that led to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11.

    Hiring and $4.5 million in fresh research grants

    Even as the Trump administration publicly insists it intends to shutter the Department of Education, it is quietly rebuilding small parts of it behind the scenes.

    In September, the department posted eight new jobs to replace fired staff who oversaw the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the biennial test of American students’ achievement. In November, it advertised four more openings for statisticians inside the Federal Student Aid Office. Still, nothing is expected to be quick or smooth. The government shutdown stalled hiring for the NAEP jobs, and now a new Trump administration directive to form hiring committees by Nov. 17 to approve and fill open positions may further delay these hires.

    At the same time, the demolition continues. Less than two weeks after the Oct. 1 government shutdown, 466 additional Education Department employees were terminated — on top of the roughly 2,000 lost since March 2025 through firings and voluntary departures. (The department employed about 4,000 at the start of the Trump administration.) A federal judge temporarily blocked these latest layoffs on Oct. 15.

    Related: Education Department takes a preliminary step toward revamping its research and statistics arm

    There are also other small new signs of life. On Sept. 30 — just before the shutdown — the department quietly awarded nine new research and development grants totaling $4.5 million. The grants, listed on the department’s website, are part of a new initiative called, “From Seedlings to Scale Grants Program” (S2S), launched by the Biden administration in August 2024 to test whether the Defense Department’s DARPA-style innovation model could work in education. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, invests in new technologies for national security. Its most celebrated project became the basis for the internet. 

    Each new project, mostly focused on AI-driven personalized learning, received $500,000 to produce early evidence of effectiveness. Recipients include universities, research organizations and ed tech firms. Projects that show promise could be eligible for future funding to scale up with more students.

    According to a person familiar with the program who spoke on background, the nine projects had been selected before President Donald Trump took office, but the formal awards were delayed amid the department’s upheaval. The Institute of Education Sciences — which lost roughly 90 percent of its staff — was one of the hardest hit divisions.

    Granted, $4.5 million is a rounding error compared with IES’s official annual budget of $800 million. Still, these are believed to be the first new federal education research grants of the Trump era and a faint signal that Washington may not be abandoning education innovation altogether.

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

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

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  • Trump administration cuts canceled this college student’s career start in politics

    Trump administration cuts canceled this college student’s career start in politics

    This story was produced in partnership with Teen Vogue and reprinted with permission. 

    Christopher Cade wants to be president someday. His inspiration largely comes from family members, who have been involved in local politics and activism since long before he was born. But policies from the Trump administration and the Ohio Legislature are complicating his college experience — and his plans to become a politician.

    Cade is a student at Ohio State University double-majoring in public policy analysis and political science with a focus on American political theory. He recalls his maternal grandmother, Maude Hill — who had a large hand in raising him — talking to him about her involvement in the Civil Rights Movement. She also worked at Columbus, Ohio-based affordable housing development nonprofit, Homeport, and has gone to Capitol Hill to speak with the state delegation multiple times. His dad is the senior vice president of the housing choice voucher program at the Columbus Metropolitan Housing Authority, and his older brother has a degree in political science and is interested in social justice advocacy work, Cade said. Last fall, his first on campus, Cade began applying to opportunities to bolster his resume for a future career in politics.

    The now 19-year-old secured an internship with the U.S. Department of Transportation and a work-study job on campus in the university’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion. But the federal opportunity was scrapped when the Trump administration imposed a hiring freeze and budget cuts. His campus job ended when the university announced it would “sunset” the diversity office in response to federal and state anti-diversity, equity and inclusion orders and actions, according to Cade.

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

    The work-study position was with the university’s Bell National Resource Center on the African American Male, which was founded to support Black men to stay in college. It’s a cause he was excited about. 

    “I would help order food or speak with students or do interviews,” said Cade. “I developed a good 20 different programs for the next year.” 

    In February, when the university announced it was closing the office, “I was like, ‘Well, so six months of work just for no reason,’” he said.

    OSU President Ted Carter released a statement on Feb. 27 saying the closure of the Office of Diversity and Inclusion was a response to both state and federal actions regarding DEI in public education. The move eliminated 17 staff positions, not including student roles, the university said. Programming and services provided by the Office of Student Life’s Center for Belonging and Social Change were also scrapped. 

    The change came before the Trump administration’s initial deadline for complying with a memo that threatened to cut funding for public colleges and universities, as well as K-12 schools, that offer DEI programs and initiatives. In March, the administration announced that OSU was one of roughly 50 universities under federal investigation for allegedly discriminating against white and Asian students in graduate admissions. Additionally, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine signed legislation in March banning DEI programs in the state’s public colleges and universities. The legislation went into effect in June.

    Before the DEI office closed, Cade said, “I felt so heard and seen.” He’d attended a private, predominantly white, Catholic high school, he said. “It was not a place that supported me culturally and helped me understand more about who I am and my Blackness,” he recalled. At the university, though, “the programming we had throughout the year [was] about how to change the narrative on who a Black man is and what it means when you go out here and interact with people.

    “And then for them to close down all these programs, that essentially told me that I wasn’t cared about.”

    After the February announcement, students pushed back, organizing protests and a sit-in at the student union. But eventually, those efforts quieted.

    Cade says students felt like there was a “cloud of darkness” hanging over them. But he also thought of his Office of Diversity and Inclusion coworkers, some of whom had spent decades working there, helping students. In particular he thought of his former colleague Chila Thomas, who celebrated her fifth anniversary last year as the executive director of the Young Scholars Program. That program, which helps low-income aspiring first-generation college students get to and through college, was one of several of the office’s programs that will continue. The day after Carter’s announcement, she and others in the office spent time giving students space to talk through their feelings, despite the uncertainties surrounding their own employment, Cade said. 

    Related: A case study of what’s ahead with Trump DEI crackdowns: Utah has already cut public college DEI initiatives 

    Since the university crackdown on DEI, Cade said he’s experienced more discomfort on campus, even outright racism. He says he was approached by a white person who said, “I’m so glad they’re getting rid of DEI” and spit on his shoe and used a racial slur.  

    “I don’t know how that could ever be acceptable to anyone, but that was [when] a flip switched in my head,” Cade said. “I couldn’t sit down and be sad and silent. I had to stand up and make change.”

    In March, he traveled with other students to Washington, D.C., as part of the Undergraduate Student Government’s Governmental Relations Committee. They met with Ohio Rep. Troy Balderson and an aide, along with staffers from the offices of fellow Ohio lawmakers Sen. Bernie Moreno and Rep. Joyce Beatty, to discuss college affordability, DEI policies and the federal hiring freeze. Cade says he described how he was affected by the U.S. Department of Transportation canceling his internship.

    In Carter’s announcement, he stated that all student employees would be “offered alternative jobs at the university,” but Cade said during a meeting with Office of Diversity and Inclusion student employees, an OSU dean clarified that they would have to apply for new opportunities. With the policy changes meaning there were fewer work-study roles and more students in need of jobs, Cade saw the market as increasingly competitive, and he began to job hunt elsewhere. This summer he secured work with the Ohio Department of Transportation as a communications and policy intern. In October he began an intake assistant role in the Office of Civil Rights Compliance at the university. (Ohio State Director of Media and PR Chris Booker told Teen Vogue that the school could not comment on the experiences of individual students but that “all student employees and graduate associates impacted by these program changes were offered the opportunity to pursue transitioning into alternative positions at the university, as well as support in navigating that change.”)

    Although he was drawn to OSU for the John Glenn College of Public Affairs’ master’s program, Cade says he might have reconsidered schools had he known that the university would bend to lawmakers’ anti-DEI efforts. While he’s concerned about how education-related legislation and policies may continue to affect his college experience, he worries most about some of his peers. College is already so hard to navigate for so many young people, said Cade. “And this is just another thing that says, ‘Oh yeah, this isn’t for me.’”

    This story was published in partnership with Teen Vogue.

    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.

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  • Rural teacher shortages could get worse thanks to Trump’s visa fee

    Rural teacher shortages could get worse thanks to Trump’s visa fee

    by Ariel Gilreath, The Hechinger Report
    November 7, 2025

    HALIFAX COUNTY, N.C. — When Ivy McFarland first traveled from her native Honduras to teach elementary Spanish in North Carolina, she spent a week in Chapel Hill for orientation. By the end of that week, McFarland realized the college town on the outskirts of Raleigh was nowhere near where she’d actually be teaching.

    On the car ride to her school district, the city faded into the suburbs. Those suburbs turned into farmland. The farmland stretched into more farmland, until, two hours later, she made it to her new home in rural Halifax County.

    “I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is far,’” McFarland said. “It was shocking when I got here, and then I felt like I wanted to go back home.”

    Nine years later, she’s come to think of Halifax County as home.

    In this stretch of rural North Carolina, teachers hail from around the globe: Jamaica, the Philippines, Honduras, Guyana. Of the 17 teachers who work at Everetts Elementary School in the Halifax County school district, two are from the United States. 

    In this rural school district surrounded by rural school districts, recruiting teachers has become a nearly impossible task. With few educators applying for jobs, schools like Everetts Elementary have relied on international teachers to fill the void. Districtwide, 101 of 156 educators are international. 

    “We’ve tried recruiting locally, and it just has not worked for us,” said Carolyn Mitchell, executive director of human resources in the eastern North Carolina district of about 2,100 students. “Halifax is a rural area, and a lot of people just don’t want to work in rural areas. If they’re not people who are from here and want to return, it’s challenging.” 

    Around the country, many rural schools are contending with a shortage of teacher applicants that has ballooned into a crisis in recent years. Fewer students are enrolling in teacher training programs, leading to a shrinking pipeline that’s made filling vacancies one of the most challenging problems for school leaders to solve in districts with smaller tax bases and fewer resources than their suburban and urban peers. In certain grade levels and subject areas — like math and special education positions — the challenge is particularly acute. Now, some of the levers rural schools have used to boost their teacher recruitment efforts are also disappearing.

    This spring, the federal Department of Education eliminated teacher residency and training grants for rural schools. In September, President Donald Trump announced a $100,000 fee on new H-1B visa applications — visas hundreds of schools like Everetts Elementary use to hire international teachers for hard-to-staff positions — saying industries were using the visas to replace American workers with “lower-paid, lower-skilled labor.” A lawsuit filed by a coalition of education, union, nonprofit and other groups is challenging the fee, citing teacher shortages. Rural schools are also bracing for more cuts to federal funding next year.

    “We’re not only talking about a recruitment and retention problem. We’re talking about the collapse of the rural teacher workforce,” said Melissa Sadorf, executive director of the National Rural Education Association.

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

    Most of Halifax’s international teachers arrive on H-1B visas, which allow them to work in the U.S. for about five years with the possibility of a green card at the end of that period. About one-third of the district’s international teachers have J-1 visas, which let them work in the country for three years with the possibility of renewing it for two more. At the end of those five years, educators on J-1 visas are required to return to their home countries.

    A few years ago, Halifax County Schools decided to shift from hiring teachers on J-1 visas in favor of H-1B, hoping it would reduce teacher turnover and keep educators in their classrooms for longer. The results have been mixed, Mitchell said, because within a few years, some of their teachers ended up transferring to bigger, higher-paying districts anyway. 

    There are trade-offs for the teachers, too. Mishcah Knight came to the U.S. from Jamaica both to expand her skills and increase her pay as an educator. In the rural North Carolina county, finding transportation has been the biggest challenge for Knight, who teaches second grade. 

    She lacks a credit history needed to buy a car, leaving her reliant on carpooling to work. A single taxi driver serves the area, which doesn’t have public transit, Uber or Lyft. “Sometimes, he’s in Virginia,” Knight said. “It’s lucky when we actually get him to take us somewhere.”

    Being away from family also takes its toll on teachers. Nar Bell Dizon, who has taught music at Everetts Elementary since 2023, had to leave his wife and son back home in the Philippines. He visits in the summer, but during the school year, he sees them only through video calls. 

    “This is what life is — not everything is smooth,” Dizon said. “There will always be struggles and sacrifices.”

    Dizon’s first year in Everetts Elementary School was hard — it took time adapting to a different teaching style and classroom management. Now that he’s in his third year, he feels like he’s gotten his feet beneath him. 

    “When you can build a rapport with your students, things become easier,” Dizon said.

    When her international teachers are able to stay for longer, the students perform better, said Chastity Kinsey, principal of Everetts Elementary. “I know the benefit the teachers bring to the classroom,” Kinsey said. “After the first year or two, they normally take off like rock stars.” 

    Related: Trump’s cuts to teacher training leave rural school districts, aspiring educators in the lurch 

    Trump’s new fee does not address any of the challenges the Halifax district had with the H-1B visa, and it effectively slams the door on future hires. Now, the district will have to rely on J-1 visas to recruit new international teachers, meaning the educators will have to leave just as they’ve acclimated to their classrooms.

    “We just can’t afford to,” Mitchell said of paying the $100,000 fee. Other districts, she said, might turn to waivers allowing them to increase class sizes and hire fewer teachers, among other strategies.

    Since the applicant pool began drying up about a decade ago, the make-up of the district’s teaching staff has slowly shifted to international teachers. 

    At the heart of the problem is that when a position opens up, few, if any, citizens apply, said Katina Lynch, principal of Aurelian Springs Institute of Global Learning, an elementary school in Halifax County. 

    When Lynch had to hire a new fourth grade teacher this summer, she received three applications: Only one was a licensed teacher from the U.S.

    Nationally, about 1 in 8 teaching positions are either vacant or filled by teachers who are not certified for the position, according to data from the nonprofit Learning Policy Institute, published in July. In addition to fewer college students graduating with degrees in education, diminished public perception of the teaching profession and political polarization of schools are to blame, school leaders said. In some states, the growth of charter and private school options has made competing for teachers even harder. On top of a widening pay gap between rural and urban districts, it’s a perfect storm for schools in more remote parts of the country, said Sadorf.

    In rural Bunker Hill, Illinois, where more than 500 students attend two schools, some positions have gone unfilled for years. “We’ve posted for a school psychologist for years, never had anybody apply. We posted for a special ed teacher — have not had anybody apply. We’ve posted for a high school math teacher two years in a row,” said Superintendent Todd Dugan. “No applicants.”

    As a result, students often end up with a long-term substitute or an unlicensed student teacher. 

    When teachers do arrive in the district, Dugan works hard to try to get them to stick around. He pairs new teachers with experienced mentors, and uses federal funding to help those who want master’s degrees to afford them. 

    He also formed a calendar committee to give teachers input on which days they get off during the year. “More than pay, having at least a little bit of involvement, control and say in your work environment will cause people to stay,” said Dugan. It seems to be working: Bunker Hill’s teacher retention rate is more than 92 percent. 

    Related: Schools confront a new reality: They can’t count on federal money 

    Schools across the country face the same challenges to varying degrees. Several years ago, the Everett Area School District in southern Pennsylvania would receive 30 to 50 applications for a given position at its elementary schools, Superintendent Dave Burkett said. Now, they’re lucky if they get three or four.

    Last year, the district learned that a middle school science teacher would retire that summer. Just three people applied for the opening, and only one was certified for the role.

    “We offered the job before that person even left the building,” Burkett said. The candidate accepted it, but when it was time to fill out paperwork that summer, the teacher had taken a different job in a bigger district.

    One way Burkett has tried to address the shortage is to hire a permanent, full-time substitute teacher in each of its buildings. If a vacancy opens up that they haven’t been able to fill, the full-time substitute can step in until a permanent replacement is found. The permanent substitute makes more than a traditional sub and also receives health insurance. 

    Sadorf, with the National Rural Education Association, says other ways to help include introducing students to teacher training pathways starting in high school, building “grow-your-own” programs to train local people for teaching jobs, and offering loan forgiveness and housing support.

    Sadorf’s organization is in favor of creating an educator-specific visa track that would allow international teachers to be in communities for longer. The group is also in favor of exempting schools from the $100,000 H-1B fee. “Stabilizing federal support is something that really needs to be focused on at the federal level,” Sadorf said.

    At Everetts Elementary in Halifax County, McFarland, the educator from Honduras, is among the most senior teachers in the school. She has adapted to the rural community, where she met and fell in love with her now-husband. She gets asked sometimes why she hasn’t moved to a bigger city.

    “Education has taken me places I’ve never expected,” McFarland said. “For me, being here, there’s a reason for it. I see the difference I can make.”

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

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

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  • Universal vouchers have public schools worried about market share

    Universal vouchers have public schools worried about market share

    by Laura Pappano, The Hechinger Report
    November 6, 2025

    TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — As principal of Hartsfield Elementary School in the Leon County School District, John Olson is not just the lead educator, but in this era of fast-expanding school choice, also its chief salesperson.

    He works to drum up enrollment by speaking to parent and church groups, offering private tours and giving Hartsfield parents his cell phone number. He fields calls on nights, weekends and holidays. With the building at just 61 percent capacity, Olson is frank about the hustle required: “Customer service is key.”

    It’s no secret that many public schools are in a battle for students. As school started in Florida this August, large districts, including Hillsborough, Miami-Dade and Orange, reported thousands fewer students, representing drops of more than 3 percent year over year. In Leon County, enrollment was down 8 percent from the end of last year.

    Part of the issue is the decline in the number of school-age children, both here and across the country. But there’s also the growing popularity of school choice in Florida and elsewhere — and what that means for school budgets. Leon County’s leaders anticipate cutting about $6 million next year unless the state increases its budget, which could mean reduced services for students and even school closures. 

    Other Florida school districts are also trimming budgets, and some have closed schools. As districts scramble for students, some are hiring consulting firms to help recruit, and also trying to sell seats in existing classes to homeschoolers. There is also the instability of students frequently switching schools — and of new charter or voucher schools that open and then shut down, or never open at all as promised. 

    Two years after the Florida Legislature expanded eligibility for school vouchers to all students, regardless of family income, nearly 500,000 kids in the state now receive vouchers worth about $8,000 each to spend on private or home education, according to Step Up For Students, the nonprofit that administers the bulk of the scholarships. And Florida’s Tax Credit Scholarship, created in 2001 to allow corporations to make contributions to private school tuition, is the model for the new federal school voucher program, passed this summer as part of Republicans’ “one big, beautiful bill.” The program, which will go into effect in 2027, lets individuals in participating states contribute up to $1,700 per year to help qualifying families pay for private school in exchange for a 1:1 tax credit.

    “We are in that next phase of public education,” said Keith Jacobs of Step Up For Students, who recruits public school districts to offer up their services and classes on its educational marketplace. “Gone are the days when a government institution or your zoned neighborhood school had the authority to assign a child to that school.”

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

    That’s a problem for Leon County Schools, which boasts a solid “B” rating from the state and five high schools in the top 20 percent of U.S. News’ national rankings. The district, located in the Florida panhandle, serves a population of around 30,000 students, 44 percent of whom are Black, 43 percent white and 6 percent Hispanic.

    “There’s just not enough money to fund two parallel programs, one for public schools and one for private schools,” said Rocky Hanna, the Leon County Schools superintendent. 

    Over the past few years, the Legislature has increased state and local funding for charter schools and created new rules to encourage more to open. (Charter schools are public schools that are independently operated; the Trump administration recently announced a $60 million increase in charter school funding this year, along with additional competitive grants.)

    But vouchers are the big disrupter. The nonprofit Florida Policy Institute projects annual voucher spending in Florida will hit $5 billion this year. In Leon County, money redirected from district school budgets to vouchers has ballooned from $3.2 million in 2020-21 to nearly $38 million this academic year, according to state and district figures. Enrollment in local charter schools has also ticked up, as has state per-pupil money directed to them, from $12 million to $15 million over that time.

    As a mark of how the landscape is shifting, Step Up For Students is now helping districts market in-person classes to homeschoolers on the group’s Amazon-like marketplace to fill seats and capture some money. Jacobs said Osceola County put its entire K-12 course catalog on the site. A year of math at a Miami elementary school? It’s $1,028.16. And just $514.08 for science, writing or P.E.

    “A student can come take a class for nine weeks, for a semester, for a year,” said Jacobs, adding that 30 districts have signed on. They are thinking, he said, “if we can’t have them full-time, we have them part-time.”

    Leon County is considering signing on, said Hanna, “to basically offer our courses à la carte.” It could be a recruitment tool, said Marcus Nicolas, vice chair of the county’s school board. “If we give them an opportunity to sniff the culture of the school and they like it, it could potentially bring that kid back full-time.”

    Related: Federal school vouchers: 10 things to know 

    Because of his shrinking budget, Hanna is looking at cuts to IT, athletics, arts, counselors, social workers and special tutors for struggling students, along with exploring school closings or consolidations. 

    Another challenge: With more school options, a growing number of students are leaving charters or private schools and enrolling in the district mid-year. Yet state allocations are based on October and February enrollment counts.

    Last year, 2,513 students — about 8 percent of Leon County’s district enrollment — entered after February. “Those are 2,500 students we don’t receive any money for,” Hanna said at an August school board meeting.

    Public schools do a lot well, but have been slow to share that, said Nicolas. “We got lazy, and we got complacent, and we took for granted that people would choose us because we’re the neighborhood school,” he said.

    Even as more parents choose private voucher schools, it’s not necessarily easy for them to determine if those schools are performing well. Although Florida State University evaluates the state’s Tax Credit Scholarship program, its report lags by about two years. It includes an appendix with voucher schools’ test scores, but there is no consequence for low performance. And scores cannot be compared, because even though schools must test students in grades 3 to 10, the schools pick which test to give.

    The result, said Carolyn Herrington, director of the Education Policy Center at Florida State University, who has written some of the evaluation reports, is that “the only real metric here is parent satisfaction,” which she said “is not sufficient.” 

    Yet many parents like the idea of school choice. According to a poll released last month by EdChoice, a school choice advocacy group, just over half of all Americans and 62 percent of parents broadly favor school vouchers.

    Related: Florida just expanded school vouchers — again. What does that really mean? 

    Mother Carrie Gaudio, who attended the local charter school her parents helped to found, was surprised when her son Ross visited Hartsfield Elementary, a Title I school that serves a high percentage of low-income households — and loved it.

    Before enrolling him, however, she and her husband, Ben Boyter, studied the enrollment situation. The school was under capacity, but they noticed more students coming each year.

    “We felt like if they ended up having to close a school it wouldn’t be one that’s had continual increases in enrollment,” she said, and added, “it’s a real bummer that you have to consider that, that you can’t just consider, ‘Are these people kind? Is my kid comfortable here? Do we feel safe here?’”

    Indeed, a school that a parent chooses one year may close the next.

    That’s what happened last year to Kenia Martinez. Since fall 2022, her two sons had attended a charter school run by Charter Schools USA, among the largest for-profit charter operators in the state. Last spring, she learned from a teacher that the school, Renaissance Academy, was shutting down. 

    Previously named Governor’s Charter Academy, Renaissance recently received a “D” grade, and saw enrollment fall from 420 students in 2020-21 to 220 last year. It also ran deficits, with a negative net position of $1.9 million at the end of the 2023-24 school year, according to the most recent state audit report. It closed last May.

    The school building was to re-open as Tallahassee Preparatory Academy — a private school — which was advertised on its website as a STEM school for “advanced learners” that would charge a fee, ranging from $1,500 to $3,200, in addition to the money paid through a voucher. 

    The school was to be run not by Charter Schools USA but by Discovery Science Schools, which operates several STEM charter schools in the state. The deal revealed a possible exit strategy for faltering charters: conversion to a private voucher school that gets state money, but without the requirement of state tests, grades or certified teachers — in other words, without accountability. 

    Yet as this school year began, the building remained dark. The parking lot was vacant. There was no response to the doorbell, or to emails or phone calls made to the contact information on the new school’s website. Discovery Science Schools’ phone number and email were not in service, and emails to founder Yalcin Akin and board president David Fortna went unanswered. A Charter Schools USA spokesperson, Colleen Reynolds, wrote in an email that “CUSA is not involved with the building located where the former Renaissance Academy Building stands” and did not provide additional clarification on why state audit reports indicate otherwise. 

    The Leon County School Board fiercely debated whether to sue Charter Schools USA for access to the building and its contents, which had been funded with taxpayer dollars. But school board members dropped the idea after learning that the building had a large lien, the result of how financing was crafted through Red Apple Development, the real estate arm of Charter Schools USA. Hanna was frustrated that for-profit companies benefited from taxpayer dollars — but still owned the assets.

    Related: Inside Florida’s ‘underground lab’ for far-right education policies

    When Renaissance announced it was closing, a friend of Martinez’s suggested her family apply for vouchers, which covered the full cost of attendance for her two sons at the Avant Schools of Excellence, a private Christian school with campuses in Tallahassee and Florida City. 

    The school takes vouchers (along with a school scholarship) as full payment, although its website lists tuition and fees at $22,775 per year. Martinez liked that the school is Christian, and small. None of their friends from Renaissance Academy are there. Martinez drives them 30 minutes each way, every day.

    The Tallahassee building that houses Avant was previously home to at least two charter schools. (One lasted a month.) Since the campus opened three years ago, said Donald Ravenell, who co-founded Avant with his wife, enrollment has jumped from 55 to 175.

    Ravenell, who on a recent weekday wore a red and blue tie (school colors are red, white and blue), attributed the school’s success to a focus on faith (“We talk about God all the time”) and the aim of preparing each student to be “a successful citizen and person.” 

    Like Olson at Hartsfield, he well understands this is a competitive marketplace. He wants his school to be known for offering a quality product, which he underscored by drawing a comparison to fried chicken.

    “I have nothing against Chester’s Chicken,” said Ravenell, referring to the quick-service chain sold in gas stations and rest stops. But he expects Avant to reach for more: “We want to be Chick-fil-A.”

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

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

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  • College students hedge their bets in a chaotic labor market by double-majoring

    College students hedge their bets in a chaotic labor market by double-majoring

    by Jon Marcus, The Hechinger Report
    November 5, 2025

    After he graduates from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Drew Wesson hopes to begin a career in strategic communication, a field with higher-than-average job growth and earnings.

    One year into his time at the university, Wesson became more strategic about this goal. Like nearly 1 in 3 of his classmates, he declared a second major to better stand out in an unpredictable labor market.

    It’s part of a trend that’s spreading nationwide, according to a Hechinger Report analysis of federal data, as students fret about getting jobs in an economy that some fear is shifting faster than a traditional college education can keep up.

    “There’s kind of a fear of graduating and going out into the job market,” said Wesson, a sophomore from Minneapolis who is double-majoring in international security and journalism. “And having more skills and more knowledge and more majors gives you a competitive edge.”

    The number of students at UW-Madison who double-major has grown by 25 percent over the last decade, the data show. But double-majoring is also on the rise at private, nonprofit colleges across the country, and at other public institutions, including the University of California, San Diego, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 

    Nearly 5.4 million credentials — degrees or certificates — were earned by the 4.8 million college and university graduates in 2023-24, the most recent year for which the figure is available. That means about 12 percent left school with more than one, compared to 6 percent ten years earlier. Academic minors don’t count as a credential and aren’t tracked..

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    “Students are feeling a sort of spiraling lack of control in a very dynamic labor market,” said Rachel Slama, associate director of Cornell University’s Future of Learning Lab, which studies how technology and other innovations are changing education. “They’re probably clinging to the one thing that’s in their control, which is the majors they choose. And they think that more is more.”

    They may be right, according to one of the few studies of this topic, by scholars at St. Lawrence University and Vanderbilt Law School. Students who have one major in business and a second in science, technology, engineering or math, it found, earn more than if they majored in only one of those disciplines, the 2016 study found. 

    Graduates who double-major are also 56 percent less likely to be laid off, have their pay cut or suffer other negative effects in economic downturns, according to another study, released last year by researchers at Ohio State and four other universities. These outcomes show “the importance of diverse skill sets,” the researchers concluded. If there’s a drop in demand for the skills associated with one major, “a double major can pursue a job related to the unaffected major.” 

    At Wisconsin, nearly 6 in 10 students in computer science who pick a second major choose the lucrative discipline of data science; the number of jobs in data science is projected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to increase 34 percent over about the next 10 years, at salaries that are nearly twice the national average.

    The unemployment rate among new bachelor’s degree recipients is now higher than for workers overall, and at its highest level since 2014, not including the pandemic years, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. That’s partly because artificial intelligence and other factors are transforming what employers need. 

    Nearly half of recent graduates feel underqualified to apply for even entry-level jobs, a survey by the education technology company Cengage Group finds. Only 30 percent say they have full-time jobs related to the fields that they studied.

    Meanwhile, colleges and universities — traditionally slow to transform what and how they teach — are encouraging students to combine majors as a faster way to keep up with changes in the labor market, said Taylor Odle, an assistant professor at UW-Madison who studies the economics of education and the value of credentials in the workforce.

    “Institutions are thinking strategically about how to align their degree programs with industry, and it might be by pairing two things they already have,” Odle said.

    There are other reasons for the rising popularity of double majors. At UW-Madison, for example, one factor propelling the growth is that there are no minors, noted Taylor Odle, an assistant professor there who studies the economics of education and the value of credentials in the workforce.. 

    Double-majoring isn’t easy. It typically means earning more than the usual minimum number of credits required to graduate, on top of extracurricular and other obligations. Wesson, at UW-Madison, for instance, is an officer of student government, a reporter and photographer for the campus newspaper and an honors student.

    Some separate majors have overlapping requirements. Even if they don’t, most universities and colleges charge the same tuition per semester no matter how many courses undergraduates take. So unless a second major extends the number of semesters a student needs to complete required courses, or forces him or her to take additional classes in the summers, double-majoring doesn’t typically cost more or take longer.

    Meanwhile, more students are arriving at college having already knocked off credits by taking dual-enrollment and Advanced Placement classes in high school. 

    About 2.5 million high school students participate in dual enrollment, according to an analysis of federal data by the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University. (The Hechinger Report, which produced this story, is an independent unit of Teachers College.)

    This means they have room in their schedules in college for second majors, said Kelle Parsons, who focuses on higher education as a principal researcher at the American Institutes for Research.

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

    For some students, double-majoring makes more sense than changing majors altogether. About 30 percent of students change their majors at least once, and 10 percent two or more times, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Adding a second major is less drastic than dropping a first one and starting again from scratch, said Patrick Denice, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Western Ontario.

    “If you add a [second] major, you hedge your bets against a changing labor market without losing those credits and that coursework you’ve already earned” toward the first one, said Denice, who has studied why students at U.S. universities pick and change their majors.

    There’s yet another reason students are increasingly double-majoring. Even as they crowd into specialties associated with career opportunities, such as business and health-related disciplines — which together now account for nearly 1 in 3 undergraduate fields of study — some are adding second majors for which they simply have a passion.

    Related: Students can’t get into basic college courses, dragging out their time in school

    “They’re trying to satisfy their parents, who want them to be employed,” said J. Wesley Null, vice provost for undergraduate education and academic affairs at Baylor University, where there were more than twice as many double majors last year than there were in 2014. “But they’re also interested in a lot of interdisciplinary kinds of things. They’ll combine biology with Sanskrit or Chinese. These really bright students have a lot of diverse interests.”

    At the University of Chicago, where the number of double majors has also more than doubled, “I see students committing to one career but wanting to have more breadth,” said Melina Hale, dean of the college. “They’re going and exploring all of these other majors and finding one they love.”

    Double-majoring is also “a great way for students to demonstrate that they know how to think in different ways,” said Hale, herself a biologist who has collaborated with engineers. “If you’re going into a job in finance and have a deep background in history, you’re bringing different ways of approaching problems.”

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

    This way of thinking is pushing still another trend: More students nationwide are earning certificates, which they can get in a matter of months and alongside their degrees, in subjects such as business management. Seventeen percent of bachelor’s degree recipients also finished college with at least one certificate in 2023-24, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reports.

    Known as “stackable credentials,” these kinds of certificates “have been talked about for a long time,” said Ryan Lufkin, vice president of global academic strategy at the educational technology company Instructure. “And now there’s really demand for them.” 

    That’s because — like double-majoring and minoring — they make applicants stand out to employers, said Odle, at UW-Madison. 

    Students, he said, “are trying to emphasize their attractiveness in the labor market. They’re trying to cover their bases.”

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

    This story about double majors was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

    Data analysis by Marina Villeneuve.

    Sign up for our higher education newsletter. Listen to our higher education podcast.

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