Tag: Teachers

  • What Education Leaders Can Learn from the AI Gold Rush – The 74

    What Education Leaders Can Learn from the AI Gold Rush – The 74


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    Every week, my 7-year-old brings home worksheets with math problems and writing assignments. But what captivates me is what he creates on the back once the assigned work is done: power-ups for imaginary games, superheroes with elaborate backstories, landscapes that evolve weekly. He exists in a beautiful state of discovery and joy, in the chrysalis before transformation.

    My son shows me it’s possible to discover something remarkable when we expand what we consider possible. Yet in education, a system with 73% public dissatisfaction and just 35% satisfied with K-12 quality, we hit walls repeatedly.

    This inertia contributes to our current moment: steep declines in reading and math proficiency since 2019, one in eight teaching positions unfilled or filled by uncertified teachers, and growing numbers abandoning public education.

    Contrast this with artificial intelligence’s current trajectory.

    AI faces massive uncertainty. Nobody knows where it leads or which approaches will prove most valuable. Ethical questions around bias, privacy and accountability remain unresolved.

    Yet despite uncertainty — or because of it — nearly every industry is doubling down. Four major tech firms planned $315 billion in AI spending for 2025 alone. AI adoption surged from 55% to 78% of organizations in one year, with 86% of employers expecting AI to transform their businesses by 2030.

    This is a gold rush. Entire ecosystems are seeing transformational potential and refusing to be left behind. Organizations invest not despite uncertainty, but because standing still carries greater risk.

    There’s much we can learn from the AI-fueled momentum.

    To be clear, this isn’t an argument about AI’s merits. This is a conversation about what becomes possible when people come together around shared aspirations to restore hope, agency and possibility to education. AI’s approach reveals five guiding principles that education leaders should follow:

    1. Set a Bold Vision: AI leaders speak in radical terms. Education needs such bold aspirations, not five percent improvements. Talk about 100% access, 100% thriving, 100% success. Young people are leading by demanding approaches that honoring their agency, desire for belonging, and broad aspirations. We need to follow their lead.

    2. Play the Long Game: Companies make massive investments for transformation they may not see for years. Education must embrace the same long-term thinking: investing in teacher development programs that mature over years, reimagining curricula for students’ distant futures, building systems that support sustainable excellence over immediate political wins.

    3. Don’t Fear Mistakes: AI adoption is rife with failure and course corrections. Despite rapid belief and investment, over 80% of AI projects fail. Yet companies continue experimenting, learning, adjusting and trying again because they understand that innovation requires iteration. Education must take bold swings, have honest debriefs when things fall flat, adjust and move forward.

    4. Democratize Access: AI reached 1.7 to 1.8 billion users globally in 2025. While quality varies and significant disparities exist, fundamental access has been opened up in ways that seemed impossible just years ago. When it comes to transformative change in education, every child deserves high-quality teachers, engaging curriculum and flourishing environments.

    5. Own the Story, and Pass the Mic: Every day, AI gains new ambassadors among everyday people, inspiring others to jump in. The most powerful education stories come from young people discovering breakthroughs during light bulb moments, from parents seeing children thrive, from teachers witnessing walls coming down and possibilities surpassing imagination. We need to pass the mic, creating platforms for students to share what meaningful learning looks like, which will unlock aspirational stories that shift the system.

    None of this is possible without student engagement. When students have voice and agency, believe in learning’s relevance and feel supported, transformative outcomes follow. As CEO of Our Turn, I was privileged to be part of efforts that inspired leaders and institutions across the country to invest in student engagement as a core strategy. We’re now seeing progress: all eight measures of school engagement tracked by Gallup reached their highest levels in 2025. This is an opportunity to build positive momentum; research consistently demonstrates engagement relates to academic achievement, post-secondary readiness, critical thinking, persistence and enhanced mental health.

    Student engagement is the foundation from which all other educational outcomes flow. When we center student voice, we go from improving schools to galvanizing the next generation of engaged citizens and leaders our democracy desperately needs.

    High-quality teachers are also essential. Over 365,000 positions are filled by uncertified teachers, with 45,500 unfilled. Teachers earn 26.4% less than similarly educated professionals. About 90% of vacancies result from teachers leaving due to low salaries, difficult conditions or inadequate support.

    Programs like Philadelphia’s City Teaching Alliance prove what’s possible: over 90% of new teachers returned after 2023-24, versus just under 80% citywide. We must create conditions where teaching is sustainable and honored through higher salaries, better working conditions, meaningful professional development and cultures that value educators as professionals.

    Investing in teacher quality is fundamental to workforce development, economic competitiveness and ensuring every child has access to excellent instruction. When we frame this as both a moral imperative and an economic necessity, we create the coalition necessary for lasting change.

    Finally, transformation must focus on skill development. The workforce young people are entering demands more than technical knowledge; it requires integrated capabilities for navigating complexity, building authentic relationships and creating meaningful change.

    At Harmonious Leadership, we’ve worked with foundations and organizations to develop leadership skills that result in greater innovation and impact. Our goals: young people more engaged in school and communities, and companies reporting greater levels of innovation, impact and financial sustainability.

    The appeal here is undeniable. Workforce development consistently ranks among the top priorities across political divides. Given the rapid rate of change in our culture and economy, we need to develop skills for careers that don’t yet exist, for challenges we can’t yet imagine, for a world that demands creativity, adaptability and resilience.

    The AI gold rush shows what’s possible when we set bold visions, invest for the long term, embrace learning from failure, democratize access and amplify voices closest to transformation.Our children, like my son drawing superheroes on worksheet backs, are in chrysalis moments. The choice is ours: remain paralyzed by complexity or channel the same urgency, investment and unity of purpose driving the AI revolution. We know what works: student engagement, quality teachers and future-ready skills. The question isn’t whether we have solutions. It’s whether we have courage to pursue them.


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  • Educating teachers to use AI without harming the planet 

    Educating teachers to use AI without harming the planet 

    by Ariel Gilreath and Caroline Preston, The Hechinger Report
    January 25, 2026

    This story appeared in our climate and education newsletter. Sign up here.

    I’m one of those rare people (there are others out there, right?) who have yet to try ChatGPT or any other generative artificial intelligence program. Part of my hesitation is driven by a vague concern that AI is killing the planet: Researchers predict, for example, that U.S. data centers could consume as much water as 10 million Americans and emit as much carbon as 10 million cars. At the same time, there’s hope that AI could combat climate change, by accelerating research on climate solutions. 

    So I was intrigued when I came across an announcement about a new initiative on how to teach K-12 educators to use AI with climate change in mind. The effort, called TEACH-AI, was started last fall by researchers from the University of California, Irvine, Indiana University Bloomington and the University of Bremen in Germany. Among other projects, they are developing a course to help future educators understand how to use AI in an environmentally conscious way, and how to use it to teach lessons on climate change. 

    My colleague Ariel Gilreath, who covers K-12 education for Hechinger, spoke this week with one of the TEACH-AI creators, Asli Sezen-Barrie, an endowed chair of climate and environmental education and an associate professor at the School of Education at UC Irvine. Here is Ariel’s interview with Sezen-Barrie, edited for length and clarity. 

    — Caroline Preston

    Can you explain the idea behind TEACH-AI, and how it came about?

    Institutions have started a lot of initiatives around AI. At this point, it’s hard to basically say: ‘Don’t use this,’ because there are benefits that teachers and students see. So we thought, ‘OK, how do we have them think through the environmental cost of this?’ 

    At the same time, we were trying to understand what is the confidence level and knowledge base that educators have right now, about not just commonly known tools like ChatGPT, but other AI tools developed for education purposes including to understand the changing climate. 

    What I started seeing is environmentally conscious teachers were actually a lot more cautious than what we initially thought. Even when their students were using it, they were concerned. Their districts are working on adopting certain tools, and these teachers were actually underlining a lot of reasons why not using AI is a good thing right now. We heard similar concerns from our colleagues in Germany. 

    What we thought then is: If their students are going to use it, if their districts are going to adopt AI tools, and teachers are really concerned, let’s try to figure out a way to understand how we can both use climate change as a context to see how AI can be used purposely — how do we choose the right tools, when the AI tool can align with our purposes — and then also create activities that teachers or their students will be able to use to debate what is the cost-benefit analysis for certain AI tools. 

    Is the purpose primarily to help future educators use AI to teach environmental lessons, or is it training educators how to use AI in a more sustainable way?

    It’s going to be both. Because this is going to be one course, it’s exploratory work. My  colleagues developed a tool called StoryAI, which has a specific goal and purpose and, as a result, lower energy cost. We’re going to see how we can leverage big data to store data with that tool on teaching issues like sustainable fashion or food waste or fires.

    Given the amount of water and energy AI data centers use, there’s been a lot of debate about whether using AI at all is bad for the environment. I’d love to hear your thoughts about this.

    Those concerns are valid. But at this point, where I am, it’s hard for me to say: ‘It’s bad — period.’ Because there are valid reasons teachers will tell you they use it, like with overwhelming tasks. Climate change is such a complex topic. And we tell them to teach it in interdisciplinary ways, how communities care about it, what science says about it. 

    Maybe that’s where AI tools can support educators. It can be that they use AI tools to learn about changing climate and current data and research. 

    We need to think about what AI tools and what kind of use of AI will align successfully with the way we’re designing teaching and learning, and which ones will fail. We need to prepare educators on working through that judgment.

    Part of this initiative involves designing a course that blends AI literacy with geography and environmental science education. What can teachers expect to learn from this course?

    The course is called An Education for Sustainable Futures. We’re going to explore the two angles I mentioned: how AI tools have a role in understanding and making projections about climate change, and how do they support the solutions — or not, at times. The other component is bringing in AI literacy. 

    There’s a lot of professional master’s degrees appearing all over the country right now, and internationally as well. You don’t see so much discussion — or a course or even a curriculum element — on the environmental impact. Bias, language bias and reliance is discussed a little bit, but not from an environmental context. 

    And the class you described is just one part of this initiative.

    We are also doing document analysis to look at guidance from California, Germany, UNESCO, to see where AI recommendations can align with environmental literacy. 

    Education can have a critical role in these discussions, because people make decisions, people vote for things. Not knowing and not understanding these things doesn’t give them informed actions. 

    Education’s role can be really critical to have these discussions and to learn to look at this kind of data.

    Contact editor Caroline Preston at 212-870-8965, via Signal at CarolineP.83 or on email at [email protected]. Contact staff writer Ariel Gilreath on Signal at arielgilreath.46 or at [email protected].

    This story about AI in education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s climate change newsletter.

    This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/educating-teachers-ai-without-harming-planet/”>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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  • Teachers, Parents Increasingly Back Cell Phone Bans in Michigan Schools – The 74

    Teachers, Parents Increasingly Back Cell Phone Bans in Michigan Schools – The 74


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    In his 30 years as teacher and administrator, Jason Purcell felt the weight of responsibility that often fell on his shoulders in enforcing the prohibition of cell phones in the classroom.

    When Purcell was convinced to come out of retirement this past fall to teach at Mackinaw City High School, he saw a remarkable difference teaching students in a district that had long banned cell phone use during the school day.

    “It makes a world of difference when there is a school wide policy that is enforced by all the teachers consistently and supported by the administration,” said Purcell, who has taught math, been an academic counselor and served as an assistant principal throughout his career. “Students have and always will find ways to be distracted from the learning, but not having cell phones may take away the biggest distraction that students face.”

    Mackinaw City Public Schools’ cell phone ban was instituted around 2010, coinciding with the rise of teen cell phone ownership, longtime Superintendent Jeffrey Curth said.

    Teachers have all taken on the responsibility of enforcing that students’ cell phones are left in their locker with the ringer off from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m, Curth said, removing a major source of distractions and potential source of cyber bullying.

    “Because we’ve just had it in place so long, it’s just what’s expected,” Curth said. “I think when you see the amount of cyber bullying and things that it’s raised to the level that it has in society today, I think it’s just further strengthened our stance that we feel that we’ve done the right thing.”

    As the state considers a school cell phone ban that received overwhelming bipartisan support in the Michigan House last week, an increasing number of Michigan school districts have followed Mackinaw City’s lead by enacting bans and passing cell phone policies limiting use in the classroom in recent years.

    Nationwide, 26 states have passed full bans on cell phone use, while six others have required districts to establish their own policies or limited cell phone use in class, according to Newsweek. A 2024 American Association of Educators survey of 1,517 teachers from across the country, on the other hand, found that 70% want cellphones to be banned during the school day.

    From passive presence to active participation

    Anchor Bay High School student success teacher Jamie Pietron said she was initially apprehensive about how students would adjust to the districtwide ban that started this fall, wondering how the policy would be enforced by administration.

    There have been consequences for students who violate the district’s “away for the day” cell phone policy, Pietron said, helping contribute to a more connected learning atmosphere.

    “In the past, when kids were done with their work, they went on their phones,” Pietron said. “Teachers are making lessons and activities more engaging to cover any ‘down time’ and students are focused on what they need to do.

    “… It is amazing to walk through the cafeteria and see kids actually talking, playing cards and having conversations with each other instead of staring at their screens.”

    Northville Middle School teacher Richard Tabor said he also has seen a shift from “passive presence” to active participation in his classroom since the district enacted its cell phone ban in 2024-25 for students in grades K-8 during class time, requiring them to be collected by teachers at the start of the day.

    Prior to the ban being in place, Tabor said it was teachers’ responsibility to enforce their own policies on student cell phone use, leading to inconsistency in where students were allowed to use cell phones and where they weren’t.

    Without the option to scroll during downtime, students are able to engage with the classroom environment,” Tabor said. “Students are more likely to ask questions, take physical notes and participate in discussions because they have no alternative ‘escape’ during moments of boredom or difficulty.”

    Mackinaw City special education teacher Elizabeth McNeil said her transition from teaching in a district without a cell phone policy to one where a ban has long been in place has been a “breath of fresh air” in removing “distraction and drama.”

    “At my previous district, there were daily arguments about giving up phones and discipline problems, even when just asking a student to put their phone away,” she said.

    “In a society where adults are addicted to their phones, it is encouraging to see that we are encouraging students here at MCPS to realize that their phones are not part of their lifeline,” McNeil said”

    Parental approval

    Beyond support from teachers, bans have largely been met with approval from parents, who acknowledge that devices that continually cause them distractions throughout the day shouldn’t be in the hands of their children during school.

    Heather Gatny’s opinion has evolved on the issue, from trying to hold off on getting her son a cell phone until he is in high school to recently getting him one as an eighth grader for Christmas.

    She likes the idea of him having one in his possession, even if it is kept off while he is in class at Plymouth-Canton Community Schools, but stressed that in the classroom it can only cause distractions.

    “If the kids were allowed to have their phones in the classrooms, they’d be looking at them the whole time,” she said. “I think that’s for the best for them to not have access to it, because they’re just on apps. They’re goofing around. They’re not paying attention to what the teacher is saying. They’re paying attention to what their friends are texting them.”

    With two young children in second and fourth grades at Plymouth-Canton Community Schools, Sarah Krzyzanski said she is for cell phones being stored in a central location in the classroom for those who are concerned about students being able to respond to an emergency.

    In the classroom, however, she said schools should be aiming to keep the focus on learning and not conditioning students to be dependent on having a cell phone by their side.

    “These kids are at the point where they’re kind of addicted to that ‘ding,’ and they get to where they crave it, and it becomes an impulse,” she said. “I don’t believe that a child with a phone on their person has the ability to pay attention to the teacher and actually follow lessons and do it with enough of their brain engaged to be taking that educational content out the way that they should be.”

    Michigan Advance is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Michigan Advance maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jon King for questions: [email protected].


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  • Measuring student global competency learning using direct peer connections

    Measuring student global competency learning using direct peer connections

    Key points:

    Our students are coming of age in a world that demands global competency. From economic interdependence to the accelerating effects of climate change and mass migration, students need to develop the knowledge and skills to engage and succeed in this diverse and interconnected world. Consequently, the need for global competency education is more important than ever.

    “Being born into a global world does not make people global citizens,” Andreas Schleicher of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has said. “We must deliberately and systematically educate our children in global competence.” 

    Here at Global Cities, we regularly talk with educators eager to bring global competency into their classrooms in ways that engage and excite students to learn. Educators recognize the need, but ask a vital question: How do we teach something we can’t measure?

    It’s clear that in today’s competitive and data-driven education environment, we need to expand and evaluate what students need to know to be globally competent adults. Global competency education requires evaluation tools to determine what and whether students are learning.

    The good news is that two recent independent research studies found that educators can use a new tool, the Global Cities’ Codebook for Global Student Learning Outcomes, to identify what global competency learning looks like and to assess whether students are learning by examining student writing. The research successfully used the evaluation tool for global competency programs with different models and curricula and across different student populations.

    Global Cities developed the Codebook to help researchers, program designers, and educators identify, teach, and measure global competency in their own classrooms. Created in partnership with Harvard Graduate School of Education’s The Open Canopy, the Codebook captures 55 observable indicators across four core global learning outcomes: Appreciation for Diversity, Cultural Understanding, Global Knowledge, and Global Engagement. The Codebook was developed using data from our own Global Scholars virtual exchange program, which since 2014 has connected more than 139,000 students in 126 cities worldwide to teach global competency.

    In Global Scholars, we’ve seen firsthand the excitement of directly connecting students with their international peers and sparking meaningful discussions about culture, community, and shared challenges. We know how teachers can effectively use the Codebook and how Global Cities workshops extend the reach of this approach to a larger audience of K-12 teachers. This research was designed to determine whether the same tool could be used to assess global competency learning in other virtual exchange programs, not only Global Cities’ Global Scholars program.

    These studies make clear that the Codebook can reliably identify global learning in diverse contexts and help educators see where and how their students are developing global competency skills in virtual exchange curricula. You can examine the tool (the Codebook) here. You can explore the full research findings here.

    The first study looked at two AFS Intercultural Programs curricula, Global You Changemaker and Global Up Teen. The second study analyzed student work from The Open Canopy‘s Planetary Health and Remembering the Past learning journeys.

    In the AFS Intercultural Programs data, researchers found clear examples of students from across the globe showing Appreciation for Diversity and Cultural Understanding. In these AFS online discussion boards, students showed evidence they were learning about their own and other cultures, expressed positive attitudes about one another’s cultures, and demonstrated tolerance for different backgrounds and points of view. Additionally, the discussion boards offered opportunities for students to interact with each other virtually, and there were many examples of students from different parts of the world listening to one another and interacting in positive and respectful ways. When the curriculum invited students to design projects addressing community or global issues, they demonstrated strong evidence of Global Engagement as well.

    Students in The Open Canopy program demonstrated the three most prevalent indicators of global learning that reflect core skills essential to effective virtual exchange: listening to others and discussing issues in a respectful and unbiased way; interacting with people of different backgrounds positively and respectfully; and using digital tools to learn from and communicate with peers around the world. Many of the Remembering the Past posts were especially rich and coded for multiple indicators of global learning.

    Together, these studies show that global competency can be taught–and measured. They also highlight simple, but powerful strategies educators everywhere can use:

    • Structured opportunities for exchange help students listen and interact respectfully with one another
    • Virtual exchange prompts students to share their cultures and experiences across lines of difference in positive, curious ways
    • Assignments that include reflection questions–why something matters, not just what it is–help students think critically about culture and global issues
    • Opportunities for students to give their opinion and to decide to take action, even hypothetically, builds their sense of agency in addressing global challenges

    The Codebook is available free to all educators, along with hands-on professional development workshops that guide teachers in using the tool to design curriculum, teach intentionally, and assess learning. Its comprehensive set of indicators gives educators and curriculum designers a menu of options–some they might not have initially considered–that can enrich students’ global learning experiences.

    Our message to educators is simple: A community of educators (Global Ed Lab), a research-supported framework, and practical tools can help you teach students global competency and evaluate their work.

    The question is no longer whether we need more global competency education. We clearly do. Now with the Codebook and the Global Ed Lab, teachers can learn how to teach this subject matter effectively and use tools to assess student learning.

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  • The time to prepare young people for a future shaped by computer science is during middle school

    The time to prepare young people for a future shaped by computer science is during middle school

    by Jim Ryan, The Hechinger Report
    January 19, 2026

    The future of work will demand fluency in both science and technology. From addressing climate change to designing ethical AI systems, tomorrow’s challenges will require interdisciplinary thinkers who can navigate complex systems and harness the power of computation. 

    And that is why we can’t wait until high school or college to integrate computer science into general science. 

    The time to begin is during middle school, that formative period when students begin to shape their identities, interests and aspirations. If schools want to prepare young people for a future shaped by technology, they must act now to ensure that computer science is not a privilege for a few but a foundation for all. 

    The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts more than 300,000 computer science job openings every year through 2034 — a rate of growth that far outpaces most other sectors. Yet despite this demand, in 2024, only about 37 percent of public middle schools reported offering computer science coursework. 

    This gap is more than a statistic — it’s a warning sign that the U.S. technology sector will be starved for the workforce it needs to thrive.  

    Related: A lot goes on in classrooms from kindergarten to high school. Keep up with our free weekly newsletter on K-12 education. 

    One innovative way to close this gap is by integrating computer science into the general science curriculum at every middle school. This approach doesn’t require additional class periods or separate electives. Instead — by using computational thinking and digital tools to develop student understanding of real-world scientific phenomena — it reimagines how we teach science. 

    Science and computer science are already deeply interconnected in the real world. Scientists use computational models to simulate climate systems, analyze genetic data and design experiments. And computer scientists often draw inspiration from biology, physics and chemistry to develop algorithms and solve complex problems, such as by modeling neural networks after the brain’s architecture and simulating quantum systems for cryptography. 

    Teaching these disciplines together helps students see how both science and computer science are applicable and relevant to their lives and society.  

    Integrating computer science into middle school science instruction also addresses long-standing equity issues. When computer science is offered only as a separate elective, access often depends on prior exposure, school funding and parental advocacy. This creates barriers for students from underrepresented backgrounds, who may never get the chance to discover their interests or talents in computing.  

    Embedding computer science into core science classes helps to ensure that every student — regardless of zip code, race or gender — can build foundational skills in computing and see themselves as empowered problem-solvers. 

    Teachers must be provided the tools and support to make this a reality. Namely, schools should have access to middle school science curriculums that have computer science concepts directly embedded in the instruction. Such units don’t teach coding in isolation — they invite students to customize the sensors that collect data, simulate systems and design coded solutions to real-world problems. 

    For example, students can use computer science to investigate the question: “Why does contact between objects sometimes but not always cause damage, and how can we protect against damage?”  

    Students can also use sensors and programming to develop solutions to measure the forces of severe weather. In doing so, they’re not just learning science and computer science — they’re learning how to think like scientists and engineers. 

    Related: The path to a career could start in middle school 

    Integrating general science with computer science doesn’t require more instructional time. It simply requires us to consider how we can use computer science to efficiently investigate the science all students already study. 

    Rather than treating computer science as an add-on, we can weave it into the fabric of how students investigate, analyze and design.  

    This approach will not only deepen their understanding of scientific concepts but also build transferable skills in logic, creativity and collaboration. 

    Students need to start learning computer science earlier in their education, and we need to start in the science classroom by teaching these skills in middle school. To ensure that today’s students grow into tomorrow’s innovators and problem-solvers, we must treat computer science as foundational, not optional. 

    Jim Ryan is the executive director of OpenSciEd. 

    Contact the opinion editor at [email protected]. 

    This story about computer science in middle school was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter. 

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  • How professional learning transformed our teachers

    How professional learning transformed our teachers

    Key points:

    When you walk into a math classroom in Charleston County School District, you can feel the difference. Students aren’t just memorizing steps–they’re reasoning through problems, explaining their thinking, and debating solutions with their peers. Teachers aren’t rushing to cover content, because their clear understanding of students’ natural learning progressions allows them to spend more time exploring the why behind the math.

    This cultural shift didn’t come from adopting a new curriculum or collecting more data. Instead, we transformed math education by investing deeply in our educators through OGAP (The Ongoing Assessment Project) professional learning–an approach that has reshaped not only instruction, but the confidence and professional identity of our teachers.

    Why we needed a change

    Charleston County serves more than 50,000 students across more than 80 schools. For years, math achievement saw small gains, but not the leaps we hoped for. Our teachers were dedicated, and we had high-quality instructional materials, but something was missing.

    The gap wasn’t our teacher’s effort. It was their insight–understanding the content they taught flexibly and deeply.

    Too often, instruction focused on procedures rather than understanding. Teachers could identify whether a student got a problem right or wrong, but not always why they responded the way they did. To truly help students grow, we needed a way to uncover their thinking and guide next steps more intentionally.

    What makes this professional learning different

    Unlike traditional PD that delivers a set of strategies to “try on Monday,” this learning model takes educators deep into how students develop mathematical ideas over time.

    Across four intensive days, teachers explore research-based learning progressions in additive, multiplicative, fractional, and proportional reasoning. They examine real student work to understand how misconceptions form and what those misconceptions reveal about a learner’s thought process. It is also focused on expanding and deepening teachers’ understanding of the content they teach so they are more flexible in their thinking. Teachers appreciate that the training isn’t abstract; it’s rooted in everyday classroom realities, making it immediately meaningful.

    Instead of sorting responses into right and wrong, teachers ask a more powerful question: What does this show me about how the student is reasoning?

    That shift changes everything. Teachers leave with:

    • A stronger grasp of content
    • The ability to recognize error patterns
    • Insight into students’ conceptual gaps
    • Renewed confidence in their instructional decisions

    The power of understanding the “why”

    Our district uses conceptual math curricula, including Eureka Math², Reveal Math, and Math Nation. These “HQIM” programs emphasize reasoning, discourse, and models–exactly the kind of instruction our students need.

    But conceptual materials only work when teachers understand the purpose behind them.

    Before this professional learning, teachers sometimes felt unsure about lesson sequencing and the lesson intent, including cognitive complexity. Now, they understand why lessons appear in a specific order and how models support deeper understanding. It’s common to hear teachers say: “Oh, now I get why it’s written that way!” They are also much more likely to engage deeply with the mathematical models in the programs when they understand the math education research behind the learning progressions that curriculum developers use to design the content.

    That insight helps them stay committed to conceptual instruction even when students struggle, shifting the focus from “Did they get it?” to “How are they thinking about it?”

    Transforming district culture

    The changes go far beyond individual classrooms.

    We run multiple sessions of this professional learning each year, and they fill within days. Teachers return to their PLCs energized, bringing exit tickets, student work, and new questions to analyze together.

    We also invite instructional coaches and principals to attend. This builds a shared professional language and strengthens communication across the system. The consistency it creates is particularly powerful for new teachers who are still building confidence in their instructional decision-making.

    The result?

    • Teachers now invite feedback.
    • Coaches feel like instructional partners, not evaluators.
    • Everyone is rowing in the same direction.

    This shared understanding has become one of the most transformative parts of our district’s math journey.

    Results we can see

    In the past five years, Charleston County’s math scores have climbed roughly 10 percentage points. But the most meaningful growth is happening inside classrooms:

    • Students are reasoning more deeply.
    • Teachers demonstrate stronger content knowledge and efficacy in using math models.
    • PLC conversations focus on evidence of student thinking.
    • Instruction is more intentional and responsive.

    Teachers are also the first to tell you whether PD is worth their time…and our teachers are asking for more. Many return to complete a second or third strand, and sometimes all four. We even have educators take the same strand more than once just to pick up on something they may have missed the first time. The desire to deepen their expertise shows just how impactful this learning has been. Participants also find it powerful to engage in a room where the collective experience spans multiple grade levels. This structure supports our goal of strengthening vertical alignment across the district.

    Prioritizing professional learning that works

    When professional learning builds teacher expertise rather than compliance, everything changes. This approach doesn’t tell teachers what to teach; it helps them understand how students learn.

    And once teachers gain that insight, classrooms shift. Conversations deepen. Confidence grows. Students stop memorizing math and start truly understanding it.

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  • Cutting costs without cutting corners

    Cutting costs without cutting corners

    Key points:

    With the end of federal COVID-19 emergency funding and the inherent volatility of state income tax revenues, California school districts are in an era of financial uncertainty. Fortunately, Jurupa Unified School District is already several years into the process of finding ways to track and control expenses while still supporting teachers and staff so they can provide the best possible educational experience for our students. Here’s how we’re making staffing and payroll processes more efficient, starting with the perennially challenging extra duty.

    Getting a handle on extra duty

    In addition to our salaried staff, we have a number of part-time, hourly, and what we call “extra duty” assignments. Because a significant amount of our funding comes from grants, many of our assignments are temporary or one-time. We fill those positions with extra duty requests so we’re not committed to ongoing payroll obligations.

    For many years, those extra duty requests and time cards were on paper, which meant the payroll department was performing redundant work to enter the information in the payroll system. The request forms we used were also on paper, making it very difficult to track the actual time being used back to the request, so we could be sure that the hours being used were within the limitations of the request. We needed a better control mechanism that would help school sites stay within budget, as well as a more formal budget mechanism to encumber the department and site budgets to cover the extra duty requests.

    Budgeting can get very complicated because it’s cross-functional. It includes a position-control component, a payroll component, and a financial budgeting component. We needed a solution that could make all of those universes work together. The mission was either to find a system or build one. Our county office started a pilot program with our district to build a system, but ultimately decided against continuing with this effort due to the resources required to sustain such a system for 23 county districts. 

    Our district engaged in a competitive process and chose Helios Ed. Within six months, our team developed and launched a new system to address extra duty. Since then, we have saved more than $100,000 in staffing costs, time expenses, and budget overruns because of the stronger internal controls we now have in place.

    A more efficient (and satisfied) payroll department

    Eliminating redundant data entry and working with data instead of paper has allowed us to reduce staffing by two full-time equivalents–not through layoffs, but through attrition. And because they have a system that is handling data entry for them, our payroll department has more time to give quality to their work, and feel they are working at a level more aligned to their skills.

    Finding efficiencies in your district

    While Jurupa Unified has found efficiencies and savings in these specific areas, every school district is different. As many California district leaders like to say, we have 1,139 school districts –and just as many ways of doing things. With that in mind, there are some steps to the process of moving from paper to online systems (or using online systems more efficiently) that apply universally.

    1. Sit down and identify your objectives. What are the critical components that you must have? 
    2. Make the decision to make or buy. When COVID first hit, Jurupa Unified created its own invoice-routing system through SharePoint. We’ve also built an excursion request process in PowerApps that handles travel, conferences, and field trips. As our county office found out, though, when you’re bringing a number of functionalities together, it can make more sense to work with a vendor you trust.
    3. If you choose to buy software, be certain that it can do precisely what you need it to. If a vendor says they can develop a functionality along the way, ask to see the new feature before you buy.
    4. Be certain the vendor will be responsive. When it comes to a function such as payroll, you’re dealing with people’s livelihoods, and you need to know that if there’s something wrong with the system, or if you need help, that help is just a phone call away.

    Putting in a new payroll management system has made an enormous difference for our district, but it’s not the end of our cost-cutting process. We’re always looking at our different programs to see where we can cut back in ways that don’t impact the classroom. Ultimately, these changes are about ensuring that resources stay focused where they matter most. While budgets fluctuate and funding streams remain unpredictable, my team and I come to work every day because we believe in public education. I’m a product of public education myself, and I love waking up every day knowing that I can come back and support today’s students and teachers.

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  • Reimagining teacher preparation to include student mental health supports

    Reimagining teacher preparation to include student mental health supports

    Key points:

    Teacher preparation programs have long emphasized curriculum, instruction, and assessment. However, they often fall short in one critical area: social-emotional and mental health needs of students.

    We work daily with students whose academic success is inseparable from their psychological well-being. Nonetheless, we witness new educators wishing they were trained in not just behavior management, but, nowadays, the non-academic needs of children. If preservice programs are going to meet the demands of today’s classrooms, they must include deeper coursework in counseling, psychology, and trauma-informed teaching practices.

    Students today are carrying heavier emotional burdens than ever before. Anxiety, bullying, depression, grief, trauma exposure (including complex trauma), and chronic stress are unfortunately quite common. The fallout rarely appears in uniform, typical, or recognizable ways. Instead, it shows up as behaviors teachers must interpret and address (i.e., withdrawal, defiance, irritability, avoidance, conflict, aggression and violence, or inconsistent work).

    Without formal training, it is easy to label these actions as simple “misbehaviors” instead of asking why. However, seasoned educators and mental health professionals know that behaviors (including misbehaviors) are a means of communication, and understanding the root cause of a student’s actions is essential to creating a supportive and effective classroom.

    Oftentimes, adults fall into a pattern of describing misbehaviors by children as “manipulative” as opposed to a need not being met. As such, adults (including educators) need to shift their mindsets. This belief is supported by research. Jean Piaget reminds us that children’s cognitive and emotional regulation skills are still developing and naturally are imperfect. Lev Vygotsky reminds us that learning and behavior are shaped by the quality of a child’s social interactions, including with the adults (such as teachers) in their lives. Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy further reinforces that psychological safety and belonging must be met before meaningful learning or self-control can occur, and teachers need to initiate psychological safety.

    Traditional classroom management training is often sparse in traditional preservice teacher training. It often emphasizes rules, procedures, and consequences. They absolutely matter, but the reality is far more nuanced. Behavior management and behavior recognition are not the same. A student who shuts down may be experiencing anxiety. A child who blurts out or becomes agitated may be reacting to trauma triggers in the environment. A student who frequently acts out may be seeking connection or stability in the only way they know how. Trauma-informed teaching (rooted in predictability, emotional safety, de-escalation, and relationship-building) is not just helpful, but is foundational in modern schools. Yet, many new teachers enter the profession with little to no formal preparation in these practices.

    The teacher shortage only heightens this need. Potential educators are often intimidated not by teaching content, but by the emotional and behavioral demands that they feel unprepared to address. Meanwhile, experienced teachers often cite burnout stemming from managing complex behaviors without adequate support. Courses focused on child development, counseling skills, and trauma-informed pedagogy would significantly improve both teacher confidence and retention. It would also be beneficial if subject-area experts (such as the counseling or clinical psychology departments of the higher education institution) taught these courses.

    Of note, we are not suggesting that teachers become counselors. School counselors, social workers, psychologists, and psychometrists play essential and irreplaceable roles. However, teachers are the first adults to observe subtle shifts in their students’ behaviors or emotional well-being. Oftentimes, traditional behavior management techniques and strategies can make matters worse in situations where trauma is the root cause of the behavior. When teachers are trained in the fundamentals of trauma-informed practice and creating emotionally safe learning environments, they can respond skillfully. They can collaborate with or refer students to clinical mental-health professionals for more intensive support.

    Teacher preparation programs must evolve to reflect the emotional realities of today’s classrooms. Embedding several clinically grounded courses in counseling, psychology, and trauma-informed teaching (taught by certified and/or practicing mental-health professionals) would transform the way novice educators understand and support their students. This would also allow for more studies and research to take place on the effectiveness of various psychologically saturated teaching practices, accounting for the ever-changing psychosocial atmosphere. Students deserve teachers who can see beyond behaviors and understand the rationale beneath it. Being aware of behavior management techniques (which is often pretty minimal as teacher-prep programs stand now) is quite different than understanding behaviors. Teachers deserve to be equipped with both academic and emotional tools to help every learner thrive.

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  • The schools where even young children change classes 

    The schools where even young children change classes 

    by Ariel Gilreath, The Hechinger Report
    January 13, 2026

    BATON ROUGE, La. — About two dozen second graders sat on the carpet at the front of Jacquelyn Anthony’s classroom, reviewing how to make tens. “Two needs eight!” the students yelled out together. “Six needs four!” 

    “The numbers may get a little trickier,” Anthony told them next. “But remember, the numbers we need to make 10 are still there.” The students then turned confidently to bigger calculations: Forty-six needs four ones to make a new number divisible by 10; 128 needs two to make 13 tens. 

    At the end of the hour, the second graders slung on their backpacks, gathered their Chromebooks and lined up at the door before heading to English and social studies class across the hall. While most schools wait until middle school to transition students from one class to another, kids at Louisiana’s Baton Rouge Center for Visual and Performing Arts do so starting at age 6 or 7. It’s part of a strategy known as departmentalizing, or platooning. 

    Anthony, rather than teaching all four core subjects, specializes in math. The school’s new facility, built in 2025, was designed with departmentalizing in mind: The classrooms have huge glass windows, so teachers can see their next class preparing to line up in the hallway.

    “Teaching today is so different than it was a long time ago, and there are so many demands on them. And the demand to be an expert in your content area is very high,” said Sydney Hebert, magnet site coordinator for the art-focused public school in the East Baton Rouge Parish school district. “We want to make sure that our teachers are experts in what they’re teaching so that they can do a good job of teaching it to the kids.”

    As schools contend with a decades-long slump in math scores — exacerbated by the pandemic — some are turning to this classroom strategy even for very young students. In recent years, more elementary schools have opted to departmentalize some grade levels in an attempt to boost academic achievement. The share of fourth and fifth grade classrooms operating on this schedule has doubled since the year 2000, from 15 percent to 30 percent in 2021. Often, that means educators will specialize in one or two subjects at most, such as fourth grade English language arts and social studies, or fifth grade math and science. The theory is that teachers who specialize will be more familiar with the content and better able to teach it. 

    That may be particularly important for math: Studies have shown that some early elementary school teachers experience anxiety about the subject and question their ability to teach it. Educators also say that the curriculum and standards for math and English in the early grades are changing rapidly in some districts and have become more complicated over time. In a departmentalized setup, it’s also far less likely that math instruction will get shortchanged by an educator who prefers spending time on other subjects.  

    Related: A lot goes on in classrooms from kindergarten to high school. Keep up with our free weekly newsletter on K-12 education. 

    But while some schools swear by this model, the research on it is mixed.

    One prominent 2018 study on the practice in Houston public schools found it had a negative effect on test scores, behavior and attendance. The study doesn’t explain why that was the case, but the researcher said it could be because teachers on this schedule spend less time with individual students.

    Another study published in 2024 analyzing Massachusetts schools had different outcomes: Researchers found moderate gains in academic achievement for ELA and a significant boost to science scores for students in departmentalized classes. The results in math, however, showed few gains. 

    Generally, teachers specialize in the subject they are most comfortable teaching. When a school departmentalizes for the first time, principals typically look at each educator’s test score data over time to determine whether they should specialize in math or reading.

    “There are some arguments that, at least if it’s someone who likes the subject, who is passionate about the subject, you have a greater chance of them doing a better job of delivering instruction,” said Latrenda Knighten, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. “But you’ll find mixed reviews.”

    Yet there are a few reasons why the strategy is typically reserved for students in older grades, according to school leaders: Spending all day with one teacher increases the bond between the teacher and student, which is important for younger children. In Baton Rouge, Anthony teaches 50 students throughout the day instead of the same 25 students all day.

    “Teachers want to get to know their students,” said Dennis Willingham, superintendent of Walker County Schools in Alabama. The district departmentalized some fifth grade classrooms decades ago, but recently added third and fourth grade classes on this schedule. “You tend to see less departmentalization below third grade because of the nurturing element.” 

    It’s also generally more challenging for young students to quickly change classrooms, even for electives, which means lost instructional time. Smaller elementary schools may also struggle to hire enough teachers to schedule all of them on a departmentalized setup. 

    Related: These school districts are bucking the national math slump

    But increasingly, schools that are satisfied with this approach for older grade levels are trying it out with their younger grades, too. 

    After the pandemic, the San Tan Heights Elementary School in Arizona changed its curriculum to one that was more rigorous, and it became harder for the third grade educators to master the standards of all four subject areas, said Henry Saylor-Scheetz, principal at the time.

    He proposed that third graders be taught by separate math, English language arts and reading teachers. “I told them, let’s try it for a semester. If it doesn’t work at the end of the year, we’ll go back,” Saylor-Scheetz said.

    Ten days into the experiment, teachers told him they never wanted to return to the old schedule. In the subsequent years, the school added more classrooms on this model until, by 2023, all K-8 students were departmentalized. For the last few years, teacher retention at the school was 95 percent, according to Saylor-Scheetz.

    Saylor-Scheetz, who last year became principal of a nearby middle school, credited the change for helping the school improve from a C rating on its state report card — a rating it had stagnated at every year since 2018 — to a B rating as of 2022. Since then, more schools in his Arizona school district have shifted to this schedule. 

    “I’d love to see this become something we do as a nation, but it is a paradigm shift,” Saylor-Scheetz said. “There’s merit in doing it, but there has to be a commitment to it.”

    At Baton Rouge Center for Visual and Performing Arts, students in first through third grades have two partner teachers, one for math and science and another for ELA and social studies. The school has been operating on this schedule for third through fifth grade students for more than a decade. Eight years ago, its leaders decided to try it for first and second grade students, too, and were pleased with the results. 

    On a December morning at the school, young students talked quietly with each other in the hall as they lined up to go from math class to English language arts. All told, the switch took less than five minutes. “We’re at the end of the second nine weeks, so we’ve had a lot of practice,” said GiGi Boudreaux, the assistant principal. 

    The strategy has not always been successful, though.

    During the pandemic, administrators also attempted to departmentalize its kindergarten classes. It didn’t work as they’d hoped: It was a challenge to get the 5-year-olds to quickly change classes and focus on classwork again once they did. Parents also didn’t like it. The school then tried moving teachers from classroom to classroom instead of moving students, but the educators hated it. 

    “It was too much, so we didn’t do it after that,” said Hebert.

    The Baton Rouge school doesn’t have comparison data to show that students perform better in a departmentalized setup, but most educators in the school prefer it, Hebert said. Third grade test scores from 2015 — before the school departmentalized its younger grade levels — showed 73 percent scored “advanced” and “mastery” level on the state ELA test, and 56 percent scored advanced or mastery on the math test. In 2025, 80 percent of third grade students scored advanced or mastery in ELA and 55 percent in math.

    “I know that the teachers like it better, and the kids have adapted to it,” Hebert said. 

    Teachers meet weekly with their partner teachers and grade-level counterparts to discuss their classes and progress on the state standards. Once a quarter, all of the math teachers across the grades meet to talk about strategies and student performance. 

    Related: Teachers conquering their math anxiety 

    At Deer Valley Unified School District in Arizona, departmentalizing some classrooms has helped reduce teacher turnover, said Superintendent Curtis Finch, particularly for early career educators, who can find it challenging to master the content and standards of all four subjects.

    “If you’re not confident in your subject, then you don’t have good examples off the top of your head. You can’t control the room, can’t pull the students in,” Finch said. 

    There are drawbacks though, Finch acknowledged. In a self-contained classroom, teachers can more easily integrate their different lessons, so that a math lesson might refer back to a topic covered in reading.

    And even though Anthony, the second grade math and science teacher in Baton Rouge, loves teaching math, she also misses the extra time she could spend with each student when she had the same 25 children in her class all day for the entire school year. 

    “It was a joy for me to be self-contained and to build that little family,” Anthony said. “I think the social emotional needs of students are best met in that type of environment. But being solely a math teacher, I do get to just dig in and focus on the nuance of the content.” 

    For Anthony’s partner teacher across the hall, Holley McArthur, teaching 50 students ELA and social studies is easier than having to teach 25 students math. 

    “This is my thing: reading books, comprehending and finding answers, meeting their goals,” said McArthur, who has taught in both kinds of classrooms over three decades in education.  

    While McArthur’s kids were at recess this mid-December day, the veteran teacher was grading their reading worksheets. A new student had transferred in from out of state midyear, and she was still evaluating his reading skills. 

    “I think you still get to know the kids, even if you just have them for three hours a day, because I’m not doing the hard math with them.” 

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

    This story about departmentalizing 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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  • OPINION: Colleges must start treating immigration-based targeting as a serious threat to student safety and belonging  

    OPINION: Colleges must start treating immigration-based targeting as a serious threat to student safety and belonging  

    by Madison Forde, The Hechinger Report
    January 12, 2026

    Last month, a Boston University junior proudly posted online that he had spent months calling Immigration and Customs Enforcement to report Latino workers at a neighborhood car wash.

    Nine people were detained, including siblings and a 67-year-old man who has lived in the U.S. for decades. The student celebrated the arrests and told ICE to “pump up the numbers.”

    As the daughter of Caribbean immigrants and a researcher who studies immigrant-origin youth, I was shaken but not surprised. This incident, which did have some backlash, revealed a growing problem on college campuses: Many young people are learning to police one another rather than learn alongside one another.

    That means the new border patrol could be your classmate. Our schools are not prepared for this.

    That is why colleges must start treating immigration-based targeting as a serious threat to student safety and belonging and take immediate steps to prevent it — as they do with racism, antisemitism and homophobia.

    Related: Interested in innovations in higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly higher education newsletter.

    The incident at Boston University is bigger than one student with extreme views. We are living in a moment shaped by online outrage, anonymous tip lines and a culture that encourages reporting anyone who seems “suspicious.”

    In this environment, some young people have started to believe that calling ICE is a form of civic duty.

    That thinking doesn’t stay online. It walks right into classrooms, dorms and group projects. When it does, the impact is not abstract. It is deeply personal for the immigrant-origin youth sitting in those same rooms.

    Many of these students grew up with fear woven into their daily lives. Their neighbors disappeared overnight, they heard stories of parents being detained at work and they began translating legal mail before they were old enough to drive. They know exactly what an ICE call can set into motion. They carry that fear with them to school.

    These are not hypothetical harms. They show up in everyday decisions: where to sit, what to say, whom to trust. I’ve met students who avoid speaking Spanish on campus, refuse to share their address during class activities and sit near the exits because they’re not sure who views their family as “a threat.” It is not possible to learn well in an environment where you do not feel safe.

    There is a strong body of developmental research highlighting belonging and social inclusion as central to healthy development. In her work on migration and acculturation, Carola Suárez-Orozco shows that legal-status-based distinctions among youth intensify exclusion and undermine both social integration and developmental well-being.

    When belonging erodes, colleges begin to function like small border zones, where everyone is quietly assessing who might turn them in. It is nearly impossible for any campus community to thrive under that kind of pressure.

    Quite frankly, nor can America’s democracy.

    If we raise a generation of students who feel compelled to police the nation’s borders from their dorms, the immigrant-origin youth sitting beside them in classrooms will carry the psychological burden of those borders every single day. Yet colleges are almost entirely unprepared for this reality.

    Most universities have clear policies for racial slurs, antisemitic threats, homophobic harassment and other identity-based harms. But very few have policies that address immigration-based targeting, even though the consequences can be just as severe and, in some cases, life-altering.

    Boston University’s president acknowledged the distress caused by that student’s actions. Yet, the university did not classify the behavior as discriminatory, despite the fact that his calls targeted a specific ethnic and immigration-status group. That silence sends a clear message: Harm against immigrant communities is unimportant, incidental or simply “political.” But this harm is neither political nor the price of free expression or civic engagement; it is targeted intimidation, with real and measurable consequences for students’ safety, mental health and academic engagement.

    In my view, colleges need to take three straightforward steps:

    1. Define immigration-based harassment as misconduct. Calling ICE on classmates, doxxing immigrant peers or circulating immigration-related rumors should be classified under the same conduct codes that protect students from other forms of targeted harm. Schools know how to do this; they simply have not applied those same protections to immigrant communities.

    2. Train faculty and staff on how to respond. Professors should have a clear understanding of what to do when immigration rhetoric is weaponized in the classroom, or when students express fear about being reported. Although many professors want to help, they may lack basic guidance.

    3. Teach immigration literacy as part of civic education. Most students do not understand what ICE detention entails, how long legal cases can drag on or what it means to live with daily fear like their immigrant peers. Teaching these realities isn’t “political indoctrination,” it is preparation for a life in a multicultural democracy.

    These three steps are not radical. They are merely the same kinds of protections colleges already provide to students targeted for other aspects of their identity.

    Related: STUDENT VOICES: ‘Dreamers’ like us need our own resource centers on college campuses

    The Boston University case is a warning, not an isolated moment. If campuses fail to respond, more young people will internalize the idea that policing their peers is simply part of student life. Immigrant-origin youth, who have done nothing wrong, will carry the emotional burden alone.

    As students, educators and researchers, we have to decide what kind of learning communities we want to build and sustain. Schools can be places where students understand one another, or they can become places of intense surveillance. That choice will shape not just campus climates, but also the society current students will eventually lead.

    Madison Forde is a doctoral student in the Clinical/Counseling Psychology program at New York University.

    Contact the opinion editor at [email protected].

    This story about immigration-based targeting at colleges was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.

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