Tag: Trump administration

  • Sector backs Harvard int’l students in Trump legal fight

    Sector backs Harvard int’l students in Trump legal fight

    This week, the American Council on Education (ACE) was joined by 22 higher education associations filing an amicus brief in support of Harvard against the administration’s efforts to uphold Trump’s June 2025 proclamation barring international students from the institution.  

    “If the federal government may punish a university for its perceived ideology or that of its students, then the marketplace of ideas collapses into a monopoly of dogma,” the brief warns. 

    It urges the court to affirm the preliminary injunction issued by Judge Allison Burroughs last June, which blocked Trump’s attempt to prohibit foreign nationals seeking to study at Harvard from entering the US. 

    The signatories have said the proclamation represents an unprecedented executive overreach threatening institutional autonomy and academic freedom, as well as violating the First Amendment. 

    “Over the last year, the current administration has engaged in an unprecedented effort to coerce institutions of higher education to behave in a manner that reflects the administration’s preferred ideology, including by reshaping their faculty, curriculum and student body,” the document reads. 

    “When Harvard resisted the administration’s unlawful demands, the administration retaliated with extreme sanctions, including the proclamation issued in this appeal.” 

    The case arises from multiple attempts by the Trump administration bar international students from attending the Ivy League institution last spring. 

    Initial efforts were led by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) attempting to strip Harvard of its SEVP Certification, which enables US institutions to enrol international students – a move halted by federal district judge Allison Burroughs.  

    Weeks later, Trump escalated efforts and issued his own presidential proclamation aimed at achieving the same result, which was met with a preliminary injunction from judge Burroughs, who said Trump’s directive implicated core constitutional protections. 

    Appealing judge Burroughs’ decision, the administration argued the proclamation was legal under the president’s immigration authorities – citing the familiar argument relating to national security concerns. This took the case to First Circuit appeals court, where it is now being heard. 

    The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

    Trump’s proclamation cites Harvard’s alleged “violent crime rates” and deficient reporting on foreign students as rationales for the directive, alongside its “entanglements” with the Chinese Communist Party and “discriminatory” admissions practices reducing opportunities for American students.

    If the federal government may punish a university for its perceived ideology or that of its students, then the marketplace of ideas collapses into a monopoly of dogma

    American Council on Education et al.

    The brief argues that the proclamation is “fundamentally inconsistent with institutional autonomy – at Harvard and other educational institutions across the country” and that the administration’s actions are unconstitutional and set a dangerous precedent for all US colleges. 

    “The administration’s actions at issue in this case are directed at Harvard, but they reverberate throughout every state in the nation,” the brief states, arguing that punishing a university for its perceived ideology is “the antithesis of American values”. 

    It highlights the targeted nature of Trump’s directive, which would allow international students into the US seeking to study at any institution but Harvard – signalling the intervention is punitive, not regulatory, the amici said.  

    They emphasise the value of international students, “who … enrich and strengthen our community in innumerable ways”.  

    “But these benefits are unattainable when schools are prohibited from enrolling international students because they do not pass the government’s ideological litmus test.” 

    The brief contextualises the case within the administration’s long-running assault on Harvard, involving the freezing of federal grant funding, threats to Harvard’s tax-exempt status and requests for information regarding Harvard’s international students.  

    The administration’s appeal is expected to be considered in the coming months.

    In the federal funding fight, judge Burroughs found in September 2025 that the administration acted unlawfully when it cut Harvard’s research grants – a case also heading to the court of appeal after the administration disputed the ruling. 

    Despite the ongoing attacks on America’s oldest institution, Harvard’s overseas enrolments rose to their highest level since 2002 this academic year, making up 28% of the total university population.  

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  • Fear, arrests and know-your-rights: How one school district is grappling with ICE coming to town

    Fear, arrests and know-your-rights: How one school district is grappling with ICE coming to town

    by Alexandra Villarreal, The Hechinger Report
    January 23, 2026

    NEW HAVEN, Conn. — “They took her, they took her, they took her.”  

    Those were some of the words Assistant Principal Cora Muñoz could discern while on the phone with the guardian of one of her students. As the caller sobbed and struggled to speak, Muñoz realized that immigration enforcement agents had detained a kid from Wilbur Cross, the high school she helps lead. 

    Again.

    There was a reason why Muñoz was a go-to contact for the student and her guardian: She — and New Haven public schools more broadly — have worked hard to earn the trust of immigrant families in their diverse district, even as the second Trump administration has made it easier for immigration officers to enter schools and launched a mass deportation campaign.

    The district’s teachers and administrators have nurtured deep relationships with immigrant-serving organizations and helped kids access resources — attorneys, social workers, food — when needed. They’ve hosted sessions to inform students about their rights, and sent home cards with legal information in case of an encounter with immigration officers. And when the worst has happened — when someone’s child or parent has been detained, which has occurred over and over in recent months — they have taken immediate action, writing letters in support of the family member’s freedom and raising money alongside a larger coalition of advocates trying to bring that person home. 

    “In these moments where it’s hard, you show up,” said Muñoz, “and you do what you can.”

    Yet nothing has been able to entirely snuff out the fear of deportation inside the city’s schools, say students and educators. That may have contributed to a decline this October in the number of English language learner students enrolling; their numbers dropped by more than 2,000, or nearly 3.8 percent, across Connecticut between fall 2024 and fall 2025, and by hundreds — or 7.3 percent — in New Haven, with many immigrant families who were expected to return to school simply disappearing. 

    Chronic absenteeism rates fell in New Haven during the 2024-25 academic year. But after President Donald Trump took office, students said their families told them to skip extracurriculars or early college courses at a university campus in case immigration enforcement was around. For some, a college degree has started to feel more out of reach, as they adjust their dreams to fit within a new anti-immigrant reality. Teachers have seen kids stop participating in class after friends have been detained and they wonder if they could be next. 

    “I live with fear,” said Darwin, an 18-year-old student from Guatemala who has lived in New Haven for two years. His last name, like those of others in this story, is being withheld for safety reasons. “Sometimes I don’t even want to attend school because it makes me afraid to go out of the house.”

    In many school districts around the country, immigrant enrollment is down, as far fewer asylum seekers are able to reach the United States and some immigrants have chosen to self-deport to avoid the specter of detention. That said, the consequences of Trump’s mass deportation campaign on immigrants’ education vary greatly depending on the community, its demographics and the level of enforcement activity there, said Julie Sugarman, associate director for K-12 education research at the D.C.-based Migration Policy Institute’s National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy. 

    In the Minneapolis area, for instance, where a federal officer shot and killed Renee Good after she dropped off her 6-year-old child at school, districts are offering a virtual learning option for the many kids who are staying home in fear.  

    “We are definitely hearing anecdotally that there are kids not going to school,” Sugarman said. “Obviously, losing a whole year of education or however long they’re not in school, they are missing out on opportunities to develop their content knowledge, to learn literacy, to develop English, and also to develop academic skills in their native language.” 

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

    With seven institutions of higher learning in the area, New Haven is known as a college town. But it is also a city of immigrants: More than one in six New Haven residents are foreign-born, a statistic that underscores a point of pride for many who welcome the city’s diversity. Families in the public school system speak more than 70 languages. 

    At the Roberto Clemente Leadership Academy, a K-8 school with around 430 students, notices go home in English, Spanish, Pashto and Arabic. The school’s front doors have welcome signs posted in multiple languages. And on a bright red poster in the hallway, photos of beaming children surround a message: “We all smile in the same language.”  

    When Trump, who has argued that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” nixed guidance in January that had generally restricted U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from going into schools to arrest people, New Haven Public Schools Superintendent Madeline Negrón was prepared. Ahead of Trump’s inauguration, her team reviewed how the district had protected students during his first term and in what ways they could fortify their response. They developed a district-wide policy on how to act if ICE officers sought to enter their buildings. It involves a series of steps — including legal counsel’s verification of a valid warrant — before immigration agents would ever be allowed in. 

    “Without that, nobody, no one, is going to walk through my doors. Because my obligation is to keep every single one of my children safe,” said Negrón, who also shared the policy in a letter to parents. 

    Negrón led an effort to train all administrators in the protocol, and then those staff helped to train all 2,900 district employees — including custodians, cafeteria workers, teachers, security guards and secretaries.

    Some schools went even further, holding know-your-rights presentations for students and their families. “Things like a judicial versus administrative warrant — you know, I wish that no kid in New Haven needed to know that,” said Ben Scudder, a social studies teacher at High School in the Community. “But we live in a world where they do, and their families do, and so we’re gonna make sure that they get the training they need to do that.” 

    Related: Immigration enforcement is driving away early childhood educators 

    So far, ICE hasn’t tried to enter New Haven’s public schools. But outside of the classroom, arrests and family separations abound.

    In June, a mother and her two children — an 8-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl, both U.S. citizens — were in their car going to school when vehicles on the street surrounded them and men in ski masks approached. The kids watched, crying, as the immigration agents handcuffed their mom and led her away. 

    Staff members at the Roberto Clemente Leadership Academy, which the kids attend, fundraised for gift cards to grocery stores and delivery services to help their two students. They wrote support letters for the mother’s immigration case, asking for her release. But around a month later, she was deported to Mexico. 

    Now, whenever the younger sibling sees someone in uniform at school — a security guard, a police officer — he asks them why they took his mom, said Adela Jorge, Clemente’s principal. 

    “He’s not able to understand what happened,” Jorge said. “All he knows is that his mother was taken.”

    Soon after that, two Wilbur Cross students were nabbed one after the other. First was an 18-year-old named Esdras, arrested at his summer job, shuffled to detention facilities around the country, and almost put on a removal flight to Guatemala. 

    After more than a month — with the help of advocacy groups, his attorney, the teachers union, government officials and school employees who came together during summer break — Esdras was released. When he returned to Wilbur Cross, he told staff members all he wanted was to be normal, a request they have tried to honor by quietly reintegrating him into classes.

    Then, shortly after the start of the new academic year, another student — the one whose guardian had called Muñoz in a panic — was detained.

    “At first I thought she was mad at me or something,” said 17-year-old Melany, recalling when her friend suddenly stopped responding to phone messages. “But when she didn’t come to school, it really scared me. And I asked the teachers, but they couldn’t tell me anything.”

    Her friend was eventually freed, too. But teachers and administrators say they’re fed up that their students keep being targeted and treated so poorly.  

    “They’re our kids, and they’re being detained in these cages. And the day before, they were eating pizza in our cafeteria,” said Matt Brown, the Wilbur Cross principal. 

    Rumors and fears at times disrupt learning. One day in mid-October, around 10:20 a.m., immigration agents in tactical gear were seemingly staging in a park near a New Haven area college, setting off concerns that students were their targets. But about twenty minutes later, the agents instead hit a car wash in Hamden, Connecticut, arresting its workers. 

    “I don’t know what rights they had in those moments. It didn’t seem like they had any. There were no rights there,” said Laurie Sweet, a state representative whose district includes Hamden. “I think the intention is to cause chaos and make people feel destabilized, and that definitely is what happened.”

    ICE took eight people into custody that day, some of them parents of school-aged children. Tabitha Sookdeo, executive director of Connecticut Students for a Dream, said her organization searched school records for the kids, trying to ensure they were okay. But no one could find them.

    “We just hope and pray to God that they were able to have someone to pick them up from school,” Sookdeo said. 

    Related: What’s happened since Texas killed in-state tuition for undocumented students

    Teachers say all of this has made immigrant students quieter, more reserved, more observant — and more hopeless. Kids who used to exchange greetings with their teachers in the halls now trudge around like the walking dead, or ask for passes to leave the classroom more often. 

    “I’ve seen a lot more sadness, and I’ve seen a lot more students who are good students skipping classes. And it’s for no reason except that they just, you know, they have too much going on emotionally to make them go to their classes,” said Fatima Nouchkioui, a teacher of English as a second language at Wilbur Cross’ International Academy. 

    Sookdeo has noticed a drop in students at her organization’s college access program, as they question why they would try to get a college degree when they don’t know whether they’ll be in the U.S. tomorrow.

    “You’re sitting next to them,” she said of the high schoolers she works with. “And they’re literally shaking.”

    Many of the kids already have a pile of pressures to navigate. In some cases, they are living in the country by themselves, balancing school with jobs that allow them to send money home to parents and siblings. Darwin, for example, came to the U.S., leaving behind his mom and three younger siblings, and lives in New Haven alone — all to give his family members who remain abroad a better life. 

    And then there’s always the next arrest, constantly looming. 

    “Do we anticipate having kids detained again?” said Brown. “I haven’t seen anything that would make me think we shouldn’t.” 

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

    This story about fear of deportation 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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  • how fear reshaped America’s appeal to international students

    how fear reshaped America’s appeal to international students

    One year into Donald Trump’s second presidency, the most consequential outcome for international students has not been a single policy, executive order or visa restriction. It’s been the creation of a pervasive climate of fear and the lasting reputational damage that fear inflicted on the United States as a destination for global talent.

    American universities are accustomed to planning around policy change. They model visa delays, compliance shifts and regulatory risk. What they are far less equipped to manage is a climate where uncertainty itself shapes decision-making. Over the past year, that uncertainty has influenced how the US is perceived long before any student applies for a visa or boards a plane.

    And that uncertainty has carried more weight than legislation. 

    Fear without formal policy

    While many expected sweeping changes to student visas or post-graduate work pathways, the administration’s strongest signals emerged elsewhere – in its posture toward universities and the way campuses were publicly framed.

    As universities became targets of ideological suspicion, perceptions shifted well beyond US borders. For international students and their families, studying in America increasingly feels exposed to political risk, even in the absence of formal restrictions.

    That perception has produced tangible effects. Advisors report students asking whether participating in protests could jeopardise their immigration status. Parents seek reassurance that academic disagreement will not trigger scrutiny. Even when the legal answer remains unchanged, the persistence of these questions points to a deeper erosion of trust.

    When campuses are portrayed as adversaries rather than civic institutions, international audiences take note

    Universities as America’s ambassadors

    For decades, America’s universities were among the country’s most effective ambassadors. Long before students arrived in Washington, they arrived in Berkeley, Boston, Chicago and Austin.

    They experienced open debate, academic freedom, pluralism, and the idea that disagreement was not just tolerated but valued. Higher education was one of the few arenas where America’s democratic ideals were not merely stated but lived.

    That role mattered. International alumni carried those experiences home with them, shaping how the United States was understood long after graduation. Universities helped project stability, openness and institutional strength in ways few government programs ever could.

    During Trump’s presidency, that ambassadorial function has weakened. Education begins to look like a liability – and when campuses are portrayed as adversaries rather than civic institutions, international audiences take note. 

    Reputational damage travels faster than reform

    The challenge for the US now is that reputational damage moves faster than policy repair. Even if no new restrictions are introduced, trust doesn’t automatically return. Students make decisions years in advance, guided by word of mouth, social media, and the experiences of peers.

    The UK’s experience after the Brexit referendum offers a cautionary parallel. Applications plateaued well before any formal change to student mobility rules took effect. The perception of hostility alone was enough to shift behavior. The US risks repeating that pattern, particularly as competitor countries work actively to position themselves as stable and welcoming alternatives.

    This matters not only for enrolment numbers, but for the long-term talent pipeline. We know that international students contribute to research, innovation and local economies. Many stay, building companies, staffing laboratories and strengthening entire sectors. When they choose other destinations, the loss compounds over time.

    Less visible, but no less consequential, is the effect this environment has on universities themselves. Many institutions have become more cautious in how they communicate and more guarded in how they engage publicly. Time and attention that once supported international partnerships or student-facing programs are being pulled toward risk management and internal review. These changes rarely register in enrolment data at first, yet they alter how campuses feel to prospective students. For those arriving from abroad, a campus that appears hesitant or constrained is harder to trust.

    What rebuilding trust requires

    The United States remains home to many of the world’s strongest universities. That foundation still exists, but prestige alone cannot offset fear. One year into this presidency, American universities are discovering that reputation alone is no longer enough to secure global confidence.

    Looking ahead to a potential second Trump term, the lesson is not merely about revisiting old policies but about confronting accumulated damage. Even without new restrictions, trust once broken is slow to rebuild. 

    Universities and policymakers must recognise that restoring America’s standing will require more than reversing executive orders. It will require clear commitments to due process, institutional autonomy and the principle that education is not a security threat.

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  • Trump’s national school voucher program could mean a boom in Christian education

    Trump’s national school voucher program could mean a boom in Christian education

    by Anya Kamenetz, The Hechinger Report
    January 22, 2026

    LACONIA, N.H. — Three dozen 4- and 5-year-olds trooped out onto the stage of the ornate, century-old Colonial Theatre of Laconia in this central New Hampshire town. Dressed in plaid, red, green and sparkles, some were grinning and waving, some looked a bit shell-shocked; a tiny blonde girl sobbed with stage fright in her teacher’s arms. 

    No sooner did the children open their mouths to sing, “Merry Christmas! … This is the day that the Lord was born!” than the house lights came up and a fire alarm went off. 

    It was an unusually eventful annual Christmas concert for Laconia Christian Academy. Then again, it’s been an unusually eventful year. In a small, aging state, where overall school enrollment has been dropping for more than two decades, Laconia reported a 130 percent increase in enrollment in its elementary school since 2020 — and began a three-quarter-million-dollar campus expansion on its 140 acres outside town.

     “We are in a season of incredible growth,” the school’s website reads. 

    One reason for the season: Almost every student at the academy is enrolled in New Hampshire’s Education Freedom Account program, said Head of School Rick Duba. Regardless of their family income, they receive thousands of dollars each in taxpayer money to help pay their tuition.   

    In June, New Hampshire became the 18th state to pass a universal private school choice program. After signing the bill into law, Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte announced, “Giving parents the freedom to choose the education setting that best fits their child’s needs will help every student in our state reach their full potential.” 

    Yet, as these programs proliferate, with significant expansion since the pandemic, Democrats, teachers unions and other public school advocates are raising the alarm about accountability, transparency and funding. And with President Donald Trump passing a federal voucher program to start in 2027, some are concerned about the future of public education as a whole. 

    “I think these programs are the biggest change in K-12 education since Brown v. Board of Ed,” said Douglas Harris, a scholar at Tulane who recently published two papers on the impact of universal private school choice programs. He argues that vouchers were originally introduced in the 1950s in part to resist desegregation by funding white families to attend private schools.

    According to his October 2025 paper, private school choice “allows schools to discriminate against certain students, entwines government with religion, involves a large fiscal cost, and has shown fairly poor, or at best inconclusive, academic results.” Harris said in an interview, “It changes fundamentally all the basic traditions of the education system.” 

    New Hampshire could be a harbinger of that fundamental change. Experts say the state has one of the broadest and least regulated universal school choice programs in the country. “Universal” refers to the fact that families, regardless of income, are eligible for an average $5,200 a year from the government to pay tuition at a private school or supplement the cost of homeschooling. The number of recipients reached 10,510 this year, and it’s likely to grow again next year.

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

    “Universal” also describes the fact that any type of school — or nonschools, such as an unaccredited storefront microschool, an online curriculum provider, a music camp or even a ski slope — can be eligible for these funds. 

    These schools and organizations don’t have to abide by state or federal laws, like those requiring accommodation for students with disabilities or other antidiscrimination laws. A 2022 Supreme Court decision, Carson v. Makin, affirmed the right of parents to use public money, in the form of voucher and education savings account funds, specifically for religious schools. 

    And indeed, it seems that in New Hampshire, as nationally, a disproportionate amount of the funding is going to small Christian schools, particularly to evangelical Protestant schools like Laconia. The Concord Monitor found that in the past four years, 90 percent of the revenue from the previous, income-capped EFA program went to Christian schools. This was true even though most of the state’s private schools are not religious. The Concord Monitor found in the first five years of the program, the top 10 recipients grew in enrollment by 32 percent. With the exception of Laconia, none of these schools responded to repeated requests for comment from The Hechinger Report. 

    But state officials have stopped releasing data on exactly where recipients of the Education Freedom Accounts are using those dollars. They told the Concord Monitor that the data is not subject to public record requests because it’s held by the nonprofit that administers the funds, the Children’s Scholarship Fund of New Hampshire. State officials did not respond to Hechinger queries. The Children’s Scholarship Fund directed The Hechinger Report to its website, which features a partial accounting of less than 10 percent of 2025-26 student. This accounting, which may or may not be representative, showed 671 of these students currently attend Christian schools, 64 attend non-Christian private schools and 50 are homeschooled. 

    A national analysis released in September by Tulane’s Harris of publicly available data showed that in New Hampshire and ten other states with similar policies, vouchers have boosted private school enrollment by up to 4 percent. The increases were concentrated at small Protestant religious schools like Laconia. The federal tax credit scholarship program will allow even more funds in additional states to be directed to these schools. 

    One reason that Christian schools are coming out on top, Harris said, is that this type of school tends to have lower tuition than independent private schools, meaning a $5,000 subsidy can make the difference for more families. The schools do this in part by paying teachers less.

    “ Typically, Christian school teachers see their work as a ministry and are willing to work for significantly less than their public counterparts,” said Duba, Laconia’s leader. He added that he is working with his board to try to pay a “living wage” of $55,000. 

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

    At the Christmas concert in Laconia, after the fire department gave the all clear and the performance resumed, the little ones were tuckered out from the extra excitement. In the theater lobby, Nick Ballentine cradled his kindergartner, Perna, who wore two big red bows in her hair and a dress that read “Merry” on the front in cursive. 

    Ballentine said his family chose Laconia because “it was local and it wasn’t a public school.” He also liked that it was Christian and had small class sizes, but his opposition to public school is staunch: “I don’t like public schools, nor the policies that guide them, because they come from the government.” 

    Duba said that families come to Laconia for the small class sizes, the TimberNook outdoor program that has elementary school students spending five hours each week of class time in the woods, and “ for faith.”

    “They don’t want their kids in public schools where their kids are being taught by people who don’t express faith in Christ,” he said. While the school doesn’t require students to have a “profession of faith” to attend, there are lessons about the life of Jesus in preschool, daily prayers and service mission trips for the high school students as far away as Rwanda. 

    Duba said the biggest “social issue” that drives families away from public schools and toward schools like his is “ sexuality and gender identity.” The Concord Monitor previously reported that many of the schools that are the top recipients of aid in New Hampshire won’t admit students who have anyone in their family who is openly LGBTQ+ or supports gay or trans rights. Laconia Christian Academy’s nondiscrimination policy says it does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national and ethnic origin, but it doesn’t mention sexual orientation or gender identity. Asked about the policy, Duba declined to comment. 

    Like other private schools, these schools also aren’t required by law to serve students who have disabilities. The state says 8.47 percent of EFA recipients are in special education, compared to 20 percent in the state’s public schools. 

    Adam Laats, an education historian at Binghamton University, said these universal school choice programs are part of a long history of conservative evangelical Protestants seeking to make existing public schools more Christian in character on the one hand and divert public money to explicitly Christian schools on the other. 

    “For 100 years, public schools have been the sort of litmus test of whether the U.S. is a Christian nation,” he said, citing battles over teaching evolution, sex education, prayer in schools and more recently climate change, the treatment of race and American history, LGBTQIA rights and book banning. 

    Alongside the culture wars in public schools, said Laats, there have been successive waves of founding and expansion of Christian private schools: “There’s a burst in the 1920s, the next big bump comes in the ’50s and a huge spike in the 1970s, during the height of busing, when for a while there was one new school opening a day in the U.S. of these conservative evangelical schools.” 

    Laats agrees with Harris that the 1950s and 1970s booms were in part responses to desegregation efforts. But, he said, previous enrollment booms have eventually faded, because “it’s expensive” to educate students and offer amenities like sports and arts education. “That’s why the Christians have pushed hard for vouchers.” 

    Related: Arizona gave families public money for private school. Then private schools raised tuition 

    Funding fairness is a hot-button issue right now in New Hampshire. 

    In the summer of 2025, the State Supreme Court found that New Hampshire’s schools are officially inadequately funded. School funding in the low-tax, live-free-or-die state depends heavily on local property taxes, which vary radically area to area. The state spends an average of 4,182 per head; the court found it should spend at least $7,356. 

    So far, the overall percentage of New Hampshire students enrolled in public schools has remained steady at 90 percent. That implies most of the ESA money, so far, is subsidizing families who already were choosing private schools or homeschooling, rather than fueling a mass exodus from public schools. 

    Yet some districts are feeling the bite. According to recently released data from the state, in the small town of Rindge, 29 percent of students are EFA recipients — the highest of any community in the state. 

    “It is taking money away from public education,” said Megan Tuttle, president of New Hampshire’s state teacher union. “If you have a couple kids that are leaving the classroom to take the money, that doesn’t change the staffing that we have at the schools, heat, oil, electricity, all those types of things. And so, what’s happening is the money’s leaving, but the bills aren’t.”

    Duba looks at the math differently, pointing out that the EFA doesn’t equal the full cost of educating a student. “Let’s say I took 30 kids from Laconia. I did not, but for the sake of argument,” he said. “ They don’t have to do anything with those 30 kids anymore. They’re gone.”  

    This year, the advocacy group Reaching Higher NH calculated that the education savings account program will siphon $50 million from the state’s $2.61 billion education trust fund, and it will grow from there. “We’re functionally trying to fund two systems,” said Alex Tilsley, the group’s policy director. “And we couldn’t even fund one system fully.” 

    As the program grows in New Hampshire, the opposition is growing too. 

    “There’s broad opposition to EFAs from the teacher unions, from public school groups and from voters,” sums up Tilsley.* “It’s not generally speaking a highly favored policy across the state.” But with a Republican trifecta in control of state government, school choice in New Hampshire is not going anywhere. And with a national education tax credit program in the offing, more states will soon face these debates. As in New Hampshire, the federal money will be able to be used for private schools, homeschooling costs or anything in between. 

    *Correction: This sentence has been updated to correct the spelling of Alex Tilsley’s last name.

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

    This story about Christian schools 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 need to recruit more men, but Trump’s policies are making it difficult

    OPINION: Colleges need to recruit more men, but Trump’s policies are making it difficult

    by Catharine Hill, The Hechinger Report
    January 20, 2026

    While attending a gathering of Ivy League women years ago, I upset the audience by commenting that a real challenge for U.S. higher education was the declining participation of men in higher education, not just the glass ceiling and unequal pay faced by women.  

    At the time, I was president of Vassar College (which did not become co-ed until 1969). We surveyed newly admitted students as well as first-year students and learned that the majority expressed a preference for a gender-balanced student body, with as co-educational an environment as possible.  

    With fewer men applying, that meant admitting them at a higher rate, something some other selective colleges and universities were already doing. While, historically, men were much more likely to attain a college degree than women, that changed by 1980. For more than four decades now, the number of women on campuses has surpassed the number of men.  

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

    These days, 27 percent more women than men age 25 to 34 have earned a bachelor’s degree, according to the Pew Research Center. Aiming for greater gender balance, some colleges and universities have put a “thumb on the scale” to admit and matriculate more men.  

    But the end of affirmative action, along with the Trump administration’s statements warning schools against considering gender identity (or race, ethnicity, nationality, political views, sexual orientation and religious associations) in admissions, could end this preference. 

    To be clear, I believe that the goal of admissions preferences, including for men, should be to increase overall educational attainment, not to advantage one group over another. Economic and workforce development should be a top higher education priority, because many high-demand and well-paying jobs require a college degree. America should therefore be focused on increasing educational attainment because it is important to our global competitiveness. And the selective schools that have high graduation rates should give a preference to students who are underrepresented in higher education — including men — because it will get more Americans to and through college and benefit our economy and society.  

    Preferencing students from groups with lower overall educational attainment also helps colleges meet their own goals.  

    For schools that admit just about all comers, attracting more men — through changes in recruitment strategies, adjustments in curricula and programs to support retention — is part of a strategy to sustain enrollment in the face of the demographic cliff (the declining number of American 18-year-olds resulting from the drop in the birth rate during the Great Recession) and declining international applicants due to the administration’s policies.  

    Colleges that don’t admit nearly all applicants have a different goal: balancing the share of men and women because it helps them compete for students.  

    Selective schools don’t really try to admit more men to serve the public good of increasing overall educational attainment. They believe the students they are trying to attract prefer a co-educational experience. 

    We are living in a global economy that rewards talent. When selective colleges take more veterans, lower-income students and students from rural areas and underrepresented groups, the chance of these students graduating increases. That increases the talent pool, helping to meet employer demand for workers with bachelor’s degrees.  

    The U.S. has been slipping backward in education compared to our peers for several decades. To reverse this trend, we need to get more of our population through college. The best way to do this is by targeting populations with lower educational attainment, including men. But by adding gender to the list of characteristics that should not be considered in admissions decisions, the Trump administration is telling colleges and universities to take the thumb off the scale for men.  

    I suspect this was unintended or resulted from a misunderstanding of who has actually been getting a preference in the admissions process, and in assuming incorrectly that women and/or nonbinary applicants have benefited.  

    Over the last 15 years or more, some attributes, including academic performance, have likely been traded off in order to admit more men. How big these trade-offs have been has differed from college to college and will be hard to calculate, given all the student characteristics that are considered in making admissions decisions.  

    I’m in favor of making these trade-offs to contribute to improved overall educational attainment in America.  

    But given the Trump administration’s lumping of gender with race, college and university policies intended to attract men will now face the same legal challenges that affirmative action policies aimed at improving educational attainment and fairness face.  

    Differential admit rates will be scrutinized. Even if the administration doesn’t challenge these trade-offs, rejected women applicants may seek changes through the courts and otherwise, just as happened with regard to race.  

    Related: Trump’s attacks on DEI may hurt men in college admission  

    Admitting male athletes could also unintentionally be at risk. If low-income has become a “proxy” for race, then athletic admits could become “proxies” for men. (Some schools have publicly stated that they were primarily introducing football to attract male applicants.) 

    Colleges and universities, including selective ones, are heavily subsidized by federal, state and local governments because they have historically been perceived as serving the public good, contributing to equal opportunity and strengthening our economy.  

    Admissions decisions should be evaluated on these grounds, with seats at the selective schools allocated according to what will most contribute to the public good, including improving our nation’s talent pool.  

    Targeting populations with lower-than-average college-going rates will help accomplish this. That includes improving access and success for all underserved groups, including men.  

    Unfortunately, the current administration’s policies are working directly against this and are likely to worsen educational attainment in America and our global competitiveness.  

    Catharine “Cappy” Hill is the former managing director of Ithaka S+R and former president of Vassar College. 

    Contact the opinion editor at [email protected]. 

    This story about men and college 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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  • Trump’s admissions data collection strains college administrators

    Trump’s admissions data collection strains college administrators

    by Jill Barshay, The Hechinger Report
    January 19, 2026

    Lynette Duncan didn’t expect to spend 20 hours over the past two weeks digging through a mothballed computer system, trying to retrieve admissions data from 2019.

    Duncan is the director of institutional research at John Brown University, a small Christian university in northwest Arkansas, an hour’s drive from Walmart’s headquarters. She runs a one-person office that handles university data collections and analyses, both for internal use and to meet government mandates. Just last year, she spent months collecting and crunching new data to comply with a new federal rule requiring that colleges show that their graduates are prepared for good jobs.

    Then, in mid-December, another mandate abruptly arrived — this one at the request of President Donald Trump. Colleges were ordered to compile seven years of admissions data, broken down by race, sex, grades, SAT or ACT scores, and family income.

    “It’s like one more weight on our backs,” Duncan said. “The workload – it’s not fun.”

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

    John Brown University is one of almost 2,200 colleges and universities nationwide now scrambling to comply by March 18 with the new federal reporting requirement, formally known as the Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement, or ACTS. By all accounts, it’s a ton of work, and at small institutions, the task falls largely on a single administrator or even the registrar. Failure to submit the data can bring steep fines and, ultimately, the loss of access to federal aid for students.

    After the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision banning affirmative action in college admissions, the Trump administration suspected that colleges might covertly continue to give racial preferences. To police compliance, the White House directed the Department of Education to collect detailed admissions data from colleges nationwide.

    The data collection was unusual not only in its scope, but also in its speed. Federal education data collections typically take years to design, with multiple rounds of analysis, technical review panels, and revisions. This one moved from announcement to launch in a matter of months.

    A rush job

    One tiny indication that this was a rush job is in the Federal Register notice. Both enforce and admissions are misspelled in a proposal that’s all about admissions enforcement. Those words are spelled “admssions” and “enforece.” 

    A December filing with the Office of Management and Budget incorrectly lists the number of institutions that are subject to the new data collection. It is nearly 2,200, not 1,660, according to the Association for Institutional Research, which is advising colleges on how to properly report the data. Community colleges are exempt, but four-year institutions with selective admissions or those that give out their own financial aid must comply. Graduate programs are included as well. That adds up to about 2,200 institutions. 

    Related: Inaccurate, impossible: Experts knock new Trump plan to collect college admissions data

    In another filing with the Office of Management and Budget, the administration disclosed that none of the five remaining career Education Department officials with statistical experience had reviewed the proposal, including Matt Soldner, the acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. Most of the department’s statistical staff were fired earlier this year as a first step to eliminating the Education Department, one of Trump’s campaign promises. RTI International, the federal contractor in North Carolina that already manages other higher education data collections for the Education Department, is also handling the day-to-day work of this new college admissions collection. 

    During two public comment periods, colleges and higher-education trade groups raised concerns about data quality and missing records, but there is little evidence those concerns substantially altered the final design. One change expanded the retrospective data requirement from five to six years so that at least one cohort of students would have a measurable six-year graduation rate. A second relieved colleges of the burden of making hundreds of complex statistical calculations themselves, instead instructing them to upload raw student data to an “aggregator tool” that would do all the math for them. 

    The Trump administration’s goal is to generate comparisons across race and sex categories, with large gaps potentially triggering further scrutiny.

    Missing data

    The results are unlikely to be reliable, experts told me, given how much of the underlying data is missing or incomplete. In a public comment letter, Melanie Gottlieb, executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, warned that entire years of applicant data may not exist at many institutions. Some states advise colleges to delete records for applicants who never enrolled after a year. “If institutions are remaining compliant with their state policies, they will not have five years of data,” Gottlieb wrote.

    The organization’s own guidance recommends that four-year colleges retain admissions records for just one year after an application cycle. One reason is privacy. Applicant files contain sensitive personal information, and purging unneeded records reduces the risk of exposing this data in breaches.

    In other cases, especially at smaller institutions, admissions offices may offload applicant data simply to make room for new student records. Duncan said John Brown University has all seven years of required data, but a switch to a new computer system in 2019 has made it difficult to retrieve the first year.

    Even when historical records are available, key details may be missing or incompatible with federal requirements, said Christine Keller, executive director of the Association for Institutional Research, which previously received a federal contract to train college administrators on accurate data collection until DOGE eliminated it. (The organization now receives some private funds for a reduced amount of training.) 

    Related: Chaos and confusion as the statistics arm of the Education Department is reduced to a skeletal staff of 3

    Standardized test scores are unavailable for many students admitted under test-optional policies. The department is asking colleges to report an unweighted grade-point average on a four-point scale, even though many applicants submit only weighted GPAs on a five-point scale. In those cases, and there may be many of them, colleges are instructed to report the GPA as “unknown.”

    Some students decline to report their race. Many holes are expected for family income. Colleges generally have income data only for students who completed federal financial-aid forms, which many applicants never file. 

    Ellen Keast, a spokeswoman for the Education Department, said in an email, “Schools are not expected to provide data they don’t have.” She added, “We know that some schools may have missing data for some data elements. We’ll review the extent of missing data before doing further calculations or analyses.”

    Male or female

    Even the category of sex poses problems. The Education Department’s spreadsheet allows only two options: male or female. Colleges, however, may collect sex or gender information using additional categories, such as nonbinary. 

    “That data is going to be, in my estimation, pretty worthless when it comes to really showing the different experiences of men and women,” Keller said. She is urging the department to add a “missing” option to avoid misleading results. “I think some people in the department may be misunderstanding that what’s needed is a missing-data option, not another sex category.”

    The new “aggregator tool” itself is another source of anxiety. Designed to spare colleges from calculating quintile buckets for grades and test scores by race and sex, it can feel like a black box. Colleges are supposed to fill rows and rows of detailed student data into spreadsheets and then upload the spreadsheets into the tool. The tool generates pooled summary statistics, such as the number of Black female applicants and admitted students who score in the top 20 percent at the college. Only the aggregated data will be reported to the federal government.

    At John Brown University, Duncan worries about what those summaries might imply. Her institution is predominantly white and has never practiced affirmative action. But if high school grades or test scores differ by race — as they often do nationwide — the aggregated results could suggest bias where none was intended.

    “That’s a concern,” Duncan said. “I’m hopeful that looking across multiple years of data, it won’t show that. You could have an anomaly in one year.”

    The problem is that disparities are not anomalies. Standardized test scores and academic records routinely vary by race and sex, making it difficult for almost any institution to avoid showing gaps.

    A catch-22 for colleges

    The stakes are high. In an emailed response to my questions, the Education Department pointed to Trump’s Aug. 7 memorandum, which directs the agency to take “remedial action” if colleges fail to submit the data on time or submit incomplete or inaccurate information.

    Under federal law, each violation of these education data-reporting requirements can carry a fine of up to $71,545. Repeated noncompliance can ultimately lead to the loss of access to federal student aid, meaning students could no longer use Pell Grants or federal loans to pay tuition.

    That leaves colleges in a bind. Failing to comply is costly. Complying, meanwhile, could produce flawed data that suggests bias and invites further scrutiny.

    The order itself contradicts another administration goal. President Trump campaigned on reducing federal red tape and bureaucratic burden. Yet ACTS represents a significant expansion of paperwork for colleges. The Office of Management and Budget estimates that each institution will spend roughly 200 hours completing the survey this year — a figure that higher-education officials say may be an understatement.

    Duncan is hoping she can finish the reporting in less than 200 hours, if there are no setbacks when she uploads the data. “If I get errors, it could take double the time,” she said.

    For now, she is still gathering and cleaning old student records and waiting to see the results… all before the March 18 deadline.

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

    This story about college admissions 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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  • Infants and toddlers are a growing group among homeless children

    Infants and toddlers are a growing group among homeless children

    by Jackie Mader, The Hechinger Report
    January 17, 2026

    BOSTON, Mass. — For months, Karian had tried to make it on her own in New York.

    After the birth of her second daughter, she was diagnosed with postpartum depression, major depressive disorder and anxiety. A single mother who had moved from Boston to New York about 13 years ago, she often spent days at a time on the couch, unable to do more than handle the basics for her daughters.

    “I wasn’t taking care of myself,” she said softly on a recent afternoon. “I was not really present.” The Hechinger Report is not publishing her last name to protect her privacy.

    Karian’s mother urged her to move back home to the Boston area and offered to house her and her daughters temporarily. She started working the night shift at a fast food restaurant to save up for her own place while her mother and sister watched her children. 

    But in a city where fast food wages aren’t enough to pay the rent, her efforts felt futile. And then, a month after moving in with her family, her mother’s landlord told her the apartment was overcrowded and she had to leave. Karian and her girls, then 7 years old and 8 months old, moved into a homeless shelter, where her depression and anxiety worsened. 

    “I tried my best, but it’s not their home,” said Karian, now 31.

    Karian’s children had joined the growing ranks of very young children experiencing homelessness. Between 2021 and 2023, the number of homeless infants and toddlers increased in 48 states and the District of Columbia. The most recent estimates found that in 2023 nearly 450,000 infants and toddlers in the United States were in families that lacked a stable place to live. That was a 23 percent increase compared to 2021, according to a report released last year by the nonprofit SchoolHouse Connection in partnership with Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan.  

    The numbers could be even higher, experts worry, because “hidden homeless” children — those who are doubled up in homes with family or friends or living in a hotel — may not be captured in tallies until they start school.

    High prices for diapers and formula, the exorbitant cost of child care, the rising cost of living, and rising maternal mental health challenges all contribute to the growing rate of homelessness among very young children, experts say. In 2024, one-third of infants and toddlers were in families that struggled to make ends meet, according to the nonprofit infant and toddler advocacy organization Zero to Three. 

    “We’re talking about families who have generationally been disadvantaged by circumstance,” said Kate Barrand, president and CEO of Horizons for Homeless Children, a nonprofit that supports homeless families with young children in Massachusetts. “The cost of housing has escalated dramatically. The cost of any kind of program to put a child in, should you have a job, is escalating,” she added. “There are a lot of things that make it really hard for families.”

    Related: Young children have unique needs and providing the right care can be a challenge. Our free early childhood education newsletter tracks the issues.

    Housing instability is dire for anyone, but particularly for young children, whose brains are rapidly growing and developing. Studies show that young children who are homeless often lag behind their peers in language development and literacy and struggle to learn self-regulation skills, like being able to calm themselves when feeling angry or sad or transition calmly to new activities. They also may experience long-term health and learning challenges.

    Early childhood programs could provide a critical source of stability and developmental support for these children. But SchoolHouse Connection found only a fraction of homeless children are enrolled in early learning programs, and the percentage who are has decreased over the past few years.

    “It’s not just incredibly tragic and sad that infants and toddlers are experiencing homelessness,” said Rahil Briggs, national director of the nonprofit Zero to Three’s HealthySteps program, which works with pediatricians to support the health of babies and toddlers. The first few years are also a “disproportionately important” time in a child’s life, she added, because of the brain development that’s happening.

    Karian and her daughters faced new difficulties after they moved into a shelter.

    They shared an apartment with another family. If the other family was using the shared common space, Karian tried to give them privacy, which meant keeping her children in the bedroom the three of them shared.

    Her older daughter had to change schools, and left without getting to say goodbye to many of her friends. At her new school, her grades dropped. The baby developed a skin condition and there was a bedbug infestation at the shelter. Karian didn’t want to put her on the floor for tummy time. She was desperate to find a home.

    “We were in a place where we couldn’t really make noise. I couldn’t really let them be kids,” she said.

    The rise in housing insecurity among young children has created more demand for programs created specifically to meet the unique needs of children who are experiencing instability and trauma. Many of these programs offer support to parents as well, through what is called a “two-generation” approach to support and services.

    Related: A school created a homeless shelter in the gym and it paid off in the classroom

    In 2021, in response to ballooning child homelessness rates, Horizons opened the Edgerley Family Horizons Center, an early learning program that serves children from 2 months to 5 years old. While some families find Horizons on their own, many are referred by shelters around the Boston area. The need is great: Edgerley serves more than 250 children, with a waitlist of 200 more. Karian’s younger child was one of those who got a spot soon after the program opened.

    Inside Horizons’ large, light-filled building on the corner of a busy street in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood, every detail is tailored to the needs of children who have experienced instability. Walls are painted in soothing blues and greens. Each classroom has three teachers to maintain a low child-to-staff ratio. Many of the teachers are bilingual. All educators are trained in how to build relationships with families and gently support children who have experienced trauma. 

    The starting salary for teachers is $54,200 a year, far more than the national median for childcare workers of $32,050 and the Massachusetts median of about $39,000. That has encouraged more teachers to stay on at the center and provide a sense of security to the children there, said Horizons CEO Barrand.

    In the infant room, teacher Herb Hickey, who has worked at Horizons for 13 years, frequently sees infants who are hyperaware, struggle to fall asleep, can’t be soothed easily or cling desperately to whichever adult they attach to first. The goal for the infant teachers, he said, is to be a trusted, responsive adult who can be relied on.

    Every day, the teachers in the infant room sing the same songs to the babies. “When they hear our voices constantly, they know they’re in a safe space,” Hickey said. “This is calm.” 

    Teachers also follow the same familiar routines. The rooms are decorated simply, organized and filled with natural light. Teachers constantly scan the infants for signs of distress.

    “We have to be even more responsive,” Hickey said. “When the child starts crying, we don’t have the convenience to say, ‘I know you’re hungry, I’ll get to you.’” He said teachers want even the tiniest babies to learn that “we’re not going to leave you crying.’”

    Related: A federal definition of ‘homeless’ leaves some kids out in the cold. One state is trying to help

    Other needs arise with Horizons’ youngest children: Infants and toddlers living in homeless shelters often lag in gross motor skills. Many spend time on beds rather than on playmats on the floor, or they are kept in car seats or in strollers to keep them safe or from wandering off. That means they’re missing out on all the skills that come from active movement.  

    Even the arrangement of toys at the center has a purpose. Staff want children to know they can depend on toys being in the same location every day. For many children, those are some of the only items they can play with. Families entering a shelter environment can usually only bring a few bags, with no room for toys or books. A toddler who recently entered a shelter where Horizons runs a playroom came in holding a small empty chip bag, recalled Tara Spalding, Horizons’ chief of advancement and playspace. When a shelter staff member threw it away, the boy was inconsolable. “This is the only toy my child has,” staff recalled the mother saying.

    “This just shows the sheer poverty,” said Spalding. 

    As infant and toddler homelessness has increased, other cities and states have tried to provide more support to affected families and get a better sense of their needs. In Oklahoma, experts say, low wages, a lack of housing and eviction laws that favor landlords have led to rising homelessness rates. State officials are trying to gather better data about homeless families to determine the best use of resources, said Susan Agel, chair of Oklahoma’s Homeless Children and Youth Steering Committee. Their efforts are hampered, however, by the fact that many homeless families fear that their children will be taken away by child protective services because they are homeless. 

    In 2024, to fill that gap in data, the state launched a residency questionnaire given to every K-12 student that includes new questions about homelessness, including if there are younger children in the home who are not students and may not otherwise be counted in homeless populations. Officials say it isn’t a perfect solution, but it’s a start to get a sense of the severity of family homelessness. “We can’t devise a system for dealing with a problem if we don’t know what the problem is,” said Agel.

    In Sioux Falls, South Dakota, city officials have ramped up efforts to coordinate city agencies to respond to an increase in homelessness among infants and toddlers.

    “In general, the families we see more often have younger children. The school offers so much support, and there’s limited daycare access” to get similar support for infants and toddlers, said Tommy Fuston, Community Services and Housing Navigator at Minnehaha County’s Department of Human Services. “If a family has younger children, they’re going to struggle more.” 

    Each week, officials from the city, the Sioux Falls School District, local early childhood programs and shelters hold a “care meeting” to make sure any homeless families, or families at risk of homelessness, are quickly connected to the right resources and receive follow-up. “We don’t have unlimited resources, but I think it maximizes the resources that we do have,” Fuston said. “We’ve tried to create a village of supportive services to wrap around these folks.” The city relies extensively on private and faith-based donations to help. All shelters in town are privately funded, for example. 

    Related: Shelter offers rare support for homeless families: a child care center

    Karian heard about the child care center run by Horizons from a social worker soon after she and her daughters moved into their Boston-area shelter. In the infant room, her youngest daughter quickly settled into a routine, something Karian said didn’t happen when the baby was watched at night by family members. When staff identified speech and developmental delays, they helped connect Karian to an early intervention program where her daughter could receive therapy. Now 4 years old and in pre-K at Horizons, “she’s thriving,” Karian said. “She’s getting that nourishment.” 

    Karian also received support. Each family at Horizons is assigned a coach to help parents set personal goals and connect with resources. The organization offers classes in computing, financial management and English, all within the early learning building.

    Two months after setting goals with a family coach, Karian earned her GED, with the help of  the child care assistance. A few months later, she graduated from a culinary training program. She now works a steady job as a cafeteria manager for a local school district, where she earns a salary with benefits. 

    After a year in the shelter, her family was approved for subsidized housing and moved into their own apartment. Horizons allows families to stay in its programs for at least two years after they secure housing to make sure they are stable. 

    Now, Karian has her sights set on eventually opening a restaurant. She also has big dreams for her daughters, something that once seemed out of reach. She wants them to have ambition to “work towards something big,” she said. “I want them to have a dream and be able to achieve it.” 

    Experts say there are larger policy changes that could help families like Karian’s: increasing the minimum wage, expanding child care options like Head Start, which saves a portion of seats for homeless children, and offering more affordable housing to low-income families, to start.

    Providing more federal money to the programs that help poor families pay for child care could also help. Those programs require states to prioritize homeless children and give them the first opportunity to access that money. 

    While important, experts argue, these solutions shouldn’t need to exist in the first place.

    “We should be able to come to an agreement as a society that we should prioritize keeping families with infants and toddlers in their homes,” said Melissa Boteach, chief policy officer at Zero to Three. “Babies shouldn’t be homeless.”

    Contact staff writer Jackie Mader at 212-678-3562 or [email protected].

    This story about homeless children 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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  • Nigerian student interest in the US falls by 50%

    Nigerian student interest in the US falls by 50%

    Search interest in America among Nigerians dropped immediately following the announcement of the US travel ban in December 2025, with levels more than half of what they were during a high point in August last year, according to Keystone Education Group data. 

    “We continue to see audiences responding very quickly to actions and announcements from the US government and Nigeria is no exception,” said Mark Bennett, Keystone’s VP of research & insight. 

    “These announcements don’t discourage Nigerians from studying abroad, but they will prompt them to look for opportunities elsewhere. Crucially, that doesn’t have to mean elsewhere in the big four,” added Bennett. 

    European destinations have absorbed the most Nigerian student interest pivoting away from the US, with France and Italy seeing search growth of 40% and 33% respectively during the same period.  

    China has also seen a 17% boost in interest from Nigerian students, while interest in Australia grew by 21%. 

    Previously, the challenge was navigating long wait times and backlogs. Now, there is no pathway at all

    Bimpe Femi-Oyewo

    On December 16, 2025, the administration announced the expansion of the US travel ban to cover nearly 40 nations, including Nigeria, America’s eighth largest sender of international students.  

    The African nation is now subject to partial travel restrictions, which includes barring Nigerian citizens from obtaining study visas for the US. 

    Speaking to The PIE News shortly after the announcement, founder of a Nigerian education consultancy Bimpe Femi-Oyewo said the level of uncertainty caused by the ban was “incredibly destabilising” for students and the institutions that admitted them. 

    “Previously, the challenge was navigating long wait times and backlogs. Now, there is no pathway at all,” she said – adding that she was encouraging students to consider alternative pathways in Europe and Canada.  

    What’s more, the ripple effects of the travel ban and other restrictive US policies are being felt beyond the directly impacted nations, with America’s reputation as an unwelcoming study destination growing globally. 

    This is evident in Keystone’s survey data, which found the proportion of students expressing low confidence in the ease of US visa and entry requirements increasing from 14% to 21% following the expanded travel ban. 

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  • Conservatives see married parents as a solution to low student achievement. It’s not that simple

    Conservatives see married parents as a solution to low student achievement. It’s not that simple

    by Jill Barshay, The Hechinger Report
    January 12, 2026

    Conservatives have long argued that unwed motherhood and single parenting are major drivers of poor student achievement. They contend that traditional two-parent families — ideally with a married mother and father — provide the stability children need to succeed in school. Single-parent households, more common among low-income families, are blamed for weak academic outcomes.

    That argument has resurfaced prominently in Project 2025, a policy blueprint developed by the conservative Heritage Foundation that calls for the federal government to collect and publish more education data broken out by family structure.

    Project 2025 acknowledges that the Education Department already collects some of this data, but asserts that it doesn’t make it public. That’s not true, though you need expertise to extract it. When I contacted the Heritage Foundation, the organization responded that the family-structure data should still be “readily available” to a layman, just like student achievement by race and sex. Fair point.

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

    With some help, I found the figures and the results complicate the conservative claim.

    Since 2013, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often called the Nation’s Report Card, has asked students about who lives in their home. While the question does not capture every family arrangement, the answers provide a reasonable, albeit imperfect, proxy for family structure and it allows the public to examine how a nationally representative sample of students from different types of households perform academically. 

    I wanted to look at the relationship between family structure and student achievement by family income. Single-parent families are far more common in low-income communities and I didn’t want to conflate achievement gaps by income with achievement gaps by family structure. For example, 43 percent of low-income eighth graders live with only one parent compared with 13 percent of their high-income peers. I wanted to know whether kids who live with only one parent perform worse than kids with the same family income who live with both parents.

    To analyze the most recent data from the 2024 NAEP exam, I used the NAEP Data Explorer, a public tool developed by testing organization ETS for the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). I told an ETS researcher what I wanted to know and he showed me how to generate the cross-tabulations, which I then replicated independently across four tests: fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math. Finally, I vetted the results with a former senior official at NCES and with a current staff member at the governing board that oversees the NAEP assessment.

    The analysis reveals a striking pattern.

    Among low-income students, achievement differs little by family structure. Fourth- and eighth-grade students from low-income households score at roughly the same level whether they live with both parents or with only one parent. Two-parent households do not confer a measurable academic advantage in this group. Fourth-grade reading is a great example. Among the socioeconomic bottom third of students, those who live with both parents scored a 199. Those who live with just mom scored 200. The results are almost identical and, if anything, a smidge higher for the kids of single moms. 

    As socioeconomic status rises, however, differences by family structure become more pronounced. Among middle- and high-income students, those living with both parents tend to score higher than their peers living with only one parent. The gap is largest among the most affluent students. In fourth grade reading, for example, higher-income kids who live with both parents scored a 238, a whopping 10 points higher than their peers who live with only their moms. Experts argue over the meaning of a NAEP point, but some equate 10 NAEP points to a school year’s worth of learning. It’s substantial.

    Family structure matters less for low-income student achievement

    Still, it’s better to be rich in a single-parent household than poor in a two-parent household. High-income students raised by a single parent substantially outperform low-income students who live with both parents by at least 20 points, underscoring that money and the advantages it brings — such as access to resources, stable housing, and educational support — matter far more than household composition alone. In other words, income far outweighs family structure when it comes to student achievement.

    Despite the NAEP data, Jonathan Butcher, acting director of the center for education policy at the Heritage Foundation, stands by the contention that family structure matters greatly for student outcomes. He points out that research since the landmark Coleman report of 1966 has consistently found a relationship between the two. Most recently, in a 2022 American Enterprise Institute-Brookings report, 15 scholars concluded that children “raised in stable, married-parent families are more likely to excel in school, and generally earn higher grade point averages” than children who are not. Two recent books, Brad Wilcox’s “Get Married” (2024) and Melissa Kearney’s “The Two-Parent Privilege” (2023), make the case, too, and they point out that children raised by married parents are about twice as likely to graduate from college as children who are not. However, it’s unclear to me if all of this analysis has disaggregated student achievement by family income as I did with the NAEP data.

    Related: Trump administration makes good on many Project 2025 education goals

    Family structure is a persistent theme for conservatives. Just last week the Heritage Foundation released a report on strengthening and rebuilding U.S. families. In a July 2025 newsletter, Robert Pondiscio, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, wrote that “the most effective intervention in education is not another literacy coach or SEL program. It’s dad.” He cited a June 2025 report, “Good Fathers, Flourishing Kids,” by scholars and advocates. (Disclosure: A group led by one of the authors of this report, Richard Reeves, is among the funders of The Hechinger Report.)

    That conclusion is partially supported by the NAEP data, but only for a relatively small share of students from higher-income families (The share of high-income children living with only their mother ranges between 7 and 10 percent. The single-parent rate is higher for eighth graders than for fourth graders.)  For low-income students, who are Pondiscio’s and the scholars’ main concern, it’s not the case. 

    The data has limitations. The NAEP survey does not distinguish among divorced families, grandparent-led households or same-sex parents. Joint custody arrangements are likely grouped with two-parent households because children may say that they live with both mother and father, if not at the same time. Even so, these nuances are unlikely to alter the core finding: For low-income students, academic outcomes are largely similar regardless of whether they live with both parents all of the time, some of the time or only live with one parent. 

    The bottom line is that calls for new federal data collection by family structure, like those outlined in Project 2025, may not reveal what advocates expect. A family’s bank account matters more than a wedding ring. 

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

    This story about family structure and student achievement 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 Plans to Freeze Billions in Childcare Funding to California – The 74

    Trump Administration Plans to Freeze Billions in Childcare Funding to California – The 74


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    The Trump administration says it’s planning to freeze about $10 billion in federal support for needy families in California and four other Democrat-run states, as the president announced an investigation into unspecified fraud in California.

    The plans come on the heels of the Trump administration announcing a freeze on all federal payments for child care in Minnesota, citing fraud allegations against daycare centers in the state.

    The state’s Democrat governor, Tim Walz — who ran for vice president against Donald Trump’s ticket in 2024 — announced Monday he was dropping out of running for reelection. He pointed to fraud against the state, saying it’s a real issue while alleging Trump and his allies were “seeking to take advantage of the crisis.”

    On Monday, the New York Post reported that the administration was expanding the funding freeze to include California and three other Democrat-led states, in addition to Minnesota. Unnamed federal officials cited “concerns that the benefits were fraudulently funneled to non-citizens,” The Post reported.

    Early Tuesday, President Trump alleged that corruption in California is worse than Minnesota and announced an investigation.

    “California, under Governor Gavin Newscum, is more corrupt than Minnesota, if that’s possible??? The Fraud Investigation of California has begun. Thank you for your attention to this matter! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP,” the president wrote on his social media platform Truth Social.

    He did not specify what alleged fraud was being examined in the Golden State.

    LAist has reached out to the White House to ask what the president’s fraud concerns are in California and to request an interview with the president.

    “For too long, Democrat-led states and governors have been complicit in allowing massive amounts of fraud to occur under their watch,” said an emailed statement from Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which administers the federal childcare funds.

    “Under the Trump administration, we are ensuring that federal taxpayer dollars are being used for legitimate purposes. We will ensure these states are following the law and protecting hard-earned taxpayer money.”

    Gov. Gavin Newsom’s press office disputed Trump’s claim on social media, arguing that since taking office, the governor has blocked $125 billion in fraud and arrested “criminal parasites leaching off of taxpayers.”

    Criminal fraud cases in CA appear to be rare for this program

    Defrauding federally funded programs is a crime — and one LAist has investigated, leading to one of the largest such criminal cases in recent years against a California elected official, which surrounded meal funds.

    When it comes to the federal childcare funds that are being frozen, the dollar amount of fraud alleged in criminal cases appears to be a tiny fraction of the overall program’s spending in California.

    A search of thousands of news releases by all four federal prosecutor offices in California, going back more than a decade, found a total of one criminal case where the press releases referenced childcare benefits.

    That case, brought in 2023, alleged four men stole $3.7 million in federal childcare benefits through fraudulent requests to a San Diego organization that distributed the funds. All four pleaded guilty, with one defendant sentenced to 27 months in prison and others sentenced to other terms, according to authorities.

    It appears to be equivalent to one one-hundredth of 1% of all the childcare funding California has received over the past decade-plus covered by the prosecution press release search.

    Potential impact on California families

    The plans call for California, Minnesota, New York, Illinois and Colorado to lose about $7 billion in cash assistance for households with children, almost $2.4 billion to care for children of working parents, and about $870 million for social services grants that mostly benefit children at risk, according to unnamed federal officials speaking to the New York Times and New York Post.

    In the largest category of funding, California receives $3.7 billion per year. The program is known as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF.

     ”It’s very clear that a freeze of those funds would be very damaging to the children, families, and providers of California,” said Stacy Lee, who oversees early childhood initiatives “at Children Now, an advocacy group for children in California.

     ”It is a significant portion of our funds and will impact families and children and providers across the whole state,” she added. “It would be devastating, in no uncertain terms.”

    About 270,000 people are served by the TANF program in L.A. County — about 200,000 of whom are children, according to the county Department of Public Social Services.

    “Any pause in funding for their cash benefits – which average $1000/month – would be devastating to these families,” said DPSS chief of staff Nick Ippolito.

    Ippolito said the department has a robust fraud prevention and 170-person investigations team, and takes allegations “very seriously.”

    It remains to be seen whether the funding freeze will end up in court. The state, as well as major cities and counties in California, has sued to ask judges to halt funding freezes or new requirements placed by the Trump administration. L.A. city officials say they’ve had success with that, including shielding more than $600 million in federal grant funding to the city last year.

    A union representing California childcare workers said the funding freeze would harm low-income families.

    “These threats need to be called out for what they are: direct threats on working families of all backgrounds who rely on access to quality, affordable child care in their communities to go to work every day supporting, and growing our economy,” said Max Arias, chairperson for the Child Care Providers United, which says it represents more than 70,000 child care workers across the state who care for kids in their homes.

    “Funding freezes, even when intended to be temporary, will be devastating — resulting in families losing access to care and working parents facing the devastating choice of keeping their children safe or paying their bills.”

    Federal officials planned to send letters to the affected states Monday about the planned funding pauses, the New York Post reported. As of 3 p.m. Tuesday, state officials said they haven’t gotten any official notification of the funding freeze plans.

    “The California Department of Social Services administers child care programs that help working families afford safe, reliable care for their children — so parents can go to work, support their families, and contribute to their communities,” said a statement from California Department of Social Services spokesperson Jason Montiel.

    “These funds are critical for working families across California. We take fraud seriously, and CDSS has received no information from the federal government indicating any freeze, pause, or suspension of federal child care funding.”

    This story was originally published on LAist.


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