As we enter the new year, I want to share some thoughts about what higher education needs to accomplish as a sector in 2026. I view these as resolutions: tough challenges we need to tackle with courage and determination. Are you ready?
Fix Accreditation
I have participated in accreditation as a college president, a law school faculty member and as a board member of the NWCCU, the Northwest’s regional accreditor, and so I say this from experience: Our accreditation system is horrible. It wastes massive amounts of time and accomplishes almost nothing to guarantee students a good education. We need to scrap it and start over. Instead of multiyear cycles, we should review schools every five years, in a process that takes no more than six months. It should focus on just three things: student outcomes, responsible financial management and academic freedom. Schools that do not meet strong, clear, objective standards in these areas should be placed on probation and, ultimately, decertified if they fail to improve. We have to stop rubber-stamping failure.
Discuss Creating a True National Higher Ed System
If I use the phrase “American higher education system” with colleagues from Europe and Asia, they laugh. “System? You don’t have a system! You have a giant collection of unregulated institutions that perform very inconsistently, many of them for-profit scams.”
There is so much truth in this reaction. The venerable Higher Education Act of 1965 no long meets our national needs. We need to start a rational discussion about reform of the higher education regulatory landscape. We need a smaller number of higher-performing universities, we need to eliminate institutions with poor outcomes that provide limited or no real return on investment, we need to provide truly affordable undergraduate programs in every state, we need to cut regulations and legal rules that drive up the cost of compliance, and we need to limit student debt. This is not the year for reform—Congress is a divided mess. But we need to start discussing the future.
Focus on Community Colleges
The foundation of American higher education is the part of the sector we talk about least: our community colleges. Community college is the best place to provide four vital services our students and our country desperately need: remedial education to make up for poor K–12 schools, valuable job training in skills and trades to help students prepare for the workplace, ESL classes to help nonnative English speakers thrive, and low-cost general education to help students determine whether they want to proceed to a four year degree.
Community college quality is inconsistent across the United States: excellent in some states, poor in others. As a result, there is no one-size-fits-all set of reforms we need to enact. Every state government needs to have a serious, honest conversation led by the governor on how to strengthen and improve this vital sector.
College costs too much. Instead of pretending this is not true, we need to develop new low-cost, high-quality models. We cannot rely on new institutions to do this: The entry costs and accreditation barriers are too high.
Here’s a place to start.
The eight (relatively wealthy) Ivy League universities should jointly create Ivy College, a low-cost undergraduate lab school in a place they currently don’t serve, like Los Angeles. They should cut everything ancillary to great undergraduate education that drives up costs. That means no research, no sports and recreation, no subsidized activities, no alumni association, no communications department, no health and counseling, no permanent campus (just rented office space). They should reduce the number of majors and the number of electives. Simplify admission, with a lottery for every student scoring 1100 or above on the SAT. Get federal regulatory waivers for compliance cost drivers.
If we tried this for four years, we would learn so much! Then, the Big Ten schools should follow suit.
Advertise on Television
A recent Pew poll found that 70 percent of Americans think higher education is headed in the wrong direction. How do we improve public trust in higher education? Reform will help, yes, but we also need a more effective approach to public relations. When other industries run into trouble, they don’t rely on heartfelt op-eds and books published by university presses to make their case. They launch proactive television and a social media ad campaigns.
ACE should enlist the top 100 universities to bankroll ads that explain the ROI of higher education and the value of university research to national security, health and the economy. Trusted figures should explain why college matters. Celebrities should explain why they benefited from college. And we should remind people that American research universities helped win the Second World War.
John Kroger served as president of Reed College, attorney general of Oregon, chief learning officer of the U.S. Navy and a visiting faculty member at Harvard and Yale Universities and Lewis and Clark College.
A prominent academy trust leader will be knighted and a well-known professor of social mobility will be made a dame in the new year’s honours list.
Dr Stephen Taylor and Professor Sonia Blandford are among 57 people working in or with the schools community in England recognised this year.
Steve Taylor
Taylor, the CEO of the 35-school Cabot Learning Federation and chair of the Queen Street Group of academy leaders will be knighted for services to education.
“Since learning of this award, I have thought about all those colleagues in the Cabot Learning Federation and in the wider sector, whose work and successes have inspired me over the years to strive to do my best for the children we serve,” he said.
“Anything I would count as an achievement has come about as the result of working in collaboration with great people I have had the privilege of knowing, in the CLF and beyond.
“That includes a number of leaders in the Queen Street Group whose work in education has been recognised over the years, and I feel fortunate to have them as colleagues.”
Professor Sonia Blandford
He added he was “extremely grateful for this honour and look forward to sharing the news with colleagues and sharing the experience with my family, whose support I never take for granted”.
Blandford, professor of social mobility at Plymouth Marjon University and founder of the school improvement charity Achievement for All, will be made a dame.
She said: “My thanks to all my colleagues, friends and family for your support and kindness throughout my career. I am proud to be a member of the teaching profession.”
Leaders honoured
Fifty-five other people who work in or with schools were recognised this year.
Four will receive the CBE, 15 the OBE, 25 the MBE and 11 the British Empire Medal.
Among those recognised are 17 current or former trust CEOs or school executive headteachers, nine heads, eight people from the charity or third sectors, six support staff, five council officials, three governors or trustees, two volunteers, two academics, a civil servant and an assistant head.
Dr Nikos Savvas
Dr Nikos Savvas, chief executive of Eastern Education Group, which runs nine schools, will receive the OBE.
“This honour belongs to the whole of Eastern Education Group and to Suffolk,” he said.
“What we have achieved here shows that world-class education doesn’t only happen in big cities.
“Suffolk is leading the way, and this award is recognition of the people, partnerships and communities that make that possible. I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve accomplished together.”
Anita Bath
Anita Bath, chief executive of the Bishop Bewick Catholic Education Trust has also been awarded the OBE.
She said she was “deeply honoured and so happy to receive an OBE in the new year’s honours.
“This recognition is not something I ever expected, and I accept it on behalf of the many dedicated colleagues I have worked alongside throughout my career.
“I am particularly thankful for the opportunity to lead the Bishop Bewick Catholic Education Trust since its inception and I am so grateful to the leaders and staff who made this possible.
“It was a brave leap of faith to bring all 39 Catholic schools together in such a short time and the commitment shown by its people has been very humbling indeed.”
‘Highly respected’
Anne Dellar
Anne Dellar, the former chief executive of the Oxford Diocesan Schools Trust, will receive the MBE.
Kathy Winrow, chair of the trust’s trustees, said: “During her time as our CEO, Anne always had an exciting vision for ODST.
“She oversaw the MAT’s growth from two to 43 schools and her passion for ensuring every child had the opportunity to access the very best education was exemplary.
“She is highly respected by trustees and headteachers within the MAT, and colleagues at national level. It was been a privilege to work with Anne over many years and see her ambition, generosity of spirit and care have a lasting and positive impact.”
The full schools list
Please note the spellings, titles and styles of each entry match what has been provided by government. If there’s a mistake or we’ve missed anyone out, please email [email protected].
Please bear in mind we only cover the schools sector in England.
Damehood
Professor Sonia BLANDFORD, Professor of Social Mobility, Plymouth Marjon University. For services to Education. Wiltshire
Knighthood
Dr Stephen Peter TAYLOR Chief Executive Officer, Cabot Learning Federation. For services to Education. Somerset
Commanders of the Order of the British Empire (CBE)
Professor Teresa Mary CREMIN Professor of Education, The Open University. For services to Education. East Sussex
Shazia Kauser HUSSAIN Director of Children’s Social Care, Department for Education. For services to Children and Families. Greater London
Deborah Anna JONES Lately Executive Director Children, Families and Education Services, Croydon Council. For services to Children, Young People and Families. Oxfordshire
Heather Ann SANDY Executive Director of Children’s Services, Lincolnshire County Council. For services to Education. Lincolnshire
Officers of the Order of the British Empire (OBE)
Anita Frances Maria BATH Chief Executive Officer, Bishop Bewick Catholic Education Trust, Newcastle, North Tyneside and Northumberland. For services to Education. County Durham
Jonathan BISHOP Chief Executive Officer and Executive Headteacher, Cornerstone Academy Trust, Devon. For services to Education. Devon
Simon ELLIOTT Chief Executive Officer, Community Schools Trust. For services to Education. Greater London
Emma Kate ENGLISH Executive Director, British Educational Travel Association. For services to the Youth and Student Travel Industry. Greater London
Clare Elizabeth FLINTOFF Lately Chief Executive Officer, Asset Education, Ipswich, Suffolk. For services to Education. Suffolk
Linda Susan JONES Chief Executive Officer, Prospere Learning Trust. For services to Education. Cheshire
Carolyn MORGAN Lately Chief Executive Officer, The Ascent Academies’ Trust, Sunderland, Tyne and Wear. For services to Special Educational Needs and Disabilities. County Durham
Gaynor Alison RENNIE Lately Headteacher, All Souls Church of England Primary School, Heywood, Lancashire. For services to Education. Greater Manchester
Paul Thompson RICKEARD Ecumencial Canon, Cathedral of Newcastle upon Tyne and Chief Executive Officer, Durham and Newcastle Diocesan Learning Trust, Tyne and Wear. For services to Education. Northumberland
Dr Nikolaos SAVVAS DL Chief Executive Officer, West Suffolk College, West Suffolk Trust, and Eastern Education Group, and Principal Abbeygate Sixth Form College, Suffolk. For services to Further Education. Suffolk
Timothy William SHERRIFF Vice-Chair, Chartered Institute of Educational Assessors. For services to Education. Lancashire
William George Stewart SMITH Chief Executive Officer and Founder, Greenshaw Learning Trust. For services to Education. Oxfordshire
Thomas Brendan TAPPING Chief Executive Officer, Bishop Chadwick Catholic Education Trust, Houghton-le-Spring, Tyne and Wear. For services to Education. County Durham
Victoria Ann WELLS Lately Director of Sport, Youth Sport Trust, Loughborough, Leicestershire. For services to Special Educational Needs and Disabilities. Worcestershire
Rachel Emma WILKES Chief Executive Officer, Humber Education Trust. For services to Education. East Riding of Yorkshire
Members of the Order of the British Empire (MBE)
Olusola Oluronke Anike ALABI Director, Exam Success Education Centre. For services to Education. Essex
Oluremi Morenike ATOYEBI Headteacher, Osmani Primary School, London Borough of Tower Hamlets. For services to Education. Greater London
Helen Victoria BINGHAM Early Years Practitioner, Aspire Academy Trust, St Austell, Cornwall. For services to Early Years Education. Cornwall
Rebecca Jane BOLLANDS Head Teacher, Earlson Primary School, Coventry. For services to Cultural Education in the West Midlands. Warwickshire
Georgina BURROWS (Georgina Stafford) Senior Teacher, Rumworth School, Bolton, Greater Manchester. For services to Education. Greater Manchester
Mervin CATO Head of Secondary Behaviour Support Service, Enfield Council. For services to Education. Greater London
Judith Lesley CHARLESWORTH Lately Chair, Barnet Special Education Trust, London. For services to Education. Hertfordshire
Eileen Gillian CLARK Vice-Chair, Pickwick Academy Trust Board and Chair, School Improvement Committee. For services to Education. Wiltshire
Lucy CONLEY Lately Chief Executive Officer, South Lincolnshire Academies Trust. For services to Education. Lincolnshire
Kathryn Anne CREWE-READ Lately Headteacher, Bishop’s Stortford College. For services to Education. Shropshire
Edison DAVID Executive Headteacher, Granton Primary School, London Borough of Lambeth. For services to Education. Greater London
Jacqueline Anne DELLAR Lately Chief Executive Officer, Oxford Diocesan Schools Trust. For services to Education. Berkshire
Andrea ENGLISH Lately Executive Headteacher, North and South West Durham Learning Federation. For services to Education. County Durham
Margaret Antoinette FISHER Lately Chair of Governors, Dorridge Primary School. For services to Education. West Midlands
Fiona Mary GEORGE Trustee, Rumbletums Community Cafe, Kimberley, Nottinghamshire. For services to Special Educational Needs. Nottinghamshire
Beth GIBSON Head of Attendance and Inclusive Pathways, Birmingham City Council, West Midlands. For services to Education. Warwickshire
Vanessa Marie GRAUS (Vanessa Langley) Headteacher, Arbourthorne Community Primary School, Sheffield, South Yorkshire. For services to Education. South Yorkshire
David John GURNEY Chief Executive Officer, Cockburn Multi- Academy Trust, Leeds, Yorkshire. For services to Education. West Yorkshire
David William HUDSON Lately Headteacher, Royal Latin School, Buckinghamshire. For services to Education. Oxfordshire
Amanda KING Early Years Strategic Lead, Warwickshire County Council and Coventry City Council. For services to Early Years Education. Warwickshire
Michael Andrew LONCASTER Lately Headteacher, Molescroft Primary School, Beverley, East Riding of Yorkshire. For services to Education. East Riding of Yorkshire
Karen RATCLIFFE Lately Headteacher, Harton Primary School, South Shields, Tyne and Wear. For services to Education. Tyne and Wear
Kylie Melissa SPARK Chief Executive Officer, Inspiring Learners Multi-Academy Trust, Cheshire. For services to Education. Greater Manchester
John Francis TOWERS Headmaster, Barrow Hills School, Godalming, Surrey. For services to Education. Surrey
Rachael WARWICK Lately Chief Executive Officer, Ridgeway Education Trust, Oxfordshire. For services to Education. Oxfordshire
Medallists of the Order of the British Empire (BEM)
Jake Oliver ARMSTRONG Careers Leader, Addey and Stanhope School, London Borough of Lewisham. For services to Education. Greater London
Amila BEGUMAHMED (Amila Ahmed) Teaching Assistant, Cyril Jackson Primary, London Borough of Tower Hamlets. For services to Education. Greater London
Kelly CLARKE Inclusion Manager, Hanson Academy, Bradford. For services to Education. West Yorkshire
Annabel Susan Alice GITTINS Chair, Association of Senior Children’s and Education Librarians. For services to Young People. Shropshire
Frances Elizabeth HILL Caretaker, John Ruskin School, Coniston, Cumbria. For services to Education. Cumbria
John Melvyn JOHNSON Volunteer, Wolverhampton Grammar School, West Midlands. For services to Education. West Midlands
Susan Renee MARSHALL For services to Education and to the community in Weston-super-Mare. Somerset
Bhajan MATHARU Assistant Headteacher, Deanesfield Primary School, London Borough of Hillingdon. For services to Education and Early Years. Greater London
Lisa RIDING Head of the Speech and Communication Specialist Resource, St Thomas à Becket, Wakefield, West Yorkshire. For services to Education. West Yorkshire
Cindy Marie SUTCLIFFE Inclusion Manager, Hanson Academy, Bradford, West Yorkshire. For services to Education. West Yorkshire
Brenda Irene WRIGHT Volunteer, St Issey Church of England Primary School, Wadebridge, Cornwall. For services to Education. Cornwall
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by Felicia Mello, The Hechinger Report December 23, 2025
OAKLAND — In 2020, California led the nation in outlawing transcript-withholding, a debt collection practice that sometimes kept low-income college students from getting jobs or advanced degrees. Five years later, 24 of the state’s 115 community colleges still said on their websites that students with unpaid balances could lose access to their transcripts, according to a recent UC Merced survey.
The communications failure has been misleading, student advocates said, although overall, the state’s students have benefited from the law.
It “raises questions about what actual institutional practices are at colleges and the extent to which colleges know the law and are fully compliant with the law,” said Charlie Eaton, a UC Merced sociology professor who led the research team that conducted the survey in October.
California community colleges say they are following the law, which prohibits them from refusing to release the grades of a student who owes money to the school — anywhere from a $25 library fine to unpaid tuition. The misinformation on some college websites is a clerical problem that campuses have been asked to update, the California Community Colleges chancellor’s office said in an emailed statement.
Without an official transcript, students can’t prove they’ve earned college credits to admissions offices elsewhere or to potential employers. Millions of students nationwide have lost access to their transcripts because of unpaid fees, according to estimates from the higher education consulting firm Ithaka S+R.
Student advocates argued that the practice made little money for colleges, while costing graduates opportunities that could help them pay back their debts.
California lawmakers agreed; in 2019, they passed legislation that took effect on Jan. 1 2020, barring colleges from using transcript holds to collect debts.
At least 12 other states have followed California’s lead, passing laws limiting or banning colleges from withholding transcripts.
A similar but less stringent federal rule approved during the Biden administration took effect last year.
The new rules have raised awareness about colleges’ debt collection practices and inspired some to find ways to help their students avoid falling behind on their payments in the first place or to pay off what they owe — including by forgiving their debts.
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Colleges and universities, however, argued that withholding transcripts was one of the few ways they had to prevent students from bouncing among institutions and leaving unpaid bills in their wake. Some use another tactic, blocking them from registering for new courses until bills are paid.
When colleges choose to withhold transcripts, the burden falls more heavily on low-income students and students of color, according to the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. Often those students accrue debts when they withdraw partway through a course, leading the college to return part of their financial aid to the federal government and charge the bill to the student.
In states with laws limiting transcript withholding, many colleges have begun communicating earlier and more often with students about their debts and offering flexible payment plans, said Elizabeth Looker, a senior program manager at Ithaka S+R. Some have added financial literacy training or required students with unpaid bills to meet with counselors.
Eight public colleges and universities in Ohio went further, offering a deal to former students with unpaid balances: Reenroll at any of the eight, and get up to $5,000 of the outstanding debt forgiven. Called the Ohio College Comeback Compact, the program, which began in 2002 and concludes this fall, was open to former students who had at least a 2.0 GPA and had been out of school a year or more.
The program was designed to give a second chance to students whose educations stalled because of events outside their control, such as losing a job in the middle of the semester, said Steve McKellips, vice president for enrollment management at the University of Akron.
Since the Ohio College Compact’s inception, 79 students have returned to the university under the program, at a cost to the state of $54,174 in debt forgiven. The university netted five times that, or $271,924, in additional tuition, McKellips said. More than 700 students have used the compact to reenroll, according to Ithaka S+R, which helped coordinate the program and is studying the results.
“I think sometimes people have this image of somebody walking away from a tuition bill because they just don’t care,” McKellips said. “But sometimes there’s just a boulder in the way and somebody needs to move it. Once the boulder was moved and they could move forward, we’re finding them continuing happily along the way they always intended to.”
The University of California cited expected cuts to federal and state funding as one reason it opposed the bill. “UC believes that maintaining the ability to hold registration is essential for its ability to reasonably secure unpaid student debt,” UC legislative director Jessica Duong wrote to lawmakers.
Cal State spokesperson Amy Bentley-Smith said that Cal State wanted a flexible approach to debt collection and that campuses had started eliminating registration holds for minor debts such as parking tickets and lost library books.
“Students are able to move forward with their enrollment even with institutional debts in the low hundreds to the low thousands of dollars, depending upon the university,” she said.
Supporters of the failed bill — which also would have barred colleges from reporting a student’s institutional debt to credit agencies — said curbing aggressive debt collection doesn’t just help low-income students; it speeds up the training of workers in industries crucial to the state’s economy.
“Schools think about these institutional debts in a way that is very penny-wise and pound-foolish, and it’s preventing people from participating in the economy,” said Mike Pierce, executive director of Protect Borrowers.
Annette Ayala of Simi Valley, hoping to become a registered nurse, took her for-profit college to court to force it to comply with California’s debt collection law.
She had earned her vocational nursing license from the school, the Professional Medical Careers Institute, and wanted to continue her studies to become a registered nurse. But the college refused to release her transcript — citing a $7,500 debt that Ayala argued in court records she did not owe — and without the transcript she could not apply to other colleges.
In her case, California’s Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education, which regulates for-profit colleges under the state’s Department of Consumer Affairs, cited her former school for violating the state’s transcript-withholding law.
The college was fined $1,000 and ordered to update its enrollment agreement. The school forgave the debt it said Ayala owed. It’s the only case in which a school has been cited for withholding a transcript since the bureau started monitoring compliance with the law more closely two years ago, said Monica Vargas, a spokesperson for consumer affairs.
School officials had been unaware of the California law at the time Ayala sued, the school’s controller, Joshua Taylor, said, and have since updated their catalog to comply with it.
With her vocational nursing license, Ayala has been working in home health care. Now that she has her transcript, she’s applying for RN programs, and said her salary would roughly double once she has the new degree, allowing her to save for the future and help her son pay for college.
“You’ve got to give people the chance to get through their program and pay their debts as they’re working,” she said. “You can’t hold them back from being able to make top dollar with their abilities to pay back these loans.”
This <a target=”_blank” href=”https://hechingerreport.org/5-years-after-california-banned-holding-college-students-transcripts-hostage-for-unpaid-debt-some-colleges-neglect-the-law/”>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&ssl=1″ style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>
HEPI’s final publication of 2025 takes a timely look back to reflect on a period of profound change in higher education policy and debate.
A Baker’s Dozen: Thirteen years of book reviews on higher education, 2013 to 2025 (HEPI Debate Paper 42), written by HEPI’s Director Nick Hillman OBE, brings together 30 book reviews published since higher undergraduate tuition fees first came into effect in 2012/13. This moment marked the beginning of an era that reshaped higher education across the UK: from the removal of student number controls to the creation of the Office for Students, with lasting consequences for the sector.
The collection spans books by leading academics, politicians, commentators and international figures, as well as a cultural perspective from beyond the policy world. Authors reviewed include Peter Mandler, Alison Scott-Baumann, David Cameron, Wes Streeting, David Goodhart, Sam Freedman, Richard Corcoran, Ben Wildavsky and David Baddiel. Together, the reviews chart how debates about higher education, the state, students, institutions and free speech have evolved over more than a decade.
Organised into five thematic sections, the debate paper offers both a historical record and a platform for renewed discussion. With further reform on the horizon, new leadership at the Office for Students and elections in Wales and Scotland approaching, this Debate Paper offers an important moment to consider how we arrived at the current policy landscape and how debate should develop next.
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Dive Brief:
Preliminary case numbers for pertussis, or whooping cough, in the U.S. remain elevated in 2025, compared to immediately before the pandemic, when more than 10,000 cases were typically reported each year, according to recent figures from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Meanwhile, KFF reported this year that exemptions from school vaccination requirements — and particularly non-medical exemptions — have increased. In addition, the New York Academy of Sciences reported in May that disinformation across social media, politicization of vaccines and public figures promoting skepticism, “have all contributed to declining coverage, fueling the resurgence of pertussis.”
Dive Insight:
The Texas Department of State Health Services reported on Nov. 3 that it was tracking a significant increase in pertussis cases in 2025. According to provisional data, the agency said, “Texas has had more than 3,500 reported pertussis cases through October this year, roughly four times the number reported for the same period last year.”
The number of cases is also reportedly the highest for the state in 11 years.
Texas schools, among other entities like hospitals, are required to report individuals who are suspected of having pertussis within one work day, according to the state health agency.
This is the second consecutive year that Texas has experienced high year-over-year increases in reported pertussis cases, and it’s also the second consecutive year the state’s Department of State Health Services has issued a health alert, according to a news release.
The CDC said reported cases of pertussis are currently trending down in 2025 since a peak in November 2024, when more than six times as many cases were reported, compared to 2023. The agency added that case counts will likely change as it finalizes the data.
In September, Colorado-based healthcare system UCHealth reported that cases of whooping cough “are on track to be even worse this year than in 2024,” adding that health officials in parts of the state have warned of “a noticeable jump” in pertussis cases as kids have returned to school.
In many states across the U.S. — including Florida, Oregon and Washington — cases of pertussis as of Sept. 20 were already outpacing total year-to-date cases reported by the CDC in 2025. UCHealth’s September report noted that the worst U.S. pertussis outbreaks so far in 2025 were on the West Coast, with high numbers also reported in Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Minnesota, North Carolina and Arizona.
Other childhood diseases are also on the rise as a result of shifting attitudes toward vaccines and vaccine mandates. According to the CDC, the best defense against pertussis is a vaccination.
In March, measles infections spread across several U.S. states, a quarter-century after the potentially fatal disease had been declared eradicated in the U.S. in 2000.
In addition to the impact on student health, an uptick in acute and chronic illnesses can also increase chronic absenteeism issues for schools and school districts. A CDC study published last year found that in 2022, 5.8% of children experienced chronic school absenteeism for health-related reasons.
Senate lawmakers on Monday advanced legislation that would launch the most comprehensive overhaul of New Jersey’s regulation of charter schools in 30 years.
The bill advanced by the Senate Education Committee on Monday would outright ban for-profit charter schools, require them to post a range of documents online, and impose residency requirements for some charter school trustees.
“We have not looked at charter schools as a whole legislatively in this committee since the 1990s, so this is an opportunity where we’re trying to do that,” said Sen. Vin Gopal (D-Monmouth), the panel’s chair and the bill’s prime sponsor.
The bill comes as New Jersey charter schools have faced scrutiny after reporting revealed top officials were paid far more than their counterparts at traditional public schools, including, among others, a Newark charter school CEO who was paid nearly $800,000 in 2024.
The proposal, which Gopal said was the product of a year of negotiations, would require charter schools to post user-friendly budgets that include the compensation paid to charter school leaders and school business administrators. They must also post existing contracts.
Charters would be required to post meeting notices, annual reports, board members’ identities, and facility locations online. Some critics have charged that charter schools routinely fail to provide notice of their public meetings.
The legislation would also require the state to create a dedicated charter school transparency website to host plain language budgets, 990 disclosure forms filed with the IRS, contracts with charter management organizations, and a list of charter schools on probation, among other things.
It would also ban fully virtual charter schools.
“We support the bills as a step forward in holding all public schools in our state accountable for fiscal and transparency requirements that will ultimately best serve our students,” said Debbie Bradley, director of government relations for the New Jersey Principals and Supervisors Association.
The two sides remained at odds over the membership of charter school boards.
Charter critics argued residency for those positions — which, unlike traditional public school boards, are largely appointed rather than elected — should mirror those imposed on regular public schools.
In New Jersey, school board members must live in the district they serve. That’s not the case for charter schools, whose trustees face no residency or qualification limits under existing law.
The bill would only impose a residency requirement on one-third of a charter school’s trustees, and rather than forcing them to live in the district, the bill would require charter trustees to live in the school’s county or within 30 miles of the school.
That language was criticized by statewide teachers union the New Jersey Education Association, which has called existing law governing charter schools outdated and flawed.
“School board representation should remain primarily local, and when we mean local, we don’t mean within a 30-mile radius. A 30-mile radius of Newark could include Maplewood, South Orange, communities that don’t necessarily represent what Newark looks like as a community,” said Deb Cornavaca, the union’s director of government relations.
Charter school supporters said their boards need flexibility because their leadership has broader responsibilities than counterparts in traditional public schools.
“Running a charter is a little different than running a traditional district. You need experience in school finance. You need to fundraise a bunch of money on the front end because you’re not getting paid on the front end,” said New Jersey Charter School Association President Harry Lee, adding they also needed familiarity with real estate and community experience.
Amendments removed provisions that would have required charter school board members to be approved by the state commissioner of education, though the commissioner retains sole power over whether to allow the formation of a new charter, a power that gives the commissioner some veto power over a charter’s board.
Gopal acknowledged the 30-mile residency rule was a sticking point and said legislators would discuss it before the measure comes before the Senate Budget Committee. Earlier, he warned the bill was likely to see more changes as it moved through the Legislature.
Some argued enrollment in charter schools should be more limited by geography, arguing that out-of-district enrollments that are common at New Jersey charters could place financial strain on the students’ former district.
Most per-pupil state and local funding follows students who enroll in charter schools, even if their departure does not actually decrease the original district’s expenses because, for example, those schools still require the same number of teachers and administrators.
Charter operators said that would make New Jersey a national outlier and argued that a separate provision that would bar new charter schools when there are empty seats in existing area charters should come out of the bill.
“It could be read as a moratorium on charters, so we want to revisit that provision,” Lee said.
Such vacancies could exist for various reasons, they argued, including student age distributions.
Alongside that measure, the panel approved separate legislation that would bar charter schools from setting criteria to enroll students, ban them from imposing other requirements on a student randomly selected to attend, and place new limits on how such schools can enroll children from outside their district.
That bill would also bar charter schools from encouraging students to break with the district. Some opponents have charged that charter schools push out low-performing students to boost their metrics.
The committee approved the bills in unanimous votes, though Sens. Owen Henry (R-Ocean) and Kristin Corrado (R-Passaic) abstained from votes on both bills, saying they are broadly supportive but need more time to review amendments.
New Jersey Monitor is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. New Jersey Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Terrence T. McDonald for questions: [email protected].
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When I first began teaching Islam, there was no road map. In 2001, I was a visiting assistant professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Iowa—the first full-time professor of Islam in the history of the state. I was in my 20s, still finishing my dissertation, when the attacks of Sept. 11 unfolded. Suddenly, I found myself trying to explain a 1,400-year-old religion to students who had watched the Twin Towers fall on live television.
Teaching Islam in American universities has never been more widespread, more diverse or more embattled. That is the story of the past two decades: a field that has grown dramatically, transformed in terms of who teaches it, and now finds itself under intensifying political scrutiny.
That experience in Iowa shaped everything that came after. I discovered that my task was not only to introduce students to the theological, historical and cultural breadth of Islam but also to help them unlearn the simplistic caricatures they had absorbed from media and politics. Islam was not a monolith. It was not synonymous with terror. It was, like Christianity or Judaism, a faith defined by argument, diversity and adaptation.
Those class lectures eventually became the foundation for No god but God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam, first published in 2005. I hoped the book would serve both general readers and university classrooms. To my surprise, it quickly became a popular text for teaching Islam in the United States and far beyond. It has been translated into dozens of languages, adopted in seminaries and world religion courses, and read in mosques, churches and synagogues.
Two decades later, the landscape of Islamic studies in American universities looks profoundly different. In 2001, very few institutions offered dedicated courses on Islam outside of theology departments. Today, there are hundreds of such courses, spanning history, political science, gender studies and literature. The proliferation has been remarkable—though uneven. Some courses are rigorous, rooted in language and text, while others are more ad hoc, responding to student demand and global events.
Another profound shift has been in who is teaching Islam. For most of the modern history of religious studies in America, Christian professors taught Christianity, Jewish professors taught Judaism—but it was rare to find Muslim professors teaching Islam. In nearly two decades of studying the subject, I had only one Muslim professor. That has changed dramatically. Today, Muslim scholars occupy faculty positions across the country, and new professional associations—such as the International Quranic Studies Association, of which I am a member—are fostering networks of Muslim academics who bring both scholarly expertise and lived experience into the classroom. This diversification has expanded the kinds of questions and perspectives that shape the field, though it has also forced universities to confront new debates over authority, representation and bias.
Meanwhile, the teaching of Islam—like so many fields in the humanities—is now buffeted by unprecedented political pressure. Across the country, state governments have moved to limit what can and cannot be taught in universities and ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs. More recently, elite universities such as Columbia and Harvard have faced political scrutiny from the Trump administration and Congress into their Middle East studies programs, accused by some lawmakers of being biased. In today’s climate, teaching Islam can feel like an act of defiance. Professors often self-censor, conscious that a stray lecture note could trigger outside campaigns or even threats. The irony is that in a moment when greater understanding of Islam is needed more than ever, the very institutions best equipped to provide that education are being undermined.
Yet this is precisely why teaching Islam in universities matters more than ever. At a time when Islam has faded from the headlines but remains entangled in the debates that define our era—from authoritarianism to surveillance to religious pluralism—the classroom is one of the few places where the faith can be encountered on its own terms. The role of professors is not to sanitize or defend Islam, but to present it in all its richness, contradictions and ongoing transformations.
The fully updated 20th-anniversary edition of No god but God is my attempt to support that task for another generation of teachers and students. The new preface reflects on what has changed since 2005—the Arab Spring, the rise of digital Islam, the ebb of the “war on terror”—and what has not: Islam’s enduring struggle to reconcile tradition and modernity, authority and pluralism.
More than two decades of teaching have convinced me that education about Islam cannot be episodic, tied only to moments of crisis or headlines of violence. It must be sustained, interdisciplinary and grounded in serious scholarship. It must expand beyond political science courses on terrorism and foreign policy, and beyond theology seminars comparing sacred texts, into the wider humanities and social sciences. And it must center the lived experiences of Muslims themselves.
The classroom is not a mosque. But it is one of the few spaces where young people can confront their assumptions, wrestle with complexity, and imagine new ways of understanding the role of religion in the world. That was my conviction in 2001, when I walked into a lecture hall in Iowa just days after Sept. 11. It remains my conviction today.
The classroom may not be a mosque, but it remains one of the few places where Islam can be encountered in all its richness, contradictions and humanity.
Reza Aslan is a writer and scholar of religion. His books includeZealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth and No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam, now available in an updated 20th-anniversary edition from Random House. He is a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside.
In a statement, Bell Educational Services Ltd confirmed that the group has served notice to put its three schools in Cambridge, London and St Albans into administration due to financial difficulties, with the schools set to close on October 31.
“It is with deep regret that we announce Bell Educational Services Ltd has made the difficult decision to wind down its operations and will cease to trade shortly,” the group said in a statement.
“Regrettably, the closure of the schools will also mean that staff members will face redundancy in the coming weeks,” it said, adding: “This is a deeply sad outcome for all involved”.
English UK is finding replacement courses for some 125 students affected by the news under the student Emergency Support Scheme (SES), which obliges British Council-accredited centres to offer places to those whose schools have closed suddenly. The affected students are currently studying at Bell’s Cambridge and London locations, while the St Albans site will have no students by the closure date at the end of this month.
English UK’s acting joint chief executive, Huan Japes, said he was “very sorry” for all those caught up in the closure. “[We] wish to pay our respects to the contribution that Bell has made to shaping the English language teaching industry over the last 70 years,” he added.
“The English UK team is working with Bell management and nearby centres to ensure the students can continue their courses as quickly as possible. We have visited the school to answer the students’ questions in person, and we hope staff who have lost jobs find new employment quickly. We are very grateful to Bell staff and the administrators for managing the closure responsibly and with sensitivity.”
Bell highlighted its “proud heritage spanning over 70 years” that has been “widely recognised as a pioneer in the teaching of English as a foreign language”.
But it said it faced “significant cashflow challenges” and was unable to recover financially from the prolonged impact of the pandemic. Nor could it secure a buyer for the business.
This is a very sad closure, but we don’t see it as part of a wider trend
Huan Japes, English UK
Bell school was founded by Frank Bell in 1955, having been inspired to start a language school after teaching languages in a prisoner of war camp.
English UK noted that many bastions of the ELT sector had worked for Bell at some point in their careers. “We extend our sympathies to all of Bell’s staff, students and partners affected by this closure,” it said.
Despite the news, Japes asserted that English UK data monitoring showed the UK remained a resilient market for the ELT sector. In spite of “tough trading conditions”, English UK student numbers dipped just 0.6% between 2023 and 2024, he said.
“Unexpected closures do happen, but they are rare. Bell English’s financial set up was very unusual for our industry as it was run by a charitable foundation. This is a very sad closure, but we don’t see it as part of a wider trend,” he continued.
“We understand how shocking closures are to affected staff and students, and our student emergency scheme is here to help anyone affected complete their studies as planned. We encourage students and agents to continue booking English courses in the UK with confidence.”
The company noted that Bell Switzerland SA – of which Bell is the sole shareholder – would be unaffected by the closure and would continue operating as usual.
On Oct. 24, 1995, Duke University Press published my first book, The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack on Higher Education. Looking back 30 years at my book, it can be dispiriting to see how everything today seems the same, only worse. “Political correctness” has been replaced by “woke” as the smear of the moment, but otherwise almost every word of my book could be republished today, with a thousand new examples to buttress every point.
Sometimes the title of the book confused people who mix up a “myth” with a “lie.” As I noted 10 years ago, “When I called political correctness a ‘myth,’ I was never denying the fact that some leftists are intolerant jerks, and sometimes their appalling calls for censorship are successful. My point was that even though political correctness exists, the ‘myth’ about it was the story that leftists controlled college campuses, imposing their evil whims like a ‘new McCarthyism’ or ‘China during the Cultural Revolution.’ In reality, then and now, the far greater threat to freedom on campus came from those on the right seeking to suppress opposing views.”
I had been inspired to write the book by Dinesh D’Souza; I reviewed his best-selling 1991 book, Illiberal Education, for my column in the Daily Illini at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. If D’Souza, a recent college graduate, could publish such a terrible book full of misinformation, then surely I could write a better book. So I did.
But the publishing market was much more interested in the endless parade of conservatives bemoaning the “PC police” and “tenured radicals” than a refutation of these flawed arguments. My book, which I started to write as a graduate student in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago (home to Saul Bellow, Allan Bloom and Edward Shils), was rejected by more than 50 publishers before I was able to persuade Stanley Fish (whom I had encountered as the editor of Democratic Culture, the newsletter of Gerald Graff and Gregory Jay’s Teachers for a Democratic Culture) to publish it at Duke. My editor (and now also an Inside Higher Ed columnist) was Rachel Toor, who helped to make some sense of my ideas.
In the end, my book failed to shift the debate about academic freedom—not because it was wrong or the facts were refuted, but because it was ignored. From my perspective, I was correct about everything and nobody learned anything from me. And I’ve been writing essentially the same thesis, over and over again, in a second book and essays and hundreds of blog posts.
Looking back at my first book, I think its claims have been proven largely correct over the past three decades (but I might be biased). At the core of the book were the chapters on the “Myth of PC” (examining how many of the leading anecdotes about repression often weren’t accurate) and “Conservative Correctness” (showing the many examples of repression from the right that were ignored by the media and campus critics of PC).
The remaining chapters also still seem on target: “The Cult of Western Culture” (why multiculturalism isn’t taking over colleges and silencing traditional works, and Shakespeare isn’t being banned); “The Myth of Speech Codes” (colleges have always had speech codes, often worse ones using the arbitrary authority of a dean, and what we need are codes that protect free speech); “The Myth of Sexual Correctness” (sexual assault is a serious problem, and feminists often face suppression); and “The Myth of Reverse Discrimination” (white men are not the victims of campus oppression and the “fairy tale of equal opportunity” is false)
Michael Hobbes did an excellent episode of You’re Wrong Aboutin 2021 on political correctness that featured some of the ideas from my book. My position, then and now, is more nuanced than Hobbes’s view of PC as a pure right-wing moral panic. The panic was there, but so were real cases of repression—on both the left and the right.
The cartoonish right-wing belief that colleges had become Maoist institutions of oppression against conservatives prompted too many on the left (and the center) to counter that everything was fine on campus. In truth, free expression has been in serious danger, both against conservatives who were sometimes censored and against leftists who also faced repression. As bad as things seemed in 1995, the repression is far worse today and clearly aimed at the left—and yet the delusions about the PC police on campus are more widespread than ever.
Even in the face of the worst campus repression in American history, many conservatives continue to recite the old, tired myth of political correctness and leftist control of higher education—a myth repeated so often for so long has become a truth in the minds of many.
The worst strategic mistake progressives made in the past three decades was to abandon the cause of free speech. Too many leftists believed in the myth of political correctness; they heard the complaints about free speech and accepted the right-wing argument that only conservatives were being silenced and concluded that free speech was a right-wing plot. They imagined that tenured radicals controlled colleges because everybody said so, and so they clung to the delusion that they could support censorship and it wouldn’t be used against them.
When conservatives demanded free speech on campus, the left should have vigorously agreed and established strong protections for free expression on campus. Instead, they let the right win a propaganda war by pretending to be battling for free speech against the social justice warriors. And they lost the opportunity to make free speech a core principle established in higher education.
The war on political correctness succeeded because the enemies it targeted were weak, disorganized leftists who were not, in fact, plotting to destroy conservatives. By contrast, today the right wants to demolish higher education like it’s the East Wing of the White House, and it is willing to use its vast power to do that.
As bad as the skepticism on the left about free speech was, the right’s abandonment of free speech is much worse, both in the degree of rejection and in the impact it has on campuses. It didn’t matter if a leftist argued against free speech because they had essentially no power, on campus or off, to impose their ideas. They had no legislators joining their demands and no donors threatening to turn off the campus money spigot.
Critics of PC had many advantages on their side: Enormous money poured into building organizations and ideas that built the myth of PC, funding groups like the Federalist Society and the National Association of Scholars, and paying individual authors such as Bloom and D’Souza to write and publicize their books. A new media ecosystem of talk radio and the internet spread the myth of PC. And the war on PC recruited principled liberals and even progressives who objected to the excesses of the left.
It will be difficult for progressives to build anything similar. Wealthy donors tend to fund conservative groups, or prefer to put their names on fancy campus buildings. Universities are anxious to create free speech centers, but usually only the kind that conservatives support.
Few conservatives are willing to speak out against the Trump regime. And many centrists and liberals who have spent a generation obsessing about the PC police find it difficult to suddenly turn around and recognize the repression from the right that they’ve been ignoring for decades. A letter condemning the Trump administration’s compact signed by principled conservatives such as Robert George and Keith Whittington is a good start toward building an ideological coalition against right-wing censorship that matches what the right did against the “PC police.”
Today, we face the worst attack on academic freedom in American history, one that combines the overwhelming external power of state and federal governments, used for the first time to target free speech, and the internal power of a campus bureaucracy devoted to suppressing controversy.
Unlike political correctness—which often relied upon exaggerated accounts of dubious examples with marginal injustices—there are so many clear-cut cases of terrible repression and extreme violations of due process and academic freedom that it’s difficult for anyone to keep track of them all. The litigation strategy developed by the right of suing every censor is an important step. Telling and retelling the stories of campus censorship today is critical. So is organizing events, on and off campus, about the repression happening today, and challenging those on the right who defend their side’s censorship.
It’s not easy to find solutions when faced with this extraordinary censorship, with unprecedented dismissals and restrictions on speech. But the right-wing attack on political correctness, now over three decades old, offers liberals and progressives a guidebook for how to do it. Quote their words. Demand their reforms. Agree with them and confront their hypocrisy when they reject every free speech policy they’ve been demanding for the past three decades.
The myth of political correctness is still alive 30 years later, invoked to deny and justify the repression from the right. Understanding how the culture wars brought us to this point of authoritarianism is essential to leading us toward the goals of academic freedom and free expression on campus.
John K. Wilson was a 2019–20 fellow with the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement and is the author of eight books, including Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies (Routledge, 2008), and his forthcoming book The Attack on Academia. He can be reached at [email protected], or letters to the editor can be sent to [email protected].
