High school students will soon take part in a more than in American education: receiving yearbooks at the end of the school year.

OKLAHOMA CITY — Major changes to early childhood reading policies, including a return to strict third-grade retention, are now law in Oklahoma after .

Gov. Kevin Stitt signed while surrounded by state leaders and students at John W. Rex Charter Elementary on Tuesday morning. Multiple children at the downtown Oklahoma City school asked for the governor’s pens as a souvenir.

The legislation implements stricter requirements, starting in the 2026-27 academic year, for public schools to intervene when students fall behind grade-level expectations in reading. Third graders who score below a basic level on state reading tests and fail a second state-approved literacy assessment would be held back from advancing to fourth grade, unless they meet limited criteria for an exemption.

“This is about early support, strong instruction and giving parents the information that they need to stay involved in their child’s progress,” Stitt said. “And it ensures that when a student is struggling, we act quickly before that gap becomes a lifelong challenge.”

About 27% of Oklahoma students scored at or above their grade level in English language arts last school year while 36% scored below basic, . Below basic is the lowest category and indicates a student is not on track to be college or career ready by the end of high school.

Legislative leaders said they hope to , a former bottom-dweller in education rankings before it dramatically raised student reading scores after years of investment and stricter policies. Mississippi similarly requires low-scoring students to repeat third grade, has an expanded network of reading coaches and specialists, and spends $15 million a year on literacy initiatives.

“We can do better because Mississippi has done it, which shows that other states can as well,” House Speaker Kyle Hilbert, R-Bristow, said during the ceremony while accompanied by two of his young daughters.

It could take five years for Oklahoma to rise in national rankings, Hilbert said, though he suggested the state could see “improvement pretty quickly.”

SB 1778 passed with .

It establishes three tiers of reading instruction and support starting in kindergarten.

Tier 1 represents the core reading lessons all students receive. Children who score below their grade level qualify for Tier 2 and 3 interventions, such as small-group lessons, extra tutoring, summer programs and transitional classrooms, which would involve separate reading classes for students who have fallen behind.

Families also could choose to have their children repeat first or second grade.

Schools will be required to notify parents or guardians within 30 days of a student showing a reading deficiency and must give monthly updates on the child’s progress through an improvement plan.

“The idea here is that third-grade retention is not the actual tool for learning,” Stitt’s education secretary, Dan Hamlin, said. “It’s a last resort after many other efforts have unfolded.”

The state, for the first time, will administer the annual third-grade reading exam to second graders to give students an early opportunity to pass and avoid retention the following year.

The new law lays out good-cause exemptions for students to continue to fourth grade despite poor reading results.

Students whose individualized education plan “indicates that participation in the statewide student assessment system is not appropriate” would qualify. Exemptions also would apply to children who have spent fewer than two years learning English as their non-native language.

Children who have been retained twice between kindergarten and third grade would be eligible for a good-cause exemption, as would students with disabilities who have repeated a grade once.

The state budget, , adds more than $26 million to a fund that supports literacy instruction in public schools. The total $43.75 million Strong Readers Act Fund will dedicate 40% of its money to Tier 1 instruction across the state, 30% for students needing Tier 2 and 3 support, and 30% to reward districts that improve their reading scores.

The budget also adds $100 million to raise all teachers’ minimum salaries by $2,000.

Lawmakers dedicated $5 million to expand a team of literacy coaches at the Oklahoma State Department of Education. The team will grow from five to 20 literacy coaches, who assist educators in improving reading instruction and will prioritize low-performing schools.

State Superintendent Lindel Fields, who leads the Education Department, said the agency will begin hiring for the team immediately. His administration also will start preparing a new early literacy micro-credential program, called “teacher academies,” with Oklahoma colleges and universities.

SB 1778 requires all districts to employ a reading specialist, reading interventionist or staff member who has completed the micro-credential program, which will focus on the science of reading and best instructional practices. Any certified school employee who completes the micro-credential would receive a $3,000 stipend from the Education Department.

“The bill gets signed today, but the real work starts tomorrow morning,” Fields said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janelle Stecklein for questions: info@oklahomavoice.com.

Gov. Brad Little has officially lost support of the teachers’ union after he earlier this month.

The Idaho Education Association (IEA) issued a vote of no confidence in the Republican governor over the weekend. Members “overwhelmingly” supported the motion as part of IEA’s Delegate Assembly, the union’s annual business meeting, according to a news release.

The rebuke comes after Little signed , legislation that heavily restricts the ways school districts can accommodate a broad range of “union activities.”

“Our members have spoken clearly,” IEA President Layne McInelly said in the news release. “They are angry and frustrated with the governor. They feel his choice to sign House Bill 516, when there were so many reasons to veto it, is a betrayal of his claims to be a supporter of Idaho’s educators and public schools.”

In a statement through a spokesperson Tuesday, Little pointed to billions of dollars in “transformative investments” in public schools that he has supported in recent years. Little also listed the investments in an April 10  explaining that he signed HB 516, despite concerns with the bill.

“I have always valued the critical role educators play in shaping our students’ success,” Little said by email Tuesday. “We have made significant improvements by increasing state support for education by nearly 70% since I took office, including major gains in teacher pay and benefits. I remain focused on building on that progress and will continue working with educators to strengthen our schools and support student outcomes across Idaho.”

IEA members endorsed Little in the 2018 general election and during the 2022 GOP primary. Little is running for reelection this year — this time, without the union’s support amid a crowded primary field.

The last time IEA publicly withdrew its support for an elected leader was in 2024. The union of Rep. Ted Hill, R-Eagle, after he sponsored bills “that ran directly counter to IEA members’ pro-public education policy priorities and IEA member interests.”

Union members over the weekend also contemplated revoking Little’s “Champion of Education” award but kept it in place. Little received the recognition in 2024. Other recent winners include former Rep. Julie Yamamoto, a Republican from Caldwell (2023); Quinn Perry, deputy director of the Idaho School Boards Association (2025); and former Rep. Jack Nelsen, a Republican from Jerome (2026).

“The governor should not share this award with people who truly champion education and our members,” IEA organizer Peggy Hoy said in the news release.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Idaho Capital Sun maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Christina Lords for questions: info@idahocapitalsun.com.

Knox County Schools looked like it was doing everything right.

The district was using a well-regarded, evidence-based curriculum to teach students how to read. Young students who struggled got intensive tutoring using high-quality supplemental materials. Tutoring sessions took place during the school day, ensuring high participation.

But the 60,000-student district in eastern Tennessee wasn’t seeing the results from tutoring that leaders had hoped for. Erin Phillips, the district’s executive director of learning and literacy, decided to try something new: ask tutors to use materials that matched what students were learning in the classroom.

Working with outside researchers during the 2024-25 school year, Knox County Schools randomly assigned more than 300 early elementary students who fell below the 40th percentile on a universal literacy screener into two groups. One group received tutoring using the district’s usual supplemental materials. The other got tutoring using materials that were aligned with the district’s core curriculum, Benchmark Advance.

The results, described in a , were striking. Students who received tutoring that aligned with classroom instruction made more progress, the equivalent of an additional 1.3 months of learning, compared with students in the control group whose tutoring sessions used supplemental materials.

This approach and the outcome might sound like common sense. But it goes against a widespread way of thinking about intervention, that if students didn’t learn the material well in class, they might benefit from new ways of approaching it or different explanations of the same concepts.

But the study suggests the opposite was true, that teachers and tutors may have inadvertently confused students by, for example, teaching different letter sounds in different orders or referring to the “magic e” in one setting and the “silent e” in another.

The findings are important as school districts look for ways to make tutoring more effective with limited dollars. School districts were urged by experts and officials to invest in high-intensity or high-dosage tutoring, generally defined as occurring at least three times a week and for 10 weeks or longer, as an evidence-based way to address pandemic-related learning loss. But large-scale tutoring programs often .

The education sector jargon for what Knox County is doing is “coherence.” That’s simultaneously an increasingly popular buzzword and a .

In Knox County’s case, “What we were asking our most at-risk learners to do is carry the heaviest cognitive load,” Phillips said. “We were calling the same thing by different names in every learning experience. We were overloading their ability not only to have that knowledge in their brain, but to retrieve that information, not only retrieve it, but then apply it, and then transfer it from place to place.”

Using aligned materials, in contrast, lightens their cognitive load and gives them more opportunity to practice the same skills covered in class, she said.

Knox County students using aligned materials also did better on state standardized tests, according to the study from Jackson and Shakeel, though the difference was not statistically significant.

Tennessee is in its fifth year of a major early literacy initiative that includes teacher training, state-approved curriculum lists, mandatory tutoring for certain students, and holding back students who don’t meet certain benchmarks by third grade.

Stanford University’s National Student Support Accelerator’s notes that alignment seems like it would be good practice but doesn’t have a strong research base. Jackson, research manager at the Center for Outcomes Based Contracting, said she wanted to address that gap with a randomized controlled trial.

“We were testing something lots of people very much believed would be true, and that a lot of people have talked about for a long time,” she said.

Jackson said she hopes other researchers try to replicate her findings in other settings and with larger groups of students.

Phillips is moving to adopt more aligned curriculums across subjects and grades. She’s also continuing to closely monitor student learning, including whether fewer students score in the bottom quartile or are referred for special education evaluation.

She said the study results shed light on a long-standing problem in the district.

“We had a decade’s worth of data showing us that students were not exiting intervention,” she said. “They were becoming intervention lifers. That’s not the intention of this support. All this data was showing that this was not working.”

Different curriculum choices can create an unhelpful ‘lasagna’

Many factors have nudged districts away from using aligned curriculum for students in intervention services, according to TNTP, a school improvement consulting organization that worked with Knox County.

Large established publishing houses dominate the market for core curriculum, while dozens of smaller companies fill in the gaps. When states draw up lists of approved curriculum, core and supplemental materials might go through different approval processes, and districts might not see materials from the same company on both lists.

Grants might also require districts to pick materials from certain vendors, contributing to a proliferation of different learning materials that take different tacks.

“We build this lasagna of program over program over program,” said Devon Gadow, TNTP’s director of national consulting.

Surveys by the research organization Rand Corp. found that , with the average teacher reporting they used two core curriculums and five supplemental curriculums.

And a found more than 350 different supplemental math products in use across 1,700 school districts. These same school districts chose from fewer than 20 core curriculum options.

While districts often put significant time and attention into assessing core curriculum options before making a decision, they adopted supplemental materials in an ad hoc way, in part because the contracts were shorter and less expensive, the analysis found.

TNTP is to look at ways they may be steering districts away from using more-aligned materials. The group also wants district leaders to look at what they already have in their arsenal that they could redeploy.

Gadow said district officials should be wary of marketing pitches based on coherence or alignment. They may not need to buy something new as long as they’re already using high-quality materials.

Core curriculum often includes materials to support scaffolding, remediation, and intervention, Gadow said, but classroom teachers don’t have the time to read through every page and develop lessons for struggling students. That’s work that central office staff could take on.

In Knox County, Phillips said teachers had developed a habit of using supplemental materials in the past when the district’s core curriculum wasn’t as good. Those habits were hard to break, in part because those past experiences led teachers to distrust that any core curriculum could cover all the necessary ground.

Phillips spent roughly $1.4 million from what remained of Knox County’s pandemic relief on aligned supplemental materials from Benchmark at the beginning of the study period. But if she had it to do over again, she would have looked more closely at what already existed in the core curriculum, she said. That’s what she’s doing now for other subjects. Most teachers are on board with the change, she said.

Meanwhile, she’s phasing out materials from other publishers as licenses expire, saving money going forward.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and Department of Education and Workforce Director Stephen Dackin have announced the launch of a statewide Attendance Dashboard in an effort to combat chronic absenteeism in K-12 public schools. 

Over 25% of Ohio students were chronically absent last year, missing nearly one month of school. 

A student is considered chronically absent in Ohio when they miss at least 10% of the minimum number of hours required in the school year, including excused and unexcused absences, according to the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce.

The dashboard announced last week is an that compiles self-reported data from districts and schools across the state, aiming to assist administrators, parents, and taxpayers in identifying trends in attendance patterns down to the grade level.

It will update weekly as more schools report their data. 

The dashboard is organized on a trend line that allows users to see the weekly percentage of statewide absenteeism. It can be viewed from the district down to grade levels of individual schools, with customizable features comparing specific absentee rates.

Dackin said this feature was designed with the intention of allowing districts to learn from each by these comparisons. 

The launch comes after DeWine’s emphasis on improving the lives of children during his address. During his final stretch in office, the dashboard is seemingly another step towards rounding out his agenda. 

“When students are not in school they are not learning, and the consequences are significant,” DeWine said. “Chronic absence isn’t just a school problem, it is a community problem, it is a state problem. It is also a parent problem.”  

Ohio is the second state to have a system that updates so frequently, Dackin said.

While districts and schools are not mandated to share their data, he said the more information that is provided will allow administrators to identify the root causes of chronic absenteeism, as they can widely differ between grade levels.  

“This helps communities understand the interventions needed at a particular grade level, and what kind of supports would be necessary based on the age group of young people,” Dackin said. 

As of last week, 24% of Ohio’s districts and schools’ data is unreported, including Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland Public School Districts, who have some of the highest rates of chronic absenteeism.

“We’re working actually with a lot of those districts,” Dackin said. “We do not have a unified data system in this state, so one of the challenges we have is there are different data systems that have to talk to this system. Many of these 24% districts, we are actively working with them to solve and resolve those technical problems.”

DeWine pointed to East Cleveland City Schools as a prime example of the benefits of attendance tracking, who used its attendance data to proactively reach out to chronically absent students and their families, which reduced its chronic absenteeism by over 10%.

He said the tracking also helped them identify key reasons why students were absent, including transportation barriers, health issues and difficult home situations.  

“We urge every school in Ohio to join the dashboard,” DeWine said. “The more data each school and community have the more innovative and collaborative they can be to solve this huge problem in Ohio.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com.

In this episode of Class Disrupted, hosts Michael Horn and Diane Tavenner turn from schools powered by artificial intelligence to the tools themselves.

Matt Pasternak, founder and CEO of , shares the company’s journey from its low-tech beginnings to an AI-powered platform for early reading instruction. Pasternak shares how Once now delivers effective, personalized one-on-one tutoring through software, while emphasizing the importance of human connection in the learning process.

Listen to the episode below. A full transcript follows.

Diane Tavenner: Hey Michael.

Michael Horn: Hey, Diane. Good to see you after a few episodes, diving deep into school models and thinking all about AI and what it enables today.

Diane Tavenner: Indeed, we are going to shift gears a bit today, not away from AI because based on all the emails, the calls, the feedback we’re getting, this is the thing folks are thinking about and talking about. And so we’re sticking with AI. Rather, we’re going to shift away from AI school models, full school models, and infrastructure to how AI is being used directly by and with teachers and students and in classrooms. And so I think this is going to be a really interesting other dimension of what’s happening.

Michael Horn: Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, we thought this was the next logical place to go. Everyone says if you’re not changing the classroom at some point, you’re not changing much. And so we wanted to go into that classroom and explore how a small number of folks, entrepreneurs, are thinking about really how do we use AI in classrooms without the entire school itself or the system around it being changed. And so this is it. I’m really excited for this conversation. Someone we’ve both known for a long time and get to go deeper on it Diane.

Diane Tavenner: A very long time. I’m really excited today to welcome Matt Pasternak to the conversation. I was trying to think about when we met Matt, but it feels like so long ago. I can’t even remember at this point, because you, you actually were early at School of One, which is now Teach to One as a director of assessment. And then you went and you were on the founding team of Clever, which many people will know as a tool that effectively connected edtech products to student information systems. So this really critical infrastructure piece that enabled so much of what we now sort of take for granted in terms of technology. And then most recently, you’re the founder and CEO of Once, which is a company that leverages, well, I’m going to say what I think it is, and then we’re going to get into it. You’re going to really describe it for us.

A company that leverages the research around tutoring by using reading-based software and human people to teach 3 to 7-year-olds to read. And so we’re just grateful to have you here. Thanks for joining us.

Matt Pasternak: I’m thrilled to be here. I’ve known you both for quite some time, and it’s really an honor to be on the show.

Michael Horn: Well, we’re thrilled you’re making the time for us. So let’s dig into it. As Diane mentioned, you are working on solving a problem that we’ve talked about on this podcast historically, which is teaching reading, something that there’s a lot of evidence around how to do. But as Diane said, before tackling this reading challenge, you helped build Clever. And it does feel like a big shift from, if you will, school infrastructure to teaching, learning, curriculum. Maybe it’s back to your roots in some sense from School of One. But tell us about the origin story of Once and your own personal why for building it.

Rethinking Early Reading Education

Matt Pasternak: Sure, sure. Well, I’ll share two things. You know, one is that, you know, very early in my edtech career, before Clever, I worked on some projects that were very, very expansive in what they tried to accomplish, and both on the data infrastructure side as well as on the curriculum side. And it was sort of the heady days of the late aughts or early 2000s, and then the early 2010s, excuse me. And sort of this belief, if you just sprinkled a little bit of technology or software magic on things, education, everything would just work. And there were these really exciting analogies to Netflix’s personalization. I’m sure you remember those days. And so I spent some time trying to boil the ocean.

And then after that, I just kind of made an abrupt turn and never looked back. And I said, look, I want to work on specific problems in education. And the first one was what Clever tackled. It was an area I had a lot of insight into from some of those earlier explorations on, you know, the specific problems that rostering and single sign-on presented to schools, and particularly schools trying to adopt software in varying ways. After Clever, I kind of went in a little bit of a different direction for a while, focused on voting. And then in the sort of early to mid-pandemic, I was catching up with an old friend of mine who had been a teacher in the same school where I taught after college, and we were talking about how during the early pandemic, both of our kids who are kindergarten age were out of school because schools shut down. And yet both of them learned to read in that year out of school.

Now, my wife is a former kindergarten teacher, and so I was like, oh, I had an unfair advantage, you know? I mean, she had sort of one-on-one tutoring from a kindergarten teacher. Missing kindergarten, but, you know, my close friend was a former middle school teacher, and, you know, it’s not like he had been working on that expertise forever, but he said, yeah, you know, structured 15-minute lessons every day, you know, his child learned to read, and we just sort of stepped back from it and said, wait, you know, for as long as anyone can remember, we’ve been teaching kids to read, attempting to teach kids to read, in these sort of 30-person classrooms, and, you know the numbers, and in sort of any education environment, about half of kids, if given some of the right foundation, will learn to read to some extent. And so any teacher can look at their progress and say, well, some of my kids are learning to read, it’s working. But if you want all of your kids to learn to read, you know, you can’t say that what’s happening today is working, because we’ve had flat NAEP scores for decades. And so we just started to kind of think really big picture and say, you know, what would happen if every kindergartner got the education that our two kids had gotten in the early pandemic, which is just 15 minutes a day of one-on-one reading instruction. And initially, we actually wanted to avoid schools, avoid K-12. We said, look, the sales process in the K-12 is so complicated. Let’s do something different.

Let’s actually focus on, because preschool, you know, research was just coming out about how early the brain starts developing. For where children begin, you know, learning, you know, are able to learn to interpret written language. And then as we start to explore the preschool route, we realized that that was probably even harder than K-12. And so we kind of returned to our roots and started in a charter school, actually was our first implementation, and basically just said, hey, can we put a couple people in the back of this TK classroom and teach, you know, have them provide daily one-on-one tutoring to the students to help them learn how to read. And we had some amazing success stories, and, you know, it was just a couple-month pilot. There was a child who, a child who came to school every day, you know, lots of home context, crying and kind of hiding under his desk and did not want to be in school, And it still makes me kind of emotional to tell the story, but, you know, even a month or two in, he was sort of opening up to school and responding to school, and people asked him, you know, what had changed, and he said it was the one-on-one tutoring he was getting every single day. You know, and that’s a 5-year-old who, you know, that’s going to determine the next, you know, the rest of his life, essentially. And so, you know, we kind of took that and said, and the folks who were providing the tutoring, had not had background as reading tutors.

That was really important to us, because we said there just aren’t enough kinds of trained reading specialists in the country to do this at a scale of 4 million kids a year. So you need a method that allows any adult to access material and provide this instruction. And then we had this really interesting call with Portland Public Schools, and this is kind of right after that first, right as that pilot was winding down. And we were talking to them, and they said, well, you know, we can’t, you know, we can’t afford to, you know, sort of put all these other people, you know, pay you to bring all these other people into schools and teach kids how to read. We don’t even know where you’d source them. But they said, look, we have tons of instructional assistants. That was a position that they had at the time who were supposed to be working on reading in the early grades. You know, could we use this type of program with them? And that was kind of our lightbulb moment because we said, look, you know, we are, we’re not an HR company, right? We have no expertise in how do you hire, you know, tens of thousands of tutors all over the country to provide this instruction.

We, you know, attempted it in some pilots and literally were unable to source even like a couple tutors in some metropolitan areas. And so we said, We want to work with the staff the school already has. And that really, that, you know, that conversation launched everything. We did not win that deal. We did not end up serving Portland Public Schools. It was okay. That learning that they gave us in that phone call was, you know, worth its weight in gold. And I’ll always be grateful to them for that experience and taking the time with us at that early stage in our journey.

Diane Tavenner: Matt, I love that we’re going to get sprinkled into this conversation, this bonus of just what it’s like to try to build something and sell the schools and whatnot. So that’s really fun to hear that piece. Listening to your origin story, people might be saying, wait a minute, you’re spending this season talking about AI and education, but it doesn’t seem like Once is related to technology even, or AI. And in fact, you began in that pandemic period. So before the sort of famous release of ChatGPT in November 2022. And so, you know, as a guy who at face value seems to have been tech-forward, what was your sort of original hypothesis and approach to making sure, you know, to just sort of going what it seems like a full human approach to reading? And is there technology in here anywhere?

Matt Pasternak: Yeah, so it’s a great question. I think it has, there’s a two-part answer. There. The first is that one thing we were certain of from day one was that young children learn best from adults, like actual in-person human-to-human instruction. You know, for millions of years, you know, our species and the predecessors of our species have been, you know, teaching children to identify different berries and, you know, what animal is going to hurt them and which ones are safe and, you know, how to survive. And that was all done, millions of years of evolution. For, you know, in-person communication between an adult and a child, where the child was highly motivated to learn because the stakes were life and death. And sort of the idea that you would deviate away from that just sort of seems somewhat crazy on its face to us.

Matt Pasternak: So that was the motivation for, you know, you need to build trusting relationships with adults, and, you know, technology is scalable in a way that people sometimes aren’t. So how can we apply technology? But let’s do it in a way that deepens that connection and doesn’t attempt to replace the connection or build a kind of robot teacher. You know, the other piece of this was that I’ve had the privilege in my career, I’m not a software engineer, but I’ve had the privilege to work with, you know, some very, very, very incredible software engineers. And what I’ve often noticed is that when you start working with some of these folks, the first thing they’ll say is, hey, let’s build a version of this product in Google Slides or Google Docs or Google Sheets. Let’s build something that’s throwaway, but that we can learn from because we’re going to waste too much time. This is a little bit before the days of live coding, but we’ll waste too much time coding something up. Let’s be really, really lean in terms of how we want to model what we want to accomplish. And so our perspective at the beginning was, That’s what we want to do.

We literally started in, you know, Google Slides and Google Sheets were essentially our technology. And, you know, funders who were interested in tech staff basically ignored us because we weren’t very technical. But the one thing we said we were going to do from day one is we wanted to record every single instructional session that was given. So even though we’re talking about recordings on Google Meet, we sort of knew where things were going. I mean, yes, you hadn’t had these massive releases of OpenAI and various things, but AI was in the air, the late teens, it was in the air. Folks knew where this was going. Technology was going to fundamentally change. And we just had this belief that if you had hundreds of thousands, millions of hours of recordings of adults teaching kids to read, even if you had no other technology, that you could then, one day run software over that archive and begin to do things that others would say, oh my gosh, I wish I had this sort of database, but I don’t.

So that was, I think those were kind of the two key decisions and motivations for that early, less technical beginning.

Michael Horn: Well, so let me actually jump in there then, Matt. Let’s fast forward us to where you are now. So you’re not going to be an HR solution. You say we’re not in that business. You have all these recordings. What does Once look like today? What does it do? How’s it maybe similar, different from, you know, those initial, put aside the very early pilots, but, you know, once you sort of got on the ground and running, tell us how it’s evolved from that?

Matt Pasternak: Yeah. So what we do today is we serve sort of two different audiences. We serve school districts and we actually serve parents at home. And so I can kind of talk about those a little bit in turn. But what we do, I’ll start with school districts. In school districts, we solve two interlinked problems. One problem that we solve is that there are too many kids in school districts who have not effectively learned how to read. And sometimes I think the best evidence of that is when you have, you know, middle schools or high schools saying, hey, we figured out what we have to do differently.

Phonics and Staff Upskilling Initiative

Matt Pasternak: We have to start really emphasizing phonics in 7th and 8th grade or high school. It’s like, on the one hand, great. Kids who haven’t learned that do need to learn it, but that’s the evidence of an enormous problem, because there’s really kind of 1 to 2 years of phonics to learn, and if you’ve had 9 years of schooling and that’s like, that’s the set of activities, that indicates just a huge, a huge, you know, a huge mess basically in the early grades. So one problem is reading, and the other problem is a lack of career ladder for entry-level staff in schools, which is also a really important problem because schools are having tremendous challenges finding a large enough teaching staff to teach the children in school. And so we said, let’s solve both those problems at once. By providing coaching and curriculum to elementary school support staff, you know, paraprofessionals, teaching assistants, instructional assistants, you know, there’s a number of different roles, as long as they’re not lead classroom teacher, because then they have to oversee 20 or 30 kids. By providing curriculum and coaching to those folks, we can upskill them to the point where anyone can provide one-on-one tutoring daily for 15 minutes to, you know, kindergartners is where we focus. We do some TK and first grade, but kindergarten’s really our focus, provide 15 minutes of daily instruction to those children.

And what this looks like, you know, kind of from a technology perspective, ‘cause again, we started very low-tech, we’re now, we are a software solution today. And what this looks like is the child and the paraprofessional sit down side by side in front of an open laptop computer, We call it, we teach the parents how to build a one-desk classroom. So they have their desk, it’s all set up with the physical materials they need and their laptop computer, they sit right there. A ton of work has gone into that organization. And on the screen is, on one part of the screen is what the child’s looking at, on the other part of the screen is the script for the adult. And the adult is basically going through the script and the child is responding to the script and looking at their part of the screen. And going through a number of different science of reading-based exercises and tasks that teach the child how to read. And the adult is using a fair amount of judgment in there as well, you know, identifying when are children saying things the wrong way, when are they saying things the right way, how do you keep children motivated through this process, but the kind of focus is what’s happening on the screen.

And then we record those sessions and we provide coaching. We have a national team of coaches who then watch those recordings, and provide feedback to the paraprofessionals about how to improve, you know, essentially how to improve their instruction. Like you’re basically watching game tape of yourself and using that to improve your instructional techniques. So that’s sort of a big piece of what we do.

Diane Tavenner: Super interesting, Matt. Can you, so you’re starting in this very low-tech way with these Google spreadsheets and slides and, you know, basically prototyping what you’re gonna do. And If I remember correctly, you were videoing and then literally like doing training calls with those folks, you know, like, oh, we watch your video and let’s coach you up on this essentially. And now that’s, that’s a much more seamless software experience as you just described. Take us to that moment where AI becomes the reality and you’ve made this really smart bet and you have all these recordings. How does AI figure in here? And we’re trying to be really thoughtful. We’ve recognized that people use the word AI or whatever that is, acronym AI, to describe almost everything, like this massive range. So the specificity is super helpful of like how you actually use it here and what role it is playing.

Matt Pasternak: So we use it in a couple of ways. All of our AI is behind the scenes. there’s, So you know, this is not a chatbot. This is not, you know, either the paraprofessional asking a quick question, wait, how do I do this? Or obviously the student doing that because, you know, they couldn’t use a chatbot, they don’t know how to type yet. It’s all behind the scenes. One key way that it’s used is we are able to administer oral reading fluency tests very, very frequently on the students because we’re capturing the full session. And so then we you know, we have, have all the data, the speech data, the transcript data from that session, And so we can go and we can evaluate oral reading fluency. You know, in a typical classroom, elementary school classroom, if they use some, you know, assessment like DIBELS, the teacher might do 3 oral reading fluency assessments during the year, once the beginning, the middle, and the end.

Each one takes roughly a month because the teacher has to pull each kid aside one-on-one and administer this test. And so it’s like 3 months, you know, of instruction to some extent are spent not providing instruction, but performing these tests. And that’s just, you know, that’s not the best use of teachers’ time. And so simply by just having all the kids individually learning on camera, we’re able to run these tests in the background, and we have you know, results, every 2 weeks. So that’s a really important piece of AI. Again, the parents may have no idea that AI is even involved in that, and that’s great. Like, this is not you know, sort of that Gemini sparkle in the corner. This is just like, no, it’s actually just making the experience seamless.

Connected Phonation and AI Learning

Matt Pasternak: The next thing that we do is we’re huge fans of what’s called connected phonation. Again, if I’m going too deep into Tales of Literacy, let me know. But you basically, know, a lot in, in some systems, even sort of science of reading evidence-based systems, there’s a lot of focus on kind of tapping out individual sounds. So if I want to say the word bat, it would be the /b/ sound, the /æ/ sound, the /t/ sound. And when you teach a child like, oh, you just sort of say /b/, /æ/, /t/. And it’s like, well, that’s bat. Like, that doesn’t sound like bat. That sounds like /æ/t/.

You know, it sounds like these sort of disconnected sounds. And you can, you know, that is again one way that people teach it. But I think the more modern approach that, you know, University of Florida and others have really emphasized is connected phonation. So you’re not, if a B and an A come sequentially, you’re gonna teach a child to go, ba, like that B is kind of a quick sound and then they’re gonna go right into that long A sound and they’re always gonna do that when they see those sounds in sequence. They connect those sounds. Well, not only do we have audio of what’s happening in the lesson, but we also have little sliders underneath the words, and so a child can move the slider while they’re saying the word, And we can use AI to really notice things about, you know, is the child’s finger actually tracking what they’re saying? How much are they connecting? Are they pausing in the right places? Because some kids, you know, maybe they know the word “bat,” so they just want to jump in and say it really fast. Well, that’s great for that word, but you don’t then learn the fundamental skills that will help you read much more complex words. So, you know, evaluating something like how quickly does a child’s finger move on the screen is another beautiful application of AI?

Then really for us, the last one, it seems obvious, but it’s just using AI to write code. It’s just we are able to move 10 times as fast on 10x fewer resources as we would be able to otherwise before this moment in time. We wouldn’t be able to do what we do without AI assisting in development. But I’ll say, sort of one level deeper is, you know, where does it go from here? Is it just these sort of fluency tests and, you know, kind of tracking fingers on the screen? You know, as we progress, you know, you can really use AI to evaluate, you know, student fluency in real time, right? How did they just pronounce that word that was just said? This is a much harder technical problem than it sounds like because while the tech world has made huge advances in interpreting adult speech, where you basically try and eliminate the errors to turn some garbled thing an adult says into something intelligible. With kids, you want the opposite. You actually want to figure out which of those sounds when they pronounce that word was incorrect. Rather than automated speech recognition, you want automated phoneme recognition. And if you ask, you know, folks who are really deep in that world, everyone will admit we don’t have good automated phoneme recognition today.

It’s just not there yet. But we have, again, the video archives that will let us build towards that. So we’re very, very excited about that. You can also begin to use AI to you connect, know, reading, many folks regard as multiple strands. So there’s comprehension, there’s, you know, there’s phonics, there’s phonemic awareness, there’s these different elements of it. And so how is a child progressing on these different strands, and how does progress on one strand kind of influence what you would want to teach them next? So really, that sort of learning engineering And then the final piece, just to kind of fill out the story, is, you know, a lot of folks will tell you, I’ve heard on your episodes before, that, you know, 90% of learning is motivation, you know, 10% of the technology, the curriculum, but most of it is really the motivation. You know, we have, if you want to learn, between YouTube and all the different educational apps out there, like, there’s never been a better time in history to learn, and yet we see, you know, essentially flat performance over the decades. Well, one way to motivate both learners, but even more importantly, their teachers, is to show them a highlight reel of like what’s gone really well.

Well, it is prohibitively expensive for us to, you know, manually curate a highlight reel of every session of instruction. But if a pair has taught 10 kids and at the end of that day, or 20 kids, know, you they get to see, hey, here’s a 30-second recap of like your best aha moments during the day, I am coming in tomorrow. I’m not gonna call out sick. I’m not gonna do anything else. I’m going to do it, and I’m going to kind of push those kids as far as I can take them. And so that might be the most magical application of AI at all, not even kind of automated phoneme recognition, but just literally highlight reels of the incredible instruction we’re seeing.

Diane Tavenner: That’s fascinating because we’ve had several conversations about motivation here, and I personally have felt kind of unsatisfied about those conversations. So this actually seems like a really amazing use of the technology related to motivation. Let me ask you about something that comes up, I think, a lot in the reading conversations, dare I say the reading wars, which is this idea that kids need to be reading things that they’re interested in and that they care about and that they’re motivated by, you know, those sorts of things. When you’re in this early stage of teaching reading, are you personalizing what the kids are reading at all? Does that matter? You know, is technology supporting that? What’s going on there?

Matt Pasternak: Yeah, it’s a great question. We are definitely keeping an eye on the ability of AI to generate what we would call, or what many people in this sort of industry would call, decodables, which are texts that students are able to decode. A lot of times things are called decodables, that actually aren’t decodable to the student. So one thing that’s really interesting about reading is that, you know, you might think, well, if a kid, you know, if they can read 75% of the words, like, that’s probably good enough. Like, that’s better than not, you know, being able to read 10% of the words or something. But actually, comprehension often requires, like, being able to read 90 to 95% of the words. So if you want to build decodable texts, like, there is not really a margin for error. You need to make sure that kids are reading text with words that they are able to decode.

Doesn’t mean they’ve memorized those words. I’m not talking about sight words, but they’re able to decode those words. And the challenge of reading English, not true of all languages, but English, is that, you know, a single letter can have many different sounds depending on what other letters are around it and kind of how it’s positioned. And so if you just tell a computer, build stories using this letter or you know, using this sequence of letters, it will often inadvertently pull in the wrong, pull in the words that the kid isn’t able to decode. Well, if it pulls in one of those, maybe that’s OK, they can figure it out from context. But if you’ve got, you know, a page with 15 words and 5 of them aren’t decodable, like, this decodable is not decodable. And that’s where kids can lose motivation. So it’s deeply interlaced with this concept of motivation.

So we’re keeping an eye on it. We don’t think it’s quite there yet. At the age that we’re working at. You know, I know some people working in higher grade levels, and I don’t have the expertise there, but in the kind of 3 to 6-year-old grade level, we are very, very carefully still hand-curating stories at this point.

Michael Horn: It’s fascinating, Matt, because as you alluded to, there’s this huge conversation around can you level reading? And, you know, some of that is directed at particular publishers that tried to do it in a way that was not related to Decodables, and some of it is just a broader conversation. I’m taking some new information away from this conversation, so I appreciate that. Let me shift though, rather than go too deep in that, because one of the other things that you’re doing, I think, is pushing on how AI can start to redefine the role of the educator themselves, right? In some ways, you have AI, it seems, making sure that they stick to what’s the evidence around how to teach reading the best, right? So that we’re not getting too far ahead of ourselves or freelancing in ways that may be detrimental. Then you’re also deferring to judgment, it seems, for the educator around that motivation piece and what they’re seeing on the ground with the kid in ways that you just can’t pick up with technology today. Help us understand that shift over the time around what you think that Reading Coach ultimately is and that split between technology, the human judgment, and how that gets redefined. Maybe we make it easier, frankly, or more people can be great reading coaches in the future?

Empowering Adults to Teach Reading

Matt Pasternak: Yeah, yeah, it’s a great question. It’s a great question. You know, our vision is that any adult, and by adult, actually broadened to older teenagers, are able to teach children how to read. And I think if, you know, if you look, you know, we sometimes cite a stat that, you know, 95% of kids are taught, you know, the ABCs by their parents or guardians, right? It’s like parents and guardians, they’re trying to do the right thing, They just don’t know what to do. Like teaching a child the ABCs, for a couple kids will teach them to read, for almost all other kids, it will not teach them to read. And so, and so they have, they’re motivated, they know how important this is, they don’t know what to do. So we want any adult, doesn’t matter if English is your second language, it doesn’t matter, you know, if you’ve struggled to read yourself, like we want to empower any adult to be able to teach any child. Now, you know, you do sometimes, there are conflicts where, do I want to give the adult who’s delivering the instruction more autonomy so they can kind of grow more in their career, or I want to remove a little judgment and make it a little more scripted? And I think over time you’ll see dials in our system where you can kind of dial it up and down either way.

Because once you get to the point where it’s just the computer speaking, well, now you’re back to just computer education with an adult patiently sitting there. That’s not how kids learn to distinguish berries, right? Like, we’re actually, we’ve gone too far. So the adult needs to be really, really involved in that teaching, but, you know, understanding their capacity and what they feel like, you know, sort of, you know, because it’s not just reading a script. It’s, you know, the hardest thing in teaching reading is what do you do when a kid makes a mistake, right? Like, we have a whole sort of flowchart, a whole approach we take when a child makes a mistake decoding. And being able to implement something like that is hard. And so software can help. Our biggest innovation kind of in this regard, which is something that we’ve just started to roll out recently, is no longer restricting this actual teaching to paraprofessionals or instructional assistants or existing support staff at the school, but actually broadening that circle to older high school students. That’s where I sort of hinted at teenagers.

And it is, we’ve just gotten started here, so we, you know, we are learning as much as they are. But I’ve seen some pictures and I’ve seen some videos of a high school student sitting down next to a kindergartner, teaching them to read, with the, you know, the little kindergartner just eyes full of adoration. You know, this is not a teacher, this is someone who they deeply look up to, this, an older kid who actually cares about them. And it is so inspiring. And if we had a world where our high school students could knock out reading specialization for a large number of our kindergartners, I mean, I think it would change it.

Michael Horn: Generational impact would be huge.

Diane Tavenner: I mean, yeah, when you called me with this idea, Matt, I haven’t stopped thinking about it since because I think that this is the type of thinking that we need in education right now because this checks so many boxes. I mean, not only are we putting multi-age groups together and learning, right, but we are giving, let’s talk about the impact on the high school student here who feels a sense of worth and purpose and is actually doing an early job, gaining real experience coaching and developing person. Who knows where that could possibly lead? And then you have this brilliant idea of enabling them to be entrepreneurial. Like, imagine a neighborhood where teenagers in the summer sort of have the Once tool and they can open their own little neighborhood business teaching kids to read in the summer. Like, I love this so much for so many reasons. It’s really brilliant.

Matt Pasternak: Yeah, I appreciate that. I mean, we are, you know, again, we’re learning so much right now. But the response, you know, I mentioned I kind of joked earlier about, you know, selling to school districts and how hard that was. And I mean, it really is every entrepreneur’s challenge. And in K-12, you know, there are these magic moments when school districts don’t become hard to sell to. It’s really hard to find those products. Like, it is extremely hard. Clever was one of them.

Student-Led Reading Program Growth

Matt Pasternak: I mean, Clever just blossomed across the country, and it was so exciting to see, you know, sort of help it spread and kind of watch the spread, and it was something very special. You know, we are not operating at Clever velocity right now in terms of distribution, but we have gotten such an outpouring of response, superintendents who write in saying, you know, I get a million cold emails a day, you know, I don’t read any of them, but when I saw high school CTE students teaching kindergartners how to read, I was like, oh, that’s it. You know, that’s, that’s so obviously it. And we’re hearing that response. One thing that’s so exciting, to date we’ve primarily focused on kind of top 500 districts, it’s very large districts. A lot of them are urban, but you know these very big school districts. And we are getting this response from tiny districts, you know, also from some large ones, but from tiny ones, from districts that can’t really afford to have paraprofessionals, but they’ve got high school CTE students and they’re looking for a great thing for them to do. And they’ve got kindergartners who aren’t learning how to read. And it’s like, let’s go, you know? And that is just amazing.

And so we are flying to, you know, towns across the US right now that, you know, we’ve never heard their names before. And just being embraced by the folks who are there and just going right in. It’s, it’s just, it’s wonderful.

Michael Horn: That’s so cool. I mean, I think about the leadership opportunities, responsibility, judgment, just like it’s checked so many boxes. And then again, the generational impact, if you do that at scale, could be humongous. Let’s wrap up with this last question, which is before we go to our what you’ve been reading and watching outside of work thing. But, you know, look, Once, as you just talked about, is designed to be facilitated by, could be an instructional aide, parapro, high school student, whatever, it’s not a whole class curriculum, right? And so you talked about those magic moments where districts actually start to absorb it and so forth, but take us into the classroom itself. How are schools putting Once into their schedules and days? How are they integrating it? What’s the impact it’s having about how they think about, you know, the whole class activities that they perhaps have been doing? Are there trade-offs that they’re having to make? Help us understand where does it lock into the current schedule?

Matt Pasternak: It’s a great question. It’s like the fundamental question to making tutoring work. I mean, a lot of the leading tutoring researchers have said tutoring is fundamentally a question of logistics. You know, anyone, you know, so many providers have great training and many have great coaching and various things, like can you get the logistics right or can you not, know?

And so we go very, very deep with our school district partners. We have, you know, a world-class, we call them our program team, and they go in and they work because it is not like, they’re not district-wide answers to how you solve that question. You cannot go to, you know, XYZ Public Schools with 100 schools and say, OK, we’re going to do once during these blocks in this space in the school, because every school has slightly different requirements, different spaces, you know, different people. It’s all different. And so we go school by school. We help them map out a schedule. Will this instruction happen in the back of the classroom? Will it happen in a little annex room that’s right near the classroom? Does it happen in the hallway if the hallways are quiet? Often in elementary schools they are, it just sort of, again, depends very much on that school. Oh, you know, here was this space that was used for teachers to congregate, but teachers aren’t actually congregating there, or, you know, the lunchroom is actually empty from 8 to 10 AM every day, that’s unused space, like, let’s take advantage of that.

Customized Solutions for Every School

Matt Pasternak: We have worked with so many schools by this point, we just have thought through all these different permutations. And so we sit down with the schools, school by school, come up with a customized solution for each one. And, you know, the challenging part, if you’re listening to this, is that it sounds hard and expensive and, you know, and it is, I don’t want to minimize like that is, that slows down scale a little bit when you have to kind of do hard things. On the flip side, we have never come across a school that can’t do this. So sometimes you have a solution that says, oh, well, when we rewrite the language of schooling, when we completely change what schools look like and how they’re structured and what the day is, then that will unlock AI and unlock everything, and then kids can finally learn. And if you’ve been around schools for a long time, I think many of us would be pessimistic that you’re going to see rapid changes in those dimensions anytime soon at scale. And so we’re really proud of the fact that we can go into any school district, any school building, and we will find a way to, you know, to build up the schedules. And the neat thing again about the application of technology, in our earlier days, we, you know, back in the kind of Google Meet and Google Sheets days, it took so much training and coaching on how to make those very lightweight technical tools work that realistically someone giving instruction could only give it to, you know, would have to give it to at least 10 or 15 or 20 kids because the investment you put in and teaching them the ropes made it, it just wasn’t worthwhile to teach a single kid.

But as we’ve amped up our software and amped up this use of AI, you know, we can realize this vision. You have high school kids coming in and doing it. The school secretary, does she have a free 15 minutes or 30 minutes? That’s 2 kids right there. In many schools, the principals say, hey, I don’t want to just administer this. I want to work with the you very hard, not hardest, like most difficult kindergartner, the most challenged kindergartner, the one who maybe has, you know, home circumstances that are you know, the most or, challenging, you know, who has you know, a, a learning difference, or for some reason is really struggling in the classroom. I want to take that kid under my wing as a school principal, and I you know, I want to teach that kid to read, and I want the school to see that I’m teaching that kid to read. And it goes a little bit back to, you sort of think of Steve Jobs, he’d go into Apple devices and he’d look at the wiring configurations in the background, like the things customers could never see. And he’d say, if the wires are messy in the back, then it shows that we don’t actually care about what we’re building and we’re never going to build good stuff, even though customers would never see that.

And I think it’s that attention to detail. And historically, principals maybe are really strict about kids lining up, are really strict about like certain small details that then create that school culture. Well, here’s another detail that shows, you know, my focus is on the kid, and it’s really beautiful to watch.

Diane Tavenner: Yeah, well, and thank you for that. In early elementary school, I mean, Michael and I have talked about this often, like we are hard-pressed to think of something more important than what happens in early elementary school than literally every child learns to read. And so I’m glad to hear that people are doing what’s necessary and that they understand that it’s totally possible to organize school in a way that every child will learn to read. That feels so critical. So thanks for the inspiring story of what you’re doing and the connection between the humans and the AI. Really, really fun.

Diane Tavenner: And so now, of course, Michael and I are very curious to hear what you are personally reading or listening to or watching outside of your work. We try to stay outside of our work.

We break our rule often, but if there’s something that you have to share, we’d love to hear it.

Matt Pasternak: Oh, well, no, I’m happy to. Actually, yeah, I feel like for many years between raising kids and having intense jobs, I really didn’t find much time to read other than, you know, sort of the newspaper and things like that. But I have recently joined some book clubs and gotten back into reading, which feels great, and I cherish it. I’m currently in the middle of Demon Copperhead. I don’t know if you’ve read that, but the first part was so depressing. It just, you know, it’s, you know, lightly based on Dickens, and it just felt like, oh my God, like just kind of going down that, going down that hole. And it was a little challenging to get through. And now things have turned around a little bit.

So I haven’t finished it. I’m excited to see what happens. But I’ve been having a lot of fun with it. And then for watching, I just got to watch, I watched Alex Honnold’s ascent of the Taipei Building on Netflix.

Michael Horn: Very cool.

Matt Pasternak: Which was very fun. I watched it after it was over, so I knew at the beginning he was going to stay safe. But I got to watch it while running on a treadmill, which is a really fun experience. I’m not sure I’ve ever been able to push myself that hard. It’s like, well, this guy’s doing something much harder, so I can at least run fast. So that was enjoyable.

Diane Tavenner: That’s awesome. Well, Michael and folks who’ve listened for a long time will know that when I tell you we’re preparing for a trip to Morocco and southern Spain, that means that I’ve got a combo fiction and nonfiction reading list that I’m working through because that is sort of how we do vacationing. And on this one, I’m digging into sort of religion, culture, history that is not very familiar to me. So it’s been a fun learning journey. I’m grateful to Gemini, who is my study buddy for this one and is actually such an incredibly useful tool for these purposes. At the moment I’ve got 3 books going. So, one is called Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood by Fatima Marisi. Sorry, butchered that one.

And it’s not what you think. I’m learning a ton. It’s actually quite an interesting feminist, story,, and then 2 others. So Islam by Karen Armstrong and No God But God by Reza Asad. And those are really interesting different perspectives on the religion that I’m sort of reading side by side with each other. So super fun.

Michael Horn: Very cool. Very exciting. I always love when you share these, Diane, because as listeners also know, you’ve changed my own practice around travel, uh, to start to do this habit as well, and Matt, I liked your Dickens, reference because it connects in an odd way for the one that I’m going to do, which is Diane knows I don’t read a ton of fiction, but I actually finished a fiction book here, In the Shadow of the Greenbrier by Emily Matchar. I’m probably also bungling her last name, but I picked it up, honestly, I was at synagogue. I saw it in the temple library, and Greenbrier was a place that we used to vacation with my grandparents and my cousins a few times growing up over Christmas. And so I was sort of curious, and it’s like this intergenerational Jewish sort of mystery story, if you will, trying to piece together different puzzle pieces. And the Greenbrier is sort of the central part of it.

But the only reason I say that, Matt, is I remember one of the years that we vacationed at the Greenbrier, they had like the foremost Charles Dickens expert or something like that in residence, and he gave lectures, which we as 12 or 13-year-olds dutifully attended and I think did not cut up too much during, which, which was impressive for us. But, so I, I feel like I’m connecting on a bunch of these things at the moment, but, uh, it was a fun read, and Diane, one of the reasons I don’t read a lot of fiction, I forgot, is because when I read it, I don’t put it down and I become a bit of a zombie around the house for a couple days.

Diane Tavenner: So yeah, there is such a thing as binge reading, just like binge watching, right?

Michael Horn: Exactly. And nonfiction, while I love it and I read it a lot, turns out it doesn’t do that for me, whereas fiction I’m a lost cause around the house.

Matt Pasternak: The secret is just simultaneously reading it on the Kindle and Audible, and then you can, you know, you can volunteer, hey, I’ll go do the dishes, you just put in

Michael Horn: Exactly, plug it in and power through.

Matt Pasternak: You keep going, right, you know, right where you were.

Michael Horn: So good, good tip, good power tip. All right, huge thank you, Matt, for joining us. And again, to all of the listeners, who keep coming in with all sorts of feedback, both positive notes, questions, we like those and then some of the hate mail too, we love it all because we learn tons, and just, keep it coming off this conversation. We look forward to more, and we look forward to seeing you next time on Class Disrupted.

This episode is sponsored by LearnerStudio.

The Los Angeles Unified School District unanimously voted to curb classroom screen time, directing staff to develop a policy by June ahead of the upcoming school year.

aims to set clear limits on how screens are used in classrooms across grade levels. It was championed by Schools Beyond Screens, a group of parents that has spent months pressuring the district to is impacting student learning, especially in the earlier grades.

The move signals a shift in how the nation’s second-largest school district approaches classroom technology, as officials respond to concerns about excessive use.

“What we don’t have is equity of resource to protect students from the harms of excessive or passive screen time. Today’s screens can be a barrier to instruction,” said a parent at the board meeting immediately before the board’s vote. The proposal coming to the board for approval in June is expected to include:

• Daily and weekly screen time limits by grade level — the example provided in the proposed resolution was no more than one hour per day or five hours per week for third through fifth graders, though no specifics have been provided on actual time limits
• Elimination of student digital device use in early education through first grade, with exceptions made for students enrolled in the district’s virtual learning program and for certain district-mandated assessments
• Prohibition of student access to YouTube
• Considerations to block video games that are not instructional in nature, such as Roblox and Fortnite
• Promoting the use of computer labs and reducing use of individual devices for students in second through fifth grade, while still allowing families to opt in to using district-issued devices at home as a way of ensuring equitable digital access

With the exception of board President Scott Schmerelson, who recused himself, every board member commented on the resolution before listening to public comments and voted in support of the resolution.

“We know that tech is not going away and can be a powerful tool in the classroom. This is not about going backwards. This is about rethinking school time and screen time in schools to ensure we are doing what actually helps students learn best,” said board member Nick Melvoin while discussing the resolution, which he co-authored.

Board member Kelly Gonez amended the resolution to include an assessment of the use of i-Ready, a district-mandated assessment implemented in 2023. This amendment appeared to be popular among some of those in the audience, who could be heard clapping and cheering on two separate occasions when board members mentioned reviewing i-Ready.

“I know our families and educators are actively trying to navigate that balance between technology as a learning tool while avoiding excessive, poorly structured screen time that has real consequences for our children,” said Gonez during the board meeting.

“I hope that with this new policy, we’re able to prioritize the uses of technology that have actual, real educational value, like coding, robotics, video production, editing and intervention for targeted students, while de-emphasizing rote tasks like reading text on screens, unlimited video streaming and other passive activities.”

Board member Sherlett Hendy Newbill supported the resolution but questioned whether the timeline was feasible. “I don’t want us to rush this because this means coming back in June. It’s a couple of weeks to be able to do this,” she said, though the board ultimately decided to maintain the June deadline.

While parents and public speakers were largely supportive, some thought the resolution could have gone even further by limiting screen use.

After thanking the board for introducing the resolution, one parent described it as a “baby-step resolution.” The parent continued, stating: “It’s better than nothing, but it has no teeth.”

Among the items this parent was pushing for was the prohibition of screen time through second grade and eliminating requirements for one-to-one device use.

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High-impact tutoring was widely embraced by thousands of school districts as they grappled with learning loss, whose deficits have proven difficult to overcome even in 2026. In its ideal form, is delivered to no more than four students at least three times a week, for at least 30 minutes per session, by a specific adult using high-quality materials aligned with a school’s curriculum. Most such programs take place during the school day, which ensures access to all students and signals that the tutoring is core to their academic progress. Getting students the requisite sessions and minutes to yield meaningful progress is , according to and advocates.

Afterschool tutoring, as a result, has taken a backseat. As tutoring’s popularity continues to grow, however, some providers and schools are applying the lessons learned about high-impact tutoring to out-of-school programs that have yielded impressive results. ’s afterschool model, for example, has helped students in California gain in math, on average, and 92% of parents say they would recommend the program. In Louisiana, helped students in less than six months of afterschool tutoring. 

As part of ongoing research into the high-impact tutoring movement, I spoke with educators and providers about the success of these two afterschool programs, both of which launched after the pandemic. 

Elsie Whitlow Stokes Public Charter School in Washington, D.C., had tried working with two providers to build tutoring into the day. But for a language immersion charter school already spending additional academic time helping students learn Spanish or French, finding time during regular hours tutoring was a struggle. So this school year, Maribel Wan, Stokes’ chief academic officer, started offering Step Up’s afterschool tutoring program to 59 students in grades 2 to 5 who are around one grade level below where they should be. Students meet twice a week with their tutors, who are college students paid through work-study at their schools.

Wan says early metrics show improvement in the students’ confidence and attitude toward schoolwork, and she hopes the tutoring will pay off academically as well. In other words, she hopes Stokes will find the same success with tutoring as Monlux Elementary in Los Angeles. Monlux started working with Step Up Tutoring in January 2022 as the school, like so many across the United States, struggled to close achievement gaps that widened during the pandemic. That year, just 43% of Monlux students scored as proficient on the California state math assessment. Three years later, on the, 62% of Monlux students met proficiency. Principal Hermineh Markosyan, who launched the partnership with Step Up, told me she attributes much of their math improvement to tutoring. 

Part of the program’s strategy is to engage parents as partners in their children’s academic progress. Estefany Gomez is on the frontline of that family engagement as a Step Up tutor. She has met with a student at another L.A. district school twice weekly for three years now, continuing even after Gomez graduated with a bachelor’s degree in molecular cell and developmental biology from UCLA in July 2025. “My student will graduate from [Step Up] in a few months, and there’s still more to do. … It’s such an out-of-this-world feeling to see his growth over the last few years,” she told me. 

In the initial postpandemic years, nobody knew whether virtual tutoring would work as well as in-person help. Today, however, multiple studies have shown that virtual tutoring is about as effective as in-person tutoring and resolves many of its operational challenges. There’s no travel time to a short in-person session, for example, schools in a variety of locations can recruit tutors without geographic constraints and college students can tutor during class breaks. Afterschool providers like Step Up have doubled down on these early findings even as others, like Louisiana’s Canopy Education, remain committed to in-person tutoring. 

Canopy is the largest provider of tutoring supported by the Steve Carter Tutoring Program, a state-funded voucher that gives students achieving below grade level $1,500 for after-school help using state-approved providers. When William Minton was building Canopy’s program, he explained to me, “We knew we wanted to use teachers, and we knew that we could make it work if we paid them well.” Teachers are paid $30 to $60 per hour to tutor after school with Canopy, running in-person small-group sessions at the same school where they work during the day. Almost 2,000 Louisiana students received tutoring last year through Canopy across 298 schools. Minton attributes their success to three key pieces: quality, communication and consistency.

More than three decades ago, the wrote, “For the past 150 years, American public schools have held time constant and let learning vary.” Elementary schools that have adjusted their daily schedules to include an intervention or tutoring block find this use of time worthwhile, but many schools struggle to change their master schedule. Tutoring has also found less purchase in middle and high schools, perhaps because timing becomes yet more complicated as students move to a day filled with course-specific class periods or block schedules. Leveraging out-of-school time, then, especially when closely linked to within-school activities, might allow more students and more schools to benefit from high-impact tutoring. 

The key to the success of these afterschool tutoring programs may be that both Step Up and Canopy incorporate critical aspects of high-impact tutoring into their models. Students are eligible for tutoring based on school assessment data, the dosage is 90 minutes per week or more, and the tutors use high-quality materials aligned with what students are learning in school. In spring 2025, Step Up Tutoring’s attendance rates were north of 75%, according to CEO Sam Olivieri.

“We work with a large percentage of non-English-speaking families and low-income families,” she says. “They get weekly texts from their tutor about what their children are working on and an accomplishment they can celebrate. We’ve really focused on bringing parents into the process and giving them a lot of visibility.”

Canopy’s bet on family engagement is that using teachers as tutors in the physical school building creates stronger bonds between families and the school, while Step Up gives parents and tutors tremendous flexibility when it comes to scheduling sessions. 

Afterschool high-impact tutoring may thus be poised to help schools add effective learning time beyond the academic day, while bolstering parent involvement in their children’s learning and the school community. It’s certainly a trend to watch, and for more schools to consider.

“With pain in my heart, I told my son I couldn’t pick up or drop off my grandson at school anymore,” said Hernandez, who asked to be identified by her first initial and last name in order to protect her safety. “I was scared. If they take me when he’s with me, what would they do to him?”

She cares for her two grandchildren, ages 5 and 6, while their parents are at work. The 5-year-old, who has been diagnosed with autism, attends a preschool with specialized resources. Outside of preschool, Hernandez is the only one his parents trust to care for the boy.

“I dropped him off, picked him up, went on his school field trips, cooked for him after school,” recalled Hernandez. She took three buses to get to the school, a daily roundtrip commute between two and three hours, while carrying a stroller and diaper bag.

But Hernandez had to pull back. 

The nation’s child care system relies on the contributions of immigrants like Hernandez. early care and education providers identify as immigrants, and home-based child care — the most arrangement in the U.S. — has a of immigrant providers than center-based programs.

Over the past year, immigration enforcement activities have intensified, leaving providers and families anxious and unsettled. Since he took office, Trump has expanded immigration enforcement and a policy that prohibited immigration activity in certain spaces, including schools and places where children congregate. The administration has also made financial investments in federal immigration enforcement.

These investments and policy shifts have disrupted the child care workforce nationwide, heightening fear and instability among providers. caregivers and child care providers of young children have reported noticing the impact of immigration enforcement activities in their community, according to the RAPID Survey Project at the Stanford Center on Early Childhood. Some have left the field altogether. 

A conducted by economists Chris Herbst and Erdal Tekin found that increased arrests by federal immigration officers in the first six months of the Trump administration are associated with 39,000 immigrant child care providers leaving the workforce. It also found that, as a result of the increased arrests and shrinking child care workforce, 77,000 American-born mothers also .

Below are the stories of five immigrant women providing home-based care for relatives and neighbors. Located in California, Colorado, Illinois and Texas, they all reported that intensified immigration enforcement has disrupted their work, with ripple effects on the children and families they serve. 

Some shared that the young children they care for have expressed fear that their parents could be arrested. Some said they had to change their routines to limit their time in public spaces, and that parents were doing the same. Others said parents stopped taking their older kids to school. 

These vignettes — which draw from interviews conducted in Spanish that have been translated and edited for clarity — offer insight into the experiences of immigrants caring for our nation’s youngest children. 

A. Hernandez

Home State: Illinois
Place of birth: Mexico
Number of years providing child care: 6
Still providing child care: Yes
Number of children cared for 2��

After visiting family in the U.S. in 1991 when she was 16 years old, A. Hernandez fell in love with Chicago and decided to stay. She started working at a local restaurant, where she met her husband. She married at 17, had four children and eventually became a stay-at-home mom. 

Her children are now adults, and she provides child care for their kids. It’s not uncommon: working parents rely on a grandmother for child care.

But after President Trump was inaugurated, Hernandez said she put cardboard on her windows so no one could see inside and barely left the house. 

When she could no longer bring her grandson to and from preschool, his parents changed their work schedules as best they could to account for the disruption in child care. They eventually enrolled their son in a busing program, but the process took over a month, she said. On the days they could not adjust their work schedules, they opted for him to stay home with Hernandez. He missed over a month of school, and a number of sessions with his speech therapist.

“It affected him a lot. Before, he was starting to speak and sing. He was more conversational,” Hernandez said. “Now, he struggles. His communication is more sounds and gestures. He missed over a month of his therapies, and it shows.”

Hernandez said she’s been anxious for months. Once her grandson was enrolled in the busing program, she decided she could pick him up at the bus stop. She began returning to her routine, but said she constantly felt “like someone was following her.”

Then, in November 2025, a Chicago child care provider was at an early learning center on the same street where Hernandez’s daughter works. It happened while children were being dropped off.

Hernandez recalled hearing the news. The child care provider “was doing something good, working with children. Now we have to explain this to children, that we’re all at risk,” she said.

Worried for their safety, Hernandez and her husband opened a naturalization case in November with the hope of gaining U.S. citizenship. The legal proceedings are expensive, so to help make ends meet, Hernandez has picked up an overnight shift at a fast food chain. (She is typically paid $75 a week to care for her grandchildren.)

Hernandez has tried her best to shield her grandchildren from the increased presence of immigration officers in their neighborhood. “My eldest grandson saw officers near his school,” she said. When he told her about it, he said he was afraid they were coming to take him. “Their uniforms are green. He said that the ‘green men’ were coming to take children in black vans. I told him, ‘No, they won’t take you.’”

Carmela Enriquez

Home State: Colorado
Place of birth: Mexico
Number of years providing child care: 20
Still providing child care: Yes
Number of children cared for: 4

In 2001, Carmela Enriquez came to the United States from Mexico, joining her family in Colorado. She was 15 years old, and enrolled in a local high school as a ninth grader. In 11th grade, she was warned that she would not have access to federal financial aid because, at the time, she was an undocumented immigrant. 

Knowing that her family wouldn’t be able to help cover the cost of college, she dropped out of high school. “I was sad, because I always liked school,” said Enriquez. 

In 2004, Enriquez got married and the next year, she gave birth to her first son. Soon after, her cousin approached her about caring for his infant, who was around the same age as her son. He liked the idea of his baby being watched by someone in the family while he was at work. Since then, different family members have relied on Enriquez for child care. Today, she cares for four of her nephews, in addition to her two youngest children, who are 2 and 6 years old.

Enriquez said she changed a number of daily routines immediately after Trump came back into office. She typically picked up her four nephews from her sister’s house, but assuming there would be more immigration officers stationed at high-traffic roads, she changed her route. 

“I tried not to drive on busy streets,” she said. “But when it snows in Colorado, I noticed they weren’t removing the snow as fast on the roads I traveled on as on the main streets. I told myself I had to stop my fear of officers, because I was also scared of being in a car accident.” 

A few months later, Enriquez began volunteering for a local group that alerted community members if federal immigration officers were nearby. Her eldest child, now in college, warned his mother not to participate.

“He said, ‘No, don’t go. You shouldn’t go outside. If you need something from the market, I’ll go,’” Enriquez recalled. “It makes me sad that my children, born here, are scared.”

Enriquez said she has witnessed people get arrested by immigration officers, and fear has swept across the community. “Last September, there was a local celebration for child care providers. There was food, flowers. Only three providers, myself included, showed up,” said Enriquez. “There had been immigration officers seen on a nearby street. I couldn’t tell providers to come anyway. I can’t take away their fear.”

“We are essential workers. We care for children whose parents work in agriculture, dairy farms, food transport,” said Enriquez. “I’m crying because I see so many kind providers, and the quality care they give to children. There’s people saying this country is not ours, and that if [immigration] officers mistreat us, we deserve it. But no one deserves to be treated that way.”

E. Hernandez

Home State: Texas
Place of birth: Mexico
Number of years providing child care: 12
Still providing child care: Yes
Number of children cared for: 7

E. Hernandez, A. Hernandez’s sister, moved to Texas from Mexico with her husband in 2013, when he relocated for work. Then five months pregnant, she became friendly with a neighbor, who mentioned she could not find before- and after- school care for her 7-year-old son.

“It started as a favor. [The neighbor] said it would be difficult to leave her son with someone she didn’t know,” said Hernandez, who requested we refer to her by her first initial and last name in order to protect her safety. “I said I’d take care of him. I’d drop him off at school, pick him up, and care for him until she came home.” 

Hernandez cared for her neighbor’s son until the family moved 15 months later.

Over the past 13 years, Hernandez has cared for more than a dozen children through a variety of arrangements — some steady, others occasional. She began by watching the children of her husband’s coworkers and, once her eldest started school, connected with local parents in need of after-school care.

Today, Hernandez looks after her own three children and provides care for others as needed. She regularly supports one family during school breaks and, in health emergencies, steps in for another family, sometimes caring for all five of their children — four of whom she said are immunocompromised.

“It’s a favor,” Hernandez said. “These are children who are ill, so I always say yes — even if it’s two in the morning.”

Such flexible, around-the-clock care is especially common among home-based providers. At some point, children requires care during nontraditional hours.

Last year, Hernandez was advised by a local parent to pursue a child care license so she could provide long-term care to more families. (In Texas, child care providers are from a license if they do not care for more than one unrelated child or sibling group.)

“I was so excited. I’ve always loved children, so I decided to call the local agency,” said Hernandez. When asked over the phone to provide her Social Security Number, Hernandez specified she had anIndividual Taxpayer Identification Number (). “The woman on the phone said that Texas does not give child care licenses to people without a Social Security Number,” Hernandez said.

Though she’s been unable to get licensed, she continues to care for children. “I do it for the good of the community, for the good of our children,” she said.

Blanca Luna

Home State: California
Place of birth: Mexico
Number of years providing child care: 5
Still providing child care: Yes
Number of children cared for: 3

Blanca Luna immigrated to California from Mexico in 2016, when she was 24 years old. She arrived with her then 15-month-old daughter in order to join her husband in the U.S. 

She now has two children, 12 and 9 years old. As a stay-at-home mom, Luna began to meet local parents when her youngest son started kindergarten in 2020. 

“In our town, many parents work in agricultural fields. Agricultural workers continued to work during the pandemic [stay-at-home orders], and they needed child care because many centers closed,” said Luna. “I wanted to help because they couldn’t stop working. I started providing child care, even if it was an hour or two … If it were me who needed help, I would want someone to help me. I did it out of love, community.”

Luna has continued to provide child care to local families, usually when school is closed for holidays. She provides regular child care on weekdays to a 3-year-old girl, and is compensated between $300 and $400 a month. She also occasionally provides before- and after- school care for two other children. One of those families pays her $25 per day. The other doesn’t pay her at all.

Over the past few months, Luna said she has been approached by two local parents who do not have American citizenship about whether she would take care of their children if they were arrested by immigration officers. “I don’t have the heart to say no. But it is a concern for me,” she said. “Taking care of a child needs money, and I don’t have an income. Only my husband does.”

Those fears weigh heavily on the children in her care, Luna said, particularly their mental health. The threat of family separation creates instability, especially when “children see parents being beaten, mistreated and humiliated.”

Luna said there are efforts to support families in her community, but they fall short.

“I’ve seen resources like food banks. That’s good. But people can’t pay rent with food,” she said. “I think people want to go to work safely and build a better future.”

Yanet Martinez

Home State: California
Place of birth: El Salvador
Number of years providing child care: 17
Still providing child care: Yes
Number of children cared for: 6��

Yanet Martinez immigrated to the U.S. 17 years ago, fleeing domestic violence in her home in El Salvador. Her five children stayed behind. 

In 2019, Martinez said she qualified for — a program for victims of criminal activity — that has since changed to a, a program for victims of trafficking.

She found her way to Los Angeles and picked up a series of odd jobs. Today, she works at a local community center as a promotora, a Spanish term similar to a community liaison or resource navigator. She’s also a local child care provider.

Four of her children have immigrated to the U.S. She has nine grandchildren, and cares for six of them. She also occasionally cares for her neighbor’s children. 

, federal immigration officers and state troopers arrived at a local park on horseback and in armored vehicles in the neighborhood where Martinez lives. One of her children witnessed the raid.

“My daughter was on the way to work, but she ran back inside. I had a doctor’s appointment, and I chose not to go. It was chaos. I saw tanks — tanks I haven’t seen since I was a girl during the [Salvadoran Civil] war,” said Martinez. “Another time, one of my sons saw federal agents at a parking lot close to his job. He managed to see them in time and hid, but six of his coworkers didn’t make it to their cars. The agents pushed them to the ground, beat them and took them away.”

Despite fearing for her safety, Martinez continues caring for her grandchildren, bringing them to and from school. On a local bus, in transit to pick up one of them, Martinez said, “I’m still working in the community. I’m still providing care for my grandchildren. I do it with fear, with precaution. But I do it.”

Reporting for this article was supported by New America’s Better Life Lab Story Fellowship.

]]> /article/this-high-school-student-is-teaching-kids-across-the-globe-how-to-code/ Thu, 23 Apr 2026 18:30:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=1031503 Last May, Jacob Shaul logged onto his computer and began remotely teaching more than 170 students in Bolivia the basics of programming languages, like HTML, CSS and JavaScript. He and another instructor even showed the students how to build their own websites. 

This was the largest class Shaul had taught since he started Mode to Code as a passion project while he was a sophomore at San Francisco University High School. In 2025 alone, Shaul and his team of 15 high school volunteer instructors taught 1,000 students in the San Francisco Bay Area, Bolivia, Botswana, Canada, El Salvador, India, Italy and Jamaica, with class sizes averaging about 5 to 25 students.  

Shaul believes the lessons Mode to Code offers, both in-person and online, stand out because the instructors are interacting with students every step of the way.

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“While students might learn quite a lot from watching a video and then doing problems after, there’s a difference between having a teacher that’s right there teaching it to you,” said Shaul. “[Students] can ask us questions and interact with us.” 

A coding class comes to life 

Shaul launched Mode to Code to introduce computer programming to middle schoolers. He had taken a programming class in sixth grade at the private Live Oak School in San Francisco and wanted to share his passion for it with other students.

“I wasn’t sure if there were middle schools around San Francisco that had the same opportunity that I did in a private school, so I did a little research, and I was very surprised to see that there was an extreme paucity of coding education, computer science education and technology education in general,” said Shaul. 

But when he reached out to school administrators, they either didn’t respond or turned him down. “I had to learn grit and persistence, and both improved with practice,” recalled Shaul.

His lucky break came when he met with Live Oak’s after-school director, who gave Shaul a shot at running his own program. “The first class had around 10 students and lasted six weeks (longer than our usual four-week program now), allowing me to try a variety of lessons and subjects to see what worked,” said Shaul. 

Bolstered by the experience at Live Oak, Shaul was able to convince several area schools, including the Chinese American International School, Presidio Middle School, Presidio Hill School and Everett Middle School, to let him offer similar programs. 

As Mode to Code gained momentum, Shaul developed a curriculum with the help of a former dean, trained volunteer instructors and connected online with other schools and educational organizations that work with underserved youth around the globe.

“I knew that there were thousands of students who could benefit from our program and I wanted to see if it was possible,” said Shaul. 

Jessica Sankey, a computer science teacher at Shelburne Community School in Vermont, was the first teacher to express interest in Shaul’s online classes. 

“She was immensely helpful and gave me confidence to teach,” recalled Shaul. 

That experience allowed him to fine tune his teaching methods and accommodate for issues that pop up while instructing online. For instance, he had to get used to asking students to come up to the computer screen to show their code and ask questions. 

Shaul then decided to offer his online classes to American schools in other countries.

“We try to find American schools in other countries that speak English, but also have volunteers who speak other languages, such as Spanish,” says Shaul.

The first international students he taught were in India. But juggling school and teaching classes halfway across the globe proved to be challenging. 

“I would teach classes during breaks in the school day, during lunch, or wake up early. I woke up at 4:00 a.m. to teach classes in Botswana, and spent my lunch teaching a class in Canada,” said Shaul. 

Educating future computer scientists and programmers

Mode to Code now partners with 30 institutions, including , which offers tuition-free after-school and summer programs, and , a nonprofit aimed at getting children to embrace the sciences.

“These institutions help us reach new students from under-resourced backgrounds, allowing us to educate future computer scientists and programmers,” said Shaul. 

“Our goal is to always be free for all the students, which means that since we don’t really have any money and aren’t making it from anywhere, the teachers are all high school volunteers.” 

Last March, the Mode to Code team began teaching senior citizens the basics of artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and the internet at eight senior centers in the San Francisco Bay Area, including and . 

“The catalyst was reading about how large the scamming industry has grown, especially when targeting more vulnerable elders,” Shaul recalled.

In August, Shaul will be starting his freshman year at the University of California, Berkeley, where he plans to major in computer science. Ultimately, he wants to become a software engineer so he can develop technology that will help people.

“Technology is how you scale solutions to problems and create products that impact millions of people. No other industry is able to do that in the same way,” he said.

Even though he’s starting his next chapter, Shaul wants Mode to Code to live on. He’s training underclassmen at his high school so Mode to Code can continue offering its in-person and online programs to middle school students and assisted living residents around the Bay Area and beyond.

“One of the biggest things about Mode to Code, is that it’s run entirely by high schoolers, who are interested in giving back to the people around them. We’re very lucky to have the resources that we have, and we want to give it back to the people around us,” he said. 

]]> /article/the-business-case-against-judging-schools-like-businesses/ Thu, 23 Apr 2026 16:30:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=1031499 Imagine if America’s favorite businesses had to operate by the same rules as your local public school.

Starbucks would open every morning to a crowd of customers assigned by ZIP code. Managers wouldn’t be able to choose their market or tailor their product to the people most likely to buy it. And if the espresso machine broke, the manager wouldn’t just replace it. They’d apply for a grant, form a committee, hold a public hearing and eventually buy a replacement from a state-approved vendor — at triple the price —sometime around next spring.

When people argue that schools should “run more like businesses,” they usually overlook one small detail: Most businesses wouldn’t survive a week under the constraints schools face every day.

So let’s flip the comparison.

Here’s what it would look like if American businesses had to follow just five of the rules public schools already operate under.

Rule #1: Serve Everyone, No Choosing Your Market

In business, success begins with knowing your audience. Public schools don’t have that luxury.

Schools must serve every child who walks through the door, every ability level, every need, every cost. They can’t specialize. They can’t narrow their mission. And they can’t turn anyone away.

If a bakery had to operate this way, it would be required to serve every resident within a five-mile radius, including customers who need gluten-free, nut-free, sugar-free, dairy-free and dye-free options at the same price.

Businesses pick customers and adapt quickly. Schools serve everyone under rules they didn’t choose.

Rule #2: Prices Frozen by an Outdated Formula

When costs rise, businesses adjust prices. Schools don’t have that option.

Many school funding formulas still reflect assumptions written long before Wi-Fi. Some date back to the era of overhead projectors, and many still rely on decades-old models of state aid. Yet a school’s basic funding structure still doesn’t come close to matching the difference between a child who needs a pencil and a smile and one who needs a full-time nurse and medical equipment comparable to a small clinic.

Imagine running a daycare and being told: “You get $7 per hour per child. Forever. It doesn’t matter what diapers cost now. It doesn’t matter if three children require one-on-one support. Figure it out.”

A business leader would quit.

A superintendent rolls up their sleeves, pulls out the budget puzzle and asks the finance director what changed in the formula this year — and which updates must now be applied retroactively.

Rule #3: Money Comes in Buckets You Can’t Mix

Businesses move money where it’s needed. Schools receive funding in dozens of restricted pots: technology, training, English learners, nutrition programs and special education. Sometimes, deadlines require that the money be spent within weeks or returned.

It’s like telling a grocery store: “This money is only for canned beans. That money is only for ceiling tiles. This money must be spent immediately on customer-service workshops. No, you can’t use any of it to fix the freezer.”

What often looks like waste in schools is usually just the mechanics of compliance.

Rule #4: Every Major Decision Happens in Public

In business, strategic decisions happen behind closed doors. In public education, they happen at open meetings where anyone can speak.

Imagine McDonald’s livestreaming a meeting about a new spatula vendor, only to pause the vote so the public can debate whether the spatulas align with “community values.”

This transparency is essential to democracy. But it also slows decision-making in ways most businesses would find unworkable.

Rule #5: Accountability Without Control

Schools are judged by test scores, attendance, behavior, graduation rates and college-going outcomes. Much of this is shaped by factors beyond their direct control, as research from the has shown.

Imagine a gym held accountable for every member’s physical fitness. If clients skipped workouts or ignored trainers’ advice, the gym would still be labeled failing.

That’s the environment schools operate in: responsible for outcomes they influence but do not control.

What This Means

The real question isn’t why schools can’t run like businesses. It’s why we keep pretending they should.

Public education operates within a system designed around universal access, equity, transparency and a commitment to every child. Those values impose real constraints. Ignoring them doesn’t make schools more efficient — it just makes the comparison dishonest.

None of this means schools are beyond criticism or improvement. Like any institution, they should constantly look for ways to serve students better. But honest reform begins with an honest understanding of the system we’ve built.

If policymakers truly want schools to operate more effectively, the conversation shouldn’t start with comparing them to businesses. It should start by asking whether the rules governing public education — funding formulas, spending restrictions, bureaucratic processes and accountability structures — actually allow schools the flexibility people assume they already have.

And yet every day, schools open their doors. Not because the system makes it easy, but because the people inside refuse to let children down.

]]> /article/texas-can-require-ten-commandments-in-classrooms-court-says/ Thu, 23 Apr 2026 14:30:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=1031482 This article was originally published in

Texas can enforce a state law requiring public schools to display posters of the Ten Commandments in classrooms, a federal appeals court ruled Tuesday.

A 9-8 majority of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in Texas officials’ favor, concluding that the law does not establish an official state religion.

“It does not tell churches or synagogues or mosques what to believe or how to worship or whom to employ as priests, rabbis, or imams,” according to . “It punishes no one who rejects the Ten Commandments, no matter the reason.”

The court heard arguments in January after 16 families sued over the law, alleging that it amounted to state leaders promoting their interpretation of Christianity over other faiths.

All 17 active judges on the court listened to the case — — alongside a similar challenge in Louisiana, the first state to pass a Ten Commandments requirement for its public schools. The court cleared the way in February for Louisiana to fully implement its law.

After Tuesday’s decision, the civil rights organizations representing the families expressed disappointment.

“The court’s ruling goes against fundamental First Amendment principles and binding U.S. Supreme Court authority,” the groups said in a statement. “The First Amendment safeguards the separation of church and state, and the freedom of families to choose how, when and if to provide their children with religious instruction. This decision tramples those rights.”

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton celebrated the decision, calling it a major victory for Texas and its “moral values.”

“My office was proud to defend SB 10 and successfully ensure that the Ten Commandments will be displayed in classrooms across Texas,” Paxton said. “The Ten Commandments have had a profound impact on our nation, and it’s important that students learn from them every single day.”

The case is playing a central role in the national debate over whether the laws violate the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which prohibits governments from endorsing or promoting a particular religion. The civil rights organizations said they plan to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse the decision.

Here’s what we know.

Background: The Texas Legislature passed in 2025, with Gov. signing it into law that June. It requires public schools to display donated posters of the Ten Commandments, sized at least 16 by 20 inches, in a visible space on classroom walls.

The families — represented by a coalition of civil rights organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas — sued 11 school districts to block what their lawyers called “catastrophically unconstitutional” legislation.

U.S. District Judge Fred Biery agreed, blocking the law from taking effect in the districts named in the lawsuit: Alamo Heights, North East, Lackland, Northside, Austin, Lake Travis, Dripping Springs, Houston, Fort Bend, Cypress-Fairbanks and Plano.

Biery concluded the law improperly favors Christianity over other faiths and said it would likely interfere with families’ “exercise of their sincere religious or nonreligious beliefs in substantial ways.”

asked the 5th Circuit Court to overturn Biery’s ruling and allow all 17 active judges on the court to hear the Texas and Louisiana cases together.

A federal judge Louisiana’s Ten Commandments law from taking effect in 2024, a decision last year by a panel of three judges on the 5th Circuit Court. Twelve of the appeals court’s were appointed by Republican presidents. The court is considered one of the most conservative in the nation.

The arguments for the case did not include two other challenging the Ten Commandments law.

One lawsuit resulted in a federal judge blocking 14 more school districts from complying with the law. The other asks a federal judge to block all Texas schools from following the law and is pending.

Why the families sued: They argued that the law subjects children to a state-imposed Protestant version of the Ten Commandments that many religious and nonreligious Texans do not recognize.

The families believe the law seeks to pressure students into observing and adopting Texas officials’ preferred religious principles.

They say the law will inflict harm by alienating children of those who do not follow the state’s preferred religion and that parents’ authority to direct their children’s religious education is undermined.

“Posting the Ten Commandments in public schools is un-American and un-Baptist,” Griff Martin, a pastor, parent and plaintiff in the lawsuit, said in a statement last year. “S.B. 10 undermines the separation of church and state as a bedrock principle of my family’s Baptist heritage. Baptists have long held that the government has no role in religion — so that our faith may remain free and authentic.”

The families’ lawyers argue that because children are legally required to attend school, they have virtually no way of avoiding Texas’ required version of the Ten Commandments.

The U.S. Supreme Court found public school displays of the Ten Commandments unconstitutional in 1980. Civil rights attorneys argue that only the Supreme Court can overturn its previous rulings.

What the state argues: Paxton and attorneys from his office say the Ten Commandments played a significant role in the nation’s history and heritage. State leaders have said previous rulings from federal courts and the U.S. Supreme Court did not examine that historical significance.

State lawyers also note that the Supreme Court recently , established by a previous ruling, that determined when a government had unconstitutionally endorsed or established a religion.

“There is no legal reason to stop Texas from honoring a core ethical foundation of our law, especially not a bogus claim about the ‘separation of church and state,’ which is a phrase found nowhere in the Constitution,” Paxton said last year.

Lawyers with the attorney general’s office see the Ten Commandments requirement as requiring only a “passive display on the wall” that does not rise to the level of coercion because students are free to ignore the posters. The law might cross the line if it sought to incorporate the Ten Commandments into lessons or assignments, they argued.

The posters must go up in Texas classrooms only if donated by someone. The law does not specify what would happen if school leaders choose not to comply. The state views that as evidence no threat or harm is posed to families. However, Paxton if schools do not comply and sued three districts for alleged noncompliance.

What happened during oral arguments: Some judges questioned state officials from Texas and Louisiana about their decisions to use a Protestant version of the Ten Commandments and how that would affect families who do not follow those religious principles.

Lawyers for the states argued that the laws do not ask children to subscribe to a particular belief and urged the judges to consider legislators’ intent to teach students about important documents in U.S. history.

The judges questioned how children would know the posters have anything to do with American history. They also asked for historical evidence showing the use of the Ten Commandments in public schools.

Lawyers for the states pointed to early textbooks that referenced the Ten Commandments but acknowledged those materials were largely used in religious settings prior to the establishment of public schools in the 1800s.

Public schools used the materials through the early 20th century. However, a prominent historian who testified in the case that the Ten Commandments were not significant aspects of the texts and that it is unclear how much teachers relied on those specific lessons.

“A legislature in Louisiana, a legislature in Texas, is absolutely well within its right to say: We want to actually teach our students about founding documents,” said Ben Aguiñaga, the attorney representing Louisiana.

Judges asked the lawyers representing the families why they consider the Ten Commandments posters problematic when students recite the Pledge of Allegiance and learn about the Declaration of Independence and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail — all of which refer to God.

King’s letter and the Declaration of Independence may reference religion, the lawyers replied, but they’re about more than religion.

Some judges noted during arguments that the Supreme Court’s 1980 ruling heavily relied on a test that courts no longer use. The families’ lawyers countered that removing the test did not overturn Supreme Court precedent preventing the Ten Commandments from going up in public classrooms.

If students do not follow the religious principles in the state’s mandated version of the Ten Commandments, judges asked, can’t they ignore the posters?

“They can’t just look away, your honor,” said attorney Jon Youngwood, representing the families. “Not for 13 years. Not in every class. Not every minute of every day.”

What the court ruled: A court majority concluded that the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1980 ruling in is no longer valid. That case found a Kentucky law requiring the posting of the Ten Commandments unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court recently abandoned the test established in Stone that determined whether states had illegally endorsed or promoted a religion, the 5th U.S. Circuit judges noted. That means “there is nothing left of Stone,” they noted in the ruling.

They concluded that Texas’ Ten Commandments law does not establish an official state religion. Among reasons, they noted that it “levies no taxes to support any clergy. It does not co-opt churches to perform civic functions.”

The judges ruled that the law is not coercive because it does not require students to learn the Ten Commandments or give teachers authority to undermine students’ religious beliefs.

“Yes, Plaintiffs have sincere religious disagreements with its content,” the opinion reads. “But that does not transform the poster into a summons to prayer.”

An opinion written by judges who opposed the decision argued in response that it is insignificant that Texas’ law does not require schools to teach the Ten Commandments.

The law poses a threat to children’s religious beliefs and undermines what parents may want their kids to learn about religion, they wrote in dissenting statements.

The opposing judges agreed with the argument of families who sued that the Supreme Court has not overturned its Stone v. Graham ruling. Lower courts are bound by Stone even if the test established in it is no longer in use, they added. Taking into account the historical-based approach courts must now use, the dissenting judges said Texas’ law still violates the Constitution.

This first appeared on .

]]> /zero2eight/the-reading-crisis-is-real-so-is-the-tool-we-keep-ignoring/ Thu, 23 Apr 2026 12:30:00 +0000 /?post_type=zero2eight&p=1031467 The latest Nation’s Report Card results didn’t arrive as a warning; they arrived as a verdict. Reading scores are down again, and the gaps are widening. Lower-performing fourth and eighth graders posted the worst scores in more than 30 years. Not one state improved its eighth-grade reading score.

In response, the national conversation has kicked into high gear. More than a dozen states have rewritten literacy laws, banning discredited instructional methods and mandating phonics-based curricula. Districts are overhauling materials. Parents are being urged to act in a multitude of ways: reading more at home, hiring a tutor, trying multiple apps.

I’ve spent decades as a classroom teacher, literacy coach, researcher, and now training future educators. I’ve worked with children who thrive and children who need extra support with reading. And I’ve seen how often parents are sent searching for complicated solutions while underestimating the impact of what happens in ordinary moments at home. That’s overlooking something both simpler and more immediate: Families already have powerful, evidence-based tools at their fingertips, and they don’t cost anything.

This isn’t a critique of schools. The evidence of what’s possible when schools commit fully is compelling: Louisiana became the only state to fully rebound in reading post-pandemic. Mississippi climbed from near the bottom of national rankings to the top ten in fourth-grade reading. Systematic, structured literacy instruction works when it’s implemented well. 

However, the best outcomes happen when classrooms and homes work together. The current reading crisis has exposed how much everyday language, attention and early habits have been neglected in shaping literacy, long before a child is ever formally tested.

Start with something deceptively simple: conversation. Reading is not just about decoding words on a page; it’s built on language. When parents narrate what they’re doing, ask questions and engage children in back-and-forth talk, they are building vocabulary and comprehension in real time. This isn’t enrichment. It’s the foundation strong readers stand on, and it happens in the car, at the kitchen table and at the checkout line.

Then there’s the way reading itself gets treated. Too often, it becomes something children think only “counts” as reading if it’s from a book. But literacy lives in the real world. A grocery list. A recipe. Street signs. Instructions. When children see that print carries meaning in daily life, they begin to understand why reading matters at all. 

And yet, in a culture saturated with screens and subscriptions, one of the most effective tools is analog: the public library. It’s easy to overlook because it’s free. But access to physical books — and the sustained attention they encourage — offers something many digital experiences do not. At a time when families are told to download more, the better advice may be to step into a quieter space and let a child linger with a book.

Honesty about the basics matters too. Letters and sounds are not outdated or trivial; they are essential. Helping children learn the alphabet, recognize letters in the environment or spell their own name is not busywork. It is preparation for the moment formal instruction begins and a base for whether that instruction sticks.

Perhaps most urgently, parents should stop being told to “wait and see” or “they’ll grow out of it.” These may sound reassuring, but in reading, it can be costly. Unlike spoken language, reading does not develop naturally without direct teaching. When a child consistently avoids reading, guesses at words, or becomes visibly frustrated, those are not quirks to outgrow. They are early warning signs. 

The earlier parents and educators respond, the easier the path forward, and the window for intervention narrows quickly. What looks like a behavioral problem in fourth grade often traces back to a foundational gap that could have been caught in kindergarten.

None of this will single-handedly reverse national test scores. But that’s not the point. The point is that in a moment when the literacy conversation is dominated by policy, programs and products, the most immediate and equitable intervention available risks being overlooked entirely: what families do every day.

The NAEP data tells a story of stratification: scores rising for high-performing students while struggling students fall further behind. That divide is not about capacity. It is, in part, about access to the kinds of early language experiences that wire children for reading before they ever enter a classroom. Debates about curriculum mandates and state laws are worth having. But while those debates unfold, children are sitting at kitchen tables tonight.

Parents are not a backup plan for struggling schools. They are a child’s first and most consistent teachers. The reading crisis is real. But so is the quiet, largely untapped power sitting in ordinary moments.

If better outcomes are the goal, the question shouldn’t stop at what schools will do differently next year. It should also demand answers about what’s already possible today — and why anyone has been told it isn’t enough.

]]> /article/exclusive-high-school-redesigns-curb-enrollment-loss-report-finds/ Thu, 23 Apr 2026 11:01:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=1031510 Like , Brooke Davis spent much of her college years preparing for a career she later realized wasn’t for her. She eventually switched her major from marine biology to engineering, but she didn’t want her daughter to make the same mistake.

That’s why she’s grateful that her 11th grader Kai can explore a career field at her high school in the Tomball Independent School District, outside Houston. Kai is in the legal studies program, which meets daily at the Tomball Innovation Center, a 70-acre facility that houses programs like aviation maintenance, cybersecurity and app design.

“For her to just get her feet wet and see if it’s something that she might want to do for the rest of her life is awesome,” Davis said. “You don’t want to go into something in college and then all of a sudden not understand what it is you’re getting into.”

Programs like Tomball’s are helping to keep some families in public schools at a time of rapidly expanding private school options, according to from Tyton Partners, a consulting firm that focuses on the education sector. Enrollment in the district has climbed from 10,000 to nearly 24,000 students over the past decade, even as many others in the Houston metro area have . The report attributes such increases to career-connected high schools that not only reflect student interests, but that are popular with both kids and parents. 

“Everyone’s looking to create fun, interesting new programs. In fact, there are probably too many of them,” said Adam Newman, Tyton founder and managing partner. Instead, districts should focus on making sure a “critical mass” of students participate in high school redesign initiatives for those programs to “remain compelling for parents” and attract growth, he said.

A survey of 250 high school administrators showed that more than half of districts and charters with high participation in redesigned programs saw enrollment growth between 2022 and 2025. Those with minimal participation continued to see enrollment decline.

But that hasn’t been the problem in Tomball. The demand to enroll in classes at the facility, a for an oilfield services company, is so great, the district holds a lottery to admit students. With an actual courtroom on site, Kai, who attended a classical Christian school for K-5, has been able to observe traffic court. She’s learning how to prepare oral arguments and properly cite case law. 

“They teach you about how to think like a lawyer,” she said. “I feel like I’ll definitely have a leg up once I get to college.”

Other students can earn a pilot’s license when they graduate or leave with an industry certification in fields like animal science or graphic design. Those in the , an early college model, will complete an associates degree along with a high school diploma. 

With HCA Healthcare nearby and building a branch of its pharmaceutical business in Houston, Tiffani Wooten, assistant director of the Tomball Economic Development Corp., said P-TECH helps “fast track” kids into in-demand careers. 

Health care is a “huge growing industry that we’re going to have to continue to filter kids in,” she said. She describes her role as a “connector” who works with the district to “bring the industry to the table.”

Christian Lehr, managing director at Tyton, said the district views “career-connected pathways as a core enrollment and value proposition strategy,” instead of as an add-on.

‘Enrollment pressure’

The report is a departure for Tyton, which has focused most of its analyses in recent years on efforts to disrupt the public education system. In 2022, it released survey data showing a one-year, 9% drop in families saying their children were enrolled in a traditional district school. Charters, private schools and homeschooling saw increases over that same time period.

In a deeper look at school choice, Tyton researchers reported in 2024 that improving their children’s mental health was the main reason why parents considered leaving the traditional system for alternatives like online programs and private schools.

This year, the team “turned the lens back to the public system because many of them are grappling with enrollment pressure,” Lehr said. With AI changing the workplace, they’re also thinking about the “shift from a college-for-all, No Child Left Behind mentality.” 

There are plenty of reasons to rethink education for teens, said Celina Pierrottet, who leads a high school transformation project with the National Association of State Boards of Education. 

In a from Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation, less than half of students said their schoolwork was challenging in a positive way or matched what they do best. Forty-six percent of 12- to 27-year-olds, including those in K-12, said they weren’t having any engaging experiences at school. Chronic absenteeism also remains higher than it was before the pandemic.

“There are a lot of warning signs flashing that high schools need to change,” Pierrottet said. 

‘A long journey’

The Tyton project, funded by the Walton Family Foundation, also includes brief case studies of districts and charter networks to identify some common redesign elements, like getting input from students on what they want and relying on outside groups, including employers and nonprofits, to execute the programs. 

The pattern revealed itself in Arizona, where over 100,000 students participate in the state’s universal private school choice program. Enrollment in the , outside Tucson, has increased 4.3% since 2022. While new housing development in the area has contributed to growth, enrollment increases have outpaced that of the high school-aged population. 

The Tyton report also features the Anaheim Union High School District in California, which used to remake secondary schools and re-engage students. District leaders took the focus off testing and designed courses like biotech chemistry that link academic content with job skills.  

One school launched a community gardening project that’s used for instruction across the curriculum. But getting the community to notice can be “a long journey,” Lehr said. The Anaheim district has been at its redesign work for a decade. 

In a state where public school enrollment is expected to through the end of the decade, the Anaheim district has seen a slight decline since 2022.

“The key question is whether execution holds,” Lehr said. “If it does, we’d expect stabilization and ultimately growth over the next five years.”

Disclosure: Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to The 74.

]]> /article/how-new-york-city-can-offer-schools-that-are-both-integrated-and-rigorous/ Wed, 22 Apr 2026 18:30:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=1031412 Each summer during new employee orientation at I open with a hard reality: Despite the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, most school districts remain deeply segregated. New York City — one of the most diverse cities on earth — is home to the largest and most segregated school district in the nation. 

A report released last month makes this even harder to ignore: New York State ranks among the most segregated in the entire country. That finding builds on a showing that deep school segregation in New York City has been the status quo since at least 2009. In some districts, the racial divide looks no different than it did in the 1930s.

Why have the state and the city failed to live up to the promise of excellent schools for all? Because a misconception persists: that building racially and economically diverse schools means lower quality and less academic rigor. Prospect Schools, a K-12 network of intentionally diverse charter schools in Brooklyn, was founded to challenge this notion, and I’m proud to have served as CEO since 2021. 

Brooklyn Prospect, our first campus, was the city’s first public charter school designed intentionally to be integrated along racial and socio-economic lines. Today, Prospect Schools serves almost 3,000 students across seven campuses, and is one of the few open enrollment public charter school networks offering the International Baccalaureate program to all high school students. Integrated schools benefit all students and raise performance across the board by spreading out resources and opportunity, expanding access to the best teachers and facilities, and preparing learners to thrive in a diverse world. 

The recent appointment of New York City Public Schools’ Chancellor Kamar Samuels and his policy agenda underscore that equity and excellence are not at odds. He garnered community support during previous leadership roles while  pursuing integration, an approach usually too controversial to touch. As superintendent of District 13 here in Brooklyn, he made the bold decision to replace exclusionary programs with school-wide IB enrichment. He understood that true equity isn’t about picking winners and losers; it’s about raising the ceiling for every child. 

Since taking office, Chancellor Samuels has signaled he is ready to hold this entire city accountable to a vision of education that is both radically inclusive and relentlessly rigorous. This is the right move for New York City. It also validates the approach to integrated education we rely on at Prospect Schools, where nearly two decades of work demonstrate that this vision can deliver meaningful results for students. 

We operate with a conviction that Samuels shares: that students learn best alongside peers who do not look, pray or live like them. At Prospect, we are “diverse by design,” which means we ensure that all of our classrooms reflect the vibrant diversity of the city through strategic recruitment, a weighted lottery, provision in our charter and a program that is inclusive and affirming. The result is a student body that is 29% White, 29% Black, 27% Hispanic and 10% multi-racial;  currently 44% of our students qualify for free and reduced-priced meals. 

We ensure all of our students have access to excellent teachers and rigorous academic curriculum which we model on the renowned IB Program. Through this globally recognized program, we raise the level of academic responsibility for all our students by cultivating curiosity, academic confidence, empowerment, global mindedness, community stewardship and life readiness. Further, we have proven that when you combine this intentional diversity with the high bar of the IB curriculum, the results are transformative.

Our students excel on state English language and math exams, most recently outperforming their city and district peers by 23 and 18 percentage points, respectively. This past year, over 80% of our graduating class was IB Diploma eligible, the highest in our history, and 100% of graduates were accepted into college. 

In Chancellor Samuels, I see a kindred spirit: a leader who understands that equity and excellence are not zero-sum competitors but twin pillars of a functioning democracy. Like Chancellor Samuels, I am the proud daughter of West Indian immigrants. I attended school in the Bronx and navigated the complexities of being a first-generation college student. Those experiences taught me early on that talent is distributed equally, but opportunity is not.

When I discovered the IB program, I saw a framework that didn’t just teach students what to think, but how to think. I knew then that this opportunity shouldn’t be reserved for private schools or select tracks of students — it belonged in every neighborhood and should be accessible to every child. 

We need this focus now more than ever. We are living in a time of deep polarization across our country, where echo chambers are solidifying into concrete walls. If NYC schools continue to remain segregated by race, class or academic tracking, we are merely preparing the next generation to perpetuate this divide. By championing integrated schools, academic excellence for all and global-mindedness of the IB, Chancellor Samuels is offering an antidote to this fragmentation. 

]]> /zero2eight/kids-in-state-funded-preschools-hit-record-high-but-program-quality-varies/ Wed, 22 Apr 2026 17:13:03 +0000 /?post_type=zero2eight&p=1031479 If state-funded preschool programs are in a race, then it’s clear that some states are approaching the finish line while others have lost momentum. 

So said Steve Barnett, director of the National Institute for Early Education Research at Rutgers University, which has just published its examining state-funded preschools. 

“That’s the story this year — that the race is highly uneven,” said Barnett. “Even as some states are racing toward the finish line, more states are moving in the wrong direction. A few states never entered the race. They’re not running.”

The research center has been publishing the State of Preschool Yearbook since 2003, measuring state-funded preschool programs against a set of quality standards and tracking programs’ enrollment and funding. For the first time, six states hit all 10 of NIEER’s , which measure factors such as teacher credentials, staff professional development, curriculum supports, class sizes and staff-to-child ratios. One of those states, Georgia, became the first with a universal preschool program to meet all 10 quality indicators — a feat that NIEER is touting widely and which Barnett said made the Peach State a “symbol” for everyone else. 

“You don’t have to choose between serving all the kids and building a high-quality program,” he said. “Georgia shows you can do it and not break the bank.”

In the 2024-25 school year, state-funded preschools saw record high enrollment and funding, though the pace slowed considerably from the prior year, according to NIEER’s findings. 

State-supported preschool programs now serve a combined 1.8 million children nationally, including 37% of 4-year-olds and 9% of 3-year-olds. The states that contributed most to the enrollment gains are California, Colorado, Michigan, Minnesota and Missouri, adding more than 52,000 new preschool seats.

Federal, state and local governments spent a combined $17.7 billion on preschool, with more than $14 billion of that amount coming from states. More than half of states increased their funding for preschool, including Michigan and New Jersey, which increased spending by more than $100 million each. Meanwhile, 17 states spent less, with Arizona, North Carolina and Texas among those seeing the biggest declines. Another six states do not have a state-funded preschool program, as defined by NIEER: Idaho, Indiana, Montana, New Hampshire, South Dakota and Wyoming.

Thus, the high-stakes race metaphor. 

“You have states moving ahead,” Barnett reiterated. “But you have states faltering, states that didn’t make much progress.”

Part of the explanation for the faltering states, he said, is that they have less federal funding to prop up these programs than they used to. But that’s not the full story, since even in some states with budget deficits, , they managed to increase funding for pre-K. “It is about how you set your priorities,” Barnett said. 

This report found that enrollment for 3-year-olds in public pre-K is at an all-time-high, though Allison Friedman-Krauss, lead author of the report, clarified that it’s only marginally higher than it was the previous year and that it still lags far behind enrollment for 4-year-olds. 

Several states have pledged to serve all 3-year-olds, including less populous ones like Vermont and New Mexico and more populous ones such as Illinois and New Jersey. 

It takes time to build those programs, though, Friedman-Krauss and Barnett said, so the progress on serving 3-year-olds is expected to be slow and incremental. 

As for Georgia, it joins an elite group of states that are lauded by NIEER for quality, including Alabama, Hawaii, Mississippi, Michigan and Rhode Island.  

Each of the 10 quality benchmarks represents an improvement in preschool quality that can be felt by children and families, Barnett said. 

“Children’s experiences can be tremendously different between programs that have all of this in place and programs that have little in place,” he said. 

For example, he added, “one of the keys to good early childhood education is the teacher-child relationship.” It is much more likely for that relationship to be strong and for children to get individualized support for their learning and development when a teacher has fewer children in her care.  

And better-prepared teachers, he said, are going to have more realistic expectations about what the job entails and will be more likely to stay in their positions for longer. That matters for young children, who benefit from consistent, stable caregivers and teachers. 

To meet all 10 benchmarks, Georgia its staff-to-child ratios and maximum classroom sizes, said Susan Adams, deputy commissioner for pre-K and instructional support at the Georgia Department of Early Care and Learning.

As of fall 2024, Georgia has reduced maximum preschool class sizes to 20 and set ratios at one adult to 10 children, Adams said. The state has also achieved salary parity for preschool teachers, so that they now align with the earnings of K-12 teachers, she added. 

What sets Georgia’s preschool program apart is that it is maintaining a high-quality learning environment while serving more than 70,000 children per year across Georgia’s 159 counties. 

The changes to ratios and maximum classroom sizes did reduce the number of preschool slots statewide, but the state is midway through a four-year effort to build back that capacity, by adding 100 new classrooms each year, Adams said. 

NIEER is tracking a number of other states that, with just a few changes, could join Georgia in providing universal access to high-quality pre-K, including New Mexico, which will be on par with Georgia once it meets the benchmark that requires all lead teachers to have a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education. 

While Barnett believes NIEER’s close tracking of state-funded preschool programs helps with accountability, he clarified that Georgia and other states are not improving their programs just so they can check another box in a report. 

“The rationale for the leadership is not to get the acclaim or recognition from us,” he said. “Their rationale, really, is we need to provide a better program for kids.”

]]> /article/education-dept-not-labor-to-distribute-funds-for-schools-this-summer/ Wed, 22 Apr 2026 16:21:12 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=1031488 Updated

Last fall, U.S. Department of Education officials that transferring major K-12 programs to the Department of Labor would be “more difficult” than its earlier move of career-and-technical education programs to that agency.

They’re not even going to try this year. 

To the relief of state leaders and education advocates, the department told education chiefs Friday that they would continue to access millions of dollars in Title I and other “formula” grants under the Every Student Succeeds Act through the system that’s already familiar to state staff. 

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“We have heard your concerns,” Kirstin Baesler, assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education, told chiefs on Friday. The pause on handing that responsibility over to the Labor Department means districts won’t need to worry about funds arriving in time to plan for next school year — a situation that caught schools off guard last summer when the administration held up funding for a month.

Sticking with the Education Department’s system, Baesler wrote, would give everyone involved “more time to collaborate on procedures, processes and training to ensure states are set up to successfully receive and draw down formula funds.” 

In recent weeks Education Secretary Linda McMahon and former Labor Secretary Lori Chavez DeRemer have jointly announced four smaller grant competitions related to , school leadership, and charter schools. Those funds will flow through a Labor Department grant platform. But some observers suggest the department’s decision to hang on to its largest K-12 program is an acknowledgement that the transition hasn’t been smooth. Title I serves roughly 25 million students.

“That’s an important milestone to miss and a sign that the partnership has been rocky and poorly executed,” said Braden Goetz, a senior policy adviser at New America, a left-of-center think tank. He previously directed the policy and research team focusing on career, technical and adult education at the Education Department, the first office to be transferred to the Labor Department.

State officials reported numerous complications last year in trying to access CTE funds, like error messages in the system. The Illinois State Department of Education waited several weeks to get its funding and spokeswoman Lindsay Record said communication from the Department of Labor often came “with little notice and without the benefit of the Department of Education’s expertise in overseeing education programs.”  

States don’t want a repeat of that situation when they try to pull down roughly $28 billion in funds this summer. 

Competitive grants, like the ones McMahon and Chavez-DeRemer recently announced, are one thing. But Title I and other formula programs for all states “are a different, and much larger and more essential, responsibility altogether,” said Amy Loyd, president and CEO of All4Ed, an advocacy group. 

The Rhode Island Department of Education was another agency that experienced difficulties using the Labor Department’s system last year. Spokesman Victor Morente said Commissioner Angélica Infante-Green appreciates Baesler allowing “additional time for preparedness” with the formula funds, but added that “further clarity on how the new interagency plans will be implemented is absolutely necessary to avoid disruption and confusion related to funding concerns.”

Along with state officials, staff within the Education Department “persistently communicated” to leaders that moving to Labor’s grant system “would cause significant problems for states and students,” said Rachel Gittleman, president of the union representing department employees. 

Baesler said she would discuss the matter further with chiefs when she meets with them virtually May 7.

House committee vote

Congress also expressed concerns last year with the batch of “interagency agreements” McMahon has initiated as she works to eliminate the department. Members warned that the actions would “create inefficiencies” and “cause delays and administrative challenges.”

The agreements are illegal according to a group of states and districts that have the dismantling of the department. But on Tuesday, the House education committee took the first step toward writing those agreements into law. 

The Republican majority passed a bill that formally moves adult education programs to the Labor Department. Rep. Tim Walberg of Michigan, who chairs the committee, said the move makes it easier for adults to “move from basic skills to training to employment within a more coordinated system.”

Goetz disagreed. In , he said taking the program out of the Education Department changes it into “a funnel to low-wage jobs” and turns it over to those without expertise in reading and math.

Even so, aside from Baesler’s Friday announcement, he doesn’t expect the administration to slow down its work to distribute education programs to other agencies. Chavez-DeRemer’s resignation this week, following that she used Labor funds for personal trips and had an affair with an employee, could even accelerate the process, he said.

Savannah Newhouse, a spokeswoman for the Education Department, dismissed the idea that Chavez-DeRemer’s actions got in the way of carrying out President Donald Trump’s executive order to shut down the department. 

“Suggesting one departure would affect these partnerships misunderstands how they’re structured,” she said. “These partnerships are with agencies best equipped to manage federal education programs without disruption.”

]]> /article/repurposing-closed-schools-for-community/ Wed, 22 Apr 2026 14:30:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=1031426 The 74 is proud to partner with Next City for a conversation about how developers are transforming closed schools for community use. As public school enrollment continues to decline, more schools are closing, raising questions about what to do with abandoned buildings that often become sources of neighborhood blight. Some are converted into housing. Others become offices or creative community spaces. The 74’s Linda Jacobson will moderate the event that will include developer Stan Sugarman, documentary filmmaker Paola Aguirre Serrano and designer Lindsey Scannapieco.

RSVP for the 1 p.m. ET livestream , or refresh this page after the livestream to watch right here.

Related coverage from The 74:

• As Enrollment Falls, Old Schools Find New Life as Apartments

• Thousands of Schools at Risk of Closing Due to Enrollment Loss

• How a Notorious Maximum-Security Prison Was Transformed Into a Thriving Preschool

]]> /article/how-should-educators-teach-americas-story/ Wed, 22 Apr 2026 14:20:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=1031448 The 74 was proud to partner with the Progressive Policy Institute for a special conversation about how best to teach the American experience. As America celebrates its 250th birthday, educators at the K-12 and higher education levels are grappling with the best way to educate young people about the United States. What is the proper balance between explaining the grand ideals of liberty and equality found in the Declaration of Independence — and acknowledging the many ways America has fallen short?

The 74’s Greg Toppo steered the event including Richard D. Kahlenberg, director of PPI’s American Identity Project; Rice University professor Caroline Levander; and PPI fellow Lief Lin.

Related coverage from The 74:

• The Kids Could Determine the Future of Democracy

• Rebooting Civics for the Digital Age

• Why the War in Iran Is a Teachable Moment for American Education

• Why History Instruction is Critical for Combating Online Misinformation

]]> /article/stop-trying-to-teach-21st-century-financial-literacy-with-20th-century-tools/ Wed, 22 Apr 2026 12:30:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=1031433 If you hand teenagers a spreadsheet and ask them to track their expenses, they will quit in five minutes. If you hand them a smartphone game where they have to manage resources to survive a zombie apocalypse, they will obsess over it for hours.

The cognitive load is identical: budgeting, resource allocation and risk management. The difference is the delivery mechanism. And that difference is costly.

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The United States has a financial literacy problem that decades of classroom instruction have failed to solve. Fewer than 57% of American adults are considered financially literate, according to the S&P , placing the U.S. behind countries such as Canada, the United Kingdom and Germany. Meanwhile, has climbed to $18.8 trillion, and rose 11%, to 574,314 cases, in the year ending December 2025. The nation is producing high school graduates who might understand the Pythagorean theorem but cannot read a credit card statement.

The standard policy response has been to mandate more financial education in schools. now require completion of a personal finance course for high school graduation. That is progress, but it mistakes input for outcome. Adding a required course changes nothing if the instruction itself is broken. 

My experience as a student at Drexel University proved the point for me. Two of my finance courses, Applied Portfolio Management and Advanced Portfolio Management, were not textbook-based in the traditional sense. They were simulation-based. Students worked on Bloomberg terminals, learning through market-driven exercises that mirrored real financial environments. That hands-on experience made the material stick in a way lectures never could, and it helped me land a job in investment accounting because I could speak to real-world tools and decision-making, not just theory.

Now, I am developing an artificial intelligence-powered financial literacy tool for K-12 students who are natives of a gamified world. 

Instead of sitting through lectures on compound interest and credit scores, students could access an AI-driven financial simulator that could compress 30 years of compounding into 30 minutes of gameplay. They could make a risky investment, watch the market crash and lose their virtual homes, all within a single class period. The lesson would land not as an abstraction, but as a lived experience.

Such an approach would also give students the safety to fail. Just as in the traditional classroom, where failure is punished with grades, in the real financial system, failure is catastrophic: bankruptcy, foreclosure, destroyed credit. Mistakes are irreversible.

A simulator breaks that trap. Students might begin with a paycheck, fixed monthly bills, a savings goal and a credit card balance. Then the simulation forces tradeoffs. Do they spend on wants, pay down debt or build an emergency fund? What happens if a surprise medical bill appears, work hours get cut or interest starts compounding after a missed payment? Instead of reading about leverage and cash flow as abstract ideas, students experience the consequences of those choices in real time. They can fail safely, reset and try again with better judgment. That process builds what textbooks cannot: financial muscle memory.

At a time when teachers are competing with TikTok for students’ attention, policymakers, school districts and curriculum developers have a real opportunity to embrace approaches that work for this generation, rather than trying to solve a 21st-century problem with 20th-century tools. 

AI simulations that turn abstract financial concepts into actual experience — allowing students to practice budgeting, debt repayment, credit management and emergency spending decisions in interactive environments where consequences unfold in real time — can be a powerful solution to America’s financial literacy crisis. What is missing is the willingness to abandon the comfort of the familiar worksheet.

It is time to let students play the game.

]]> /article/nebraska-passes-special-ed-bill-without-proposed-protections-for-students/ Wed, 22 Apr 2026 10:01:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=1031439 This story was co-published with , Nebraska’s first independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories that matter.

For Dave Murman, the issue was personal.

The Republican state lawmaker knew Nebraska school districts were denying transfer requests at high rates to students with disabilities — kids who reminded Murman of his now-grown daughter. 

In 2025, he proposed a bill to ban the disproportionate rejections.

Gov. Jim Pillen , but by then, it was unrecognizable to the parents and disability advocates who had once backed it.

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Murman, facing opposition from schools and the state teachers union, stripped most of the protections for students with disabilities out of the proposal earlier this year. The new focus of the legislation: allowing schools to suspend their youngest students.

Angela Gleason, whose son Teddy has been denied transfers several times, said it feels like one step forward and two steps back. 

“I was like, ‘Oh, it was going to help kids, and now I feel like it’s hurting more kids than it was going to help,’ ” Gleason said.

Nebraska’s option enrollment policy allows students to transfer from one public school district to another, but in practice, kids with disabilities don’t have the same freedom to transfer as their peers, by the Flatwater Free Press and The 74 found.

That trend continued during the 2024-25 school year, according to the latest state report. Nebraska districts denied 35% of option applications from students with individualized education programs, compared with about 9% of applications from students without them, a new Flatwater analysis found.

The rejection rates are especially disproportionate in the Omaha suburbs.

Bellevue Public Schools turned away more than three-quarters of students with IEPs but accepted all but one of the 246 applicants without disabilities. Three other suburban districts each denied well over half of the kids with IEPs who applied while accepting a majority of kids without IEPs.

Murman’s original bill would have outlawed that. But school administrators and opposed the legislation, contending that districts with dire special ed teaching shortages shouldn’t be forced to take on more kids with IEPs.

Murman knew he didn’t have enough votes from lawmakers willing to buck their local superintendents. So earlier this year, he altered the focus of the legislation.

The amended bill aimed to restore schools’ ability to suspend students in pre-K through second grade for violent behavior, reversing on the practice.

One option enrollment provision remained: Districts had to guarantee seats for siblings of students who had already optioned in.

After on school suspensions, Republican lawmakers passed the bill over objections from Democrats.

The siblings clause will provide an avenue for at least some students with disabilities to get into districts that might otherwise deny them, Murman said. 

State Sen. Danielle Conrad, a Lincoln Democrat, said Murman had hijacked a well-intentioned bill to push Pillen’s priority of removing protections for young students facing punishment.  

“If the schools, the governor and the Legislature won’t act to remedy this clear discrimination on a systemic level, I hope parents start suing the schools to hold them accountable,” Conrad wrote in an email to Flatwater Free Press.

Gleason said it’s disappointing that the bill she thought would help kids like her son Teddy transfer schools will result in more of them being suspended. 

In first grade, Omaha Public Schools placed Teddy, who has autism, in a general education classroom where he struggled behaviorally, she said. The school called almost daily asking her to pick him up early, she recalled. 

“He basically had a lot of informal suspensions where they would call me and ask me to come get him,” Gleason said. “Then he’s just missing out on the education, and so it just snowballed.”

Across the state, students enrolled in special education were suspended more than twice as often as their peers last school year, . The Arc of Nebraska, a leading disability advocacy organization, opposed Murman’s bill because of that disciplinary disparity. 

Gleason’s other children are option students at a nearby suburban district, so Teddy could potentially join them under the new law. It’s still upsetting that the opportunity to transfer doesn’t extend to all other children with IEPs, she said.

For the Shada family, the bill comes years too late to make a difference. 

Gary Shada, a longtime teacher at Pierce Public Schools in northeast Nebraska, applied years ago for his daughter Kylee to join the district as an option student, but his employer turned her away. His son was granted a transfer.

Instead, Kylee, who has Down syndrome, has been enrolled at the nearby Plainview district. But with Shada nearing retirement and his son due to graduate next year, he said he doesn’t see the point in bringing Kylee into the district anymore. Still, he said he wishes Murman’s bill had been in effect when the family first applied for option enrollment.

“I think sometimes public schools forget what their reason for existing is,” Shada said. “It’s not about being able to pick and choose who walks who walks through your front door.”

Bellevue Public Schools is short six special ed teachers and about 15 paraprofessionals, and adding more option students with IEPs to “already difficult caseloads is not what is best for teachers or students,” said district spokeswoman Amanda Oliver.

“Our decisions are not based on a student’s disability, but on our ability to provide the services required by their IEP in a manner that meets both educational standards and legal obligations,” Oliver wrote in an email. 

Grand Island Public Schools, which denied all five of the students with IEPs who applied last school year, is similarly understaffed in special ed and is close to enrollment capacity just with neighborhood students, Superintendent Matt Fisher said in a statement.

“Legally and functionally, we have not been able to accommodate some of the needs of those requesting to enter the district through the option process,” Fisher said.

Staff at the Nebraska Department of Education are considering option enrollment rule changes tied to the original and amended versions of Murman’s bill, but it’s not clear what they will look like.  

Murman said the disproportionate rejection of kids with disabilities is “pure discrimination.” Term limits prevent him from running for reelection this year, but he hopes another state lawmaker will take up the cause after he’s gone.

Gleason said she appreciated Murman’s intentions, but she’s not hopeful the Legislature will resolve the issue soon, especially given schools’ opposition.

This year, the Legislature also that would have required schools to get parents’ approval before changing a student’s IEP. Proponents said the legislation would have given families a way to fight schools’ attempts to cut special education services. 

Mary Phillips, president of the Arc of Nebraska, takes the long view on advocating for the rights of children with disabilities. It wasn’t until 1975 that a law ensured they could attend their neighborhood schools. 

“I feel like progress comes very slow for the disability culture,” Phillips said. “The work isn’t done.”

is Nebraska’s first independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories that matter.

]]> /article/pittsburgh-schools-are-going-remote-for-the-nfl-draft/ Tue, 21 Apr 2026 17:33:28 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=1031422

]]> /article/why-blue-state-governors-should-sign-up-for-new-federal-scholarship-tax-credit/ Tue, 21 Apr 2026 16:30:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=1031374 While education choice advocates have fought, and reconciled, over the concept and implementation of what is now the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit for almost a decade, the policy — which enshrines in the federal tax code a $1,700 tax credit to individuals contributing to Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs) starting Jan. 1, 2027 — is new to many state politicos and education policy advocates.

As momentum for participating in the program (which in most cases requires governors to opt their states in) grows, Democratic governors in particular are now caught between a Scylla and Charybdis of policy choices. Signing on provides a new revenue stream for enrichment, tutoring and other public school activities. But some children may use the credit to attend private schools, and opting out — as teachers unions advocate — won’t necessarily prevent money from flowing toward such purposes across state lines. 

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What are governors, and advocates, to do?

��DZ��ǰ������’s Jared Polis, a Democrat, has been a leader on the issue, opting the Centennial State in to the program, and several of his Blue State colleagues have at least signaled they are willing to examine the opportunity, primarily for the benefits it offers their states’ public school families.

The political and financial realities of a program that turns taxpayers into philanthropists are quickly dawning on education reformers as well, both those who opposed it and those who simply weren’t paying attention. And with billions of new dollars in charitable donations potentially in play, conversations are now being held in earnest about how to implement the credit at the state level. By implement, what I really mean is regulate the program in a fashion that accomplishes traditional education reform goals in the best cases, or that blocks private school participation in the most cynical.

While the motivations in the former instance are laudable, they show a misunderstanding of what the program actually is and what can and cannot be “regulated” as a result.

First, the tax credit scholarship is not education policy and is not regulated by any educational entity. It is tax policy, regulated by the Internal Revenue Service, that accomplishes a charitable purpose tied to education. Some have that donations should be treated as the federal government treats education dollars it distributes to states. But the mechanisms are dissimilar, and there are no provisions for this in the law, which instead only structures the eligibility and use of the credit, the types of organizations that can collect it and the kinds of students (by income) and activities (fees, supplies, equipment) it can be used for. In fact, the program is more like the widely supported Child Tax Credit, which gives families broad discretion, than education tax credits that exist in most states. 

Secondly, while states must opt in (and 28 have at the time of writing), contributions are not state money; they are a credit to individual taxpayers who may or may not give them to a scholarship-granting organization, be it public or private, in their home state or another. Members of the Colorado legislature, ironically and perhaps tellingly, have proposed regulating the program as if they are its arbiter and fiduciary. Moreover, under the guise of non-discrimination, they seek to enforce uniform public school rules on a diverse set of charitable actors. While those who support school choice know such language is often used to make participation unpalatable to private schools (which feature communities built on choice and voluntary association, not zip code and compulsory attendance), this language would potentially also prohibit public schools from building affinity programming to support marginalized communities. Additionally, Colorado (and all states) already have rules that govern individual charitable contributions. If those have historically eluded such regulation, why should this credit be treated differently? 

While these issues are resolved, many advocates who focus on student achievement are left with an interesting question to answer: How could tax policy be regulated to ensure children receive high-quality opportunities, given the absence of traditional policy levers, like authorizing or similar criteria, for SGO participation? This is a new question that requires novel thinking, but it is not impossible to do. And currently, there are three tools at the disposal of advocates and politicos worth considering to accomplish this goal.

The first is the bully pulpit, specifically state executives. Governors, when opting in to the program, have the opportunity to assert their priorities for it, including whom they think it should prioritize (such as low-income students), how they’d like to see it measured (i.e. state assessments) and what kinds of SGOs, or even which ones specifically, they believe are worth contributing to. Governors can do this with their state’s entire communications apparatus at their disposal. This is a megaphone of the highest and loudest order.

The second is brands, which signal quality in all areas of life including education. Here, trusted community organizations and, of course, school districts themselves have the opportunity to set the market for what is possible. District of Columbia Public Schools, for instance, could start a Summer Enrichment SGO to provide extended learning opportunities for the city’s students, as could the Boys and Girls Club or an established charter network such as Success Academy. A current example of this is Bloomberg Philanthropy’s program, which pairs philanthropists and charter schools across the country to deliver high-quality summer programming and tutoring to students. The tutoring and enrichment camps of and ��DZ��ǰ������’s are also worth emulating.

Lastly, states can build their own SGOs. Arizona’s pandemic summer effort, AZ On Track, which sought to catch kids up after COVID school closures, was one such example. And while started by philanthropy, the state-funded nonprofit , which delivers high-impact tutoring for K-8 students and now runs on both state education funding and charitable donations, is another. Together, they show how states can lead the way or partner to found an aligned SGO.

The Federal Scholarship Tax Credit provides new challenges for political actors and advocates, but also new opportunities for families, nonprofits, districts and others to support the country’s children. As a new revenue stream with lots of flexibility, it creates a rare chance to do both more and different things across the nation’s education landscape. Governors shouldn’t waste that opportunity. Advocates shouldn’t either.

]]> /article/school-vouchers-fail-the-civil-rights-test-the-federal-program-is-no-exception/ Tue, 21 Apr 2026 16:30:00 +0000 /?post_type=article&p=1031387 Our public education system rests on a foundation of civil rights protections. Public schools exist to serve every child. They are legally required to accept all students and provide the services they need, regardless of their race or ethnicity, disability status, language needs, sexual orientation or academic performance. 

This obligation is the heart of equal opportunity in our country — and private school vouchers were built to bypass it. Vouchers to a time when states fought federally mandated school desegregation. Funded by , today’s state voucher programs extend this legacy by diverting funds to unaccountable schools that pick and choose the students they enroll, and the in them. 

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“Choice” is a compelling slogan, but with private school vouchers, it’s the school’s choice, not the families. Participating private schools admissions and enrollment decisions, with little oversight of nondiscrimination compliance. Private schools can kick students out without any explanation or deny admission to students based on religious affiliation, LGBTQ+ status, language proficiency, and more. 

One on Washington, DC’s voucher program found that students most often did not use vouchers because participating schools lacked services for their learning or physical disabilities. 

This is what happens when public dollars flow into systems that are not built to serve every child. 

Now, the federal government wants to supercharge this exclusion. Last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act introduced the country’s first national school voucher program. Starting Dec. 15, governors can opt into the program, which allows the use of tax-credit-funded scholarships to underwrite private or religious schools as early as 2027. The program for students who themselves or their siblings have previously received a federal voucher, favoring families already using vouchers.  

Selective admissions isn’t the only way the federal voucher scheme fails the “civil rights test.” Having data on student and school performance broken down by student subgroups is a necessary civil rights tool, allowing the public to track disparities and target resources. Yet participating private schools do not have to report, test, or be held accountable for the requirements that apply to public schools. 

Most school choice programs students to take state assessments. And not all require that the . It is no surprise that lower-quality private schools are participate in voucher programs than higher-quality ones. When outcomes are hidden families are in the dark about how schools are serving their children. 

Then there is the cost. The true cost of this program to taxpayers and public school budgets is likely underestimated. In states with existing voucher programs, expenses have well beyond expectations, draining and destabilizing state budgets. In one Florida alone, the state voucher program contributed to a $17 million budget shortfall. Duval County serves a majority of students of color, about 40% of students are Black and 17% Latino, underscoring who bears the cost of these funding losses.   

In many places, voters have also rejected efforts to divert public funds away from public school students. In 2024, voters in Colorado, Kentucky, and Nebraska voted against ballot measures that would have directed taxpayer dollars to private school vouchers. 

According to UnidosUS’ of the Hispanic Electorate, a plurality of Latino voters oppose diverting public school funds to pay for private or religious school tuition, while found that more than two-thirds of all voters choose funding for public schools over vouchers. 

Despite its clear drawbacks, some supporters argue the new federal program could unlock new dollars for purposes that could benefit public school students, such as tutoring, after-school programs, transportation or services for students with disabilities. The promise of expanded services is appealing, but this, too, ignores key realities. 

Under the new federal tax-credit scholarship program, donors give money to Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs), which then provide “scholarships” or vouchers to eligible students. It is up to the U.S. Treasury Department to determine whether states can screen and set guardrails for SGOs participating in the program, and the agency has not yet released their proposed regulations. Still early and suggest states won’t get a choice in which vendors are eligible, which services quality nor which non-discrimination protections SGOs have to uphold. 

That would mean governors couldn’t prioritize SGOs that serve public school students, ensure quality standards or bar those that offer private school vouchers.

Even if a state is allowed to pick the SGOs that participate in the program, guaranteeing transparency and quality is a complex, demanding and potentially costly endeavor. With new SGOs and vendors entering the market, weeding out bad actors has proven to be a major and costly undertaking for states.  

A state audit revealed that Florida failed to reliably track in voucher funds, making it easy for fraudsters to game the system with fictitious The same audit revealed scholarship granting organizations in the state kept large sums of taxpayer money in their accounts, leaving programs and parents waiting for voucher payments for months. 

The federal program is so convoluted and biased towards private school uses that it is unlikely to serve public school students in practice. Ultimately, the potential harm outweighs any hypothetical good. 

We call on governors and state leaders: Do not opt in. Put the focus on civil rights, strengthening public schools and the proven options within them: tutoring, after-school learning, special education services, dual-language programs, magnet programs, gifted-and-talented programs with fair access and career and technical education. 

The program only passed the U.S. Senate last year by one vote, and Democratic Sens. Mark Kelly of Arizona and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii recently introduced the to repeal the program.

Public dollars should expand civil rights, not shrink them. Public education is the backbone of equal opportunity. Leaders should protect it.

]]> /zero2eight/head-start-programs-face-funding-squeeze/ Tue, 21 Apr 2026 14:30:00 +0000 /?post_type=zero2eight&p=1031379 This article was originally published in

When Rickencia Clerveaux McClean’s son was around 18 months old, she noticed he wasn’t speaking the way she expected. He pointed instead of asking. He struggled with food textures. McClean looked ahead at his future in public school with some dread.

Fortunately, she said, there was an opening at Head Start at Action for Boston Community Development in Dorchester – the same program her younger sister had attended years before. Now her son is three, eating applesauce with his classmates and using his words.

“I feel like ABCD helped him navigate first before he was able to go to a public school,” said McClean, whose 2-year-old daughter is enrolled there, too. “That’s the best pathway for any kid who’s having a difficult time on their own.”

McClean, 27, is a student at Roxbury Community College working on the requisite classes for the nursing program. Head Start, she said, is what makes that possible.

She is among the lucky ones these days. Massachusetts has lost 1,300 Head Start slots over the last three years, as the federal government has level-funded the program, and there is worry that more seats could be in jeopardy.

The 60-year-old federally funded program for children from low-income families is navigating what advocates describe as a painful stretch of uncertainty.

The Trump administration’s , released earlier this month, includes $12.3 billion for Head Start nationally – the same level as the prior two fiscal years. While that has forced programs to reduce the number of families they serve, it is a retreat from that the administration might seek to eliminate the program entirely.

“It has been an incredibly unpredictable year, from both policy changes to funding instability,” said Michelle Haimowitz, executive director of the Massachusetts Head Start Association, which advocates for Head Start programs in the state. “Flat funding itself is a pretty sharp cut to programs every year, given increasing costs from things like health care and rent and utilities, as well as the need to continue to raise wages for our educators.”

Head Start provides early education, health, nutrition, and family support services to children from birth to age five.

In Massachusetts, it serves more than 11,000 children annually across 28 programs and employs about 4,000 early childhood professionals, according to the . Families receiving Transitional Aid to Families with Dependent Children, SNAP benefits, or disability assistance, as well as children in foster care or experiencing homelessness, qualify automatically.

Massachusetts is one of the few states that supplements the federal program with state dollars, contributing $20 million on top of the $189 million in annual federal funding that comes to the state, according to the .

The Massachusetts Head Start Association is asking the Legislature for a $4.56 million increase — enough to fund a 3 percent cost-of-living adjustment for program staff.

“Just because you close a classroom here or there doesn’t mean the children aren’t there to fill it,” said Haimowitz. “Programs need to make terrible choices between access and being able to staff the classrooms they are able to maintain.”

State financial support has crept up in recent years, but Gov. Maura Healey’s proposed 2027 budget kept its recommendation at $20 million, as does the version advanced through the House on Wednesday.

“We know it’s a tough budget year,” Haimowitz said. “And at the same time, we need to make sure our programs have what they need to keep as many classrooms open as they can.”

Compounding that financial pressure is a bureaucratic disruption that began a year ago. On April 1, 2025, the Trump administration five of Head Start’s 10 regional offices, including the Boston office that had served Massachusetts and the five other New England states. Massachusetts programs were reassigned to the Philadelphia regional office, which now carries twice its previous caseload.

Haimowitz said several programs in the middle of federally approved construction projects have nearly missed contractor payment deadlines because approvals that once flowed through the Boston office have stalled.

“Those bureaucratic slowdowns can seem really minor, but if you’re a contractor who’s been hired to build a Head Start program and your check hasn’t been clearing — that’s not minor,” she said.

The funding pressure came to a head last fall, when the federal government shutdown cut off grants to six Massachusetts programs with November award dates. operated by Self Help Inc. in Brockton and Norwood closed, leaving roughly 550 children without care and more than 150 staff furloughed.

McClean, who sits on ABCD’s policy council, has been tracking the funding uncertainty alongside other parents.

“Everybody’s on the edge, because we don’t know exactly the certainty of what can happen,” she said. A Haitian immigrant trying to carve out an education and a life for her family, McClean said the Head Start program is not “just like a place you drop your kids. It’s a family. It’s a community.”

She said the program is not only crucial to her children’s development, but also makes it possible to work toward her goal of becoming a nurse. If her Head Start program is cut, McClean said, “I’ll have to drop out of school.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

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