LOCKHART, Texas — Sometime last year, Alfonso Sifuentes was on a bus tour as part of a chamber of commerce’s efforts to map out the future of the bustling Central Texas region south of Austin where he lives and works.

There was chatter about why San Marcos, a suburb along one stretch of the Interstate 35 corridor, had little interest in a proposed expansion of Austin Community College into that area. Voters previously rejected the idea because of the property tax increase it would have required. As he swayed in his seat on the moving bus, Sifuentes, a businessman in the waste management industry who has long been involved in community development, thought about his hometown of Lockhart — like San Marcos just 30-some miles from Austin — and about the opportunities the college’s growing network of campuses could bring. Somewhere along the bus route, he made a declaration for all to hear. 

“Well, if San Marcos doesn’t want it,” Sifuentes said, “Lockhart will take it.”

This November, the college is coming to voters in the Lockhart Independent School District with a proposition to begin paying into the Austin Community College taxing district. In exchange, residents would qualify for in-district tuition and trigger a long-term plan to build out college facilities in this rural stretch of Texas, which is positioning itself to tap into the economic boom flowing into the smaller communities nestled between Austin and San Antonio.

Community colleges have long played a crucial role in recovering economies. But in Lockhart, ACC’s potential expansion could serve as a case study of the role colleges can play in emerging economies as local leaders and community members eye the economic growth on the horizon.

That is, if they can convince enough of their neighbors to help pay for it.

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At the edge of two massive metropolitan areas — Austin to the north and San Antonio to the south — Caldwell County is dotted by quaint communities offering small-town living. While the streets in other small rural communities are lined by shuttered storefronts or sit in the shadow of industry long gone, local leaders pitch this as a place “where undeniable opportunity meets authentic Texas community.”

Lockhart, the county seat, is revered as the barbecue capital of Texas with an established status as a day trip destination. About 30 miles southeast of Austin, its picturesque town square hosts a regular rotation of community events, including a summer concert series on the courthouse lawn and a series of pop-ups on the first Friday of the month featuring some mix of live music, receptions at a local art gallery, and sip and strolls and cheesecake specials at the antique store.

The county’s population of roughly 50,000 residents is dwarfed by the big cities and the nearby suburban communities that often rank among the fastest growing in the country. But what the county lacks in population it makes up for with a relatively low cost of living, space to make room for industry, housing and, potentially, Austin Community College.

The potential annexation is an example of how colleges are becoming more nimble and more responsive to both emerging economies and the needs of students, said Maria Cormier, a senior research associate for the Community College Research Center at Teachers College, Columbia University. But Cormier argues such expansions must be intentionally designed with equity in mind to envision multiple pathways for students so that, for example, students from marginalized backgrounds aren’t limited only to certificate-level programming. (The Hechinger Report is an independent unit of Teachers College.)

“These sorts of questions become important when colleges are proposing these kinds of expansions: To what extent are they thinking about longer-term pathways for students?” Cormier said.

ACC already partners with Lockhart ISD on an early college high school that allows students to complete transferable college credit hours while earning a high school diploma, and proponents of annexation highlight the affordable higher education opportunities it would generally provide students in the Lockhart area. But their sales pitch emphasizes what it would mean to leverage ACC for the whole community. While the share of adults with a high school degree within Lockhart ISD’s territory is roughly aligned with the state, the share who have a bachelor’s degree — just 16.8 percent — falls to about half of the state rate.

“An effort like this can never be wrong if it always is for the right reasons,” said Nick Metzler, an information technology manager and consultant who serves as the president of the Greater Lockhart for ACC political action committee, which formed to pursue the college’s expansion.

Related: Five community colleges tweak their offerings to match the local job market

First established in 1973, ACC has steadily grown its footprint in Central Texas through annexation. Though not commonly used, a provision of Texas education law grants a community college the ability to expand its taxing district by adding territory within its designated service area. Working within a service district roughly the size of Connecticut, ACC first expanded its reach in 1985 when voters in the territory covered by the Leander Independent School District, a northern suburb of Austin, agreed to be annexed.

In the years since, neighboring communities in the Manor, Del Valle and Round Rock school districts followed with large majority votes in favor of annexation. ACC’s expansion into Austin’s southern suburbs didn’t begin until 2010, when annexation passed in the Hays Consolidated Independent School District.

The collective initiative to bring ACC to Lockhart has been the topic of discussion for many years, but the current effort was formally triggered by a community-led petition that required locals to gather signatures from at least 5 percent of registered voters. Fanning out at youth sporting events, school functions and other community gatherings, PAC members met with neighbors who indicated their children would be the first in their families to go to college, if they could afford it. Others were adults excited by the prospect of trade programs and certifications they could pursue and the transformative change it could bring to their families as new industries move into Caldwell County.

“Those things would catch a lot of the individuals who couldn’t make it to four-year universities or couldn’t afford to go to four-year universities,” Metzler said. “That’s always been kind of where we as a community have kind of been lacking.”

Lockhart also has an incentive for partnering with ACC: A recent assessment commissioned by the city identified the need to partner with a postsecondary institution for job training if it wanted to meet its economic goals and compete in its target business sectors, namely large-scale auto and electronic manufacturing, food processing and tourism. It also identified the lack of skilled administrative workers along with computer and math specialists as a challenge to reaching those goals.

In the end, PAC members easily surpassed the threshold of the 744 signatures they were required to submit — they turned in 1,013.

Related: After its college closes, a rural community fights to keep a path to education open

On the ballot now is a proposal for homeowners to trade $232.54 a year on average — a rate of $.1013 per $100 in property value — for in-district services. That includes a steep discount for in-district tuition that comes out to $85 per credit hour compared with $286 for out-of-district residents, though high school graduates from Lockhart ISD would also qualify for free tuition under a recently adopted five-year pilot program going into effect this fall.

“We are very interested in providing access to high-quality, affordable education in our region because we think it’s a game changer for families,” Chris Cervini, ACC’s vice chancellor for community and public affairs, said in an interview. “We think it promotes affordability by providing folks a lifeline to a family-sustaining wage, so we are very bullish on our value proposition.”

The vote would also allow ACC to grow its tax base as it works to keep pace with its growing enrollment. When classes kicked off this fall, ACC was serving about 70,000 students across 11 campuses in the Central Texas region — an enrollment increase of 15 percent compared with a year earlier. The potential expansion comes as community colleges are adapting to a new state financing model based on student outcomes, including financial incentives for schools if students obtain workforce credentials in certain fields.

The college proposed a three-phase service plan that would begin with expanded offerings in the area, such as evening classes, and eventually work up to a permanent facility tailored to match workforce needs, including demand for certificate programs to “reskill and upskill” for various high-demand careers. Cervini, who has been a main liaison with the Lockhart community, previously said the college was considering whether it could quickly deploy its resources into the community through mobile training rigs for HVAC and welding.

Its timeline could be sped up now that the college has identified a historic building in the heart of downtown — the old Ford Lockhart Motor Company building — as its potential home. During a recent presentation to the Lockhart City Council, ACC Chancellor Russell Lowery-Hart told city leaders he appreciated that the site would represent the community’s history juxtaposed to “what we think the future looks like.”

But ACC leaders said the issue ultimately has to play out in the community. There’s been no apparent organized opposition to the vote in Lockhart, and ACC officials say they’ve been engaged with local leaders who have been supportive in helping inform voters about the annexation process. The proposal recently picked up the endorsement of Lockhart’s mayor, Lew White, who commended ACC leaders for their outreach to the community about their offerings.

“I think that’s what a lot of people have been asking for, and I think you’re really shaping your proposal for this fall election very nicely,” White said. “And I think it’s something that our community needs to get together and get behind and support.”

Related: States and localities pump more money into community colleges than four-year campuses

Even Lockhart ISD leaders frame the college’s pitch as an initiative with potential benefits extending well beyond the increased access it would offer students in the region.

Overseeing a record 6,850 students in a district covering about 300 square miles, Superintendent Mark Estrada said education is essential to cultivating communities where residents can not only actively participate in the sort of growth Caldwell County is experiencing but benefit from it as well.

“I think the real conversation and consideration is how would this benefit the educational attainment of the entire community, which currently is one of the lowest in Central Texas,” Estrada said. “The mid-career switches, people’s opportunity to have access to education to pursue a passion or career they’ve always been interested in — that’s a major consideration for the community. It’s a narrow look if we’re only looking at high school graduates.”

Still, Caldwell County remains a conservative area in a conservative state where fighting property tax increases has become a favorite political calling card. Much of that debate has centered on funding for public schools, with the fight over school finance often falling to the question of whether older Texans, who are mostly white and less likely to have children enrolled in public schools, are willing to pay for the future of younger Texans, who are mostly Latino. Roughly 4 out of every 5 students enrolled in Lockhart ISD are Latinos.

Voters in the area have shown at least some unwillingness to foot the bill for education-related expansions. In 2019, they rejected a $92.4 million bond proposed to address the significant growth in student enrollment Lockhart ISD had seen in the prior decade. The bond package would have gone toward making more room for more students through the addition of a two-story wing to the local high school, two new school buildings and renovations throughout the district. It also would have backed improvements to the district’s workforce preparation efforts, including a new agricultural science facility and additions to the district’s career technology center to allow more students to participate in auto repair classes and hospitality training. Opponents of the measure, 1,632 voters, won with 55 percent of the vote compared with 1,340 who voted in favor.

This time around, proponents of annexation are hoping the eagerness they’ve felt in the community from those who signed onto the original petition — and those who come to see the broader benefits it could bring to the community — will translate to votes.

In recounting the interest they fielded in the early days of their efforts collecting signatures, PAC members described one canvas of a local gym in a portion of the county that’s seeing some of the biggest growth but trails in terms of income. Some of the gym-goers were enthusiastic about the possibility of pursuing technical certifications but realized they weren’t registered to vote, a requirement of the signature collection process.

They went out and got on the voter rolls. Then, they came back to put their names on the petition.

Contact the editor of this story, Nirvi Shah, at 212-678-3445 or shah@hechingerreport.org.

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

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KANEOHE, Hawaii — In the basement of a church at the foothills of the Koʻolau mountains, Darrylnn Ferreira perched on a plastic chair at the edge of a large blue rug while her 4-year-old granddaughter, Talia, settled down for circle time. Three teachers welcomed other families as they trickled in and sat down, then launched into a morning greeting song in English and Hawaiian.

Ferreira followed suit, clapping along and singing, before settling back in her chair and paying close attention as a teacher held up a picture book about the Honolulu Zoo and started to read to the class.

As a grandmother, Ferreira is as much a member of the target audience for this free, traveling preschool program as Talia. Named Tūtū and Me after the Hawaiian word for “grandparent,” the program introduces children to early academic and social skills as well as native Hawaiian language and culture. At the same time, caregivers, many of whom are grandparents, learn about child development and how to navigate toddler tantrums, support early language and math skills and help children learn through play.

Every Tuesday and Thursday, Ferreira and Talia drive up a narrow, winding road, flanked with deep green foliage, to the hilltop church, about ten miles northeast of Honolulu. They amble down to a basement classroom that mimics a traditional school or center-based program, with multiple teachers for the dozen children, a structured routine and thoughtfully designed activity centers, each of which includes a poster for caregivers with instructions and tips to encourage exploration and learning. When circle time ends, Ferreira and Talia rotate through the centers to Talia’s favorite activities: drawing, painting and — on at least one day — riding a small tricycle in dizzying circles.

“This is amazing,” Ferreira said, motioning around the room as toddlers and preschoolers, trailed by their caregivers, dashed from one activity to the next. “We have this resource that gives this for us to learn.”

Tūtū and Me is one of several family-child interaction learning programsin Hawaii that offers support to the state’s large number of non-parental caregivers who provide child care each day. At least 43 percent of young children in Hawaii were watched by friends or relatives in 2019. The state has the highest percentage of families — 72 percent — that use federal funds to pay for unlicensed care, such as that provided by grandparents and friends.

These caregivers — mostly women and largely invisible within the broader child care ecosystem — are often isolated in their homes and can’t always access the funding and training critical to offering the best care possible during a pivotal time of children’s brain development.

“What they learn in our program, what we’re trying to teach them, is that they are that child’s most important educator,” said Shawn Kanaʻiaupuni, president and CEO of the Hawaii-based Partners in Development Foundation, which runs Tūtū and Me. “Nobody is born knowing how to be a parent or caregiver, we all have to learn it.”

Ferreira, who brought another grandchild to a different Tūtū and Me location more than 15 years ago, has seen immense benefits for Talia. The preschooler is now more prepared for kindergarten, Ferreira said, and has learned aspects of Native Hawaiian culture that are meaningful to their family. Through the program, Ferreira has learned how to teach Talia how to form letters. “She won’t do that here,” Ferreira whispered, as Talia eyed some handwriting practice sheets before opening a drawing journal and coloring in a picture with a thick pink crayon. “But I’m doing it at home, just to reinforce it,” she added.

At home, Ferreira infuses more counting into their day, as well as reading, English and Hawaiian songs, and creative activities, like painting and making homemade playdough. She and Talia have attended field trips and live theater, and Ferreira has enrolled Talia in gymnastics, a program she learned about through Tūtū and Me. 

“We’re very fortunate this program is here,” she said.

For generations, families have relied on friends, family members and neighbors to help care for young children during the day. Friend, family and neighbor (FFN) care is the most common form of non-parental child care in America. Experts estimate at least 60 percent of children under age 6 spend their days in such arrangements with more than 4 million caregivers — mostly grandparents or aunts — a number that has grown over the past decade.

This type of care is especially common in low income communities, among families with limited English proficiency, in immigrant communities and for children with disabilities. During the pandemic, friend and family caregivers were a lifeline for many parents; recent data shows parents continue to desire and value it. Child care provided by relatives or other informal caregivers can offer valuable benefits for children, such as consistency of care, support of native language and culture, flexibility and affordability.

As states work to stabilize the child care industry in the wake of the pandemic, experts are calling for more support for all child care settings, including the informal, home-based care, where so many children spend their days.

“The individuals that provide FFN care are doing a huge service to young children and their families, and they’re also doing a considerable service to the community and the economy,” said Natalie Renew, executive director of Home Grown, a nonprofit aimed at increasing the access to and quality of home-based child care. “Our high-priority children and families are often in this setting, and if we really want them to be ready for kindergarten and able to thrive, we really need to care for them in this setting with these caregivers,” she added.

Related: Funding and training is rarely available when your child care is friends, neighbors

In Hawaii, friend, family and neighbor care is valued both culturally and by necessity. Extremely high real estate costs coupled with a high cost of living means several generations of families often live together. While many working families choose and prefer ‘ohana, or family, care, while their children are young, other options are scarce. Before the pandemic, the state had only enough licensed infant-toddler center spots for one out of every 37 children under age 3. The state lost 12 percent of its child care spots during the pandemic. In some parts of Hawaii, including the islands of Kauai, Molokai and Lanai, there are no child care centers serving infants and toddlers. The average cost of center-based infant child care, when it is available in Hawaii, is more than $1,700 a month, several hundred more than the national average.

Nationwide, aid for family and friend caregivers is rare. In 23 states, there are no known statewide supports for relatives and friends who provide child care. Many of these providers don’t view themselves as educators, but rather as caregivers who are simply helping their families. Few attend educational workshops or get help from a home visitor or coach. During the pandemic, when family members and friends were a critical caregiving lifeline, only 13 states used federal stabilization funding to invest in these providers.

Policymakers have mixed views on whether grandparents, neighbors, and family friends should be included in formal child care policy, said Patricia Lozano, executive director of Early Edge California, which advocates for high-quality early learning programs in a variety of settings. “It’s complicated,” she said. “It’s really difficult to have policies that apply to all.”

But a few states, such as Alabama and California, do offer formal training specifically for this population. In California, where one in five FFN caregivers watch four or more children, the state runs play groups and training for caregivers through a child care agency. Other states offer programs like those in Hawaii: play groups for caregivers and children, featuring key aspects of formal preschool programs, as well as educational materials through the mail.

Several states, including Colorado and Massachusetts, have expanded home visitation programs to serve relatives and friends who care for children. This model is especially promising, helping ensure that informal caregivers don’t feel they’re being pushed into the regulations and oversight involved in formal child care, said Linda Smith, director of the early childhood development initiative at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

“There’s this constant debate … ‘If I’m the grandparent, do I want somebody coming in and telling me how to care for my grandchildren?’” she said. “The other side of that coin is, ‘Hey, I haven’t been around little kids in a long time. What do I need to know now, that I didn’t know before?’” she added. “How do you support grandparents in this whole role, without regulating them and telling them what to do?”

Despite the benefits these caregivers offer, there are also challenges.

Children in informal care settings may have fewer resources than their peers in formal, licensed child care programs, spend more time watching television and have lower cognitive and school readiness scores. Research has found some caregivers are less likely to play with children and engage in the back-and-forth conversation known to stimulate cognitive development. In some states, caregivers can care for up to six children without a license, mirroring more formal home care settings, but without the support provided to licensed programs.

Without access to information or training, caregivers may rely on their own child-rearing experiences, which, for some, could be limited.

The essential components of “identity and love and affection and reciprocity,” are already baked in to care provided by family friends and relatives, said Renew from Home Grown. “And with more resources, I think we could do so much more to intervene on the cognitive pieces of the development.”

Caregivers nationwide largely report that they’d welcome help and information, especially on health and safety, how to offer nutritious meals and navigate state systems, as well as how to use materials to support play and learning.

And some caregivers simply need immediate tips on how to handle challenges with the children they watch each day.

On a recent Wednesday morning in Kapolei, Hawaii, caregivers followed children inside two brown yurts sitting in tall grass on the grounds of two homeless shelters. Although this program, the Ka Paʻalana Homeless Family Education Program at Hope Shelter, is aimed at families experiencing homelessness, many local families drive to the homeless shelter to take advantage of the free early learning opportunity. Ka Paʻalana’s shelter-based location is of such high quality, it is accredited by the National Association for the Education of Young Children.

Like their counterparts at Tūtū and Me, the teachers with Ka Paʻalana, which runs the shelter location and several traveling sites, see themselves as guides for caregivers of young children. For a portion of the class at Hope Shelter, teachers mind the children while caregivers receive instruction on topics like child development and career and life skills.

Inside one of the yurts, Cece Kailiwai trailed a boisterous 1-year-old, who recently has been experimenting with climbing, pushing and was experiencing big feelings. Kailiwai, whose own children are grown, lives at one of the shelters and watches the toddler, who also lives in the shelter, as a favor for the child’s parents while they work. She chatted with teachers and watched their interactions with the boy when a tower of blocks fell over and he erupted in tears, kicking at some of the blocks.

Kailiwai said the program benefits them both. Without it, the toddler would miss out on socialization with other children and the stimulation of educational activities and toys. Kailiwai would be on her own to learn how to manage tantrums and behavior, how to play in ways that support his development and make sure he is on track with age-appropriate skills.

The program has impacted her as a caregiver. “For me, it’s learning patience and structure … and learning that when you’re consistent, things will flow,” she said.

Related: Finding child care still impossible for many parents

A growing body of research shows support programs for informal caregivers can make a positive difference, increasing caregiver knowledge of child development and decreasing caregiver depression and isolation.

There are also long-term benefits for children. In Hawaii, a study of a small group of Tūtū and Me graduates found 86 percent were proficient in reading and math by third grade, nearly 20 percentage points higher than the statewide average. Ninety-eight percent of children leaving Tūtū and Me met school readiness standards on state tests, and Native Hawaiian graduates of the program were generally performing at the same levels as their non-Native Hawaiian peers, closing a persistent gap among children in the state.

A longitudinal study of Keiki Steps, a family-child interaction program in the state similar to Tūtū and Me, found similar positive results: A survey of 80 percent of the first seven cohorts of Keiki Steps graduates found they all graduated from high school on time and 75 percent were college bound. These results are particularly stunning in a state where the Native Hawaiian population faces “generational effects of colonization,” said Maile Keli’ipio-Acoba, CEO of the Institute for Native Pacific Education and Culture, or INPEACE, which runs Keiki Steps.

Despite the promise and success of these programs, the state provides little funding for these efforts. Tūtū and Me and Keiki Steps get most of their funding from the federal government, an amount set aside for Native Hawaiian Education programs, as well as from foundations and other private donors. The state’s Executive Office on Early Learning funnels some $300,000 into two other family-child interaction programs, held at two elementary schools.

FFN support programs also receive some funding from the state’s Department of Human Services, which invests about $188,000 toward these programs. The bulk of this investment is steered toward Learning to Grow, an outreach program for FFN caregivers and home-based providers, run by the University of Hawaii at Manoa and Windward Community College. Every month, caregivers across the Hawaiian Islands who are registered with the state can receive packets of educational materials centered around a theme, like learning through play and early brain development.

Hawaii has been largely focused on expanding pre-K for 3-year-olds and constructing pre-K facilities — investing $200 million last year toward efforts to do so. This approach ignores the family-and-friend settings that advocates say many parents choose and, in many cases, prefer. “Our native Hawaiian population really continues to hold a cultural value of their child being raised at home with their families,” said Keli’ipio-Acoba, instead of in an “institutional, educational kind of setting” for young children.

More funding could help expand the reach of programs for informal caregivers, advocates say. But in the meantime, the caregivers who have access to this support say it’s made a difference.

Four days a week, teachers from Keiki Steps fan out across the islands to set up makeshift classrooms in nine communities. On a recent morning in northwest Oahu in the town of Waianae, on a farm tucked away on the edge of the Makaha Valley, a half-dozen families roamed around activity centers under a lush canopy of macadamia nut, jackfruit and ‘ulu trees.

On the edge of the large, outdoor classroom, Dee Kila crouched down next to her 2-year-old granddaughter, Hi’iaka, at a painting station.

“Can you say blue?” she asked as Hi’iaka picked up a paintbrush and smeared turquoise paint on a piece of cardboard depicting Hawaiian goddess Pele’s journey home.

“Dab, dab, dab,” Kila said as her granddaughter dipped her paintbrush in more paint. Kila gently put her hand over Hi’iaka’s hand and moved it back and forth, showing her how to create long strokes that resembled waves.

“Nice job, high five!” she said, high fiving the toddler.

Kila watches Hi’iaka and her 1-year-old brother five days a week, from 7 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., for free. “It’s very exhausting,” Kila said. “I am underpaid,” she added, laughing. Kila said her grandchildren are benefiting from the activities, songs and books at Keiki Steps. But the program has helped her, too. In addition to her grandchildren, Kila also cares for her 81-year-old mother, a combination Kila said can be overwhelming.

The biggest change she’s noticed since she started coming to Keiki Steps is in herself. Having a place to bring the children to learn and socialize with others, where she can also learn about child development and interact with other caregivers, has been helpful, Kila said, especially since no such programs existed in her community when she was a young mom learning how to be a caregiver.

“It’s made me more calm, and taught me how to be more patient,” she said. “Now that I’m caregiving, I’m like, I gotta go to Keiki Steps, so I can learn.”

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

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Community colleges say they can’t help the neediest students get through college successfully without more funding. But these institutions, which educate 10 million students a year or 44 percent of all undergraduates, have a terrible track record; fewer than half their students end up earning degrees. Obviously, all those college dropouts aren’t improving local work forces. And state lawmakers aren’t keen to write community colleges blank checks without accountability. 

The problem is that no one really knows how much it costs to educate a community college student, or exactly how much more should be spent on the neediest ones, from young adults who are the first in their families to go to college, known as first generation students, to older adults who are juggling a job and children of their own along with school, often called “nontraditional” students.

A first attempt at finding an answer was the publication of a paper in October 2022 that examined the costs of Texas community colleges. The analysis was conducted for the U.S. Department of Education’s research arm, the Institute of Education Sciences, by a team of researchers from the American Institutes for Research, a nonprofit research organization, and education finance specialists from Rutgers University and the University of Tennessee. (The American Institutes for Research is one of the many funders of The Hechinger Report.*) 

The team applied the same cost analysis used in K-12 education to the community college context. In K-12 education, cost modeling helps states design per-pupil funding formulas that give more weight to English language learners, low-income students and students with disabilities. The idea is to give needier students more resources.

In the Texas analysis of six years of student records across all 50 community colleges, the researchers noticed that two categories – first generation students and students older than 24 – were the least likely to hit various academic milestones, such as passing remedial courses, completing the first 15-credit semester hours, or earning a degree. At the same time, the researchers noticed that Texas community colleges were spending more on these students. Colleges that serve higher percentages of at-risk students had higher per pupil expenditures than colleges that serve less needy students. 

“Funding is progressive, but it’s not progressive enough” to provide an equal opportunity for all students, said Jesse Levin, an economist at the American Institutes for Research and lead author of the study. 

According to the researchers’ cost modeling, it costs more than twice as much to achieve statewide average outcomes for a first generation or older student than for a student without extra needs. Students from low-income households and English learners cost 19 to 31 percent more. But high school students who earn dual credits at community colleges are actually 16 percent cheaper to educate. That’s because dual-credit courses cost less to administer and high school students need fewer support services from local colleges.

This extra funding that the researchers suggest for needier students doesn’t guarantee that they’ll all end up with a college degree. But it might make it more likely that needier students could achieve average statewide outcomes at community colleges.

In Texas, the average community college student racks up a little more than two and a quarter success points, a metric that the state uses to award performance-based funding to colleges, which receive about 12 percent of their state funding this way. (Total state funding accounts for less than 25 percent of community college revenues in Texas with the rest coming from local property taxes and student tuition.) 

Earning a degree generates two success points, but students can rack up additional points along the way, including earning one point for passing a first college level course in math, one point for completing the first 15 credit hours, another point for completing 30 credits, and other measures of progress.  (See Table 1A in the appendix for a list of success points.) A student who completes every milestone on the road to earning a degree could conceivably rack up eight points, so an average of two points is not a very high bar. 

Nonetheless, it can be expensive for many students to reach that standard. First generation students made up half of Texas’s 750,000 community college students between the academic years 2014-15 and 2019-20. And it would cost $14,460 for a first generation college student who attends a small college to have the same opportunity to earn success points. That is more than three times the $4,537 that it would cost to educate a student with no extra needs attending a large community college to achieve statewide average outcomes. 

The colleges in Texas that serve the highest shares of first generation college students actually spent $10,523 per full-time equivalent student, which was $1,475 less than the researchers’ estimated cost of $11,998. By contrast, the colleges that serve the fewest first generation students spent less per student ($9,980) but the researchers said their estimated cost for an adequate education for these students was $10,385. That’s a much smaller $405 funding gap. 

The researchers also developed a simulation tool to allow community colleges and policymakers to tweak assumptions and come up with their own cost estimates. (There is no public link for this tool, but it is available upon request from relsouthwest@air.org.**)

It’s worth emphasizing that these costs have nothing to do with an individual student’s costs, such as tuition and fees, or the financial aid and loans students receive. These are the estimated expenditures that a college would have to allocate for faculty and support services in order to level the playing field between the haves and have-nots.

It’s important to note that this is not an analysis of which support services are effective. It’s also not a bottom-up analysis of how much academic counseling each student needs and how much that costs. Instead, it is based on actual spending throughout Texas’s 50 community colleges over the six academic years from 2014-15 to 2019-20. The researchers calculated how much colleges spent per academic outcome (as measured by Texas’s success points) on their 750,000 students. Then they computed how spending per academic outcome varied for different types of students, based on how much harder it is for disadvantaged students to hit milestones.

Additional cost adjustments were made for different kinds of institutions. Colleges in big cities have higher real estate prices and faculty salaries. Smaller colleges are more expensive to run because there are fewer economies of scale. For example, a bursar’s office that serves 10,000 students is cheaper per student to run than one that serves 1,000 students. 

Cost functions like these are often criticized for being “black boxes” because it’s hard to understand how researchers are using mathematical techniques to put a dollar total on how much it costs to reach an academic goal.  And there’s no guarantee that if you gave colleges this extra money that they would actually succeed in raising the academic outcomes of first generation and older students. Some challenges  – juggling work, school and parenting – cannot be easily solved, even with unlimited money.

Nonetheless, Kate Shaw, a senior adviser at HCM Strategists, a consulting firm that works with schools and colleges, described this first attempt at community college cost analysis as a “game changer” at a January 2023 seminar on higher education by the Education Writers Association. If policymakers accept these cost analyses, it could give colleges more incentive to serve the neediest students. But we also need to know how to spend the money wisely and the most cost-effective ways to help students who need more support get through college quickly.

* An earlier version of this story omitted the disclosure that the American Institutes for Research is one of the many funders of The Hechinger Report.

** An earlier version of this story directed readers to a different e-mail address. Because of the number of requests, the American Institutes for Research asked that we redirect readers to a new address.

This story about community college costs was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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VANCOUVER, Wash. — When her bill for overdue rent topped five digits, Resly Suka decided it was time to tell her kids they might lose their home.

A bout with Covid in late 2020 had forced Suka, a single mother of seven, to take time off from her job as a home hospice caregiver. That triggered a series of financial setbacks and, by October 2021, she owed more than $10,000 in back rent. Washington state’s eviction moratorium was set to expire the next month.

Suka feared what a notice-to-vacate would mean for her children. Her two youngest, both attending Vancouver’s Washington Elementary School, had struggled with remote learning and still lagged their peers in basic math and reading. Her older kids loved their high school sports teams and she couldn’t imagine uprooting them.

“‘Oh no, Mom. Please don’t make us go to another school. We like our teacher. We love our school,’” said Suka, recalling the conversation. “All I was thinking: ‘That’s true.’”

After her primary employer cut her hours — and her health insurance — Suka ended up in the emergency room for a heart attack. As she began to recover, Suka started making calls from her hospital bed to a local housing hotline seeking assistance. She never got a reply.

Then a cousin suggested she call her kids’ school. A woman she’d never met asked a few questions about Suka’s living situation and suggested she could get help with her utility bill. Within an hour, the woman called back and shared news of a second check — to cover up to $11,000 in overdue rent.

The assistance came thanks to a Washington state program — one of the first of its kind in the country — that aims to help children who aren’t considered homeless, and unqualified for help, under a strict federal definition.  

In response to rising numbers of homeless youth here, state legislators passed a bill in 2016 that freed up money to enable schools to identify more students as homeless and get them into stable housing — even if they aren’t viewed as homeless by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development.

In other parts of the country, though, the picture for homeless students is starkly different. Public schools identified 1.1 million kids as homeless in 2020-21, the most recent school year for which data was available. But roughly 85 percent of these children didn’t qualify for public housing assistance. While the federal Department of Education considers kids homeless if they are living in motels or doubled up with other people, HUD, which controls the purse strings for federal housing aid, requires that recipients live in shelters or on the street. That forces parents to move their families into cars or risk more dangerous living situations before they’re eligible for aid.  

For years, advocates for homeless youth have tried to convince HUD and lawmakers to expand the agency’s definition to include anyone who can’t afford to put a roof over their children’s heads. Research continues to show the harmful impact of housing instability on kids’ learning: Each time students switch schools, for example, they are more likely to fall behind academically and less likely to graduate.

Homeless youth advocates succeeded in getting a bill to change the law’s language before Congress last year, but the legislation never got a hearing. And they must restart the legislative process with this year’s new congressional term.

“We do nothing to prevent the ‘hidden homeless,’” said Darla Bardine, executive director of the National Network for Youth, a nonprofit that works to end youth homelessness. “You have to sleep on the street for 14 days — you have to put yourself in danger for two weeks — before you’re eligible” for federal aid, she added. “That’s actually mandating long-term suffering before you extend a helping hand.”

A spokesperson for HUD said the agency does not support a broader definition to determine who’s eligible for housing aid, which the official described as “programs of last resort.” He said the law obligating schools to identify homeless kids was designed to help children who needed more stability at school, not who necessarily need immediate support to find a home.

“Our targeted homeless programs are grant funds, subject to annual appropriations from Congress. It’s not an entitlement program,” said the spokesperson, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

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

The nation’s patchwork of solutions to homelessness dates to the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act of 1987, Congress’s first significant response to the problem. But beyond declaring that homeless children should have access to the same public education as other kids, the McKinney-Vento Act contained few protections for elementary and secondary students experiencing homelessness.

The law has since been amended several times; school districts now must identify and enroll any student experiencing homelessness. The education provisions of the law’s definition of homeless — “individuals who lack a fixed, regular and adequate nighttime residence” — encompasses unaccompanied and unsheltered youth, students in homeless shelters, kids living at a hotel or motel and children staying with friends or family due to economic hardship or similar reasons.

Once a school identifies a student as homeless, the federal government requires districts to pay to transport the student to their preferred school, regardless of cost or distance. Districts also can compete for federal funds — about $80 per homeless student — to cover the cost of clothes, prescription glasses and other school supplies, although funding is scant and only a fraction of districts receive the aid.

Federal law prohibits schools from spending any of that money on housing. Instead, educators direct families to local housing providers, which often rely exclusively on HUD funding and have few or no resources for students the agency does not consider homeless.

The discrepancy in defining homelessness can leave families, educators and housing providers with few satisfying, or safe, options. A shelter manager in Bozeman, Montana — where a population boom has priced many locals out of housing — lied on a housing application so a young mother of three who’d spent her tax refund on a hotel room wouldn’t have to move her family into their car. In Vancouver,a shelter provider had to inform callers to its housing hotline that they might have to stay in their car for two weeks before they could get help. 

Families “have to get into more desperate situations in order to qualify for services,” said Vivian Rogers Decker, who manages the homeless student stability program for Washington state’s education department. “They won’t be able to just get it while doubled up. They would have to progress into the car and onto the streets or have one night of what others might call ‘literal homeless’ in order to get those services.”

One reason the requirements haven’t changed is opposition from some national homeless organizations. The National Alliance to End Homelessness, an influential Washington, D.C., nonprofit, has lobbied since at least 2015 against expanding HUD’s definition, arguing it would further strain the nation’s system of housing providers, which already struggle to serve the millions who count as “literal” homeless.

“That would add millions of families with no additional funding,” said Steve Berg, the group’s vice president for programs and policy. “It sort of calls on the homeless programs to have more people eligible without being able to help them. It just means saying no to a lot more people.”

Unless the government allocates more funding for homeless aid, Berg added, the increased competition for already limited services could leave chronically homeless individuals without help.

“People in more stable situations have an easier time getting help,” he said. “They can keep appointments. They can get to them. So, it’s not just saying no more often. I’m afraid it would mean people who need help the most would be squeezed out.”

And some educators worry about further extending the role of schools to include housing navigator. Many districts are already struggling to comply with the federal mandate to employ a homeless liaison, and that duty is often given to school or district administrators who don’t have time for it. Mike Carr, a retiring liaison in the Washington County School District in southern Utah, said it’s hard not to worry at night about all the families he can’t help. “Every emergency cannot always be my emergency,” he said.  

Related: 420,000 homeless kids went missing from schools’ rolls last year. They may never be found

Similar debates played out in Washington state in 2016, when the bill to help alleviate student homelessness was before the state legislature. Lawmakers questioned whether it made sense to spend public dollars on kids who could finish their homework at a friend’s kitchen table or in a hotel lobby, rather than on children living in a homeless shelter or on the street.

But research suggests any housing instability — whether that means sleeping in a tent or a cousin’s basement — harms the ability of young people to learn. Regardless of how and where homeless students find a place to sleep each night, their academic performance suffers equally, according to a 2019 analysis of state education data by the homeless advocacy group Building Changes. The Seattle-based group found students experiencing any form of homelessness posted lower rates of attendance, graduation and academic proficiency. Low-income housed students, meanwhile, performed much better.

“Homeless is homeless is homeless,” said Liza Burrell, managing director of programs for Building Changes. “These definitions don’t matter. When it comes to academic outcomes, any instability takes up so much of our young peoples’ brain energy. That doesn’t create a great moment for learning.”

That message resonated with state lawmakers, and the 2016 bill passed with bipartisan majorities in both chambers. The program financially incentivizes housing providers and school districts to partner on homeless prevention. School districts also receive state grants to boost what little, if any, money they get from the federal government to find and support unhoused kids. Funding for housing providers, meanwhile, can cover rental assistance, emergency shelter, case management and other services for all students identified as homeless — including those who live in hotels or couch-surf.

Early findings suggest the program has provided stability to some families and students, although it’s not a panacea. According to a Building Changes evaluation for the state, two-thirds of households that participated in the program in 2020 and 2021 stayed in or secured permanent housing, while a quarter ended up in less stable situations, such as shelters. Housing providers primarily used the grant money they received — roughly $460,000, combined — to help families cover past due rent, landlord fees and other forms of rental assistance or move-in costs like security deposits and application fees.

Related: Hidden toll: Thousands of schools fail to count homeless students

In Vancouver, the homeless student stability program covered the entirety of Resly Suka’s overdue rent. Her kids didn’t have to relocate across the city — or across state lines, a common move along the Columbia River here — and had the chance to stay in their schools.

“It’s hard on homeless kids,” said Suka. “But at least we can help them focus on school if they have a place to stay.”

When Suka took her cousin’s advice to call her kids’ school for help, Elizabeth Owen picked up the phone. Owen works as the community resource coordinator at Washington Elementary, helping families navigate services, like housing aid. The school identified 16 students as homeless — out of a total enrollment of 250 — during an annual count for the 2021-22 school year. The district as a whole counted nearly 750 homeless students, up from about 620 students during the 2020-21 school year. 

Owen has the local housing providers on speed dial: She knows which receive the state grants that can actually help those families. If circumstances forced her families into neighboring Oregon, it’s a gamble whether Owen’s counterparts in school districts there will have the same ability to help. 

“We live in a system that’s extremely hard — it was set up to be difficult,” she tells parents and guardians. “But we’ll figure this out.”

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

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I sat at a table with superintendents from around the country this summer, talking about the losses threatening districts coming out of the pandemic. Learning loss was certainly a huge concern, but not the only loss that worried them.

Not one of these districts is growing. Some of them have lost more than 10 percent of their students since the pandemic started. Enrollment losses will be an enormous, ongoing challenge for many school systems across the U.S. post-pandemic.

“What we’re trying to do is just stop the bleeding,” said Jerry Almendarez, the superintendent of the Santa Ana Unified School District, south of Los Angeles.

It’s important to understand why enrollment loss is such a critical issue for these leaders. With every student who walks out the door, school funding leaves with them. The fixed costs of running their schools do not decrease proportionately.

This makes it difficult for these leaders to provide more opportunities, rigor and support for students at the precise time students need them the most. If we can’t reverse enrollment losses, the cost of running a school will become untenable. Schools will be forced to close or cut corners on quality; inequality will soar as parents with means find and fund alternatives to public schools — paying private school tuition or home schooling — while families who already struggle to get access to a quality school will be stuck in a flailing public education system.

If access and quality are compromised, it will risk our democratic foundations.

There are many reasons to see this as a real danger. Public school enrollment fell nearly 3 percent after the pandemic hit. Some children switched to private schools. Others started home schooling, which ballooned by 35 percent from before the pandemic in the 18 states that shared recent homeschooling data.

Santa Ana’s enrollment losses accelerated during the pandemic, according to the California Department of Education, from about 5 percent overall from 2017 to 2019, to 12 percent from 2019 to 2021. Some classes now have as few as a dozen students in them. Almendarez is keeping the district afloat through short-term federal Covid relief funds but told me: “We don’t know how long we’ll be able to do that.”

Jeff Finch, who oversees the Grove City Area School District in Pennsylvania, is facing similar issues. He says that the threat to funding is exacerbated by a lack of time to address it. “When you’re always in a triage mode, then you’re only fixing wounds,” Finch said. “And then you relate that to technology or future job needs, that means you’re always working in a reactive sense, never in a proactive sense.”

“We have had to make some cuts due to decreased enrollment. It stretches your budgets so you can’t [fund] initiatives and other things that you need to do — professional development, things like that … it limits you.”

Simpson County, Mississippi, Superintendent Tori Holloway

In Simpson County, Mississippi, Superintendent Tori Holloway must also do more with less. “We have had to make some cuts due to decreased enrollment,” Holloway said. “It stretches your budgets so you can’t [fund] initiatives and other things that you need to do — professional development, things like that … it limits you.”

If these three superintendents are to keep their current students and entice others to return before they reach a critical tipping point when the decreased enrollment makes it financially impossible to provide an adequate education to all, they must rebuild connections between schools, students and the community. All three leaders are working hard to do just that.

“We found out the reason some families left is because this district did not offer some of the things that they wanted their kids to have access to,” Holloway said.

So, Simpson County is adding Advanced Placement classes to address that feedback, bringing students together to help decide which ones to introduce. The district has also spoken with local community and business leaders about creating closer ties between education and jobs and is opening a new high school centered around career academies.

Finch is working to make Grove City’s schools more relevant to their northwest Pennsylvania community, so they’re not seen as a singular entity but as part of the broader economy.

“If we really want to connect with what kids in school today will need as skills tomorrow, we have to have intentional partnerships with the employers of tomorrow,” Finch told me. “We have to make them a part of the school system.” To foster that change, the Grove City district is partnering with community leaders and businesses to create a shared vision.

Related: Where have all the kindergartners gone?

Almendarez is looking for ways to save money so that Santa Ana can provide students with more learning options. The district has combined some elementary and middle schools into K-8s, cutting down on fixed costs, while also providing more opportunities for students to choose their own learning paths. The district is exploring flexible scheduling, with evening and online sessions to accommodate working students and families.

These leaders, the school systems they lead and even how we educate kids are all at a crossroads.

Many families are so fed up that they’re pushing for alternatives to public schools, which would effectively strangle the public education system as we know it.

But we do not have to kill our public schools in order to save them. We can revitalize them. The efforts of these district leaders and those in other systems around the world show us that it is possible.

I’ve seen the proof in countries that currently out-perform our own by using innovative policies: Estonia’s competency-based curriculum, Switzerland’s continual focus on rigorous career and technical education, Hong Kong’s nearly universal early childhood education and Singapore’s highly effective educator development programs. These systems are better designed to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing world.

U.S. districts can raise their value and appeal by listening to the students, parents and businesses that their schools serve. They can give students increased learning options while at the same time meeting real world budget conditions. And they can work across and beyond their systems to build connections that will allow students to thrive now and in the future.

A demographer predicted that Santa Ana’s population will continue to shrink in the coming years. Almendarez told me his goal is to prove them wrong. He and his colleagues aren’t content to simply stop the enrollment losses: They are building stronger school systems that will attract students to their schools and families and businesses to their communities.

Jason Dougal is the president and COO of the National Center on Education and the Economy, a nonprofit international education research, policy and professional learning organization.

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

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Abbey Clegg watched the Manchester school board meetings online in the summer of 2020, slowly coming to terms with what was happening.

New Hampshire schools were not going to reopen in the fall.

Clegg, her husband, Rich, and their six children were all at home together. She and her husband were trying to work and her older kids were trying to tap into online classes.

“It was a disaster for our family. They’re sending home these packets. They’re trying to do Zoom and we don’t have enough broadband,” Clegg recalled.

Clegg, who works with the New Hampshire program for foster and adoptive children, and her husband, a Baptist pastor, didn’t have strong feelings about what type of schools their kids attended. Their eldest was enrolled at a private Christian school, while their four younger school-aged kids were attending a local public school, two of them in special education.

But six kids at home for months on end was not going to work.

Nearly a decade earlier, New Hampshire had created a private school voucher program wherein state taxpayers and businesses get a credit that lowers their state taxes in exchange for donating money to the program. Clegg applied for the 2020-21 school year, enrolling two of her younger kids at a Catholic school that was open for in-person classes.

When New Hampshire lawmakers created a new voucher program in the spring of 2021, joining a list of states tapping into frustration with pandemic schooling to advance school choice measures, Clegg applied again. The additional financial support proved essential: It meant the kids could stay in their private schools.

Over the past two years, more than 20 states have started or expanded voucher-type programs, steering taxpayer money to help families afford private schools, pay for books and other materials for homeschooling, and cover the cost of services such as speech or physical therapy for kids who aren’t attending public schools. Some states tweaked long-standing programs. Others created entirely new, expansive programs with few or no limits on who can access public dollars — including students already enrolled in private schools — and minimal oversight on how the money is spent. Many states, red and blue, also acted to boost charter schools in some way, such as by adding millions in state dollars for charter school buildings and per student funding.

More than 20 states have started or expanded school voucher or similar programs over the past two years.

Often, politicians and advocacy groups backing the new programs cited parental concerns about remote schooling, along with the teaching of systemic racism and other topics ensnared in the culture wars, as reasons for pushing through school choice measures.

“The educational choice movement has done everything possible to build the best surfboard for parents. This was the right wave,” said Robert Enlow, president and CEO of the advocacy group EdChoice, referring to the pandemic. “The timing was perfect – unfortunately perfect.”

But it’s far from clear how much support the new programs will get from parents.

Despite parental anger that has continued to simmer and evolve since the start of the pandemic, polling about parents’ interest in private school vouchers provides a mixed picture. Support for vouchers for all students, and even for vouchers limited to kids from low-income families, actually declined over the last few years, to about 45 percent, according to a 2021 poll by the journal Education Next, though polling conducted this year for some choice lobbying groups found strong support for private school subsidies.

Related: Opinion: After two decades of studying voucher programs, I’m now firmly opposed to them

The drive to create voucher-type programs is part of a broader strategy by some choice advocates: Libertarian think tanks and D.C.-based advocacy groups, which offer model legislation for state lawmakers, are among those lobbying for these measures and some aggressively attack legislators who don’t sign on. School choice advocates are trying to motivate parents to vote, especially given parents’ role in helping to elect a conservative Republican who campaigned against school closures in last year’s Virginia gubernatorial race. In some states, pandemic restrictions at statehouses may have offered legislators the opportunity to pass measures without the large-scale in-person protests led by teachers and others in the past.

Last year, a manufactured conflict over instruction about so-called critical race theory fueled parents’ anger, adding to frustration about pandemic schooling. One of the underlying goals of those trying to rile parents is the privatization of public education.

“Too many parents today have no escape mechanism from substandard schools controlled by leftist ideologues,” conservative activist Christopher Rufo wrote earlier this year. “Universal school choice — meaning that public education funding goes directly to parents rather than schools — would fix that.”

“The educational choice movement has done everything possible to build the best surfboard for parents. This was the right wave.”

Robert Enlow, president and CEO of the advocacy group EdChoice, referring to the pandemic.

Most of the nation’s kids — about 50 million of them — have stuck with conventional public schools, although school choice advocates say that’s in part because laws need to change to allow more parents to choose those options for their kids. They note that many of the vouchers offered around the country do not cover the full cost of tuition at a private school and regulations about who can open charters and how much money they get can be restrictive too. Currently, about 5 million school aged kids are enrolled in private schools, though that number includes kids from families who don’t use a subsidy for tuition. Another 3.5 million attend charter schools, a number that has ticked up during the pandemic, and the rate of homeschooling has increased too, though it still includes only a few million children.

It’s the potential that tantalizes choice advocates — and scares public school proponents.

“Let’s pretend, we have 55,000 students for the district I’m in,” said Kelly Berg, a calculus teacher who is president of the Mesa Education Association in Arizona. “Now 5,000 students take vouchers and go elsewhere, not in our district. That’s over 100 teachers we have to cut. That could potentially mean a school closure somewhere.”

Those students might return to the public school system within a few months if things don’t work out, but the money wouldn’t follow them back until the following school year, Berg said, and teachers already would have been shifted around or laid off.

“That’s the real rub for me,” she said.

Related: Supreme Court ruling brings a changed legal landscape for school choice

Some of the new programs were created specifically for parents objecting to pandemic restrictions. At the start of the 2021 school year, for example, Florida’s state board of education expanded a small voucher program for students who had been bullied to include students who didn’t want to wear a mask to school or face regular Covid testing — its own form of harassment, the board argued. Only about 100 students in districts that required masks took the state up on the offer.

The New Hampshire program the Clegg family is using gives children from families with incomes of up to 300 percent of the federal poverty limit — or roughly $80,000 for a family of four — as much as $5,200 for private school tuition, homeschooling or educational services, or transportation to an out-of-district public school, among other uses. There’s no requirement that a child attend public schools before applying for a grant. That kind of provision infuriates choice critics, because it means parents can choose private schools without knowing whether a public school might be a good fit for their children. Supporters, however, say that these clauses honor a parent’s choice, whatever that may be, without requiring them to jump through hoops.

Republican Gov. Chris Sununu signed the New Hampshire legislation as part of the state budget in June 2021. By the end of the following school year, about 2,000 students had signed up. He also expanded a separate tuition program for families in rural areas with limited public options, allowing them to use taxpayer dollars to attend religious as well as secular private schools. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that states with such programs cannot exclude religious schools, opening the door to more public funding for private, religious education.  

West Virginia and Arizona went the furthest on school choice, creating options that would provide so-called education or empowerment scholarships to most or all of their respective state’s public school students. Both efforts face hurdles: A court challenge has blocked the West Virginia program, at least for now, and a campaign is underway to force the Arizona measure to face voters, which could put the program on hold until at least until 2024.

To be sure, for as many school choice programs that emerged since the pandemic, “lots still failed,” said Sharon Krengel, policy and outreach director at the Education Law Center, which has joined with other public school advocacy groups to form Public Funds Public Schools. The organization works on litigation that challenges vouchers and related programs.

In Louisiana, the Democratic governor recently vetoed a bill that would have created education savings accounts allowing parents to use tax dollars for private school tuition, homeschooling and other expenses. In Georgia, Republican lawmakers earlier this year pulled back a bill that would have provided state dollars for parents who wanted to send their children to private school. In Oklahoma, a bill to create a voucher program failed in the Senate in March, despite a pressure campaign from a D.C.-based lobbying group. Opposition to the bill came from Democrats as well as Republicans from rural areas that don’t have private schools.

Related: I got to choose private schools, but will vouchers really help other kids make it?

Politicians’ motivations don’t always align with what drives families to choose private school vouchers.

Pam Lang, an Arizona parent whose son James has autism and struggles to work independently, turned to the state’s empowerment scholarship program, or ESA, when she couldn’t find a public school that could meet his needs. The ESA program was limited to students with disabilities, children of military families and students attending low-performing high schools, but legislation, currently on hold, would open it to all students.

But, even with the scholarship, Lang had trouble finding private schools that could effectively serve her son. Still, with the ESA, “at least I could hire tutors,” Lang said, and the tutors worked with James independently at home. Now that her son is 15, Lang is taking a chance on a new private school for the coming school year.

Despite her own frustration with the teaching and services James received in public schools, Lang at times has criticized the ESA program and argued that money should instead be spent helping public schools better serve kids like her son. “I believe in public schools as an institution even though they were terrible for my son,” she said, her voice breaking. “You have to believe in democratic institutions. It would be wrong not to support them.”

But she said, “I can’t say there shouldn’t be any ESAs, until there is really not a need. I do feel they should only be for kids with special needs like mine.”

Some studies on vouchers don’t make a strong case that they improve kids’ educational achievement, finding that students using the subsidies actually lose ground in reading and math. Others, sometimes paid for by foundations that support vouchers, conclude the students who attend school using a voucher are more likely than peers to graduate from high school or attend college.

“Now 5,000 students take vouchers and go elsewhere, not in our district. That’s over 100 teachers we have to cut. That could potentially mean a school closure somewhere.”

Kelly Berg, calculus teacher and president of the Mesa Education Association, in Arizona

Whatever the research or voters’ will, even the smallest voucher program has a tangible effect on state spending. In Ohio, five state voucher programs that enrolled nearly 80,000 students last school year commanded $552 million, a spokeswoman for the state department of education said, or about 5 percent of total state spending on education. In West Virginia, critics of the new education savings programs — including the state superintendent and president of the state board of education — argued that it was unconstitutional and would decimate public school finances, and a court agreed.

Choice advocates argue public money for education should follow individual students. They say research shows choice programs, such as Florida’s tax credit scholarships, actually save taxpayers money, though advocates of public schools don’t agree.

“We want all families to get all the dollars to go to any potential options. That’s our North Star,” said Enlow, of EdChoice. He noted that in Indianapolis, for example, public school students in third grade would be allocated about $15,000 for their education. About $11,000 would follow third graders to their charter school. But students using a voucher to attend a private school would have only about $4,500 to spend. “It’s not an equal playing field,” he said.

Related: What would actually happen if we gave all parents the chance to pick their children’s schools?

More choice programs, and battles, are still to come.

Some of the options created by lawmakers in 2021, like voucher programs in Missouri and two cities in Tennessee, are just getting off the ground. Others face new pushback. In Ohio, a coalition of groups including about 100 school districts, are suing over the state’s expansive voucher options, a past version of which survived a U.S. Supreme Court challenge.

In Iowa, Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds, who watched as a school choice bill stalled in the legislature earlier this year, helped five candidates who support choice win their primaries in the hopes of a better showing next year. And in Texas, where opposition by rural lawmakers and Democrats has helped kill voucher legislation in the past, some experts predict things could be different in the near future, with Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, facing a tough primary, recently embracing private school vouchers.

Back in New Hampshire, Abbey Clegg is waiting to see whether her youngest, Emilia Jo, will fit in at the Catholic school some of her siblings attend when she starts kindergarten soon, or whether another school will make more sense. “It might not be a good fit for her. She’s a fiery little kid,” Clegg said.

But “being able to keep the kids where they are was such a blessing,” she said, especially after the trauma her family experienced last year, when her son Kaden died from complications related to some long-term conditions. The teachers are loving and warm, Clegg said. Several came to Kaden’s funeral and “loved on our kids so much during that time period.”

“We are huge advocates of finding kids that fit our school,” Clegg said. “We want them to go to a school that helps them academically — and to be a good human, really.”

“Whatever school fits your needs is where your kid deserves to be.”

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

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My college journey has been long and winding. I was born in the Dominican Republic and moved to the Bronx when I was 4 years old. I have had to work twice as hard to prove myself throughout my whole educational life.

When it came time to go to college, my parents and I struggled to know where to begin. We knew nearly nothing about how to apply to a school, or even that the FAFSA existed. Language barriers impeded my parents’ attempts to understand the complex financial aid process. With little guidance, I found my way to college upstate.

Unfortunately, the school was a bad fit, and not just because I missed the bodegas back home. I was hoping to study political science, which was not the institution’s specialty. I transferred to the Borough of Manhattan Community College (BMCC), in New York City, bringing very few of my credits with me. Essentially starting over, and facing a lack of academic and financial support, I struggled to get back on track.

I worried that maybe college just wasn’t for me. But after taking some time off, I went back to school — again in New York City — to continue my academic journey.

Related: Doubling the Pell Grant will make college a reality for more students like me

Since then, I have spent hundreds of dollars each semester on riding the subway to school. When I couldn’t find the money to buy a MetroCard, I just had to miss class. To afford to pay for food and transportation, I worked two part-time jobs, with half my income going to these living expenses and the other toward helping out my family. There have been days when I’ve sustained myself on nothing but a bag of chips to get through all my classes. It’s difficult to focus on school when you are working 30 hours a week and worried about where your next meal will come from or how you’ll afford to get to class.

I eventually earned my associate degree, and I am now a student at the City College of New York, currently working on my bachelor’s. I am just four electives away from graduating. But due to my nontraditional college path, I ran out of Pell this year.

There are many important changes higher education leaders and policymakers can make to ensure that first-generation learners and students from low-income families have the support they need to complete their college journeys. Chief among them is simply making sure we can actually pay to do so. There is one specific step policymakers can take that would have a considerable and immediate impact: doubling the federal Pell Grant.

About 70 percent of students who leave college are forced out by financial hardship.

My story is not unusual. More than one-third of college students transfer, and nearly half of those transfer more than once. Just 40 percent of students graduate within four years. Many never graduate at all; 36 million Americans have attended college but never earned a degree or credential. One in five of these learners completed more than three-quarters of their credits before stopping out. About 70 percent of students who leave college are forced out by financial hardship.

Those financial challenges go beyond paying tuition. Just surviving can be expensive. In one large-scale survey in 2019, nearly 60 percent of undergraduates at community colleges said they were experiencing some form of housing insecurity and nearly half were experiencing some form of food insecurity.

The pandemic has only exacerbated the challenges that students from underserved communities face — and made the need to provide them with greater financial support even more urgent. Last fall, 38 percent of students said they were worried they did not have enough money to last the semester.

Meanwhile, enrollment continues to fall, with undergraduate enrollment down more than  9 percent since the spring of 2020.

Doubling the Pell Grant can help reverse these terrible trends.

Related: Pell changes could mean more eligible students, more money, more programs

For five decades, Pell has been the cornerstone of college financial aid in the U.S., with more than six million students per year depending on Pell Grants to pay for their education. Unfortunately, the aid Pell provides has been dramatically outpaced by rising college costs.

When Congress first created Pell in the 1970s, the award could cover more than three-quarters of the cost of a four-year degree at a public institution. Today, it covers  less than a third of the cost.

In his State of the Union address in March, President Joe Biden proposed expanding the Pell Grant by about $2,000. This would be an encouraging start, but doubling the Pell Grant would have an even greater impact on students. Doubling Pell — from a maximum of $6,495 to $12,990 — would restore its purchasing power to more than half the cost of college for a bachelor’s degree at an in-state, public institution, advocates say. That’s a life-changing amount of aid for students like me.

I am doing all I can to ensure that I stay enrolled and finally graduate. I am working and applying for scholarships — and hoping for the best.

Students like me should not have to wish upon a star for the financial means to complete their degrees. Increasing the maximum award under Pell would immediately put more financial aid directly into the hands of the learners who need it most.

Policymakers cannot stand by as higher education loses a generation of learners from low-income communities. We are the leaders of tomorrow. Doubling Pell would be an important investment in both the education of young college students and the future of this country.

Darleny Suriel is a program assistant for the New Designs to Advance Learning program at the Carnegie Corporation. She is in the final semester of her senior year at City College.

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

The post STUDENT VOICE: If you want students like me to succeed, there’s a policy decision that works: Doubling Pell Grants appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Editor’s note: This story led off this week’s Future of Learning newsletter, which is delivered free to subscribers’ inboxes every other Wednesday with trends and top stories about education innovation. Subscribe today!

In 2020, as the pandemic, polarization and racial justice uprisings upended the status quo, calls to use the moment to build a better education system to address the country’s inequities became ubiquitous. In the two years since, that will to reinvent has largely dissipated.

Frustrated at seeing so many people fall back into the old ways of schooling, Michael B. Horn, author and co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation, created a blueprint for schools and educators to reinvent the current education system, despite the challenges. “I wanted to give a template for how they could escape it and what they can do instead,” Horn said.

Early in the pandemic, Horn and Diane Tavenner, co-founder and CEO of Summit Public Schools, created a podcast, “Class Disrupted,” to help parents and educators navigate teaching and learning during the crisis. This year, he took that project a step further with the book “From Reopen to Reinvent: (Re)Creating School for Every Child,” which was published in July.

Horn and I spoke last week about his book and how we can “recreate” our education system to better serve all students. This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

Javeria: What inspired you to take what you were doing on the podcast and write down those theories into this book?

Michael: We were getting a lot of questions from parents: “Why does school work this way? How should we educate our kids now that they’re home?” And we felt it was a great opportunity to try to help them peel back the curtain a little bit further on schools, why they work this way, but also for them and teachers to see that it doesn’t have to be this way, there are better ways to actually unlock each student’s potential. And so, we did that podcast … As we kept doing it, I felt like, gosh, I’ve got to put this in one place so that educators hopefully will actually design and build something better that really unlocks each student’s potential.

J: In the book, you talk about how the school system we currently have isn’t built for any student to really succeed? Can you explain your argument?

M: Before the pandemic, a lot of people just sort of said or assumed it worked for the haves in our society and not the have nots. But the pandemic, I think, showed how broken it was for people from all walks of life. And then the more people have thought about it, they realize, hey, actually, I’m not sure it’s been working fully for anyone in our society.

The big idea in the book is that we really have been trapped in this zero-sum system where we’ve assumed that for every winner there must be a loser. And either the haves are consciously playing “the game of schooling” or the have nots don’t know the game of schooling and are being left out. Either way, the game of schooling is distracting from the real purpose, which is to prepare our students to be living in such a complex world as adults when they graduate. And for that, we need a positive-sum system that escapes this zero-sum mindset and allows people to really figure out who are they and develop their specific mix of passionate potential.

J: In the book, you talk about schools needing to build a positive-sum education system. What’s the difference between the zero-sum system and the positive-sum system?

M: A big one is moving to mastery-based learning instead of the current time-based system. In a time-based system, we teach the topic and we move on to the next regardless of a student’s results on the tests. So, some students fall further and further behind and other students “win” and sort of learn how to play the game of school. In a mastery-based system, we say every student is going to reach mastery.

A second one that I talk about [is that] we ought to shift to a system in which teachers are not the graders of students. That they are not making these judgments about student’s capabilities, but instead can be fully devoted to being their coach and helping them figure out purpose and passion and potential. That’s a second big shift that the book proposes. There’s obviously a whole conversation about what parents are trying to prioritize and how they’ve been so acclimated to seeing school as a status game or judgment on their parenting. [A positive-sum system] tries to say, we can be part of this societal shift toward a healthier culture that isn’t judging parents or their kids, but is instead supporting both.

J: Let’s talk about parents. In the book, you make a point to address the parent experience. Can you talk about what you’ve heard from parents on what they want from schools? 

M: What the pandemic did was wipe away a sense of the status quo or have it as this thing holding you in place, and accentuated all the reasons that it might be great if you changed. Parents who are looking to help their kid escape a bad situation or parents who are looking to be part of a like-minded community or parents who were trying to develop their whole child or even parents that are saying, “Follow my plan for my kid.” They are much more aware [that] the status quo for whatever reason isn’t hitting what they needed [it to hit]. And they’re much more likely to either be verbal about their discontent or actually switch [schools]. We see that in the data, right? Of the enrollment declines of roughly 3 percent.

J: What does this mean for schools and educators?

M: You have to get out of this one-size-fits-all mindset that all kids do better in brick-and-mortar learning, that all kids do better with the exact same classroom experience or all kids need the exact same lesson on the exact same day — to a system that really recognizes students and parents have different circumstances, different situations and they need different models of schooling. School districts really need to meet parents where they are with more of a portfolio mindset as opposed to a one-size-fits-all mindset.

J: In the book you share the story of two fictional students, Jeremy and Julia, to showcase how the education system treats students as parts of a group, rather than individuals. Who are the Jeremys and Julias in our current system?

M: Jeremy represents an only child of a single mom who’s working multiple minimum-wage jobs, which leaves him home alone a lot during the day and during the year. And then the other student, Julia, comes from an upper-middle class home with a lot of parental support. You might call her parents “helicopter parents” as they appear constantly in the principal’s office throughout the book. They’re archetypes to show how, throughout the book, along a variety of dimensions, school as it is, it’s just not meeting them. It’s not engaging them. It’s not helping them make progress. It’s causing them to feel like failures. It’s punishing them when they try to have fun with friends. Jeremy needs a lot more support and integration and help from the community to help them succeed. Julia — perhaps her family wants more customization, more ability to make choices. [I wanted] to try to get people to just ask questions of “Gee, like if it’s not working for Julia holy cow, who is it not working for in my school?”

J: We’ve talked about rebuilding a better education system for students and parents. In the book, you also talk about creating something that works better for teachers, especially coming out of the pandemic.

M: In the book, I argue that regardless of your take on the current teacher shortage — whether it’s a result of burnout or a result of more teacher positions — we’ve not been supporting teachers well for a long time. We’ve been ignoring the pretty clear body of research about what motivates employees as we’ve designed the teaching profession. I argue, we need to move to more team-teaching models and not models where teachers have a professional learning community that they meet with maybe once a day if they’re lucky, but where they’re actually co-teaching in these environments, and they’re able to differentiate roles. Now we can think about staffing schools very differently and allowing these educators to bounce off each other in a variety of ways.

J: In the book, you talk about how schools need to move beyond the conversation of “learning loss” that everyone was talking about during the first years of the pandemic. Can you explain?

M: I came in with that mindset that we needed to get beyond learning loss and I was surprised as I did the research, that actually it was important to frame it as learning loss upfront to motivate resources for schools, like the unprecedented federal infusion of dollars. But staying in that framing of learning loss is incredibly paralyzing, demoralizing and demotivating to students and teachers. In the book, I suggest moving away from learning loss to a framing of guaranteed mastery.

Students are setting goals; they’re planning on how they’re going to reach them. They’re learning and then they’re showing evidence of what they’ve learned. Then that informs what they do next, do they move on or do they deepen and reflect about the learning process along the way? That creates a success cycle of positivity.

J: Our education landscape will likely continue to face disruptions, whether from new variants of the coronavirus or natural disasters. What should schools be thinking about, in terms of digital technology, that will serve both students and educators better than some of the methods used during the pandemic?

M: I do hope at some point we are able to step back and do a thought experiment. If this pandemic had occurred 20 years earlier in society, we would not have had the technology to do any continuity learning. The fact that so many schools pivoted as quickly as they did is amazing and a testament to what we have today. And yet, if another natural disaster, a pandemic, something like that occurs, and we have not invested in that backbone so that we can do it way better … we’ll really be kicking ourselves because there are a lot of things that were done really poorly. But to … think that we should [not] keep that infrastructure up seems crazy to me in the current moment, with all the challenges we have in the world.

For those that are saying, “Oh, virtual learning didn’t work,” or whatnot. Well, for some students it worked better. Yeah, it’s the second option for the majority of students, no question about it, but if we have to move to that, let’s make sure we have that disaster preparedness and experienced teachers who know what they’re doing in those environments. It seems to me it’d be a mistake to walk away from all [that learning].

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

The post New book advocates using pandemic lessons to reinvent education appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Last week, the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Carson v. Makin left advocates on both sides of the school choice debate navigating a new legal landscape.

The Court ruled that Maine’s exclusion of religious schools from a state tuition program was “discrimination against religion.” The program uses taxpayer dollars to help rural families who live far from a public school attend a private school instead.

Writing for the majority, Chief Justice John Roberts noted that while a state is not required to fund a private, religious school, if public funding is extended to secular, private schools it must also be extended to religious schools.

Up for debate now is what the broader effects of the ruling might be, as well as its impact on public school funding.

Jessica Levin, director of the advocacy campaign Public Funds Public Schools, said that the ruling currently applies only to Maine and neighboring Vermont and New Hampshire, where similar tuition programs already exist. It would not apply to any state operating a school voucher program.  

“In light of the Carson decision, a state cannot single out and exclude religious options from a program in which other programs are allowed to participate. In doing so, it is going to pave the way for many, many more school choice programs.”

Michael Bindas, lawyer for the Institute for Justice, which represented the lead plaintiffs

“The tuitioning programs are not vouchers. Vouchers are a separate statutory scheme to provide funding for an additional private school option on top of the public schools that are available for all and that is not the situation for these historic and geographic reasons in these three states,” said Levin.

Related: I got to choose private schools, but will vouchers really help other kids make it?

Michael Bindas, a lawyer with the Institute for Justice, who represented the lead plaintiffs, said that while it’s true the case will have the most immediate impact on the administration of programs in those three states, he sees the judgment having wider consequences.

“In light of the Carson decision, a state cannot single out and exclude religious options from a program in which other programs are allowed to participate,” said Bindas. “In doing so, it is going to pave the way for many, many more school choice programs.”

According to Bindas, the ruling nullifies no-aid amendments found in 37 state constitutions. Sometimes referred to as Blaine amendments, these provisions forbid public funds from going to private, religious institutions.

Bindas said the Carson decision removes the hurdle of no-aid amendments for states wishing to establish school choice programs.

“The legal cloud has been lifted and we are going to see many more state legislatures adopt these programs,” said Bindas.

But not everyone agrees with that interpretation.

“There are a lot of attacks on no-aid clauses that have not been successful,” said Levin.

Last year, the South Carolina Supreme Court rejected an attempt by a coalition of private colleges to strike down the state’s no-aid amendment, finding that the amendment did not spring from animosity toward religion and declined to strike it down.

“People recognize that we are always struggling to get enough money for our public schools and so people have enshrined in their state constitutions firewalls to keep that public money in public schools,” said Levin.

After Carson, Levin said public school advocates must prioritize educating state legislatures on the implications of school choice programs on the allocation of public dollars.

“If they are going to create a system where parents receive public school funds [for their kids] to attend private school, they are opening up a Pandora’s box for funding religion, for funding discrimination,” said Levin.

Public school advocates in Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire say they are also considering a new campaign to repeal or reform tuition programs to ensure that only public schools receive public dollars.

“We’re talking about a Supreme Court decision that forces taxpayers to send their tax dollars to a religious institution. It’s one more opportunity to siphon public dollars from public schools,” said Don Tinney, president of the Vermont chapter of the National Education Association, a national teachers’ union.

Tinney said he will encourage union members to press districts to remove any private school option — religious or secular — from their tuition programs.

“It’s important that our members be engaged on this issue,” said Tinney, “because the entire system is at risk.”

Also up in the air following the Carson decision is how future judges may interpret the tension between an individual’s religious rights under the First Amendment’s free exercise clause and a state’s anti-discrimination policy.

Related: Vouchers may be ticket out of public schools for kids with disabilities — but is that a good thing?

After the Supreme Court announced its decision, Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey issued a statement saying that any private, religious school receiving public dollars would be required to adhere to the anti-discrimination provisions found within the state’s Human Rights Act. Last year Maine legislators amended that law to explicitly forbid any publicly funded educational institution, including private schools receiving funds through the tuition program, from discriminating based upon gender identity or sexual orientation.

Two of the religious, private schools at the center of the Carson case — Bangor Christian School and Temple Academy — have explicit policies barring the admission of LGBTQ students or hiring LGBTQ teachers, according to court documents.

In his statement, Frey said schools participating in the state’s tuition program “must comply with anti-discrimination provisions of the Maine Human Rights Act and this would require some religious schools to eliminate their current discriminatory practices.”

That means despite the Supreme Court’s decision barring Maine from excluding religious schools from the state’s tuition program, schools that refuse to comply with the state’s anti-discrimination policy — such as Bangor Christian School and Temple Academy — would remain ineligible for public funding.

Dmitry Bam, who teaches constitutional law at the University of Maine School of Law, says that because Maine’s Human Rights Act is a generally applicable legal principle, religious institutions are ineligible for an exemption, but he says this principle could be tested.

“I think the area of law is in flux. I think the AG is right that currently under the law, a generally applicable legal principle applies to everyone, so there’s no religious exemptions that are required,” said Bam. “But the court seems to be skeptical of that line of reasoning and at least in recent cases have found ways to require states to provide those exemptions, so I expect it is an evolving area of the law.”

Lawyers on both sides agree that this tension could be taken up by the courts in the future. In last year’s decision Fulton v. Philadelphia, the court unanimously found that a religious foster care agency that declined to make referrals to LGBTQ couples was entitled to an exemption from a rule forbidding such discrimination because the city provided exceptions in its anti-discrimination policy.

In Carson v. Makin, the Court did not address the question of whether a religious institution can cite sincerely held religious beliefs to violate laws against discrimination.

“The law that we challenged turned solely on religion,” said Bindas.

“Are other cases going to come up down the road, where the interaction between school choice and anti-discrimination statutes is at issue? I suspect they will,” said Bindas. “How those cases will come out — I don’t know.”

In his dissent in Carson, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote that the ruling disregarded the long-respected “wall of separation” between church and state by requiring that Maine use taxpayer dollars to fund a religious intuition.

Following Carson, Bam said it’s conceivable that a religious private school, currently excluded from the tuition program under Maine’s anti-discrimination policy, could go to the courts to challenge the state’s policy by asserting their religious beliefs entitle them to an exemption.

“When you say that you are going to publicly fund schools that engage in discrimination, that’s not a victory for choice for families, that’s a choice for schools — that’s giving them the choice to discriminate, the choice to exclude students.”

Jessica Levin, director of the advocacy campaign Public Funds Public Schools

Such an argument would challenge the precedent established in Employment Division v. Smith, a 1990 case in which the Court found that generally applicable laws don’t require a religious exemption, even if the laws burden a religious practice. But Bam said the current court may be more sympathetic to a religious freedom argument.

“There are a lot of conservative justices who think that’s the wrong approach and that the states should be required to show some higher standard of proof before they take away an exemption,” said Bam. Justice Samuel Alito, a leader of the court’s new conservative majority, argued in concurrence in Fulton that Smith should be overruled.

For public school advocates like Levin, this possibility is further cause for alarm.

“When you say that you are going to publicly fund schools that engage in discrimination, that’s not a victory for choice for families, that’s a choice for schools — that’s giving them the choice to discriminate, the choice to exclude students,” said Levin.

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

The post Supreme Court ruling brings an altered legal landscape for school choice appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Educators are anxiously awaiting a major decision in a Maine-centered U.S. Supreme Court case, due out this month, that could roll back restrictions on the use of public funding for religious and other private schools.

The high court is considering an appeal in a case called Carson v. Makin, which stems from a 2018 lawsuit brought by three Maine families against the state Department of Education. The families’ lead attorney is the Institute for Justice, which has won similar school choice and religious liberty challenges at the current conservative-majority Supreme Court in recent years. 

“This really has been just a push from those that want to privatize public education and have vouchers,” said Grace Leavitt, a Spanish teacher and current president of the Maine Education Association. “It will funnel public tax dollars away from our public schools.” 

Maine doesn’t have a voucher program, which would give families money to opt out of local public schools and attend a private school instead. The law at issue in this case is more limited, focused on students in mostly rural districts that don’t have a public high school at all. 

State statute requires such districts, if they don’t have an agreement to use a public school in another town, to pay tuition for students to get an equivalent education at an approved private school elsewhere, in or out of the state. 

The other plaintiffs, Troy and Angela Nelson, believe they would be denied from using public money to send their daughter to the private Temple Academy in Waterville, which teaches the “thoroughly Christian and Biblical worldview” that they say they want for their kids. 

As of October 2020, according to court filings, more than 4,000 of these students attended one of Maine’s quasi-public academies, which receive 60% of their funding from the state. Fewer than 700 more students used the tuition program to attend other private schools. 

Schools that receive this state funding have to meet educational and managerial standards. Since the 1980s, they’ve also had to be “nonsectarian,” in line with the state’s definition of its desired basic education as religiously neutral. This case could reshape if and how these private schools can receive state funding, and how the state oversees them.

The families that sued over this law, led by David and Amy Carson of Glenburn, a small Bangor suburb, say Maine’s law unfairly excludes religious schools like the ones where they want aid to send their kids. They argue this violates their First Amendment rights. 

“No student should be denied educational opportunity simply because, for their situation, a religious education makes sense. Yet that’s precisely what Maine is doing,” said the families’ lead attorney with the Institute for Justice, Michael Bindas, in a video about the case last year. “It’s certainly something that the Supreme Court should make clear is not allowed.” 

Lower courts disagreed, ruling in favor of Maine education commissioner Pender Makin and past precedent to find the state is within its rights to limit the tuition assistance program’s scope. 

“This really has been just a push from those that want to privatize public education and have vouchers. It will funnel public tax dollars away from our public schools.” 

Grace Leavitt, a Spanish teacher and current president of the Maine Education Association

But members of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority have strongly signaled, in December’s oral argument and related decisions, that they may overturn those earlier rulings and use this case to expand the constitutionality of public funding for religious uses. 

A Maine Department of Education spokesperson declined to comment before a ruling is issued. The appeal focuses on two of the Maine families in the original suit. The Carsons both attended Bangor Christian School as kids, according to the Institute for Justice, which describes itself as a “libertarian” nonprofit public interest law firm based in the Washington, D.C. area. 

The Carsons’ hometown of Glenburn does not have its own high school, so they paid to send their daughter Olivia to Bangor Christian School, despite being eligible to get public money for a nonsectarian private school. They say in the case that they believe Bangor Christian’s religious affiliation would rule it out of the tuition program. 

The other plaintiffs, Troy and Angela Nelson, believe they would be denied from using public money to send their daughter to the private Temple Academy in Waterville, which teaches the “thoroughly Christian and Biblical worldview” that they say they want for their kids. 

Related: OPINION: U.S. Supreme Court tax-credit decision won’t change much in terms of public-school spending requirements

Steve Bailey leads the Maine School Management and School Boards Associations, which filed one of many amicus briefs with the Supreme Court urging against such a decision. He said he believes the families behind the suit are well-intentioned, but fears a decision in their favor would “wreak havoc” on Maine’s public education system. 

Bailey said he’s concerned about two major implications: that already limited public school funding will be diluted by families newly able to get aid to attend private religious schools, and that those schools’ curricula will be significantly outside Maine’s agreed-upon educational goals. 

“That amount of money that’s there for supporting students who attend public schools would then be allowed to be spread over a much different and potentially broader population,” Bailey said last week. “I think it’s an attempt to broaden or stretch beyond the intent, as well as the responsibility, of the state and towns to be paying for religious education.”

Related: OPINION: The Supreme Court just let a church use public funds to fix its playground. Will this shift public education’s terrain?

Maine assistant attorney general Sarah Forster also focused on public education in her arguments, saying the tuition program aims to ensure free education in a heavily rural state. 

“In excluding sectarian schools, Maine is declining to fund a single explicitly religious use: an education designed to proselytize and inculcate children with a particular faith,” Forster wrote. She had support in amicus briefs from the Biden administration, state of Vermont and others. 

Forster argues it’s also unclear if the Carsons’ and Nelsons’ religious schools of choice would even accept public money. Representatives for both Bangor Christian and Temple have testified that they would refuse to do so if, to comply with other state laws, they would have to change internal policies that bar the hiring of gay teachers and discriminate against LGBTQ students. 

The MEA’s Leavitt said this issue is exactly the kind of thing that an equitable, nonsectarian public school system is designed to avoid.

“We want an educated citizenry. That’s what our public education system is about,” she said. “We don’t want to have schools that are excluding students or not welcoming all students.”

This story was produced by the Maine Monitor, a nonprofit news outlet operated by The Maine Center for Public Interest Reporting, and reprinted with permission.

The post High anxiety in Maine about pending Supreme Court decision on public funding for religious and private schools appeared first on The Hechinger Report.