DURANGO, Colo. — For three dozen high schoolers, summer break in this southwest Colorado city kicked off with some rock climbing, mountain biking and fly-fishing.

Then, the work began.

As part of a weeklong institute on climate and the environment, mountain researchers taught the students how to mix clumps of grass seed, clay, compost and sand for seedballs that they threw into burned areas of the Hermosa Creek watershed to help with native plant recovery. The students upturned rocks — and splashed each other — along the banks of the Animas River, searching for signs of aquatic life after a disastrous mine spill. They later waded through a wetland and scouted for beaver dams as part of a lesson on how humans can support water restoration.

Each task was designed to prepare them for potential careers connected to the natural world — forest ecologist, aquatic biologist, conservationist. Many of the students had already taken college-level environmental science courses, on subjects such as pollution mitigation and water quality, at local high schools and Fort Lewis College.

Other students in and around Durango were taking a summer crash course in the health sciences, and this fall can earn college credit in classes like emergency medical services and nursing. Still others were participating in similar programs for early childhood education and for teacher preparation.

“I like the let-me-work-outside model,” said Autumn Schulz, a rising sophomore at Ignacio High School. Every day this past school year, she rode a public transit bus, passing miles of high desert terrain, to take an ecology class at Bayfield High School, in another district. She’d already completed internships at a mountain research nonprofit and a public utility to explore environmental and municipal jobs in her preferred field.

“It’s my favorite subject,” she said. “It’s one of my favorite things.”

None of this would have been possible before 2020. Back then, the Bayfield, Durango and Ignacio school districts operated largely independently. But as the pandemic took hold and communities debated whether to reopen schools after lockdown, a newly formed alliance of nine rural districts in southwest Colorado attempted to extinguish their attendance boundaries and pooled staff and financial resources to help more students get into college and high-paying careers.

Across the United States, rural schools often struggle to provide the kinds of academic opportunities that students in more populous areas might take for granted. Although often the hub of their communities, rural schools tend to struggle with a shrinking teaching force, budgets spread too thin and limited access to employers who can help. Rural students have fewer options for advanced courses or career and technical education, or CTE, before entering the workforce.

But clustered near the Four Corners in Colorado, the coalition of nine rural districts has partnered with higher education and business leaders to successfully expand career and college pathways for their students. A nonprofit formed by the districts conducts job market analysis and surveys teenagers about their interests. Armed with that data, academic counselors can advise students on the array of new CTE and college-level classes in high-wage positions in the building trades, hospitality and tourism, health sciences, education and the environment.

Teachers working in classrooms separated by 100 miles or more regularly meet in-person and online to share curriculum and industry-grade equipment. More than five dozen employers in the region have created ways for students to explore careers in new fields, such as apprenticeships, job shadows and internships. And some students earn a job offer, workforce certificate or associate degree before they finish high school.

Collectively, the Southwest Colorado Education Collaborative has raised more than $7 million in private and public money to pay for these programs, and its work has inspired similar rural alliances across the state. The collaborative’s future, however, is uncertain, as federal pandemic relief funds that supported its creation soon expire. Advocates have started to campaign for a permanent funding fix and changes in state policy that would make it easier for rural schools to continue partnering with one another.

Jess Morrison, who stepped down at the end of July as the collaborative’s founding executive director, said the group — and others like it in Indiana and South Texas — demonstrates the strength of regional neighbors creating solutions of their own, together.

“It’s about our region not waiting on people to save us,” she said.

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Nationally, more than 9.5 million U.S. students — or about 1 in 5 students — attend a rural school. The National Center for Education Statistics has found that, compared with the U.S. average, students in rural schools finish high school at higher rates and even outperform their peers in cities and suburbs. But only 55 percent of rural high schoolers enroll in college, a much lower share than their urban and suburban counterparts. Rural students make less money as adults and, compared to suburban students, are more likely to grow up in poverty.

In this part of southwest Colorado, where about half of students qualify for subsidized meals at school, employers have struggled to find enough workers but also to provide a liveable wage. Hoping to steer more high schoolers into high-skill and high-wage jobs, educators and superintendents from five school districts — Archuleta, Bayfield, Durango, Ignacio and Silverton — started to meet with representatives from Fort Lewis College and Pueblo Community College. In early 2019, they began working with the nonprofits Empower Schools and Lyra Colorado to formally create a regional collaborative and visited a similar project in South Texas.

Covid briefly disrupted much of that work, but in June 2020, tapping federal relief dollars for education, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis announced a nearly $33 million fund to close equity gaps and support students affected by the pandemic. Already poised to work together, the collaborative secured the largest award — $3.6 million — from the governor’s fund to help students explore environmental science and the building trades, two areas in which the number of jobs was projected to increase.

Despite that demand for workers, none of the school districts offered a single class in HVAC, electrical or plumbing, according to Morrison, nor did any of the nearby higher ed institutions. “We were a complete desert,” she said.

In 2022, the collaborative began piloting summer institutes, employers started hiring students directly from those programs and Pueblo Community College began offering electrical certification at its southwest campus. Woodworking instructors from different districts started to gather monthly, comparing lesson plans and creating wish lists for new classes and equipment. New CNC routers, laser cutters and electric planers arrived at teachers’ classrooms. Soon, teachers will pilot an HVAC course for high schoolers.

Over time, the collaborative added four additional school districts: Dolores, Dove Creek, Mancos and Montezuma Cortez. It also formally partnered with two tribal nations, Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute, while expanding its college and career tracks to include education, the health sciences and hospitality/tourism.

As of 2023, nearly 900 students across the nine districts — of about 13,000 total for the region — had participated in environmental, agriculture and outdoor recreation courses, according to the collaborative’s annual report. Approximately 325 students have completed a building trades course, with 40 so far earning industry certificates. Another 199 students finished a welding course, and 77 students also took college-level classes in that field.

Joshua Walton just finished his 11th year teaching science at Bayfield High School. He’s seen the changes firsthand: His classroom today has clinometers, game cameras and soil-testing equipment on its shelves. Walton often reserves the collaborative’s mobile learning unit, a 14-passenger van converted into a traveling science lab, so students can run experiments along the Animas River. He also prepares students to get their certification in water science.

“We’re giving students the opportunity where they can be an aquatic biologist or get a job doing water testing pretty much right after they graduate,” said Walton.

Tiffany Aspromonte, who works as academic advisor at Mancos High School, grew up in town and has raised her two children there. Her oldest son, a rising senior at Mancos High, regularly changes his mind about his future, she said.

He already earned a mini-certification in welding, and he’s taken courses in drones and — when he wanted to become an eye doctor — medical terminology. Now, he’s in love with hands-on engineering classes, but hates the bookwork, Aspromonte said. This fall, her son will spend Friday nights at Pueblo Community College for a wildland fire class.

“He’s not the exception,” Aspromonte said. “Just in our small school, a lot of kids can go really in-depth so they can get an idea of what they do or don’t want to do.”

And, she added, the rural brain drain — of ambitious students leaving a small town for college or better jobs — seems less pressing.

“There’s no pressure to leave home, unless you really want to,” Aspromonte said.

Related: MIT, Yale and other elite colleges are finally reaching out to rural students

Along the way there have been challenges. Since 2020, all but one of the founding five superintendents left their positions, reflecting the nationwide churn of school leaders during the pandemic. Deciding how to divide money among districts hasn’t always been easy, said Morrison, the collaborative’s former director.

Student enrollment in shared courses never reached a point that would justify added costs, such as transportation. This fall, the alliance will limit the classes that high schoolers can take across district lines to education and health sciences. (Students can still take the courses in the building trades, environment and hospitality/tourism in their own high schools and at the local colleges. Each track will continue to include work-based learning.)

“We needed to simplify our approach,” Morrison said. “We started grand with all five pathways across all nine districts.”

And working with local business leaders has at times been challenging too, said Patrick Fredricks, the collaborative’s deputy director. Employers often want to give students tours of their businesses but, with the collaborative’s nudging, they can create real-world lessons: A popular bar and grill in Cortez reopened on a day off so students could host a pop-up restaurant. Dove Creek schools sent 20 kids to practice with staple guns and X-ray machines in the paramedic wing of the regional hospital.

Today, the collaborative regularly hosts career fairs with local businesses, matches students with employers to shadow on half-day visits to the workplace and helps arrange longer-term internships as well. Last school year, more than 200 students shadowed business leaders at 16 different job sites, including the local hospital, ski resorts and a cattle ranch.

The Colorado Education Initiative, a Denver-based nonprofit, has studied the impact of the pandemic relief money on students and plans to release initial findings this fall. In an early review of the data, released last November, the nonprofit found that projects funded by the governor’s office, including those of the collaborative, generally improved academic and social emotional outcomes.

The collaborative model has started to spread. Three remote districts in eastern Indiana recently created a “rural alliance zone” to get students into IT, advanced manufacturing, marketing and other career clusters. Last year, the Texas legislature overwhelmingly approved the creation of an annual $5 million pot of money to incentivize the creation of rural alliances in that state.

Back in Colorado, political allies of the collaborative have pitched the idea of dedicating state money for such partnerships or reducing the amount of bureaucracy and paperwork needed to share funds among school districts. Eric Maruyama, spokesman for Gov. Polis, said in a statement that the Colorado governor “is committed to creating educational opportunities that give students the skills needed to thrive and fill in-demand jobs” but declined to say if he would take specific action.

Taylor McCabe-Juhnke, executive director of the Rural Schools Collaborative, a national network that operates in more than 30 states, said she’s optimistic that successful partnerships in rural communities like southwest Colorado will convince philanthropic and public funders to invest.

“It’s not very sexy to fund or make time and space for relationship building,” she said. “It’s also the right thing to do to benefit broader rural community vitality.”

In Silverton, an old mining town near the headwaters of the Rio Grande, kayakers called to the students sitting on rocks along banks of the Animas River. The teenagers circled around ice trays brimming with river water and tried to classify the swimming macroinvertebrates.

“Is that one squiggly like a worm?” BreAnna Bennet, a rising senior from Durango High School, asked her group.

At the start of the summer program, Bennet said she had no desire to do any job in the outdoors. By the third day, she often tailed the instructor and supplied a stream of questions about wetland restoration efforts and wildlife in the backcountry.

“This is fun. I like this,” Bennet said, looking up from the ice tray. “Your activity is my favorite so far.”

This story about Colorado rural schools alliances 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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Education vaulted to the forefront of conversations about the presidential race when Democratic nominee Kamala Harris announced Tim Walz as her running mate. Walz, the governor of Minnesota, worked for roughly two decades in public schools, as a geography teacher and football coach. He has championed investments in public education: For example, in March 2023, he signed a bill to make school meals free to all students in public schools.

Harris, a former U.S. senator and attorney general in California, has less experience in education than her running mate. But her record suggests that she would back policies to make child care more affordable, protect immigrant and LGBTQ+ students and promote broader access to higher education through free community college and loan forgiveness. Like Walz, she has defended schools and teachers against Republican charges that they are “indoctrinating” young people; she has also spoken about her own experience of being bused in Berkeley, California, as part of a program to desegregate the city’s schools.

So what would trump do?

What education could look like under Trump and Vance

Harris and Walz have been endorsed by the country’s two largest teachers unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, which tend to support Democratic candidates.

We will update this guide as the candidates reveal more information about their education plans. You can also read about the Republican ticket’s education ideas.

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Early childhood

Child care

Harris has been a vocal supporter of child care legislation during her time in the Biden administration, though the proposals have had a mixed record of success.

During the pandemic, the Biden administration provided $39 billion in child care aid to help keep programs afloat.

The administration lowered the cost of child care for some military families and supported raising pay for federally funded Head Start teachers to create parity with public school teachers.

Earlier this year, Harris announced a new federal rule that would reduce lower child care costs for low-income families that receive child care assistance through a federally funded program. That same rule also requires states to pay child care providers on a more reliable basis. In September, Harris highlighted affordable child care as a key issue on her campaign website and said she would ensure “that care workers are paid a living wage.” Harris also said she plans to cap child care costs at no more than 7 percent of a working family’s income, but did not elaborate on how that would be funded.

Walz has also supported child care programs as governor of Minnesota. Earlier this year, he announced a new $6 million child care grant program aimed at expanding child care capacity, which followed a 2023 grant program that cemented pandemic-era support so programs could increase wages for child care workers. — Jackie Mader

Family leave and tax benefits

As soon as she became the presumptive Democratic nominee in July, Harris reaffirmed her support for paid family leave, which also was part of the platform she proposed as a candidate in the 2020 Democratic presidential contest. Harris provided the tie-breaking Senate vote that temporarily increased the child tax credit during the pandemic and has proposed making that tax credit permanent.

In mid-August, Harris unveiled an economic policy agenda that proposes giving a $6,000 child tax credit for a year to families with newborns. She also wants to bring back and expand a pandemic-era child tax credit that lapsed in 2021. Harris’ proposal would provide up to $3,600 a year per child. 

Walz also was behind Minnesota’s child tax credit increase in 2023, and successfully pushed forward a statewide paid family and medical leave law that takes effect in 2026. — J.M.

Pre-K

In 2021, the Biden administration proposed a universal preschool program as part of a multi-trillion-dollar social spending plan called Build Back Better. The plan ultimately failed to win backing from the Senate.

Earlier this year, Walz signed a package of child-focused bills into law. one of which expands the state’s public pre-K program by 9,000 seats and provides pay for teachers who attend structured literacy training. — J.M.

K-12

Artificial intelligence, education technology, cybersecurity

Harris has played a key role in leading the Biden administration’s AI initiatives, particularly since the launch of ChatGPT. Biden signed an executive order on AI in October 2023, which directed the Education Department to develop within a year resources, policies and guidance on AI and to create an “AI toolkit” for schools.

While Harris hasn’t specifically addressed education technology, in the Biden administration, the Education Department earlier this year released the National Education Technology Plan to serve as a blueprint for schools on how to implement technology in education, how to address inequities in the use and design of ed tech and how to offer ways to bridge the country’s digital divide.

In 2023, the current administration announced several new initiatives to tackle cybersecurity threats in K-12 schools, including a three-year pilot program through the Federal Communications Commission that will provide up to $200 million to help school districts that are eligible for FCC’s E-Rate program cover the cost of cybersecurity services and equipment. — Javeria Salman

Immigrant students

Harris has vowed to protect those in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which delays deportation for undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children. The Biden administration has also used its bully pulpit to remind states and school districts that all children regardless of immigration status have a constitutional right to a free public education. As a senator in 2018, Harris sponsored legislation designed to reunite migrant families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border by the Trump administration, although family separation has continued on a much smaller scale in the Biden administration. In Minnesota, Walz signed legislation that starting next year will provide free public college tuition to undocumented students from low-income families. — Neal Morton

LGBTQ+ students and Title IX

Harris and Walz have both expressed support for LGBTQ+ students and teachers. As a senator, Harris supported the Equality Act in 2019, which would have expanded protections in the Civil Rights Act on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity in education, among other areas. In a speech to the American Federation of Teachers, Harris decried the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” laws passed by Florida and other states in recent years. Walz has a long history of supporting LGBTQ+ students in Minnesota, where he was the faculty adviser of Mankato West High School’s first Gay-Straight Alliance club in the 1990s. In 2021, Walz signed an executive order restricting insurance coverage for so-called conversion therapy for minors and directing a state agency to investigate potential “discriminatory practice related to conversion therapy.” Walz signed an executive order in 2023 protecting gender-affirming health care. Earlier this year, he signed a law barring libraries from banning books based on ideology; book bans nationwide have largely targeted LGTBQ+-themed books.

The Biden administration announced significant rule changes to Title IX in 2024 that undid some of the changes the Trump administration made, including removing a mandate for colleges to have live hearings and cross-examinations when investigating sexual assaults on campus. The current administration also expanded protections for students based on sexual orientation and gender identity, which had been temporarily blocked in more than two dozen states and in schools attended by children of members of Moms for Liberty, Young America’s Foundation and Female Athletes United. — Ariel Gilreath

Native students

As vice president, Harris worked in an administration that promised to improve education for Native Americans, including a 10-year plan to revitalize Native languages. The president’s infrastructure bill, passed in 2021, created a $3 billion program to broaden access to high-speed internet on tribal lands — a major barrier for students trying to learn at home during the pandemic. During his time as governor, Walz signed legislation last year to make college tuition-free for Native American students in Minnesota and required K-12 teachers to complete training on Native American history. Walz also required every state agency, including the department of education, to appoint tribal-state liaisons and formally consult with tribal governments.

Walz spent part of his early career teaching in small rural schools, including on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. — N.M.

School choice

Harris, who was endorsed by the nation’s largest public school teachers unions, has voiced support for public schools, but has said little about school vouchers or school choice. Walz does not support private-school vouchers, opposing statewide private-school voucher legislation introduced in 2021 by Republicans in Minnesota. — A.G.

School meals

One of Walz’s signature legislative achievements was supporting a bill that provides free school breakfasts and lunches to public and charter school students in Minnesota, regardless of household income. Walz, who signed the law in 2023, made Minnesota one of only eight states to have a universal school meal policy. The new law is expected to cost about $480 million over the next two years.

The Biden administration also expanded access to free school lunch by making it easier for schools to provide food without collecting eligibility information on every child’s family. — Christina A. Samuels

School prayer

The Biden administration has sought to protect students from feeling pressured into praying in schools. Following the 2022 Supreme Court decision in Kennedy v. Bremerton, the federal Education Department published updated guidance saying that while the Constitution permits school employees to pray during the workday, they may not “compel, coerce, persuade, or encourage students to join in the employee’s prayer or other religious activity.” — Caroline Preston

Special education

As a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, Harris released a “children’s agenda” in 2019 that, among other provisions, called for a large boost in special education spending.

When Congress first passed the federal law that is now called the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, it authorized spending to cover up to 40 percent of the “excess costs” of educating students with disabilities compared to their peers. But Congress has never come close to meeting that goal, and today the federal government distributes only about 15 percent of the total cost of educating students with disabilities. The shortfall is “immoral,” Harris told members of the National Education Association at a 2019 candidates forum.

The Biden administration also has proposed large increases in special education spending, but proposals for full funding of special education have not made it through Congress.

In 2023, the Minnesota Department of Education created a grant program to help school districts “grow their own” special education teachers. The first round of funding awarded $20 million to 25 grantees. In August, a second round of funding provided nearly $10 million to benefit more than 35 districts and charter schools. — C.A.S.

Student mental health, school safety

As California attorney general, Harris created a Bureau of Children’s Justice to address childhood trauma, among other issues. She has spoken out about the mental health toll of trauma, including from poverty, and the need for more resources and “culturally competent” mental health providers. But a 2011 law she pushed for as attorney general allowing parents of chronically absent students to be criminally charged later drew criticism for its toll on families, particularly those who are Black or Hispanic. Harris has said she regrets the law’s “unintended consequences.”

The Biden administration’s actions on student mental health includes expanding the pipeline of school psychologists, streamlining payment and delivery of school mental health services and directing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to develop new ways of assessing social media’s impact on youth mental health.

As vice president, Harris leads the new White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which was created after lobbying by survivors of school shootings to support gun safety regulations. She has touted the administration’s efforts to prevent school shootings, including a grant program that has awarded roughly $500 million to schools for “evidence-based solutions,” including anonymous reporting systems for threats and training for school employees on preventing school violence. In September, the administration issued an executive order directing the surgeon general and several federal agencies to develop guidance for educational institutions on how to conduct active-shooter drills while minimizing student trauma.

In Minnesota, Walz’s 2022 budget called for $210 million in spending to help schools support students experiencing mental health challenges. “As a former classroom teacher, I know that students carry everything that happens outside the classroom into the classroom every day, and this is why it is imperative that our students get the resources they deserve,” he said. — C.P.

Teachers unions, pandemic recovery

The Biden administration has close ties to the nations’ largest teachers unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, the latter of which is the largest labor union of any kind in the country. First lady Jill Biden, who teaches community college courses, is a member of the NEA. Walz, a former teacher, is also an NEA member.

The administration was criticized for discussing with the AFT what kinds of safety measures should accompany the reopening of public schools after the pandemic.

Since 2021, the Biden administration has poured billions into helping public schools recover from the pandemic in various ways: to pay for more staff and tutors and upgrade facilities to improve air conditioning and ventilation, among other things. However, academic performance has yet to rebound, and the recovery has been uneven, with wealthier white students more likely to have made up ground lost during remote classes and Black and Latino students less likely to have done so.

The two unions, which had supported reelecting Biden, quickly threw their support to Harris and Walz. “Educators are fired up and united to get out and elect the Harris-Walz ticket,” NEA President Becky Pringle said after Harris named Walz as her running mate. “We know we can count on a continued and real partnership to expand access to free school meals for students, invest in student mental health, ensure no educator has to carry the weight of crushing student debt and do everything possible to keep our communities and schools safe.” — Nirvi Shah

Teaching about U.S. history and race

Both Harris and Walz have pushed back against Republican-led attacks on K-12 history instruction and efforts to minimize classroom conversations around slavery and race. Shortly after taking office in January 2021, the Biden administration dissolved President Donald Trump’s 1776 commission. In July 2023, Harris criticized a new history standard in Florida that said the experience of being enslaved had given people skills “for their personal benefit.”

As governor, Walz released an education plan calling for more “inclusive” instruction that is “reflective of students of color and Indigenous students.” It also called for anti-bias training for school staff, the establishment of an Equity, Diversity and Inclusion center at the Minnesota Department of Education, and the expansion of efforts to recruit Indigenous teachers and teachers of color. Walz also has advocated for educating students about the Holocaust and other genocides; state bans on teaching about “divisive concepts” in some Republican-led states have chilled such instruction. — C.P.

Title I

Harris’ 2019 “children’s agenda,” from when she was angling to be the Democratic nominee for president, proposed “significantly increasing” Title I, the federal program aimed at educating children from low-income families. The Biden administration also has proposed major increases to Title I spending, but Congress has not enacted those proposals. — C.A.S.

Higher Education

Accreditation

As California attorney general, Harris urged the federal government in 2016 to revoke federal recognition for the accrediting agency of the for-profit chain Corinthian Colleges, which she had successfully sued for misleading students and using predatory recruiting practices. The accreditor’s recognition ultimately was removed in 2022. 

As vice president, Harris has said little about the accreditation system, which is independently run and federally regulated and acts as a gatekeeper to billions of dollars in federal student aid. But the Biden administration has sought to require accreditors to create minimum standards on student outcomes such as graduation rates and licensure-exam pass rates. — Sarah Butrymowicz

Affirmative action

Harris has long supported affirmative action in college admissions. As California attorney general, she criticized the impact of the state’s 1996 ban at its public colleges. She also filed friend-of-the-court briefs in support of the University of Texas’ race-conscious admissions policy when the Supreme Court heard challenges to it in 2012 and 2015.

Last June, Harris criticized the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action the same day it was handed down, calling the decision a “denial of opportunity.” Walz, referring to the decision, wrote on X, “In Minnesota, we know that diversity in our schools and businesses reflects a strong and diverse state.” — Meredith Kolodner

DEI

Harris has not shied away from supporting DEI initiatives, even as they became a focus of attack for Republicans. “Extremist so-called leaders are trying to erase America’s history and dare suggest that studying and prioritizing diversity, equity, and inclusion is a bad thing. They’re wrong,” she wrote on X.

As governor, Walz has taken steps to increase access to higher education across racial groups, including offering tuition-free enrollment at state colleges for residents who are members of a tribal nation. This spring, Walz signed a budget that increased funding for scholarships for students from underrepresented racial groups to teach in Minnesota schools. — M.K.

For-profit colleges

Harris has long been a critic of for-profit colleges. In 2013, as California state attorney general, she sued Corinthian Colleges, Inc., eventually obtaining a more than $1.1 billion settlement against the defunct company. “For years, Corinthian profited off the backs of poor people — now they have to pay,” she said in a press release. As senator, she signed a letter in the summer of 2020 calling for the exclusion of for-profit colleges from Covid-era emergency funding. — M.K.

Free college

The Biden administration repeatedly has proposed making community college free for students regardless of family income. The administration also proposed making college free for students whose families make less than $125,000 per year if the students attend a historically Black college, tribal college or another minority-serving institution.

In 2023, Walz signed a bill that made two- and four-year public colleges in Minnesota free for students whose families make less than $80,000 per year. The North Star Promise Program works by paying the remaining tuition after scholarships and grants have been applied, so that students don’t have to take out loans to pay for school. — Olivia Sanchez

Free/hate speech

Following nationwide campus protests against the war in Gaza, Biden said, “There should be no place on any campus, no place in America for antisemitism or threats of violence against Jewish students. There is no place for hate speech or violence of any kind, where it’s antisemitism, Islamophobia, or discrimination against Arab Americans or Palestinian Americans.” His Education Department is investigating dozens of complaints about antisemitism and Islamophobia on K-12 and college campuses, a number that has spiraled since the start of the war. — O.S.

Pell grants

The Pell grant individual maximum award has increased by $900 to $7,395 since the beginning of the Biden administration, part of its goal to double the maximum award by 2029. Education experts say that when the Pell grant program began in the 1970s, it covered roughly 75 percent of the average tuition bill but today covers only about one-third. They say doubling the Pell grant would make it easier for low-income students to earn a degree. The administration tried several times to make Pell grants available to undocumented students who are part of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, but has been unsuccessful. — O.S.

Student loan forgiveness

In 2019, while campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination, Harris proposed forgiving loans for Pell grant recipients who operated businesses in disadvantaged communities for a minimum of three years. As vice president, she was reportedly instrumental in pushing Biden to announce a sweeping debt cancelation policy.

The policy, which would have eliminated up to $20,000 in debt for borrowers under a certain income level, ultimately was blocked by the Supreme Court. Since then, the Biden administration has used other existing programs, including Public Service Loan Forgiveness, to cancel more than $168 billion in federal student debt.

Harris has regularly championed these moves. In April, for instance, she participated in a round-table discussion on debt relief, touting what the administration had done. “That’s more money in their pocket to pay for things like child care, more money in their pocket to get through the month in terms of rent or a mortgage,” she said of those who had loans forgiven.

But challenges remain. In August, a federal appeals court issued a stay on a Biden plan, known as the SAVE plan, which aimed to allow enrolled borrowers to cut their monthly payments and have their debts forgiven more quickly than they currently can. — S.B.

Workforce development

Last fall, the Biden administration sent nearly $94 million in grant funding to job training programs, including community colleges and programs that partner with high schools. Earlier this year, the administration also announced $25 million for a new Career Connected High Schools grants program to help establish pathways to careers. In addition, the administration invested billions in nine workforce training hubs across the country. 

The Democratic Party platform unveiled at the national convention in Chicago also mentions expanding career and technical education. “Four year college is not the only pathway to a good career, so Democrats are investing in other forms of education as well,” the platform says.

Walz’s education plan as governor of Minnesota also set a goal of increasing career and technical education pathways. In October 2023, he signed an executive order eliminating college degree requirements for most government jobs in the state, a growing trend in states looking to expand alternative pathways to careers. — A.G.

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

The post What education could look like under Harris and Walz appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, are persistent critics of public K-12 schools and higher education and want to overhaul many aspects of how the institutions operate. On the campaign trail, Trump has repeatedly called for the elimination of the federal Education Department, arguing that states should have full authority for educating children. (Abolishing the department has been a long-standing goal of many Republicans, but it’s highly unlikely to win enough support in Congress to happen.)

Trump also supports efforts to privatize the K-12 school system, including through vouchers for private schools. Both he and Vance have launched repeated attacks on both K-12 and higher education institutions over practices that seek to advance racial diversity and tolerance and policies that provide protections to transgender students, among other issues. The candidates have also argued that higher ed institutions suppress the free speech of conservative students; as president, Trump took at least one action to tie funding to free speech protections. 

“Rather than indoctrinating young people with inappropriate racial, sexual, and political material, which is what we’re doing now, our schools must be totally refocused to prepare our children to succeed in the world of work,” Trump said in a September 2023 video describing his education proposals.

We will update this guide as the candidates reveal more information about their education plans. You can also read about the Democratic ticket’s education ideas.

Related: Become a lifelong learner. Subscribe to our free weekly newsletter to receive our comprehensive reporting directly in your inbox.

Early childhood

Child care

Even though Trump launched his first campaign for president with a child care policy proposal to expand access to care through tax code changes, child care largely took a back seat during his presidency. That said, there were some notable actions: Before the pandemic, Trump signed a tax law that increased the child tax credit from $1,000 to $2,000 per child, although research found higher-income families benefited significantly more from the change than low-income families. In 2018 he proposed cuts to the Child Care and Development Block Grant, a federal program that helps low-income families pay for child care, but ultimately approved funding increases passed by Congress in both 2018 and 2020.

In 2020, in the early days of the pandemic, Trump signed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security, or CARES, Act, which allotted an additional $3.5 billion for the Child Care and Development Block Grant. The supplemental fund was also meant to support the child care needs of essential workers. The CARES Act also provided supplemental funding to Head Start. —Jackie Mader

Family leave and tax credits

Also in 2020, Trump supported a bipartisan paid family leave bill, although it was more limited in scope and benefits than other paid leave proposals. Trump’s 2021 budget proposal called for eliminating the federal Preschool Development Grant program and decreased funding for a federal program that helps low-income college students pay for child care.

Vance has focused on legislation that encourages and supports parents to stay at home with their young children. In 2023, he co-sponsored a bill that would prevent employers from clawing back health care premiums the employers paid during a parent’s time off under the Family and Medical Leave Act if the parent chose not to return to work. He has been a vocal opponent of universal child care and instead has expressed support for more tax credits for parents. In mid-August, Vance expressed support for a $5,000 per child tax credit, an increase from the current maximum of $2,000 per child.— J.M.— J.M.

K-12

Artificial intelligence

In 2019, Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to focus on research and development around AI, and a year later his administration announced that $140 million would be awarded to several National Science Foundation-led programs to conduct research on AI at universities nationwide.

On the campaign trail this year, however, Trump said he will reverse the executive order on artificial intelligence signed by Biden last October, calling it a hindrance to AI innovation. Both Trump and his running mate, Vance, have disagreed with the Biden administration on what AI regulations should look like. While education leaders have called for regulations and guardrails around AI use and development, Vance has called for less regulation. — Javeria Salman

Immigrant, Native and rural students

The Republican presidential ticket and official party platform espouse anti-immigrant positions, advocating for mass deportations of anyone who entered the country without legal documentation. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank behind Project 2025, earlier this year released a set of policy recommendations on undocumented immigrants in U.S. public schools that would directly challenge a long-standing Supreme Court decision requiring states to provide a free education to all students regardless of their immigration status. While Trump has tried to distance himself from Heritage and its policy proposals, his running mate wrote the forward to an upcoming book from Project 2025’s former leader and many former Trump administration officials were involved in crafting the plan.

With respect to Native students, Trump as president released a “Putting America’s First Peoples First” brief outlining his promises to Indian Country, including access to college scholarships for Native American students, creating new tribally operated charter schools and improving the beleaguered agency that oversees K-12 education on reservations. Trump also pitched a 25 percent boost in funding for Native language instruction.

Vance, in an interview before Trump took office in 2017, encouraged the new administration to focus on education as a tool to help struggling rural communities. He said increasing options for students after high school would prepare them for jobs in a “knowledge economy” and give them more choices beyond pursuing a minimum-wage service sector job or going to a four-year college. “There’s no options in between and consequently people don’t see much opportunity,” Vance said. — Neal Morton

LGBTQ+ students and Title IX

In 2017, Trump rolled back Obama-era guidance that offered protections for transgender students to use school bathrooms based on their gender identity. His campaign website says he plans to reverse any gender-affirming care policies implemented by President Joe Biden, who  signed an executive order in 2022 encouraging the Departments of Education and of Health and Human Services to expand access to health care and gender-affirming care for LGBTQ+ students. He has also warned schools that, if reelected, he would cut or eliminate federal funding if teachers or school employees suggest “to a child that they could be trapped in the wrong body.” Vance sponsored a Senate bill last year that would ban medical gender-affirming care for minors, but it has not advanced.

The Trump administration significantly changed how colleges handle sexual assault allegations through Title IX during his time in office, adding a requirement for colleges to conduct live disciplinary hearings and allow cross-examinations in sexual assault cases; this was largely undone by the Biden administration. Trump said he plans to roll back Title IX rules the Biden administration implemented that expanded protections against discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation. Trump has also said he would prevent transgender athletes from participating in sports teams based on their gender identity; school rules on this issue are now decided at the state- or school-level with a Biden administration proposal stalled. — Ariel Gilreath

School choice

Expanding school choice through private-school vouchers has been a key part of Trump’s education policy, but he had little success in getting his most ambitious efforts passed by Congress. One early accomplishment came via the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. His administration made it possible for parents to use their children’s 529 college savings plan to pay for up to $10,000 annually in private school tuition.

His education secretary, Betsy DeVos, a longtime school-choice supporter in her home state of Michigan, made several high-profile attempts to support charter schools and expand private- school voucher expansion. DeVos attempted to set aside $400 million for charter schools and private-school vouchers in the 2018 federal budget, and in 2019, she promoted a $5 billion tax credit program for private-school vouchers, but neither proposal cleared Congress. During a speech in June 2020, Trump called school choice the “civil rights statement of the year.” Later that year, after widespread school closures, Trump issued an executive order allowing states to use money from a federal poverty program to help low-income families pay for private schooling, homeschooling, special education services or tutoring. His campaign website says he supports state and federal level universal school choice, and it highlights programs in Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Ohio, Oklahoma, Utah and West Virginia. — A.G.

School meals

The Trump administration made several attempts to roll back lunch nutrition standards that had been championed by Michelle Obama, arguing that schools needed more flexibility and the standards were leading to wasted food.

However, in 2020, a federal judge ended the Trump administration’s efforts to ease requirements for whole grains and to allow more sodium in school meals, among other changes. The administration did not follow proper procedures in easing those nutrition mandates, the court ruled. — Christina A. Samuels

School prayer

Trump has been an advocate for what his campaign calls “the fundamental right to pray in school.” As president, he issued guidance intended to protect students who want to pray or worship in school. The outcome of Kennedy v. Bremerton, the 2022 Supreme Court ruling that a football coach had a constitutional right to pray on the field after games, was shaped by the three justices that Trump appointed to the court. Some nonprofit and legal groups have criticized Trump’s positions, arguing that he muddies the separation of church and state and that the real problem is not suppression of religious freedom in schools but children who feel pressured into religious expression. — Caroline Preston

School safety, student mental health

When it comes to school safety, Trump has supported policies that prioritize the “hardening” of schools and strict disciplinary approaches. According to his 2024 campaign website, if reelected, Trump would “completely overhaul federal standards on school discipline to get out-of-control troublemakers OUT of the classroom and INTO reform schools and corrections facilities.” He would also support schools that allow “highly trained teachers” to carry concealed weapons in classrooms and hire veterans and others as armed guards at schools. Regarding youth mental health, his campaign says he would direct the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to investigate the effects of “common psychiatric drugs” and gender-affirming hormone therapy on young people.  

Vance has taken similar positions. During his 2022 Senate run, he said he supported Ohio’s new law that lowered the amount of training required for teachers to carry concealed weapons in classrooms. In Congress, he raised concerns about elements of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the gun safety law passed in 2022 after the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and co-sponsored two bills that would have altered language in the bill to permit schools to buy weapons for use in archery, hunting and sharp-shooting programs. (A similar bill introduced in the House ultimately passed.) Vance also sponsored a bill that would direct the education secretary to study the use of mobile devices in K-12 schools — a mental health concern — and establish a pilot program to support schools’ efforts to become device-free. — C.P.

Special education

The Trump administration attempted to roll back a rule that requires districts to track students in special education by race and ethnicity in order to determine if minority students are more likely to be identified for special education, face harsher discipline, or be placed in classrooms separate from their general-education peers. A judge dismissed the administration’s efforts to eliminate this policy on procedural grounds. — C.A.S.

Teachers unions, pandemic recovery

Teachers unions, unlike some other labor groups, did not work well with the Trump administration and do not back the Trump/Vance ticket. Trump’s 2024 platform advocates undercutting some of the protections teachers unions support. It says, “Republicans will support schools that focus on Excellence and Parental Rights. We will support ending Teacher Tenure, adopting Merit pay, and allowing various publicly supported Educational models.”

His administration pushed schools to reopen ahead of the 2020-21 school year but without the kinds of safeguards Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said were essential to get teachers and kids back together, in person. Trump signed two broad relief packages passed by Congress in 2020 that included more than $100 billion in aid for K-12 schools to recover from the pandemic. — Nirvi Shah

Teaching about U.S. history and race

Both Trump and Vance have attacked critical race theory and advanced concerns that K-12 teachers are stirring anti-white bias among students. As president, Trump criticized the 1619 Project, a New York Times history document arguing that the enslavement of Black Americans was central to U.S. history. He established the President’s Advisory 1776 Commission as a rebuke to the project; its January 2021 report called for “restoring patriotic education” and railed against “identity politics.” The Biden administration rescinded the commission, but Trump has pledged to reinstate it if reelected.

Vance, meanwhile, made education culture war issues central to his 2022 run for Senate. On his campaign website, he pledged to cut funding for state universities in Ohio that teach critical race theory and “to force our schools to give an honest, patriotic account of American history.” — C.P.

Title I

During each of his four years in office, Trump submitted budget proposals that would have consolidated more than two dozen programs, including Title I, the largest source of federal funding for schools. The program is intended to support services at schools that educate children from low-income families. Congress rejected the administration’s efforts to consolidate the programs — C.A.S.

Higher education

Accreditation

The Trump campaign has gone after college accrediting agencies, which serve as the gatekeepers for billions of dollars in federal student aid, claiming that the entities are part of the “radical Left” and have “allowed our colleges to become dominated by Marxist Maniacs and lunatics.” (The fact that some accrediting agencies have added or considered standards related to diversity, equity and inclusion also has drawn ire from many on the right.)

In a video posted to his campaign site, Trump pledges to “fire” existing accrediting agencies. The government does have regulations that these entities must follow, but revoking their recognition would require a lengthy Education Department review.

Trump goes on to say that he would open applications for new accreditors to impose standards that include “defending the American tradition and Western civilization, protecting free speech, eliminating wasteful administrative positions that drive up costs incredibly,” and “implementing college entrance and exit exams to prove that students are actually learning and getting their money’s worth.” — Sarah Butrymowicz

Affirmative action

Both Trump and Vance have taken a hard stance against affirmative action and diversity initiatives. Trump celebrated the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling banning affirmative action in college admissions, calling it a “great day for America.” “We’re going back to all merit-based — and that’s the way it should be,” he wrote on TruthSocial.

Following that decision, Vance wrote a letter to college presidents warning, “The United States Senate is prepared to use its full investigative powers to uncover circumvention, covert or otherwise, of the Supreme Court’s ruling.” Last December, he introduced a bill to create an inspector general’s office to investigate discrimination in college admissions and financial aid, which would take federal aid away from colleges found in violation. — Meredith Kolodner

Community college

Trump has said people don’t understand what community colleges are and suggested they be renamed vocational or technical colleges (though they are not the same thing). He has not supported tuition-free community college, but last year, he pitched the idea of a free online college he called American Academy, be paid for by taxes on private universities. Experts have said this plan is unlikely to take hold. — Olivia Sanchez

DEI

As the agitation about DEI initiatives intensified in 2020, Trump issued an executive order that banned diversity training that was “divisive,” which applied to federal agencies and recipients of federal grants, including universities.

Vance has also criticized DEI initiatives, calling them “racism, plain and simple.” Last December, he wrote a letter to the president of Ohio State University, probing its hiring practices and its curriculum. “If universities keep pushing racial hatred, euphemistically called DEI, we need to look at their funding,” he wrote on X. — M.K.

For-profit colleges and universities

Trump has long been seen as a friend of the for-profit college sector. Before he became president, he ran the for-profit Trump University, which trained students for careers in real estate. He was subsequently sued by former students who claimed the college had misled them; the case was settled with a $25 million payout. While in office, he took several steps to make it easier for for-profit colleges to thrive, and enrollment at those institutions began to rise in 2020. His administration rolled back the Obama-era gainful employment rule, which required for-profit colleges to meet certain benchmarks to ensure that a majority of graduates were making enough to pay back their loans. As president, Trump vetoed a bill that would have provided debt forgiveness to veterans defrauded by for-profit colleges.— M.K.

Free/hate speech

Trump considers himself an advocate of free speech, but he has attacked the speech of others and drawn criticism for comments about immigrants and other groups that some argue amount to hate speech.

In 2019, Trump signed an executive order requiring that colleges and universities commit to promoting free speech and free inquiry to continue receiving research funding from 12 federal agencies. He said this was to protect conservative students from being silenced and discriminated against. “Under the guise of ‘speech codes’ and ‘safe spaces’ and ‘trigger warnings,’ these universities have tried to restrict free thought, impose total conformity, and shut down the voices of great young Americans like those here today,” he said when signing the order.

Vance also has argued that conservative students are being silenced on college campuses. When he was running for Senate, Vance gave a speech entitled “Universities are the enemy” in 2021, calling the institutions corrupt and arguing they disseminate lies rather than truth and knowledge.

In the same speech, he called his alma mater, Yale University Law School, “clearly a liberal-biased place” at the time he graduated in 2013, adding that when he returned five years later to promote his book, “it felt totally totalitarian.” “It felt like the sort of place where if you were a conservative student who had conservative ideas you were terrified to utter them,” Vance said. — O.S.

Pell grants

The Trump administration proposed cutting the Pell grant surplus fund twice, including a proposed $3.9 billion diversion that would have funded several unrelated initiatives, including a NASA plan to take astronauts back to the moon. Though dipping into the Pell reserves wouldn’t have affected students already awarded Pell grants, education advocates argued that it would have imperiled funding for future students. None of these proposals were approved by Congress. A Trump plan to allow students to use Pell grants on short-term programs was unsuccessful.

Trump proposed formalizing an Obama-era pilot program that made incarcerated people eligible for Pell grants. Congress approved this expansion in the FAFSA Simplification Act passed in December 2020. — O.S.

Student loan forgiveness

As president, Trump proposed eliminating the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which wipes out loan debt for people who work in the public sector or nonprofits. During his tenure, the Department of Education also stopped enforcing a regulation that provided an avenue for debt relief to students who had been defrauded by their colleges.

Trump praised the three justices he appointed to the Supreme Court for their votes to strike down Biden’s broad debt forgiveness plan. He has attacked the Biden administration’s continued efforts to cancel debt as “vile” and “not even legal.”

Vance has taken a similar stance on large-scale loan forgiveness, saying on X, formerly known as Twitter, that “Forgiving student debt is a massive windfall to the rich, to the college educated, and most of all to the corrupt university administrators of America.” But he did co-sponsor a bipartisan bill earlier this year that would allow parents to get loans discharged if their child became permanently disabled. — S.B.

Workforce development

Federal funding for career and technical education, which had been stagnant for more than a decade before Trump came into office, rose significantly during his administration. In 2018, Trump renewed the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act — one of states’ primary sources of federal funding for CTE programs – and reduced regulations on how states are required to spend the money. In 2020, he proposed one of the largest-ever increases in funding for career and technical education, even as he sought to cut the overall budget for the Department of Education. 

Trump also established an advisory council tasked with developing a national strategy to train people for high-demand jobs. His campaign website says he plans to provide “funding preferences” for schools that help students find internships and jobs and for schools that have career counselors for students. His website also highlights the Cristo Rey Network — a group of Catholic schools across the country where students are required to work at part-time, entry-level jobs one day a week during the school year throughout high school. — A.G.

This story about Republicans in education 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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The proposals in the 2025 Presidential Transition Project — known as Project 2025 and designed for Donald Trump — would reshape the American education system, early education through college, from start to finish. 

The conservative Heritage Foundation is the primary force behind the sprawling blueprint, which is separate from the much less detailed Republican National Committee 2024 platform, though they share some common themes.

Kevin Roberts, the president of Heritage and its lobbying arm, Heritage Action, said in an interview with USA TODAY that Project 2025 should be seen “like a menu from the Cheesecake Factory.” No one president could take on all these changes, he said. “It’s a manual for conservative policy thought.”

The fast-changing political landscape makes it difficult to say which of these proposals might be taken up by Trump if he wins reelection. He has claimed to know nothing about it, though many of his allies were involved in drafting it. The exit of President Joe Biden from the presidential race may have an impact on Project 2025 that is still unknown. Finally, many of the broadest proposals in the document, such as changes to Title I and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, would require congressional action, not just an order from the White House.

However, it remains a useful document for outlining the priorities of those who would likely play a part in a new Trump administration. The Hechinger Report created this reference guide that digs into the Project 2025 wishlist for education.

Early childhood

Child care for military families

Project 2025 calls for expanding child care for military families, who have access to programs that are often upheld as premier examples of high-quality care in America. – Jackie Mader

Head Start and child care 

Project 2025 calls for eliminating the Office of Head Start, which would lead to the closure of Head Start child care programs that serve about 833,000 low-income children each year. Most Head Start children are served in center-based programs, which have an outsized role in rural areas and prioritize enrolling a certain percentage of young children with disabilities who often struggle to find child care elsewhere. Head Start also provides a critical funding and resource stream to other private child care programs that meet Head Start standards, including home-based programs. – J. M.

Home-based child care

A conservative administration should also prioritize funding for home-based child care rather than “universal day care” in programs outside the home, Project 2025 says. That funding would include money for parents to stay home with a child or to pay for “familial, in-home” care, proposals that could be appealing to some early childhood advocates who have long called for more resources for informal care and stay-at-home parents. – J. M.

On-site child care

If out-of-home child care is necessary, Congress should offer incentives for on-site child care, Project 2025 says, because it “puts the least stress on the parent-child bond.” Early childhood advocates have been wary of such proposals because they tie child care access to a specific job. It also calls on Congress to clarify within the Fair Labor Standards Act that an employer’s expenses for providing such care are not part of the employee’s pay.– J. M.

K-12 education

Data collection  

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” should release student performance data based on “family structure” — in addition to existing categories such as race and socioeconomic status — Project 2025 argues. Family structure, the document says, is “one of the most important — if not the most important — factor influencing student educational achievement and attainment.” The document goes on to endorse “natural family structure” of a heterosexual, two-parent household, “because all children have a right to be raised by the men and women who conceived them.” — Sarah Butrymowicz 

LGBTQ students 

Project 2025 advocates a rollback of regulations that protect people from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. It calls for agencies to “focus their enforcement of sex discrimination laws on the biological binary meaning of ‘sex.’” 

The plan also calls on Congress and state lawmakers to require schools to refer to students by the names on their birth certificates and the pronouns associated with their biological sex, unless they have written permission from parents to refer to them otherwise.

The plan also equates transgender issues with child abuse and pornography, and proposes that school libraries with books deemed offensive be punished. — Ariel Gilreath

Privatization 

In place of a federal Education Department, the blueprint calls for widespread public education funding that goes directly to families, as part of its overarching goal of “advancing education freedom.”

The document specifically highlights the education savings account program in Arizona, the first state to open school vouchers up to all families. Programs like Arizona’s have few, if any, restrictions on who can access the funding. Project 2025 also calls for education savings accounts for schools under federal jurisdiction, such as those run by the Department of Defense or the Bureau of Indian Education. 

In addition, Project 2025 calls on Congress to look into creating a federal scholarship tax credit to “incentivize donors to contribute” to nonprofit groups that grant scholarships for private school tuition or education materials. — Ariel Gilreath and Neal Morton

School meals 

The federal school meals program should be scaled back to ensure that only children from low-income families are receiving the benefit, the document says. Policy changes under the Obama administration have made it easier for entire schools or districts to provide free meals to students without families needing to submit individual eligibility paperwork. — Christina A. Samuels

Special education 

Project 2025 says that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, which provides $14.2 billion in federal money for the education of school-aged children with disabilities, should be mostly converted to “no-strings” block grants to individual states. Lawmakers should also consider making a portion of the federal money payable directly to parents of children with disabilities, it says, so they can use it for tutoring, therapies or other educational materials. This would be similar to education savings accounts in place in Arizona and Florida. 

The blueprint also calls for rescinding a policy called “Equity in IDEA.” Under that policy, districts are required to evaluate if schools are disproportionately enrolling Black, Native American and other ethnic minority students in special education. Districts must also track how these students are disciplined, and if they are more likely than other students in special education to be placed in classrooms separate from their general education peers. Current rules, which Project 2025 would eliminate, require that districts that have significant disparities in this area must use 15 percent of their federal funding to address those problems. — C.A.S.

Teaching about race 

Project 2025 elevates concerns among members of the political right that educating students about race and racism risks promoting bias against white people. The document discusses the legal concept of critical race theory, and argues that when it is used in teacher training and school activities such as “mandatory affinity groups,” it disrupts “the values that hold communities together such as equality under the law and colorblindness.” 

The document calls for legislation requiring schools to adopt proposals “that say no individual should receive punishment or benefits based on the color of their skin,” among other recommendations. It also calls for a federal Parents’ Bill of Rights that would give families a “fair hearing in court” if they believed the federal government had enforced policies undermining their right to raise their children. — Caroline Preston

Title I

This program, funded at a little over $18 billion for fiscal 2024, is the largest federal program for K-12 schools and is designed to help children from low-income families. The conservative blueprint would encourage lawmakers to make the program a block grant to states, with few restrictions on how it can be used — and, over 10 years, to phase it out entirely. Additionally, it says, lawmakers should allow parents in Title I schools to use part of that funding for educational savings accounts that could be spent on private tutoring or other services. — C.A.S.

Higher education

Affirmative action and diversity, equity and inclusion 

The document calls for prosecuting “all state and local governments, institutions of higher education, corporations, and any other private employers” that maintain affirmative action or DEI policies. That position matches the views expressed by Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio, about the use of race in college admissions and beyond. — Liz Willen 

Data collection 

In higher education, the proposal argues that college graduation and earnings data need a “risk adjustment” that factors in the types of students served by a particular institution. While selective colleges tend to post the highest graduation rates and student earnings, they also tend to enroll the least-“risky” students. A risk adjustment methodology could benefit community colleges, which often have low graduation rates but enroll many nontraditional students who face obstacles to earning a degree. It would also likely benefit for-profit colleges, which similarly tend to accept most applicants. Historically, for-profit schools have received scrutiny under Democratic administrations for poor outcomes and for allegedly misleading students about the value of the education they provide. Republican administrations typically have supported less regulation of for-profit institutions. — S.B. 

Parent PLUS loans and Pell grants 

The blueprint calls for the elimination of the Parent PLUS loan program, arguing that it is redundant “because there are many privately provided alternatives available.” Originally created for relatively affluent families, the PLUS loan program has become a crucial way for lower- and middle-income families to pay for college. In recent years, it has sparked criticism due to rising default rates and fewer protections than are afforded to other student loan borrowers.  

At present, interest rates for private loans are significantly lower than Parent PLUS rates, but they come with fewer protections, and it is more difficult to get approved for a private-bank loan. Project 2025 would also get rid of PLUS loans for graduate students.

If the federal PLUS programs were eliminated, it could stem one portion of the rising tide of families’ education debt, but it would also make the path to paying for college more difficult for some families. 

Project 2025 does not call for a change to the Pell grant program, which provides federal funding for students from low-income families to attend college. Some advocates have called for doubling the annual maximum allotment, which is $7,395 for the 2024-25 school year, far below the cost to attend many colleges. — Meredith Kolodner and Olivia Sanchez

Student loan forgiveness 

Project 2025 would end the prospect of student loan forgiveness, which has already been largely blocked by federal courts; the Biden administration, in a sort of game of Whac-a-Mole, has proposed still more forgiveness programs that are being fought by Republican state attorneys general and others. Project 2025 would also dramatically restrict what’s known as “borrower defense to repayment,” which forgives loans borrowed to pay for colleges that closed or have been found to use illegal or deceptive marketing. Largely restricting the Education Department to collecting statistics, Project 2025 would shift responsibility for student loans to the Treasury Department. — Jon Marcus

This story about Project 2025 was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter. 

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SPOKANE, Wash. — Before giving birth to her daughter, Kaleeya Baldwin, 19, had given up on education.

She’d dropped out of school as a seventh grader, after behavior problems had banished her to alternative schools. Growing up in foster homes and later landing in juvenile court had convinced her to disappear from every system that claimed responsibility for her.

“I was just really angry with everything,” said Kaleeya.

But in early 2020, during what would have been her freshman year in high school, Kaleeya discovered she was pregnant. At her first ultrasound appointment, a nurse handed her a stack of pamphlets. One, advertising a new school for pregnant and parenting teens, caught her attention.

“Something switched when Akylah got here,” Kaleeya said, referring to her daughter. “I was a whole different person. Now it’s high school that matters. It’s a legacy — and it’s hope for her.”

Four years ago, and two months pregnant, Kaleeya enrolled as one of the first students at Lumen High School. The Spokane charter school — its name, which means a unit of light, was selected by young parents who wished someone had shone a light on education for them — today enrolls about five dozen expectant and parenting teens, including fathers. Inside a three-story office building in the city’s downtown business core, Lumen provides full-day child care, baby supplies, mental health counseling and other support as students work toward graduation based on customized education plans.

When the Spokane school district authorized the charter school, it acknowledged that these students had been underserved in traditional high schools and that alternatives were needed. Nationwide, only about half of teen mothers receive a high school degree by the age of 22. Researchers say common school policies like strict attendance rules and dress codes often contribute to young parents deciding to drop out. In April, the U.S. Department of Education issued new regulations to strengthen protections for pregnant and parenting students, though it’s unclear whether the revisions, which also include protections for LGBTQ+ youth, will survive legal challenges.

Solutions for these young parents have become even more urgent after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling overturning the constitutional right to an abortion. Lumen is located about 20 miles from the Idaho border, which has one of the country’s strictest abortion bans. Recently, representatives from a network of charter schools in the state toured Lumen to evaluate whether they might bring a similar program to the Boise area. Researchers have also visited the school to study how educators elsewhere might replicate its supportive services, not only for pregnant students, but those facing crises like substance use.

“There are some bright spots. Lumen is one,” said Jeannette Pai-Espinosa, president of the Justice + Joy National Collaborative, which advocates for young women, including teen mothers, referring to support in K-12 schools for pregnant and parenting teens. “By and large it’s just not really a priority on the list of many, many things schools are challenged with and facing now.”

Related: If we see more pregnant students post-Roe, are we prepared to serve them?

Nationally, teenage birth rates have fallen for the past three decades, reaching an all-time low in 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That same year, the decline in teen births skidded to a halt in Texas, one year after the state’s Republican lawmakers had enacted a six-week abortion ban. Experts fear Texas’ change in direction could foreshadow a national uptick in teen pregnancy now that adolescents face more hurdles to abortion access in red states.

Decades of research have revealed the long-term effects of adolescent pregnancy and childbearing: The CDC reports children of teen mothers tend to have lower performance in school and higher chances of dropping out of high school. They’re more likely to have health problems and give birth as teenagers themselves.

Shauna Edwards witnessed such outcomes as part of her work with pregnant and parenting teens for a religious nonprofit and in high schools along the Idaho-Washington border. She also learned the limits of trying to shoehorn services for those students into a school’s existing budget. At one campus, where Edwards helped as a counselor, she said the principal assigned just one teacher for all subjects and two classroom aides to handle child care for the babies of 60 students.

Frustrated, she tried to convince the superintendent of another school district to offer a similar teen parent program, but with more funding. He couldn’t justify the costs, Edwards said. Instead, he suggested she open her own school.

“I could serve all of Spokane, ideally, and wouldn’t have the risk of getting shut down by a school district trying to balance its budget,” said Edwards, executive director for Lumen.

Every morning, students from across Spokane County — at 1,800 square miles, it’s a bit larger than Rhode Island — trek to the Lumen campus downtown. Many take public transit, which is free for youth under 18, and end their rides at a regional bus hub across the street from the school. Once their children reach six months, Lumen students can drop them off at an on-site child care and preschool center, operated by a nonprofit partner, before heading upstairs to start their day. Before then, parents can bring their babies to class.

Funding for small schools in Washington state helps Lumen afford a full teaching staff — one adult each for English, history, math, science and special education. The charter also has a full-time principal, social worker and counselor. Other adults manage student internships or donations to the school’s food bank and “baby boutique,” where students can “shop” for a stroller, formula, diapers and clothes — all free of charge.

It’s common to see an infant cradled in a teacher’s arm, allowing students to focus on their classwork. On a recent afternoon, two couples traded cradling duties with their newborns during a parenting class on lactation.

“Delivering is something that happens to you. Not so with nursing. You have to do it,” said Megan Macy, a guest teacher, who introduced herself as “the official milk lady.”

Kaleeya shared a bit about her daughter Akylah’s delivery: “I was so depleted. I was her chew toy, her crying shoulder, her feeding bag. Once we got home, she wouldn’t latch at all.”

Her friend Keelah, 17, rocked her newborn in a car seat. (The Hechinger Report is identifying the parents who are minors by first name only to protect their privacy.) “It’s hard, and it’s scary,” she said of the first week home with the baby. “She lost a pound between the hospital and pediatrician.”

Related: ‘They just tried to scare us’: How anti-abortion centers teach sex ed in public schools

Lumen contracts with the Shades of Motherhood Network, a Spokane-based nonprofit founded to support Black mothers, to run the parenting classes. The school reserves space for health officials to meet with mothers and babies for routine checkups and government food programs. And founding principal Melissa Pettey has pushed — and paid for — teachers to make home visits with each student.

For each student, Lumen staff develops an individual graduation plan based on earned and missing credits from previous high schools. The school uses an instructional approach, called mastery-based learning, that allows students to earn credits based on competency in academic skills, often applied in projects. The parenting class, for example, counts as a credit for career and technical education, depending on how the contracted teachers evaluate each student.

The learn-as-you-go approach also allows Lumen to work around the instability in the lives of their students, who are often coping with children’s illnesses, daycare challenges, housing insecurity and other issues.

But the chaos in a young parent’s life can look like inconsistent attendance or even truancy on state accountability reports. Just a tenth of Lumen students attend school regularly, which the state defines as missing no more than two days of class each month.

Next year, the Spokane school district will review Lumen’s operations and performance to decide whether to renew the school’s charter. State data shows less than a fifth of Lumen’s students graduate on time, while a third dropped out. The state doesn’t publicly report testing data from Lumen, due to its size. But Edwards and Pettey said proficiency on state exams isn’t their main goal.

“One student attended 16 elementary schools. Six high schools before junior year,” Pettey said. “Think of the learning missed. How do we get that student to an 11th grade level?”

Added Edwards: “If you can grow them to read baby books to their kids, that’s a success.”

Lumen’s authorizer, Spokane Public Schools, will modify how it evaluates the charter’s performance to take its nontraditional students into account, according to Kristin Whiteaker, who oversees charter schools for the district.

She noted that about a third of Lumen’s incoming high schoolers test at an elementary level; another third test at middle school levels. But during the 2022-23 school year, 52 percent of students posted growth in math while at Lumen, and nearly two-thirds performed better on English language arts exams, according to the school. All of the students who make it to graduation have been accepted into college; 95 percent actually enrolled or started working six months after graduation.

“They’re serving such a unique population,” Whiteaker said. “If you can provide a pathway for students to the next stage of their lives, that’s accomplishing their goals.”

Lumen, she added, removes many of the barriers that pregnant and parenting teens face at Spokane’s traditional high schools. Some struggle to complete make-up work after missing weeks or months of classes for parental leave. Most have no access to child care, and regular schools don’t allow babies in the classroom.

Ideally, some experts say, expecting and parenting teens could remain in their original schools and receive these supports. That’s rarely the case, though, and the social stigma alone can keep young parents from finishing their education.

At the national level, a 2010 law that provided funding to help these students expired in 2019. Jessica Harding and Susan Zief, with the research firm Mathematica, studied the effectiveness of those federally-funded programs and found that successful ones work hard to provide flexibility, for excused absences or adding maternity clothes to dress codes. Others get creative, helping students navigate public transportation and modify their work schedules to meet with students after hours.

“Sometimes,” Harding said, “the solutions are not complicated.”

Related: Teen pregnancy is still a problem — school districts just stopped paying attention

In 2022, when the Supreme Court upended abortion care nationwide, Edwards expected students without reproductive choice in Idaho to attempt to enroll in Lumen. A handful have inquired with the school, said Edwards, but to enroll they would have to move across the state border to Washington where housing costs are significantly higher.

In fact, Lumen recently lost one student whose father found a cheaper home in Idaho. Average rents across Spokane County have risen more than 50 percent over the past five years. And as of March, about half of Lumen students qualified as homeless. One young mother slept outside during winter break while her newborn stayed with a friend. Three students, asked what they would change about Lumen, cited affordable housing or temporary shelter that could help them.

Across Washington, pregnant and parenting teens account for 12 percent of all unaccompanied youth in the homeless system. But the state has a severe shortage of shelter beds available for youth under 18, with even fewer supportive housing options that allow young families to stay together, according to a February 2024 state report. Edwards, meanwhile, has talked with developers to see if they could reserve affordable units for students or loosen rules that prevent minors from signing a lease.

“We missed a whole month of class. It was a long month,” said Mena, a 17-year-old junior who convinced her boyfriend, Rene, to enroll before their son’s delivery, in January.

Rene Jr., or RJ, had already lived with the couple in several homes during his first few months. A restraining order with one set of RJ’s grandparents and guardianship battle with the other pushed Mena and Rene to couch-surf with friends.

“School was the only way we could see each other,” Rene said. “I’m surprised, honestly, they can get me to graduation,” he added, while burping RJ. “He’s going to have a future.”

Later, as Mena suctioned RJ’s stuffy nose in another classroom, Rene struggled to stay awake in math. He had forgotten what he’d learned in some earlier lessons on graphing linear equations, and retreated into social media on his phone. Another student badgered him to “put in some effort,” but Rene resisted.

His teacher, Trevor Bradley, intervened. “What’s special about today? Why don’t you want to try?” he said. “You told me you’re tired because the baby’s keeping you up at night.”

After drawing another set of equations on the whiteboard, Bradley asked Rene and the other student for help with finding the values of x and y. Rene barely whispered his answer.

“That’s it! You do remember,” Bradley said, as Rene yawned.

From the start, Lumen’s founders planned to include fathers in the school. Pai-Espinosa, with the National Collaborative, said it’s unusual for K-12 systems to focus on fathers, since mothers often have custodial rights. And at Lumen, the inclusion of “baby daddies” — as students and staff refer to them — sometimes adds teen drama to the mix of emotions and hormones already present at the school.

Lumen’s lack of diversity among adults there has also bothered some students, including Kaleeya. Only 40 percent of her peers identify as white, and all of the school’s teachers and administrators are white. Edwards said it has been difficult to recruit a diverse staff. As a temporary solution the school contracted with the Shades of Motherhood Network for parenting classes.

“It’s hard being in a white space with no Black teachers,” Kaleeya said.

Still, she said she liked the school’s emphasis on engaging students in semester-long projects in different subjects and on real-world problems. Last year, confronted with drug-use problems near the downtown campus, students researched and presented options for the city to consider on safe needle disposal in public places. Each student’s individual graduation plan also includes an internship.

Payton, 17, has wanted to be a school counselor since before giving birth to her daughter in late 2022. Her internship at nearby Sacajawea Middle School convinced her to stay on that career path. Another mother, Alana, started an internship this spring with a local credit union and plans to use the marketing experience to help her advocate for children with disabilities in the future.

Kaleeya recently turned her internship, with a downtown restaurant, into a part-time job. She planned to save for college, but no longer needs to. Gonzaga University notified her in March of a full-ride scholarship to study there this fall.

“Lumen didn’t change who I was,” Kaleeya said. “I did this for my daughter. I didn’t want to be that low-income family. So I got my ass up, got into this school and I got an education.”

This story about teen parents was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.

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ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — As their teacher pounded his drums, belting the lyrics to the Native folk rock song “NDN Kars,” middle schoolers Eli, Izzy and Manin rehearsed new guitar chords for an upcoming performance.

“I got a sticker that says ‘Indian Power,’” teacher Luke Cordova sang. “I stuck it on my bumper. That’s what holds my car together.”

Inside a neighboring greenhouse, a group of school staff and volunteers prepared to harvest herbs and vegetables for students to use in medicinal teas and recipes during science lessons on local ecology. Meanwhile, in a 19th century schoolhouse next door, eighth graders in a Native literature class debated the consequences of racism on college campuses. “Remember,” teacher Morgan Barraza (Akimel O’odham, Kawaika, Apache, Thai) told them, “power is not all with the decision makers. You as a community have power, too.”

Once the site of an Indian boarding school, where the federal government attempted to strip children of their tribal identity, the Native American Community Academy now offers the opposite: a public education designed to affirm and draw from each student’s traditional culture and language.

The charter school, NACA, opened its doors in 2006. Today, it enrolls roughly 500 students from 60 different tribes in grades K-12, bolstering their Indigenous heritage with land-based lessons and language courses built into a college preparatory model. High schoolers at NACA graduate at much higher rates and tend to outperform their peers in Albuquerque Public Schools — which authorizes the charter — and throughout New Mexico. Over the past decade, NACA’s academic track record and reputation with families and tribal leaders has spurred the creation of a network of schools designed to overhaul education for Native students across the American West.

At 13 campuses in five states, the NACA Inspired Schools Network supports tribal communities that have found little support in traditional K-12 systems and want academic alternatives that reflect their hopes and expectations for the next generation. Each school approaches that mission very differently, and with varying results. Some have struggled to keep their doors open, testing the Albuquerque-based network’s ability to sustain its success beyond the flagship school. Still, network leaders plan to continue expanding and hope to present the NACA model as a way to grant Indigenous families the self-determination and sovereignty that has been denied to them for generations.

“In 150 years, we moved from a foreign, abusive, violent structure to now, where maybe our communities have something to say about where education is going,” said Anpao Duta Flying Earth (Lakota, Dakota, Ojibwe, Akimel O’odham), the network’s executive director. “We’re leading these schools. We’re in the classrooms. It’s not just maintaining status quo. It’s how we’re pushing the edge of what’s possible.”

Related: 3 Native American women head to college in the pandemic. Will they get a sophomore year?

NACA was born out of an urgent need to reimagine education for Indigenous youth: In 2005, 

three quarters of Native American students graduated on time in the Albuquerque school district, compared to 87 percent of all students, according to state data. Only about 1 in 4 students identifying as American Indian tested proficient in math, while proficiency rates in reading and science hovered closer to 40 percent. A string of suicides in the city’s Native communities, especially among youth, shocked educators.

In response, Native administrators within the district started meeting with families, college graduates and tribal leaders to discuss what a better education for Native students might look like. More than 200 people weighed in, often sharing their poor experiences in traditional schools, such as pervasively low expectations and a lack of cultural awareness among teachers. Community members prioritized three things in their dream school for Native youth: secure cultural identities, college preparation and holistic wellness.

Those conversations prompted Albuquerque Public Schools to authorize NACA as its first charter. Today, courses at all grade levels include Indigenous history, numeracy, land-based science and language classes in Keres, Lakota, Navajo, Tiwa, Spanish and Zuni. About two-thirds of the school’s teachers are Native American, with many alumni now leading classrooms. 

NACA requires students to take at least two college-level courses and earn internship credit. Last year, nearly 80 percent of graduates enrolled in college, up from 65 percent for the class of 2022. The school also tracks college completion rates, with 59 percent of the class of 2012 finishing within six years. Since then, the numbers have slipped to the single digits, with just 5 percent of the class of 2016 finishing within six years, according to a data analysis from the charter school network. (School officials said the decline is due to incomplete data.)

Younger students attend the K-8 campus on the former boarding school site, while the high school is located in a gleaming new tower nearby at the Central New Mexico College.

During a lunch break, 11th graders Joshua, a Navajo Nation citizen, and Tyshawn, from the Laguna Pueblo, volleyed a badminton birdie under the tower’s shadow. Both are recent transfers to NACA — Tyshawn from a private Catholic school and Joshua from a traditional public high school.

“There was nothing like this. No language class, nothing,” Joshua said of his previous school. Discussions of tribal culture were limited to a few isolated craft projects during a history unit and inaccurate portrayals of Indians at the “First Thanksgiving,” he recalled.

“Yeah, not at my school,” Tyshawn agreed, chuckling. “You had to learn that experience yourself.”

“I was the ‘only’ a lot,” added Joshua, referring to his Native identity. “We fill an entire school here.”

Related: Schools bar Native students from wearing traditional regalia at graduation

It’s only recently that the U.S. has fully acknowledged its long history of using education as a weapon against tribes. An investigative report released by the U.S. Department of the Interior in May 2022 identified more than 400 Indian boarding schools, across dozens of states and former territories, as part of a system that directly targeted children “in the pursuit of a policy of cultural assimilation.”

The investigation found evidence of at least 53 burial sites for children. Schools renamed students with English names, cut their hair and punished them — through solitary confinement, flogging and withholding food — for speaking Native languages or practicing their traditional religions. Manual labor was a predominant part of school curricula, but often left graduates with few employable skills.

“We continue to see the evidence of this attempt to forcibly assimilate Indigenous people in the disparities that communities face,” U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, a citizen of the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico, said at the time of the report’s release.

According to a 2019 national survey, close to half of American Indian and Alaska Native students reported knowing “nothing” or only “a little” about their cultural heritage. A majority — between 83 percent and 91 percent — of fourth and eighth graders in the survey said they could not speak or read in their heritage language, or reported knowing a few words or phrases at most. Other studies have found significantly higher child poverty rates, lower graduation rates and lower performance on standardized exams for Native students.

As the state of education for these children continued to languish, the U.S. Department of Education in 2018 pushed for the expansion of high-quality charter schools meant to serve Native communities, among other groups it deemed educationally disadvantaged and underserved by the existing charter sector. It later published, in partnership with the National Indian Education Association, a guide to help founders and supporters of new Native American charter schools.

“The word just hasn’t gotten out about the ability to do this,” said Todd Ziebarth, a senior vice president of state advocacy and support at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

In its tally of about 4,300 charter schools with at least one Native American student, the Alliance counts at least 16 schools specifically dedicated to Native American cultural affirmation. Only a handful offer classes taught in an Indigenous language.

Related: College tuition breaks for Indigenous students spread, but some tribes are left out

In one of those schools, about 90 miles northeast of Albuquerque, a dozen students walked into the front office of Kha’p’o Community School with stacks of books teetering in their hands.

They’d just cleaned the shelves at the Santa Clara Pueblo library, grabbing their favorite titles in Tewa, one of the languages spoken by the Pueblo people in New Mexico. The third graders juggled the books as they traversed a courtyard ringed by adobe houses-turned-classrooms, with teacher Paul Chavarria trailing them.

Back in their classroom, Chavarria, a first-year Tewa language teacher at Kha’p’o, commenced a lesson on the language. It’s a traditionally oral language, and speakers frown on any written form. Chavarria, though, scribbled a rough translation for “stone,” “trees” and “plants” on a whiteboard to help the students learn their heritage language.

For decades, the school (then known as Santa Clara Day School) was run by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Education, or BIE, which today operates 183 schools on 64 reservations. But in 2014, after the government-appointed principal barred a Tewa teacher from campus, tribal leaders took control of the school from the federal government, said Porter Swentzell, the school’s executive director and an enrolled member of the Pueblo. That same year, the school officially joined the NACA-inspired network as a K-6 charter school with a dual language immersion model. Today, it enrolls about 90 students. 

“In our hands, language is a sacred obligation. Our job is bigger than math or ELA,” Swentzell said.. “Our story doesn’t begin with us, and it certainly won’t end with us.”

Swentzell, who served on the school board when it shifted to tribal control, recalled a rocky start for Kha’p’o. The BIE withdrew the bulk of its support, he said. Teachers and staff had to reapply for their jobs, which no longer offered salaries at the federal level. In terms of school policies, technology systems, contracts and more, “we were starting from scratch,” Swentzell said.

Then, during the pandemic, Kha’p’o’s principal left, and enrollment plummeted from 120 students to 73, as multigenerational households kept their children at home. Half of the school’s teaching positions were unfilled, largely because of its remote location and lower salaries, according to Swentzell, who took over as head of school in 2022. 

Kha’p’o wasn’t the only school in the network to lose its leader during the pandemic. And each has since struggled to get academics and operations back on track, said Flying Earth, head of the charter network. The network has tried to help: In 2022, it created a fellowship program to nurture new leaders like Swentzell, a former professor at the Institute for American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. The fellows meet regularly on Zoom and gather in person once a year, along with a lead teacher or executive team member who could potentially become principal one day.

Related: How one Minneapolis university more than doubled its Native student graduation rate

Indeed, as the network has grown, it has confronted the difficulty of recreating the “NACA sauce” — as the flagship’s principal called it — in each new tribal community.

Six Directions Indigenous School opened the same year as Kha’p’o, in the western region of the state near the Navajo Nation and Zuni Reservation. Data from the New Mexico Public Education Department shows that 1 in 5 students at the charter school tested proficient in science. About 1 in 10 students perform on grade level in math, with a slightly better rate in reading, at 14 percent. 

Aside from academic problems, students at Six Directions have protested what they view as the school’s failure to fulfill its charter of serving Native youth. “It’s right there on all the signs: ‘This is an Indigenous school,’” said Caleb, a 14-year-old Hopi freshman. “This is supposed to be an opportunity for us to know our culture. These teachers weren’t doing that.”

At the start of the school year, in August, Caleb and other high schoolers at the K-12 campus staged an impromptu walkout to protest what they described as a revolving door of teachers hired from overseas and ongoing vacancies for language and culture classes. As of late fall, the entire school had just one core teacher, in science.

The walkout happened during Rebecca Niiha’s first week on the job as new head administrator of Six Directions. A former teacher who has worked on the Zuni and Navajo reservations, Niiha, who is Hopi, had admired Six Directions from afar. But she described finding its academic achievement and school climate as “degenerative” on day one.

After the walkout, two more teachers quit. Then the school’s current landlord announced it planned to sell the property, leaving Niiha unsure if she’d have to find a new location. In January, Six Directions received a warning from the state about its poor performance. 

The network’s support of struggling schools, like Six Directions, can only go so far. It does not directly authorize any charter and has limited ability to hold the schools accountable. 

Still, the network dispatches experts on finance, community engagement, student experience, curriculum and professional development. On a weekday last year, a team from the network met with Niiha to discuss options for the school’s location, training for teachers and an upcoming charter reauthorization. The network also recently partnered with AmeriCorps to place Indigenous educators in schools to offer classroom support, tutoring and mentoring, and has worked with individual tribes to certify teachers in heritage languages.

“Once a school’s created, we’re in it for the long haul together,” said Ben Calabaza, Kewa – Santa Domingo Pueblo and a spokesperson for the charter network.

Ultimately, the network wants to avoid being forced to close another of its member schools, as happened last year when Denver Public Schools shuttered the American Indian Academy. That school opened in fall 2020, at the height of the pandemic, and suffered from low enrollment and poor finances, according to the charter’s board of directors.

Flying Earth acknowledged the challenges of running a charter network that spans schools in several states. He said the charter model isn’t, on its own, a solution for poor educational outcomes for Native students. But he added that the NACA-inspired network has done what it promised: offered tribal communities a chance to have agency in building a dream school for their Native youth.

“How do we use the structures of education today, including charter schools, to lift up the genius that’s always been there, since time immemorial?” Flying Earth said, referring to the “genius” of traditional ways of knowing in Native communities. “The namesake school of NACA serves as an example of how one community did it.”

Many students, long after graduation, continue to contribute to that community. Some have returned as teachers and school staff. Emmet Yepa Jr., Jemez Pueblo, commuted two hours each way to attend NACA in downtown Albuquerque when he was in high school. Now, at 30, he sings every year at the school’s annual feast day — a traditional celebration among New Mexico pueblos.

“What attracted me to NACA was just the community,” he said. “They really emphasize your culture and holistic wellbeing.”

Yepa earned a Grammy Award as a child and later graduated from NACA as part of its inaugural class in 2012. From there, he went on to the University of New Mexico and now works for an Albuquerque nonprofit that includes land-based and outdoor education in civic leadership programs for young people.

Based on his positive experience, his siblings enrolled at NACA. His younger sister graduated  last year and now attends UNM, while his younger brother is a sixth grader.

“It’s hard to get into NACA now because there’s a waiting list,” Yepa said. “Thankfully he got a spot.”

This story about NACA schools was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, in partnership with ICT, formerly Indian Country Today. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Two years ago, when I visited Westwood High School in Mesa, a suburb of Phoenix, every incoming freshman started the year in a very unusual way.

Back when my mom attended Westwood in the early 80s, students made the typical walk from class to class, learning from one teacher in math and another for English or history or science. (My mom was one of two girls in Westwood’s woodworking class.) Flash forward a few decades, and in 2022, I observed four teachers and 135 freshmen – all in one classroom.

The model, known as team teaching, isn’t new. It dates back to the 1960s. But Arizona State University resurrected the approach, in which teachers share large groups of students, as a way to rebrand the teaching profession and make it more appealing to prospective educators.

Now, team teaching has expanded nationally, and particularly in the American West. The number of students assigned to a team of teachers tops 20,000 kids – an estimate from ASU that doubled from fall 2022. Mesa Unified, the school district that runs Westwood and the largest in Arizona, has committed to using the approach in half of its schools. And the national superintendents association last year launched a learning cohort for K-12 leaders interested in the idea.

Brent Maddin oversees the Next Education Workforce Initiative at ASU’s teachers college, which partners with school districts trying to move away from the “one teacher, one classroom” model of education.

“Unambiguously, we have started to put a dent in that,” Maddin said.

The Next Education Workforce Initiative today works with 28 districts in a dozen states, where 241 teams of teachers use the ASU model. It will expand further in the next two years: A mixture of public and philanthropic funding will support team teaching in dozens of new schools in California, Colorado, Michigan and North Dakota.

ASU has also gathered more data and research that suggest its approach has made an impact: In Mesa, teachers working on a team leave their profession at lower rates, receive higher evaluations and are more likely to recommend teaching to a friend.

Early research also indicates students assigned to educator teams made more growth in reading and passed Algebra I at higher rates than their peers.

“Educators working in these models — their feeling of isolation is lower,” Maddin said. “Special educators in particular are way more satisfied. They feel like they’re having a greater impact.”

Last year, the consulting group Education First shared its findings from a national scan of schools using different models to staff classrooms like team teaching. Among other groups, their report highlighted Public Impact, which supports schools in creating teams of teachers and has reached 800 schools and 5,400 teachers.* Education First itself works with districts in California to use a team structure with paid teacher residents and higher pay for expert mentor teachers.

In North Dakota, team teaching has caught the attention of Kirsten Baesler, the state superintendent of public instruction. Her office recently sent a group of lawmakers, educators and other policymakers to Arizona to learn about the model. Later this fall, Fargo Public Schools will open a new middle school where students will learn entirely from one combined team of teachers.

Jennifer Soupir-Fremstad, assistant director of human capital for the Fargo school district, recalled Mesa teachers telling her how much more supported they feel – by administrators and their fellow teammates. “That was a game changer,” she said.

The district’s new middle school will include a competency-based model where students can learn and work through content at their own pace. Five core teachers, whom the district refers to as mentors, will split responsibility for students in all three grades. Enrollment will be capped at 100 students for the first year, with plans to add more teams and serve up to 400 students in the future.

When my mom read my Hechinger Report story about what’s happening at her high school now, she questioned whether teachers could stay on top of 100-plus teenagers who just want to socialize. But she loved the idea of seeing her classmates more.

“I would have loved to be with my friends more,” she said. “We were separated for most of our classes. I think it’s awesome.”

*Clarification: This story has been updated to clarify the description of the work of Public Impact.

This story about team teaching 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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AURORA, Colo. — Until early this year, Alberto, 11, had never stepped into a classroom.

The closest school was many miles from his village in Venezuela, and Alberto’s father never allowed him or his mom, Yuliver, to stray far, according to mother and son. The school also charged far more than they could afford.

“I want to learn to become somebody in life,” Alberto said through an interpreter. “I’m going to be a lawyer or a doctor. I wanted to go school, but dad wouldn’t let me.”

Yuliver, who has a third-grade education, stepped in as Alberto’s teacher, sharing what she knew about numbers and letters. He loved those lessons, and wanted to know more. (The surnames of Alberto and Yuliver, like those of other migrants in this story, are omitted due to privacy or safety concerns.)

Last summer, Yuliver and her son left their home country, walking through deserts and jungles across two continents before they arrived in Denver, where Yuliver’s sister lives, six months later. Alberto enrolled in suburban Aurora Public Schools as a fourth grader, and has learned enough English that his teachers hide their smirks when he makes a particularly witty, and inappropriate, pun. In math, however, he’s grades behind and even in Spanish struggles to follow his teacher’s instruction.

Alberto is one of approximately 2,800 migrant and refugee children who’ve arrived in Aurora, located just east of Denver, this academic year. The Denver school district — the state’s largest, with a total enrollment of about 88,000 — similarly has enrolled at least 3,700 newcomer students since last summer. In May 2023, Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, started sending immigrant families by the busloads to the Colorado capital, adding it to a destination list of other Democrat-led cities including Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.

Aurora and Denver, like many school systems in Colorado, have long welcomed students new to the United States. In recent years, they have designated specific campuses to serve as resource hubs for migrant and refugee families, offering wraparound supports, integration services and dual-language programs. But the ongoing surge of immigrants — local educators hesitate to call it a crisis — have exposed clear signs of strain: Classrooms don’t have enough seats for students. Teachers are fatigued by large class sizes, discipline issues and new students showing up each day. And state and local leaders are increasingly resistant to helping shoulder the costs.

The city council in Aurora, for example, recently passed a resolution restricting migrants from receiving local public services, a move that opponents fear will place undocumented residents at risk if they experience a fire, medical emergency or violent crime. But when it comes to schools, requirements under the U.S. Constitution are clear: States are obligated to allow children living in the U.S. without legal documentation to access a basic education. That’s created a new dilemma for schools in communities like Aurora and Denver: The steady arrival of newcomers has all but reversed years of declining enrollment, staving off budget cuts and layoffs, but the costs associated with addressing the new arrivals’ basic needs are steep.

“It doesn’t matter what your opinion is. You have to serve these kids,” said Julie Sugarman, an associate director for K-12 education research at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. “There are civil rights that support these kids, but it does come with real, significant costs.”

Related: How one district handles the trauma undocumented students bring to school

Although migration fell at the start of the pandemic in 2020, it rebounded quickly, with the number of migrants encountered along the U.S.-Mexico border by U.S. Border Patrol more than quadrupling in 2021.

In a typical year, Denver Public Schools enrolls about 500 students who’ve just moved to the country. The district so far this year has been receiving an average of 250 each week, according to Adrienne Endres, the district’s executive director of multilingual education.

“We have some less-than-ideal circumstances,” she said. “We have some very full classrooms. We hear most from teachers, ‘This is kind of overwhelming. There’s a lot more kids and they all need a lot more from me.’”

The majority of migrant families in Denver have chosen to place their kids in schools with existing bilingual programs, Endres added. But many students who have little, or any, formal experience with education find a better fit in one of the district’s newcomer centers. The city opened its first center back in 1999, in an unused gym at Denver South High School, as a magnet program for refugee children who speak neither Spanish nor English.

The district has since expanded the program to six campuses, where students learn literacy skills for one to two semesters before gradually moving into general classes.

On a recent morning at South High’s newcomer center, teacher Karen Vittetoe worked with 14 teenagers from nearly as many countries — including Burundi, El Salvador and Sudan — on how to tell time and describe a daily schedule in English.

“Marta goes to work at 9:50 in the morning. Is that 9:15 or 9:50? Do you hear the difference?” she asked as two teaching assistants walked in the classroom.

The adults together speak six different languages, allowing them to help during small group and one-on-one instruction during the 90-minute period. But that’s not nearly enough in Vittetoe’s larger second period, where 31 students speak 11 different languages.

“Can you imagine?” she said. “I don’t even have enough desks for them all.”

One of her students, 18-year-old Momena, spoke no English when she first enrolled at South High about eight months ago. Her family left Afghanistan, where the Taliban banned girls from attending school beyond the sixth grade. 

“I like everything about this school — except the food,” Momena said. “They have a nice curriculum and also kind teachers.”

Like her older brother, a nurse, Momena hopes to one day work in the medical field.

“This is very important for me,” she said of getting an education in the U.S. “I want to go to college, go into nursing. I try hard every day.”

Unlike Momena, most students in Vittetoe’s classes arrived after October 1 — the date on which Colorado determines its annual funding for K-12 schools based on enrollment. Only 10 other states rely on a single count day to allocate funding to districts. And in Denver, that’s required central administrators to draw from cash reserves and other department budgets to make up for the roughly $17.5 million that the district hasn’t received in per-pupil funding despite enrolling so many migrant and refugee children since last fall.

State lawmakers in February fast-tracked a plan to provide $24 million — to be split among districts across Colorado — to ease the strain on local school budgets. Gov. Jared Polis signed the legislation in early March, but the money has yet to trickle down to local districts.

“Without action in D.C., it’s up to each state if schools get any support at all,” said Jill Koyama, vice dean of educational leadership and innovation at Arizona State University’s teachers college.

Related: Convincing parents to send their children to a San Francisco public school

At Boston P-8 School in Aurora, the first few weeks made for a rough transition for Alberto.

He failed a vision screening test and received a voucher for an eye exam, but passed it. Teachers eventually determined he had such little schooling that he simply couldn’t identify letters to follow along in class. The school nurse also learned about trauma Alberto had experienced back home and on his journey to this country. School staff would have placed him with a therapist on campus, but no one on the mental health support team speaks Spanish. Many newcomers, including Alberto, have been referred to an online therapy service.

The school, however, had recently hired Danielle Pukansky, one of two English language development teachers who, in a tiny and cramped room, lead daily 45-minute classes for multilingual learners like Alberto.

“The trauma showed when he first got here,” Pukansky recalled, noting he had been aggressive toward other students. “How to re-regulate when these big emotions come up in such a little body, that is part of my background — and thank goodness.”

She said many of her students come to school worried about deportation, insecure housing and simply being misunderstood. “I try to help the kids not feel that fear,” Pukansky said.

Boston P-8 is one of six community schools in Aurora that provide intensive support services — such as medical care, food, clothing and adult education and language classes — to help stabilize families so kids can focus on academics in class. It’s similar to the community hub model that Denver Public Schools operates at six campuses. And as of 2022, the state has allowed low-performing schools to convert to the model as part of a school’s turnaround plan.

Late on a Wednesday afternoon, Yuliver sat in Boston P-8’s community room with her head in her hands. A worsening toothache had kept her awake for days, and made it hard to look for work or an immigration lawyer who might help her. After making a couple calls, a staff member booked her a tooth extraction, free of charge, at a nearby dental clinic.

“This is the only place I feel supported,” Yuliver said. “Clothes, Wi-Fi, food, shoes — they help with everything.”

Upstairs, in an afterschool science program, Alberto was learning about the education required to become a dentist.

Related: PROOF POINTS: Schools’ mission shifted during the pandemic with healthcare, shelter and adult ed

In Aurora and Denver, which both faced enrollment declines during the pandemic, the influx of migrant students this year presents an ironic silver lining: By contrast, enrollment statewide has continued to fall for two straight years — with the largest decreases in pre-kindergarten through first grade — prompting school closures, budget cuts and potential layoffs.

In the Denver area, the surge of students from other countries has more than made up the difference.

So far this year, Ellis Elementary in southeast Denver has absorbed 60 more students than initially expected. Several classes are packed with 35 students — the maximum allowed under the district’s contract with teachers. A week before even more students arrived in late February, Principal Jamie Roybal hired two novice educators. They had only a couple days to convert a teachers lounge and music room into their first classrooms.

Roybal said that on hard days many of her staff members contemplate leaving the profession. “We’re swimming in the deep end,” she said, looking into a classroom. “That’s a first-grade teacher with 35 newcomers. That’s a lot. When she goes home, she’s exhausted.”

By winter break, Hamilton Middle School in Denver had already absorbed 100 additional students over its projected enrollment. Priscilla Rahn, a Republican candidate for the Douglas County commission who teaches band and orchestra at Hamilton, said it’s been a joy to welcome so many new musicians who have never had an instrument of their own.

Still, Rahn wondered whether the community’s generosity had been exhausted.

“We’re cutting city services,” she said, referring to the mayor’s budget. “As a teacher, we can’t ask if you’re legal. It doesn’t matter. I teach all kids. But as a city, we’re pretty much at capacity. We cannot take any more families, because we don’t have the money or the space.”

At Centro de los Trabajadores, a local labor rights group, executive director Mayra Juárez-Denis has for months fielded calls from recent migrants trying to secure legal work or file complaints about employers who exploited them. Lately, her phone started ringing with rants from teachers overwhelmed with the current crisis.

The organization has tried to partner with Denver Public Schools, mostly to host a worker center or hiring fair for hourly jobs. Scott Pribble, a spokesman for the district, said it has looked for parents with legal documentation to work in cafeterias or get licensed to drive a bus.

“We want to help the district with labor integration for parents,” Juárez-Denis said. “They need not just immigrant teachers who serve Spanish speakers, but every staff position can use someone who is already part of the immigrant community.”

Related: School support staffers stuck earning poverty level wages

At some campuses, Denver principals have been able to identify and recruit migrant parents who used to teach in their home countries, but for out-of-country teachers, the checklist of requirements they must meet for eligibility to work in the state long. At Ellis Elementary, for example, a classroom aide from Venezuela finally got her teaching license approved in Colorado — three years after she first applied to teach in the U.S.

The latest federal bipartisan immigration reform proposal, which collapsed in Congress in February, would have expedited access to work authorization for asylum seekers, potentially allowing people like Yuliver to begin employment before the current six-month waiting period.

Without a job, Yuliver has struggled to afford an apartment — even one without hot water or central heating — for her and Alberto. She tried to sell household goods to shoppers on the street and would like to work in a beauty shop, doing nails and hair. Already, though, Yuliver has considered making the trek back to Venezuela if she can’t find employment.

“I wish for him to keep studying,” she said of Alberto. “He’s intelligent. He just wants to learn everything.”

Alberto, meanwhile, said he misses his friends and swimming at the beach back home. But here he’s learning to ride a bike — provided by the community school program — and has already made five new friends at Boston P-8.

During a sunny but chilly recess, Alberto drew a heart with wood chips on the ground in his school’s playground. He placed a stray feather in the middle, and said it was for those friends he’d made at his first-ever school.

*Correction: The photo credits in this story have been updated with the correct name for the photographer, Rebecca Slezak.

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

The post After enrollment slump, Denver-area schools struggle to absorb a surge of migrant and refugee children appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

TULSA, Okla. — Amoni y Zoe esparcieron el contenido de una bolsa de sándwich llena de caramelos de frutas sobre sus escritorios como parte de una lección de matemáticas sobre proporciones.

“¿Qué significa tener el 50 por ciento?” preguntó su maestra, Kelly Woodfin, a los alumnos de sexto grado en su clase de matemáticas avanzadas. “¿Qué significa tener la mitad?”

Amoni y Zoe, ambas de 11 años, comieron solo un caramelo cada una, mientras convertían la proporción de manzanas verdes o fresas rosadas de su bolsa en fracciones, decimales y porcentajes. Cuando se quedaron perplejas con una estrategia para convertir un decimal en un porcentaje, inmediatamente levantaron las manos.

“Creo que hay que dar dos pasos hacia la izquierda”, dijo Amoni, su oración terminando en una pregunta.

“Has estado haciendo esto durante dos semanas, hermana”, la reprendió Woodfin en broma. “No sé por qué dudas de ti misma”.

Hace años, cuando Woodfin asistió de kinder hasta octavo grado en Union Public Schools, ella estudió en aulas bastante homogéneas. Woodfin recuerda que sus compañeros eran predominantemente blancos, un legado de que las familias blancas se mudaron a los suburbios cuando las escuelas de Tulsa empezaron a desegregarse durante los años cincuenta. Pero cuando ella regresó para enseñar en el distrito de Union en 2012, la población estudiantil blanca matriculado se había reducido a poco más de la mitad.

Sin embargo, hasta hace poco, los estudiantes en las clases avanzadas de matemáticas de Union seguían siendo en su mayoría blancos. Los estudiantes del itinerario acelerado en la escuela intermedia y secundaria procedían principalmente de escuelas primarias en vecindarios prósperos, donde los estudiantes tendían a sacar mejores resultados en la prueba de nivel de pre-álgebra para la cual tenían una sola oportunidad de tomarla en quinto grado. Pero en un día de invierno reciente, solo dos de los estudiantes de Woodfin se identificaban como blancos y más de un tercio todavía estaban aprendiendo el inglés.

La transformación en las clases de Woodfin representa más que un cambio general sobre quién asiste a las escuelas de Unión, donde hoy solo uno de cada cuatro estudiantes es blanco. También es el resultado de una campaña de años de duración para identificar y promover a más estudiantes de orígenes subrepresentados en los cursos de matemáticas más desafiantes del distrito.

En otros lugares, preocupaciones sobre quién puede acceder a clases de matemáticas avanzadas han llevado a los distritos a eliminar los sistemas de itinerarios (desagrupamiento) que separan a los estudiantes en diferentes clases de matemáticas según su capacidad percibida, o a eliminar las clases aceleradas por completo en nombre de la equidad.

Unión Public Schools, en cambio, ha intentado encontrar un término medio. El distrito, que se encuentra en partes de Tulsa y sus suburbios del sureste, continúa el sistema de grupos de clases de matemáticas separadas a partir del sexto grado. Pero también ha agregado nuevas formas para que los estudiantes califiquen para cursos de matemáticas de nivel superior, más allá de la prueba de nivel y ha aumentado el apoyo (incluyendo tutoría en las escuelas y períodos de clase más largos) para los estudiantes que han demostrado promesa en la materia.

Los datos de inscripción sugieren que el esfuerzo de hacer que las matemáticas de nivel superior sean accesibles para más estudiantes, habían comenzado a dar resultados antes de la pandemia. Pero han habido desafíos: en los últimos años, menos estudiantes se han matriculado en clases de matemáticas avanzadas en general, aunque el decrecimiento en número de estudiantes afroamericanos y latinos ha sido menos pronunciado que para otros grupos. Sentimientos anti-profesores, además de los bajos salarios docentes en Oklahoma, han dificultado la contratación de educadores de matemáticas, según administradores del estado. En Union High School, un puesto para enseñar Álgebra II permaneció vacante durante más de un año.

Pero el distrito sigue comprometido con sus cambios. Últimamente, directores de escuela y educadores de matemáticas veteranos han convencido a algunos exalumnos a que se unan a las filas docentes de Union. Shannan Bittle, especialista en matemáticas de secundaria en Union, dijo que los nuevos programas académicos del distrito, como aviación y construcción, podrían ofrecer a los estudiantes más formas de aplicar matemáticas avanzadas en empleos lucrativos.

“Nos esforzamos muchísimo para no dejar a la gente fuera” de las matemáticas aceleradas, dijo ella. “Pero hacemos todo lo posible para darles las herramientas para tener éxito”.

Tomar álgebra o matemáticas de un nivel superior en la escuela intermedia coloca al estudiante en el camino de tomar cálculo en la escuela secundaria, lo cual abre puertas a universidades selectivas y se considera un curso de entrada para muchas carreras STEM, las cuales son bien remuneradas. Datos federales sobre educación muestran que los estudiantes blancos en la escuela secundaria se matriculan en cálculo a una tasa casi ocho veces mayor que la de sus pares afroamericanos y aproximadamente el triple del promedio de los estudiantes latinos.

“Hay muchos estudiantes afroamericanos y latinos, y estudiantes procedentes de familias de bajos ingresos, que han demostrado aptitudes y anhelan más, pero sistemáticamente se les niega el acceso a cursos avanzados de matemáticas”, escribieron los autores “Esta práctica, y esta mentalidad, debe cambiar un informe de las organizaciones sin fines de lucro Education Trust y Just Equations”, publicado en diciembre del 2023.

Aun así, los enfoques que algunos distritos escolares han adoptado para aumentar la diversidad estudiantil en las clases de matemáticas han generado controversia.

En San Francisco, el distrito escolar eliminó clases de matemáticas aceleradas en las escuelas intermedias y secundarias en 2014 para poner fin a la segregación por capacidad, lo cual provocó protestas de padres. Tres años después, Cambridge Public Schools en Massachusetts comenzó a desmantelar su política de itinerarios de matemáticas aceleradas o de nivel de curso. Cerca de Detroit, el consejo escolar de Troy eligió eliminar las clases de matemáticas avanzadas para las escuelas intermedias empezando más tarde este año.

Asimismo, el año pasado la junta de educación del estado de California adoptó nuevas pautas curriculares que, entre otras ideas, alientan a las escuelas a posponer álgebra hasta el noveno grado. La junta insistió que el esquema “afirma el compromiso de California de garantizar la equidad y la excelencia en el aprendizaje de matemáticas para todos los estudiantes”. Pero los críticos, entre ellos profesores de matemáticas y ciencias, han opinado que hace lo contrario, al negar a los estudiantes la preparación académica que les hace falta para tener éxito.

“Veo el valor, en teoría”, dijo Rebecka Peterson, profesora de matemáticas de Union High y la Maestra Nacional del Año 2023, acerca de esfuerzos como el de California. Pero añadió: “Cada niño es distintivo, y como madre, una talla única no es lo que quiero para mi hijo”.

Peterson comenzó a trabajar en las escuelas de Union hace unos 12 años, impartiendo clases de matemáticas desde álgebra de nivel intermedio hasta cálculo de Advanced Placement. Desde el principio, Peterson notó la división demográfica en sus clases: “Somos un distrito con una riqueza cultural, y, sin embargo, mis clases de cálculo eran en su mayoría blancas”, dijo.

Decidió hablar con su directora de escuela en ese entonces, Lisa Witcher. Las dos descubrieron que, aunque Union High recibía a estudiantes de todos los 13 campus de primaria del distrito, los estudiantes de cálculo de Peterson venían principalmente de solo tres: los más blancos y ricos de las escuelas primarias de Union.

Poco después, oficiales administrativos del distrito recurrieron a Witcher para encabezar un nuevo programa de universidad temprana. Ella comenzó a reclutar estudiantes que habían tomado geometría en su primer año, pero descubrió que solo un décimo de los estudiantes afroamericanos de primer año en Union eran elegibles para inscribirse en esa clase. No habían tomado la clase requerida para entrar, Álgebra I, en octavo grado.

“Eso provocó algunas conversaciones incómodas”, dijo Witcher, quien se jubiló del distrito en 2021.

Al final, los administradores encontraron que la causa de la falta de diversidad estudiantil en las clases de matemáticas avanzadas de la escuela intermedia y secundaria se encontraba en el quinto grado. Ese era el año en el cual las escuelas administraban un examen mayormente basado en palabras, en el que los estudiantes tenían una sola oportunidad de aprobar. Los funcionarios del distrito dijeron que ese examen de gran peso perjudicaba a dos poblaciones en aumento en las escuelas de Union: los niños que todavía estaban aprendiendo el inglés y los niños de familias de bajos ingresos, cuyos padres no podían pagar tutores privados.

Este descubrimiento provocó una serie de cambios que comenzaron hace aproximadamente una década. El distrito escolar no eliminó el examen de quinto grado que servía como entrada a las matemáticas avanzadas, pero hoy los estudiantes pueden tomar el examen múltiples veces. Las escuelas primarias ofrecen tutores de matemáticas a partir del tercer grado, con programas extraescolares para estudiantes rezagados en la materia. Los maestros pueden recomendar a estudiantes prometedores a tomar matemáticas avanzadas de sexto grado, independientemente de su desempeño en el examen de nivel. Un administrador central también revisa las calificaciones de los estudiantes y el progreso en los exámenes de competencia para automáticamente inscribir estudiantes en clases aceleradas. (Se les envía una carta a los padres notificándoles sobre la inscripción automática y en ese momento pueden optar por que sus hijos no participen).

“Los perseguimos a todos los rincones del distrito escolar”, dijo Todd Nelson, ex profesor de matemáticas que ahora supervisa datos, investigaciones y pruebas del distrito.

Desde 2016, ha aumentado la diversidad de los estudiantes matriculados en los cursos avanzados de matemáticas del distrito. Ahora los estudiantes latinos representan el 29 por ciento de la matrícula total, antes representaban el 18 por ciento. Los estudiantes afroamericanos y multirraciales representan cada uno el 10 por ciento de la matrícula, en el 2016 representaban cerca del 8%.

Sin embargo, más recientemente la participación en matemáticas de nivel superior ha disminuido en todos los subgrupos de estudiantes en las escuelas de Unión. Las cifras del distrito muestran que esta tendencia comenzó antes de la pandemia, especialmente en las escuelas secundarias. Pero los administradores dicen que la interrupción debido a los cierres de las escuelas contribuyó a una persistente aversión a inscribirse en cursos desafiantes. Aun así, las proporciones de estudiantes afroamericanos, latinos y multirraciales que se matriculan en las clases avanzadas de matemáticas de Union han caído en tasas mucho más bajas que las de los estudiantes asiáticos y blancos.

“Consideramos que el trabajo que estamos haciendo es un proceso a largo plazo, a diferencia de solucionar el problema en un año”, añadió Nelson.

En la clase de sexto grado de Woodfin, Vianca, de 11 años, no estaba segura de cómo había terminado en la clase de matemáticas avanzadas. Recordó haber tomado un examen “súper difícil” cuando estaba en quinto grado y se registró para matemáticas estándar en la escuela intermedia.

“Parece que me colocaron aquí”, dijo.

Vianca dijo que la materia le ha sido un desafío este año. Pero un cambio reciente en los horarios de sexto grado que agrega más tiempo para las matemáticas significa que tiene 90 minutos con Woodfin cada día, en lugar de solo 45.

“Ella siempre va más despacio” cuando le parece demasiado, dijo Vianca sobre su maestra. “Puedo pedir ayuda”.

Duplicar la cantidad de tiempo para las matemáticas para los estudiantes de sexto grado en Union ha tenido un costo. Algunos padres se enojaron ante la reducción de actividades extracurriculares, como arte o música. El cambio requirió duplicar el número de profesores de matemáticas de secundaria, y los directores de escuela ya habían tenido dificultades para reclutar profesores para esas materias. (El año pasado, la tasa de rotación de docentes de Oklahoma alcanzó el 24 por ciento, la tasa más alta en una década, según datos estatales.)

La falta de diversidad docente también complica la misión general del distrito de incrementar la diversidad estudiantil en las matemáticas avanzadas, reconoció Bittle. Solo dos de aproximadamente 90 profesores de matemáticas de escuelas intermedias y secundarias se identifican como afroamericanos; y los esfuerzos para reclutar en Langston University, la única universidad históricamente afroamericana del estado, aún no han sido exitosos. Bittle añadió que los bajos salarios docentes en Oklahoma no ayudan. Las escuelas de los estados vecinos tienden a ofrecer mucho más que el salario inicial para profesores en Oklahoma de aproximadamente $40,000 anuales.

Las investigaciones acerca del debate sobre la eliminación de los sistemas de seguimientos demográficos presentan un panorama complicado. Casi al mismo tiempo que el distrito hizo sus cambios, un estudio internacional encontró que separar a los estudiantes dotados en clases aceleradas podría exacerbar la división entre ricos y pobres en las escuelas. Otro artículo, publicado por la Brookings Institution en 2016, encontró que los estudiantes afroamericanos y latinos en estados que utilizaron más sistemas de itinerarios para separar a estudiantes de octavo grado en diferentes niveles de habilidad en matemáticas obtuvieron mejores calificaciones en los exámenes de Advanced Placement.

“Esto seguirá siendo turbio”, dijo Kristen Hengtgen, analista senior de Education Trust. “El proceso de eliminar los sistemas de itinerarios parece tener buenas intenciones, pero todavía no hemos visto de manera concluyente que funcione”.

Sin embargo, Unión sigue comprometido con sus esfuerzos. Y en una clase de cálculo totalmente silenciosa, donde sólo el zumbido del sistema de climatización interrumpía el frotar de los lápices, los estudiantes permanecían comprometidos con sus propios trabajos.

Lizeth Rosas estaba sentada en la última fila. Vestida con bata azul brillante del programa de enfermería que tendría más tarde ese día, la joven de 18 años garabateó notas sobre cómo encontrar el valor promedio de fricción en un intervalo determinado.

“¿Alguna pregunta?”, dijo su maestra. “Hablen ahora o callen para siempre.”

Sólo ocho de los 22 estudiantes de la clase se identificaban como blancos. Rosas comenzó a estudiar matemáticas avanzadas cuando estaba en séptimo grado, dijo. El año pasado, para su sorpresa, un maestro le recomendó tomar el curso de Advanced Placement.

“Al principio me cuestioné, y, mucho”, dijo. “No sabía si estaba lista. Es mucho que procesar y nos movemos muy rápido”.

Rosas planea trabajar como enfermera práctica con licencia después de graduarse y supone que las conversiones de medicamentos y líquidos intravenosos requerirán matemáticas. Su padre, quien dirige su propia empresa de remodelación, no puede ayudarla con sus tareas de cálculo, dijo ella. Pero su programa de enfermería, parte de un programa de extensión de la escuela secundaria en el cercano Tulsa Technology Center, ofrece tutoría académica.

“No me hace tanta falta”, dijo Rosas. “Los profesores aquí son realmente atentos. Simplemente me ayudan. Me recuerdan que puedo hacerlo”.

Este artículo sobre equidad en las matemáticas fue producido por The Hechinger Report, una organización de noticias independiente sin fines de lucro centrada en la desigualdad y la innovación en la educación. Regístrese para el Hechinger newsletter.

The post Cómo un distrito ha diversificado sus clases de matemáticas avanzadas — sin controversia appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

TULSA, Okla. — Amoni and Zoe scattered the contents of a sandwich bag full of fruit-flavored candy across their desks as part of a math lesson on ratios.

“What does it mean to have 50 percent?” their teacher, Kelly Woodfin, asked the sixth graders in her advanced math class. “What does it mean to have half?”

Amoni and Zoe, both 11, ate just one piece of candy each, as they converted the share of green apples or pink strawberries from their bag into fractions, decimals and percents. When they got stumped on a strategy for turning a decimal into a percentage, the pair’s arms shot in the air.

“I think, you go two steps over, and to the left,” Amoni said, her voice trailing into a question.

“You’ve been doing this for two weeks, sister,” Woodfin playfully chided her. “I don’t know why you’re doubting yourself.”

Years ago, when Woodfin attended Union Public Schools from kindergarten through eighth grade, she sat in fairly homogenous classrooms. Woodfin recalled her peers as predominantly white, a legacy of families moving to the suburbs as Tulsa schools desegregated during the 1950s. But when she returned to teach at Union in 2012, the white student population had shrunk to a little more than half of total enrollment.

Until recently, however, students in Union’s advanced math classes remained mostly white. The accelerated track in middle and high school drew mostly from elementary schools in affluent neighborhoods, where students tended to perform better on a pre-algebra placement test that they had one chance to take as fifth graders. But on a recent winter day, only two of Woodfin’s students identified as white and more than a third were still learning English.

The transformation of Woodfin’s class rosters represent more than a general shift in who attends Union schools, where today only one in four students is white. It’s also the result of a years-long campaign to identify and promote more students from underrepresented backgrounds into the district’s most challenging math courses.

Elsewhere, concerns about who gets access to advanced math have led districts to end the tracking of students into different math classes by perceived ability or to remove accelerated classes altogether in the name of equity. Union, by contrast, has attempted to find a middle ground. The district, which overlaps part of Tulsa and its southeast suburbs, continues to track students into separate math classes beginning in sixth grade. But it has also added new ways beyond the one-time placement test for students to qualify for higher level math courses, and increased support — including in-school tutoring and longer class periods — for students who’ve shown promise in the subject.

Enrollment data suggest the effort to make higher-level math accessible to more students had started to yield results before the pandemic. But there have been challenges: In the last few years, fewer students overall have enrolled in advanced math classes, although the declines for Black and Hispanic students have been less steep than for other groups. Anti-teacher sentiment, on top of Oklahoma’s low teacher salaries, have made it difficult to hire math educators, administrators here say. At Union High School, an Algebra II position remained vacant for more than a year.

But the district remains committed to its changes. Recently, principals and veteran math educators have persuaded some former students to join Union’s teaching ranks. Shannan Bittle, a secondary math specialist for Union, said new academic programs — like aviation and construction — could offer students more ways to apply higher levels of math in lucrative jobs.

“We try really, really hard not to keep people out” of accelerated math, she said. “But we do our best to give them the tools to succeed.”

Related: How can schools dig out from a generation of lost math progress?

Taking algebra or higher in middle school places a student on the path to calculus in high school, which opens the door to selective colleges and is considered a gateway course for many high-paying STEM careers. Federal education data shows white students enroll in high school calculus at nearly eight times the rate of their Black peers and about triple the average for Hispanic students.

“There are many Black and Latino students and students from low-income backgrounds who have demonstrated an aptitude and are yearning for more — yet they are systemically denied access to advanced math courses,” wrote the authors of a December 2023 report from nonprofits Education Trust and Just Equations. “This practice — and mindset — must change.”

Still, approaches school districts have taken to increase diversity in math have inspired controversy.

In San Francisco, the school district eliminated accelerated math at middle and high schools in 2014 to end the segregating of classrooms by ability, prompting parental outcry. Three years later, Cambridge Public Schools in Massachusetts began dismantling its policy of tracking students into either accelerated or grade-level math. Near Detroit, the Troy school board voted to remove advanced math for middle schools beginning later this year.

Similarly, the California state board of education last year adopted new curriculum guidelines that, among other ideas, encourage schools to delay algebra until ninth grade. The board insisted the framework “affirms California’s commitment to ensuring equity and excellence in math learning for all students.” But critics — including math and science professors — have suggested it does the opposite, by denying students the academic preparation they need to succeed.

“I see the value, in theory,” Rebecka Peterson, a Union High math teacher and 2023 National Teacher of the Year, said of efforts like California’s. But, she added, “Kids are so unique, and one size fits all — as a mom, it’s not what I want for my son.”

Peterson started working for Union schools about 12 years ago, teaching math classes ranging from Intermediate Algebra to Advanced Placement Calculus. Early on, Peterson noticed the demographic split in her classes: “We’re a very culturally rich district, and yet, my calculus classes were mostly white,” she said.

She decided to talk with her principal at the time, Lisa Witcher. The pair discovered that, although Union High enrolled students from all 13 elementary campuses, Peterson’s calculus students primarily started at just three — the whitest and wealthiest of Union’s elementaries.

Shortly after, district administration tapped Witcher to spearhead a new early college program. She began recruiting students who had completed geometry as freshmen, but found only a tenth of Black freshmen in Union were eligible to enroll in that class. They hadn’t taken the prerequisite, Algebra I, in eighth grade.

“That sparked some uncomfortable conversations,” said Witcher, who retired from the district in 2021.

Ultimately, administrators traced the cause of the narrow pipeline into advanced middle and high school math to the fifth grade. That’s when schools administered a heavily word-based exam, which students had one chance to pass. District officials said the high-stakes exam disadvantaged two growing populations in Union schools: kids who were still learning English, and children from low-income families, whose parents couldn’t afford private tutors.

This discovery prompted a series of changes, beginning about a decade ago. The school district did not eliminate the fifth-grade exam as an entryway into advanced math, but students can now attempt the test multiple times. Elementary schools offer math tutors starting in the third grade, with after-school programs for students struggling in the subject. Teachers can refer promising students for sixth grade advanced math, regardless of how they did on the placement exam. A central administrator also reviews student grades and growth on proficiency exams to automatically enroll students into an accelerated class. (Parents are sent a letter notifying them of the automatic enrollment, at which point they can choose to opt out.)

“We hunt them down from every corner of the school district,” said Todd Nelson, a former math teacher who now oversees data, research and testing for the district.

Related: Is it time to stop segregating kids by ability in middle school math?

Since 2016, the diversity of students enrolled in the district’s advanced math courses has increased. Hispanic students now make up 29 percent of enrollment, up from 18 percent; Black and multiracial students each represent 10 percent of enrollment, up from about 8 percent in 2016.

More recently, however, participation in higher-level math has dipped in Union schools, across all student subgroups. District data show the trend, especially in high school, started before the pandemic. But administrators say the disruption of school lockdowns contributed to a lingering aversion to signing up for challenging courses. Still, the share of Black, Hispanic and multiracial students enrolling in Union’s advanced math classes has fallen at much lower rates than those of Asian and white students.

“We see this as the long-term process of the work that we’re doing, as opposed to fixing the problem in one year,” Nelson added.

In Woodfin’s sixth grade class, 11-year-old Vianca wasn’t sure how she got into advanced math. She remembered taking a “super hard” test as a fifth grader and registered for regular math in middle school.

“I guess I was just placed in here,” she said.

Vianca said the subject has been a struggle this year. But a recent shift in sixth grade schedules to add more time for math means she has 90 minutes — instead of just 45 — with Woodfin each day.

“She always slows down” when it feels like too much, Vianca said of her teacher. “I can ask for help.”

Doubling the amount of math that both sixth graders take in Union has come with a cost. Some parents bristled at the reduction of extracurriculars, like art or music. The change required doubling the number of secondary math teachers, and principals already had a hard time recruiting teachers for those subjects. (Last school year, the turnover rate for Oklahoma teachers reached 24 percent, the highest rate in a decade, according to state data.)

The lack of teacher diversity also complicates the district’s overall mission of increasing diversity in advanced math, Bittle acknowledged. Only two out of about 90 middle and high school math teachers identify as Black, and efforts to recruit at Langston University, the state’s only historically Black university, have yet to prove successful. Bittle added that Oklahoma’s low pay for teachers doesn’t help: Schools in neighboring states tend to offer much more than the roughly $40,000 starting salary for teachers in the Sooner State.

Research on the detracking debate presents a complicated picture. About the same time that the district made its changes, one international study suggested steering bright students into accelerated classes could exacerbate the rich-poor divide in schools. Another paper, published by the Brookings Institution in 2016, found that Black and Hispanic students scored better on Advanced Placement exams in states that tracked more eighth graders into different ability levels in math.

“This will remain murky,” said Kristen Hengtgen, a senior analyst with the Education Trust. “Detracking seems to have good intentions, but we just haven’t seen it work conclusively yet.”

Related: Inside the new middle school math crisis

Union remains committed to its efforts, though. And in a pin-drop quiet Calculus class, where only the hum of the HVAC system disrupted the scratching of pencils, students remained committed to their own hard work.

Lizeth Rosas sat in the back row. Wearing bright blue smocks for a nursing program she had later in the day, the 18-year-old scribbled notes on how to find the average value of friction with a given interval.

“Any questions?” her teacher invited. “Speak now, or forever hold your peace.”

Only eight of the 22 students in the class identified as white. Rosas first got into an advanced math as a seventh grader, she said. Last year, to her surprise, a teacher recommended she take the Advanced Placement course.

“In the beginning, I questioned myself — a lot,” she said. “I didn’t know if I was ready. It’s kind of a lot to process, and we move so fast.”

Rosas plans to work as a licensed practical nurse after graduation, and expects conversions of medications and IV fluids will require math. Her father, who runs his own remodeling company, can’t help with her calculus work, she said. But, her nursing program, part of a high school extension program at the nearby Tulsa Technology Center, offers academic tutoring.

“I don’t really need it,” Rosas said. “The teachers here are really helpful. They just kind of help me. They remind me I can do it.”

This story about math equity 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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