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109 on the first day of school?

That was the case this year in Palm Springs, California, where parent Cyd Detiege has been campaigning to delay the start of the school year because of extreme heat.

Palm Springs Unified District officials haven’t budged, but administrators elsewhere in the country are shifting school calendars to keep kids from commuting to school in high heat and learning in sweltering classrooms, according to a new Hechinger story from writer Erin Rode.

The neighboring Desert Sands Unified School District, after studying which weeks are typically hottest, decided to postpone its first day from the third to fourth week of August and push the last day of school further into June.

Other districts that have experimented with delaying the start of school because of heat are Denver, Milwaukee and Philadelphia. At best, though, the schedule shakeups are a stopgap. “Just thinking about the shift in our climate across our planet, shifting the calendar isn’t going to be as helpful as it was three years ago,” said Carrie A. Olson, Denver school board president. The solution for her district, she said, is going to be more air conditioning and heat mitigation strategies in schools.

Climate change has certainly scrambled how I think about seasons. Growing up in Washington, D.C., I used to love July and August. Now it feels like fall is the new summer, the time to finally escape outdoors and enjoy being outside.

Related reads

How extreme heat is threatening education progress worldwide. New UNICEF data demonstrates how hot temperatures are unraveling education gains globally, writes The New York Times’s Somini Sengupta. One in five kids today experiences twice as many extremely hot days as their grandparents did.

Canceled classes, sweltering classrooms: How extreme heat impairs learning. I wrote about kids suffering in school buildings without air conditioning or being sent home early for “heat days,” and how high temperatures deepen racial divides in education.  

As climate change fuels hotter temperatures, kids are learning less. The 19th’s Jessica Kutz covered how policymakers are taking notice of how higher temperatures mean dehydrated, exhausted students. 

The interview

I spoke with Shiva Rajbhandari, 20, who just stepped down at the end of a two-year term this month on the Boise School Board, in Idaho. Rajbhandari ran and won at age 17 on a climate change platform. He’s now a sophomore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an organizer for the Sunrise Movement, helping to lead its push for a Green New Deal for Schools. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

You ran for school board on comprehensive climate education and energy efficient schools. How much progress were you able to make on those issues?

I’ve been really impressed with the progress in the Boise school district. We have conducted a districtwide, scope one through three carbon audit, using a private contractor, and have identified easy ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and save money in the process. Now we are putting together a long-term plan on greenhouse gas emissions mitigation and also on water conservation, waste reduction and climate education.

What do you want to see happen in the next two years?

I hope that we can pass a comprehensive climate action plan this school year. A lot of these changes, especially with money coming from the EPA and Inflation Reduction Act, are changes that we can begin implementing immediately. We now have a grant to purchase electric buses. There’s a lot of stuff around energy efficiency and the way we build our new buildings especially, where it’s really easy to, say, install an electric heater instead of a natural gas heater. I’m also looking forward to an upcoming bond in 2028 when I think we’ll put a lot of these climate infrastructure projects on the ballot.

Do you feel like your other school board members took you seriously?

Not at first. I think there was an attitude of, I’m here and I don’t really know what I’m doing. But I think I changed that over the course of my term. And I do think that I’ve expanded student voice. My fellow trustees, many of them didn’t have kids, they are not interacting with kids on a day-to-day basis who are in our school district. I do think people begin to underestimate young people and the students in our schools. And I think I helped to change that.

You had pushed for a permanent student non-voting position on the board but that didn’t happen. Is that something you’ll keep pushing for?

Yes, absolutely. We just saw last week in New York the signing of legislation requiring all school districts to have at least one non-voting student member on their school board. We have other states and districts where that is the case. I think that, fundamentally, students bring a perspective that is needed in the boardroom. They’re on the ground in the classroom every day and they are the ones seeing the implementation of the policies and the budgets that school boards are voting on.

What are the biggest barriers to progress on these climate and education issues?

I think it’s a belief gap. There is kind of this old guard that thinks schools are the place to teach reading, writing and math. And that’s absolutely true. But there’s so much more of a role that schools have to play in modern society. We have schools that are feeding America’s kids, schools are providing child care, they are agents of socialization. It’s really the place where most people in this country interact with government on a day-to-day basis. Schools are keystone entities in our community and they have a lot of power to shape what our communities look like. And I think when it comes to stopping the climate crisis, that’s the ultimate superpower of our schools. When a school has installed solar panels, it shows everyone else in that neighborhood that solar panels work and are saving our district money. When a school in Phoenix, Arizona, can provide heat relief when it is 110 degrees, it shows our communities what climate resilience looks like. But the belief gap exists out there that we don’t have the technology to solve climate change, that it’s really expensive, and it’s not schools’ place.

Help a reporter

My colleagues and I were struck by a recent Guardian story on four high school football players who died in August for what appears to be heat-related causes. The news outlet notes that 77 heat-related athlete deaths have been recorded since 2000, of which 65 percent were teens. At Hechinger, we want to learn what training coaches and teachers need to keep kids safe in a hotter world. What do you think about kids playing sports in extreme heat? Do we need new rules and regulations on outdoor sports? Let us know your thoughts at newsletter@hechingerreport.org

Resources and events

• How districts are spending Inflation Reduction Act dollars to green their schools: Undaunted K12, a nonprofit group that advocates for schools to reduce their climate toll, recently shared an interactive map that shows which school districts use federal tax credits to defray the costs of clean energy projects. Some examples: The Menasha Joint School District in Wisconsin expects to receive $3.8 million in tax credits to help build a new carbon neutral middle school that includes solar panels and energy storage. Hasting Public Schools in Nebraska is using the federal dollars for ground-source heat pumps, while North Carolina’s Clinton City Schools are investing in solar.  

• How to protect vulnerable Americans — including children — from extreme heat: That’s the topic of an event on Sept. 18 hosted by the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. Speakers include Levar M. Stoney, the mayor of Richmond, Virginia; Rev. Terrance McKinley, a vice president with the National Black Child Development Institute; John M. Balbus, director of the Office of Climate Change and Health Equity for the Department of Health and Human Services; and David Michaels, an epidemiologist and professor at George Washington University.

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

The post Too hot for school appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Imagine engineering students retrofitting campus buildings to make them more energy efficient. Or students in a human behavior class applying what they’ve learned to encourage cafeteria visitors to waste less food.

Efforts like these are part of an instructional approach known as the “campus as a living lab,” in which classroom teaching mixes with on-the-ground efforts to decarbonize campuses. Earlier this year, I visited the State University of New York to see the living lab model in action.

During my trip, I sat in on a business class as students pitched their proposals for greening the New Paltz campus. They’d researched topics including solar energy and composting, acquiring skills in project management and finance as they developed their business plans. Students I spoke with said the fact that the projects had a chance of becoming reality — thanks to money from a university “green revolving fund” — helped the lessons stick.

“A lot of projects are kind of like simulations,” Madeleine Biles, a graduating senior, told me. “This one was real life.”

I was struck by how professors in fields as diverse as theater, economics and architecture were participating in the “living lab” model. Former NPR education reporter Anya Kamenetz writes about a related trend in her latest column for Hechinger: Colleges embedding climate-related content into all sorts of classes — sociology, history, English literature, French.

“We want every major to be a climate major,” Toddi Steelman, vice president and vice provost for climate and sustainability at Duke University, told Anya. “Our responsibility is to ensure we have educated our students to capably deal with these challenges and identify the solutions. Whatever they do — preachers, teachers, nurses, engineers, legislators — if they have some sort of background in climate and sustainability, they will carry that into their first job and the next job.”

Research take

This is Planet Ed, the Aspen Institute initiative on climate and education, highlighted strategies like these and more in its recent plan for how colleges and universities can respond to the climate crisis. The report talks about higher ed’s role primarily in four areas:

• Educating and supporting students: Higher ed can ensure all students obtain a basic level of climate literacy and also prepare students for jobs in renewable energy and related fields. One example: The Kern Community College system, in California, is attempting to move away from training students for oil jobs to jobs in carbon management.
• Engaging people in communities where colleges are located: Higher ed can convene and support community leaders as they develop climate plans. For example, the Bullard Center for Environmental and Climate Justice at Texas Southern University has worked with predominantly Black communities in the Gulf Coast to mitigate environmental harms.  
• Developing solutions for climate mitigation: Colleges must reduce their own climate footprint and prepare their campuses for climate risks. Some examples: Arizona State University has a “campus metabolism dashboard” that allows students, faculty and staff to track their resource use, while at Ringling College of Art and Design in Florida, 85 percent of its 41 campus vehicles are electric.  
• Putting equity at the center of their climate work: Colleges can prioritize support for students most affected by climate and educational inequities, and historically Black colleges and universities, tribal colleges, and other institutions that serve such individuals must be part of climate planning. The HBCU Climate Change Consortium, for example, strives to diversify the pipeline of environmental leaders.

The interview

I spoke with John B. King Jr., chancellor of the State University of New York and co-chair of This is Planet Ed, about higher ed’s role in fighting climate change and how it’s reshaping childhood. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

What are you doing at SUNY to combat climate change?

One of the first things I did was name a chief sustainability officer, Carter Strickland. He has convened a task force that is developing a system-wide climate action plan to address campus sustainability practices and educate students around climate issues and for green jobs. He also has worked with our campuses on their clean energy master plans. Each of our state operating campuses has identified what steps they need to take to get to the 2045 net-zero [greenhouse gas emissions] goal. We changed our algorithm for prioritizing capital projects to build in climate, so we are doing a number of projects that involve geothermal.

According to the nonprofit group Second Nature, only about 12 universities are carbon neutral. Why can’t SUNY and other universities move faster to reduce their carbon footprint?

It really comes down to capital. For our state-operating campuses, we project it’s going to take something like $10 billion in capital investment to get to our net zero targets. We also have a substantial critical maintenance backlog of $7 billion or $8 billion dollars. One way we’re trying to reconcile this challenge is as we do renovations of buildings, we are taking steps to make them as energy efficient as possible. We are adding more charging stations, we’re moving our fleets to electric, we’re changing out light fixtures, we are phasing in a ban on single-use plastic. We do think the Inflation Reduction Act may be a help because of the direct pay provision [which provides universities and other nonprofits payment equivalent to the value of tax credits for qualifying clean energy projects].

Could this result in students having to pay more to attend SUNY schools?

No. Our hope is that the governor and legislature will work with us to develop a comprehensive capital plan.

How is climate change already reshaping childhood?

Sadly. We already see school being disrupted regularly by extreme weather events, whether that’s hurricanes or heat waves. There is growing data on the negative impact of high temperatures on student learning. We already are seeing the negative consequences of climate change for the student experience. If you think about being a kid in Phoenix where it’s well over 100 for days, you’re not going to be able to play outside. But I do think increasingly you are seeing K-12 trying to engage students in how they can be a part of the solution — and students are demanding that.

Resources and events

• As this summer — the hottest on record — nears an end, I’m looking forward to several sessions on education happening Sept. 24, 25 and 26 as part of Climate Week NYC. Say hi if you’re going, too.
• EARTHDAY.ORG, a nonprofit that supports environmental action worldwide, recently released a “School Guide to Climate Action.” On Oct. 9, in Washington, D.C., the group will hold a workshop for educators on the guide and climate instruction in schools. Email walker@earthday.org with questions or to sign up.
• A new World Bank report argues that climate action has been slow in part because people don’t have the necessary knowledge and skills. Policy makers need to invest in education as a tool for fighting climate change, it says.
• New research in the journal WIREs Climate Change examines the fossil fuel industry’s extensive involvement in higher education. Oil and gas companies and their affiliated foundations finance climate and energy research, sit on university governance boards and host student-recruitment events on campus, the report notes. 

What I’m reading

The Light Pirate, by Lily Brooks-Dalton. This novel tells the story of a family trying to survive in a Florida of the not-so-distant future that’s been ravaged by climate change. There’s an education angle: Storms and floods have driven away most residents of the fictional town of Rudder, including the only friend of 10-year-old Wanda, for whom school has become a hostile place. I found this book absolutely gutting but it also provides a glimpse of how people can persevere and even thrive in a world that looks very different from the one we’ve known.

Thanks for subscribing — and please let me know your thoughts on this newsletter and what you’d like to see me cover!

— Caroline Preston

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

The post Theater, economics and psychology: Climate class is now in session appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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.

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

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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NEW PALTZ, N.Y. — At the end of a semester that presaged one of the hottest summers on record, the students in Associate Professor Michael Sheridan’s business class were pitching proposals to cut waste and emissions on their campus and help turn it into a vehicle for fighting climate change.

Flanking a giant whiteboard at the front of the classroom, members of the team campaigning to build a solar canopy on a SUNY New Paltz parking lot delivered their pitch. The sunbaked lot near the athletic center was an ideal spot for a shaded solar panel structure, they said, a conduit for solar energy that could curb the campus’s reliance on natural gas. 

The project would require $43,613 in startup money. It would be profitable within roughly five years, the students said. And over 50 years, it would save the university $787,130 in energy costs.

“Solar canopies have worked for other universities, including other SUNY schools,” said Ian Lominski, a graduating senior who said he hopes to one day work for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. “It’s well within the realm of possibility for SUNY New Paltz.” 

Sheridan’s course is an example of an approach known as “campus as a living lab,” which seeks to simultaneously educate students and reduce the carbon footprint of college campuses. Over the past decade, a growing number of professors in fields as diverse as business, English and the performing arts have integrated their teaching with efforts to minimize their campuses’ waste and emissions, at a time when human-created climate change is fueling dangerous weather and making life on Earth increasingly unstable. 

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Engineering students have helped retrofit buildings. Theater students have produced no-waste productions. Ecology students have restored campus wetlands. Architecture students have modeled campus buildings’ airflow and worked to improve their energy efficiency. The efforts are so diverse that it’s difficult to get a complete count of them, but they’ve popped up on hundreds of campuses around the country.

“I think it’s a very, very positive step,” said Bryan Alexander, a senior scholar at Georgetown University and author of the book “Universities on Fire: Higher Education in the Climate Crisis.” “You’ve got the campus materials, you’ve got the integration of teaching and research, which we claim to value, and it’s also really good for students in a few ways,” including by helping them take action on climate in ways that can improve mental health.

That said, the work faces difficulties, among them that courses typically last only a semester, making it hard to maintain projects. But academics and experts see promising results: Students learn practical skills in a real-world context, and their projects provide vivid examples to help educate entire campuses and communities about solutions to alleviate climate change.

From the food waste students and staff produce, to emissions from commuting to campus and flying to conferences, to the energy needed to power campus buildings, higher education has a significant climate footprint. In New York, buildings are among the single largest sources of carbon emissions — and the State University of New York system owns a whopping 40 percent of the state’s public buildings. 

About 15 years ago, college leaders began adding “sustainability officers” to their payrolls and signing commitments to achieve carbon neutrality. But only a dozen of the 400 institutions that signed on have achieved net-zero emissions to date, according to Bridget Flynn, senior manager of climate programs with the nonprofit Second Nature, which runs the network of universities committed to decarbonizing. (The SUNY system has a goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2045, per its chancellor, John B. King Jr.) 

Campus sustainability efforts have faced hurdles including politics and declining enrollment and revenue, say experts. “Higher ed is in crisis and institutions are so concerned about keeping their doors open, and sustainability is seen as nice to have instead of essential,” said Meghan Fay Zahniser, who leads the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. 

Related: One state mandates teaching climate change in almost all subjects – even PE 

But there’s change happening on some campuses, she and others noted. At Dickinson College, in Pennsylvania, a net-zero campus since 2020, students in statistics classes have run data analyses to assess why certain buildings are less efficient than others. Psychology students studying behavior change helped the campus dining hall adopt a practice of offering half, full and double portions to cut down on food waste. Physics students designed solar thermal boxes to boost renewable biogas production on an organic farm owned by the college. 

Neil Leary, associate provost and director of the college’s Center for Sustainability Education, teaches classes in sustainability. Last fall’s students analyzed climate risks and resilience strategies for the campus and its surrounding county and then ran a workshop for community members. Among the recommendations emerging from the class: that athletic coaches and facilities staff receive training on heat-related health risks. 

Similarly, at SUNY Binghamton, Pamela Mischen, chief sustainability officer and an environmental studies professor, teaches a course called Planning the Sustainable University. Her students, who come from majors including environmental studies, engineering and pre-law, have helped develop campus green purchasing systems, started a student-run community garden and improved reuse rates for classroom furniture. 

And across the country, at Weber State University in Utah, students have joined the campus’s push toward renewable energy. Engineering students, for example, helped build a solar-powered charging station on a picnic table. A professor in the school’s construction and building sciences program led students in designing and building a net-zero house. 

Related: Teaching among the ashes: ‘It’s not just your house that burned, it’s everyone’s

On the leafy SUNY New Paltz campus about 80 miles north of Manhattan, campus sustainability coordinator Lisa Mitten has spent more than a decade working to reduce the university’s environmental toll. Among the projects she runs is a sustainability faculty fellows program that helps professors incorporate climate action into their instruction. 

One day this May, Andrea Varga, an associate professor of theatre design and a sustainability fellow, listened as the students in her honors Ethical Fashion class presented their final projects. Varga’s class covers the environmental harms of the global fashion industry (research suggests it is responsible for at least 4 percent of greenhouse emissions worldwide, or roughly the total emissions of Germany, France and the United Kingdom combined). For their presentations, her students had developed ideas for reducing fashion’s toll, on the campus and beyond, by promoting thrifting, starting “clothes repair cafes” and more. 

Jazmyne Daily-Simpson, a student from Long Island scheduled to graduate in 2025, discussed expanding a project started a few years earlier by a former student, Roy Ludwig, to add microplastic filters to more campus washing machines. In a basement laundry room in Daily-Simpson’s dorm, two washers are rigged with the contraptions, which gradually accumulate a goopy film as they trap the microplastic particles and keep them from entering the water supply.

Ludwig, a 2022 graduate who now teaches Earth Science at Arlington High School about 20 miles from New Paltz, took Varga’s class and worked with her on an honors project to research and install the filters. A geology major, he’d been shocked that it took a fashion class to introduce him to the harms of microplastics, which are found in seafood, breast milk, semen and much more. “It’s an invisible problem that not everyone is thinking about,” he said. “You can notice a water bottle floating in a river. You can’t notice microplastics.”

Around campus, there are other signs of the living lab model. Students in an economics class filled the entryway of a library with posters on topics such as the lack of public walking paths and bike lanes in the surrounding county and inadequate waste disposal in New York State. A garden started by sculpture and printmaking professors serves as a space for students to learn about plants used to make natural dyes that don’t pollute the environment. 

In the business school classroom, Sheridan, the associate professor, had kicked off the student presentations by explaining to an audience that included campus facilities managers and local green business leaders how the course, called Introduction to Managing Sustainability, originated when grad students pitched the idea in 2015. The projects are powered by a “green revolving fund,” which accumulates money from cost savings created by past projects, such as reusable to-go containers and LED lightbulbs in campus buildings. Currently the fund has about $30,000. 

“This class has two overarching goals,” said Sheridan, who studied anthropology and sustainable development as an undergraduate before pursuing a doctorate in business. The first is to localize the United Nations global goals for advancing sustainability, he said, and the second is “to prove that sustainability initiatives can be a driver for economic growth.” 

In addition to the solar canopy project, students presented proposals for developing a reusable water bottle program, creating a composter and garden, digitizing dining hall receipts and organizing a bikeshare. They gamely fielded questions from the audience, many of whom had served as mentors on their projects.

Jonathan Garcia, a third-year business management major on the composting team, said later that he’d learned an unexpected skill: how to deal with uncooperative colleagues. “We had an issue with one of our teammates who just never showed up, so I had to manage that, and then people elected me leader of the group,” he said later. “I learned a lot of team-management skills.”

The solar panel team had less drama. Its members interviewed representatives from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, Central Hudson Gas & Electric and a local company, Lighthouse Solar, along with Mitten and other campus officials. Often, they met three times a week to research and discuss their proposal, participants said.

Lominski, the senior, plans to enroll this fall in a graduate program at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry, in Syracuse. Before Sheridan’s class, he said, he had little specific knowledge of how solar panels worked. The course also helped him refine his project management and communication skills, he said. 

His solar panel teammate Madeleine Biles, a senior majoring in management, transferred to New Paltz from SUNY Binghamton before her sophomore year because she wanted a school that felt more aligned with her desire to work for a smaller, environmentally minded business. 

An avid rock climber whose parents were outdoor educators, she’d developed some financial skills in past business classes, she said, but the exercises had always felt theoretical. This class made those lessons about return on investment and internal rate of return feel concrete. “Before it was just a bunch of formulas where I didn’t know when or why I would ever use them,” she said. 

This summer, Biles is interning with the Lake George Land Conservancy, and hopes to eventually carve out a career protecting the environment. While she said she feels fortunate that her hometown of Lake George, in New York’s Adirondack region, isn’t as vulnerable as some places to climate change, the crisis weighs on her. 

“I think if I have a career in sustainability, that will be my way of channeling that frustration and sadness and turning it into a positive thing,” she said. 

She recently got a taste of what that might feel like: In an email from Sheridan, she learned that her team’s canopy project was chosen to receive the startup funding. The school’s outgoing campus facilities chief signed off on it, and, pending approval from the department’s new leader, the university will begin the process of constructing it.

“It’s cool to know that something I worked on as a school project is actually going to happen,” said Biles. “A lot of students can’t really say that. A lot of projects are kind of like simulations. This one was real life.” 

This story about campus sustainability 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. Listen to our higher education podcast.

The post How colleges can become ‘living labs’ for combating climate change  appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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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Imagine interacting with an avatar that dissolves into tears – and being assessed on how intelligently and empathetically you respond to its emotional display.

Or taking a math test that is created for you on the spot, the questions written to be responsive to the strengths and weaknesses you’ve displayed in prior answers. Picture being evaluated on your scientific knowledge and getting instantaneous feedback on your answers, in ways that help you better understand and respond to other questions.

These are just a few of the types of scenarios that could become reality as generative artificial intelligence advances, according to Mario Piacentini, a senior analyst of innovative assessments with the Programme for International Student Assessment, known as PISA.

He and others argue that AI has the potential to shake up the student testing industry, which has evolved little for decades and which critics say too often falls short of evaluating students’ true knowledge. But they also warn that the use of AI in assessments carries risks.

“AI is going to eat assessments for lunch,” said Ulrich Boser, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, where he co-authored a research series on the future of assessments. He said that standardized testing may one day become a thing of the past, because AI has the potential to personalize testing to individual students.

PISA, the influential international test, expects to integrate AI into the design of its 2029 test. Piacentini said the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which runs PISA, is exploring the possible use of AI in several realms.

• It plans to evaluate students on their ability to use AI tools and to recognize AI-generated information.
• It’s evaluating whether AI could help write test questions, which could potentially be a major money and time saver for test creators. (Big test makers like Pearson are already doing this, he said.)
• It’s considering whether AI could score tests. According to Piacentini, there’s promising evidence that AI can accurately and effectively score even relatively complex student work.  
• Perhaps most significantly, the organization is exploring how AI could help create tests that are “much more interesting and much more authentic,” as Piacentini puts it.

When it comes to using AI to design tests, there are all sorts of opportunities. Career and tech students could be assessed on their practical skills via AI-driven simulations: For example, automotive students could participate in a simulation testing their ability to fix a car, Piacentini said.

Right now those hands-on tests are incredibly intensive and costly – “it’s almost like shooting a movie,” Piacentini said. But AI could help put such tests within reach for students and schools around the world.

AI-driven tests could also do a better job of assessing students’ problem-solving abilities and other skills, he said. It might prompt students when they’d made a mistake and nudge them toward a better way of approaching a problem. AI-powered tests could evaluate students on their ability to craft an argument and persuade a chatbot. And they could help tailor tests to a student’s specific cultural and educational context.

“One of the biggest problems that PISA has is when we’re testing students in Singapore, in sub-Saharan Africa, it’s a completely different universe. It’s very hard to build a single test that actually works for those two very different populations,” said Piacentini. But AI opens the door to “construct tests that are really made specifically for every single student.”

That said, the technology isn’t there yet, and educators and test designers need to tread carefully, experts warn. During a recent panel Javeria moderated, Nicol Turner Lee, director of the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution, said any conversation about AI’s role in assessments must first acknowledge disparities in access to these new tools.

Many schools still use paper products and struggle with spotty broadband and limited digital tools, she said: The digital divide is “very much part of this conversation.” Before schools begin to use AI for assessments, teachers will need professional development on how to use AI effectively and wisely, Turner Lee said.

There’s also the issue of bias embedded in many AI tools. AI is often sold as if it’s “magic,”  Amelia Kelly, chief technology officer at SoapBox Labs, a software company that develops AI voice technology, said during the panel. But it’s really “a set of decisions made by human beings, and unfortunately human beings have their own biases and they have their own cultural norms that are inbuilt.”

With AI at the moment, she added, you’ll get “a different answer depending on the color of your skin, or depending on the wealth of your neighbors, or depending on the native language of your parents.”  

But the potential benefits for students and learning excite experts such as Kristen Huff, vice president of assessment and research at Curriculum Associates, where she helps develop online assessments. Huff, who also spoke on the panel, said AI tools could eventually not only improve testing but also “accelerate learning” in areas like early literacy, phonemic awareness and early numeracy skills. Huff said that teachers could integrate AI-driven assessments, especially AI voice tools, into their instruction in ways that are seamless and even “invisible,” allowing educators to continually update their understanding of where students are struggling and how to provide accurate feedback.

PISA’s Piacentini said that while we’re just beginning to see the impact of AI on testing, the potential is great and the risks can be managed.  

“I am very optimistic that it is more an opportunity than a risk,” said Piacentini. “There’s always this risk of bias, but I think we can quantify it, we can analyze it, in a better way than we can analyze bias in humans.”

This story about AI testing 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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MIAMI — Shiva Rajbhandari doesn’t want you to think there’s anything impressive about the fact that he ran for a school board seat at age 17.

He doesn’t want you to consider it remotely awe-worthy that he campaigned on a platform to turn his Idaho district into a leader on climate change, or that he won, against an incumbent, in the highest-turnout school board election in Boise history.  

What’s impressive, he says, are his Boise public school teachers, who educated him on climate change beginning in seventh grade, not because of any state science guidance but because they recognized its importance. They also “told me every single day that your voice is powerful, that you can make a difference,” he said. 

“This is something that should be accessible to every student,” Rajbhandari, now 19, told an audience at the Aspen Institute’s annual climate event earlier this month. But “not every student has that.”

Rajbhandari, like many of those I spoke with at the Miami event, sees education as fundamental to reducing the harms of a warming planet. By giving young people the skills and resilience to fight climate change, and by harnessing school systems – often among the largest employers and landowners in communities – to reduce their carbon footprint, education can unleash positive changes for a less-apocalyptic future.

“We must recognize that education is the climate solution,” said Rajbhandari, who spoke on a panel organized by This is Planet Ed, an Aspen project that has pushed to get education on the climate agenda and vice versa.

Here are some of my takeaways from the conference, both in terms of how climate change is affecting students and learning, at all education levels, and how education systems can tackle the problem.

Early education:

• Danger lurks for the youngest kids: Kids ages zero to 8 are especially vulnerable to climate change and its harms, such as heat waves; it’s also when kids’ brains are developing most rapidly and laying the foundation for climate resilience is especially critical, said Michelle Kang, chief executive officer for the National Association for the Education of Young Children.
• No need to wait until kindergarten: Kids can be introduced to activities like composting and recycling,and values around a healthy planet, at very early ages, Kang said.
• It’s about access, too: Kang mentioned visiting a child care program in Texas that had lost its shade structure in a storm and no longer had a way to take kids outside safely in the heat of the day.

K-12:

• Money, money, money: The Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal and the Inflation Reduction Act contain hefty financial incentives and support for schools to reduce their carbon footprint through solar rooftops, electric buses and building efficiencies. Many don’t know of those opportunities, speakers said. 
• Confront the topic differently so it’s not just “the polar bears are dying, the seas are warming and the coral reefs are bleaching, and people in sub-Saharan Africa may not in 50 years have enough to eat,” Rajhbandari said. The issue is urgent, immediate and personal, he noted, but students also need to know they can have a positive impact: “The key there is talking about solutions and talking about agency.” 
• Silence won’t help: Laura Schifter, an Aspen senior fellow who leads This is Planet Ed, recalled hearing from a student who’d become alarmed by a U.N. report about climate change and was shocked that no adults in her school were talking about it. “She started to think, am I the crazy one, that I’m so worried and no one else is worried?” Schifter said. 
• A perfect storm: Climate threats are sharpening the focus on other threats to public schools, like expanded school choice and vouchers. Luisa Santos, a Miami Dade school board member, noted public schools in the city serve as hurricane shelters. School privatization could complicate that role if fewer school buildings are district run and are instead led by many different private operators, she noted.

Higher education:

• New world, new needs: Climate change is starting to reshape the workforce, with new opportunities in renewable energy, sustainability and other sectors, speakers said. Higher ed needs to identify these new needs and help prepare students to fill them, said Madeline Pumariega, president of Miami Dade College.
• For example: She noted that her college started a program for automotive technicians focused on electric vehicles: “We can have the workforce so we don’t find ourselves saying, well sorry, we were trying to do this but we didn’t have the workforce to be able to.”
• Changing existing programs: Colleges are increasingly infusing climate studies into an array of fields – culinary students need to learn about reducing food waste, while future nurses need to know about mitigating the health effects of climate change, speakers said.
• Change begins on campus: There’s also a push to incorporate campus sustainability efforts into coursework. At University of Washington at Bothell, for example, students in several majors worked to restore campus wetlands. At Weber State University, in Ogden, Utah, students in engineering and other fields helped make buildings more efficient. And SUNY Binghamton offers a class called “Planning the Sustainable University” in which students have developed dorm composting, improved furniture reuse rates, and more. 

It’s sobering to contemplate climate change, especially from Miami, where sea level rise threatens to swamp much of the city in the coming decades. But I was reminded of messaging I heard at last year’s Aspen conference, from Yale University senior research scientist Anthony Leiserowitz: “Scientists agree, it’s real, it’s us, it’s bad, but there’s hope.”

Important sources of that hope are students, educators and school systems.      

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

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The landscape of sex ed in the United States is confusing. What students are taught, and in what grades, varies widely from one school district to another. In many communities, how to talk with kids and teens about sex is hotly debated. Educators, parents, outside groups and state regulations all play a role in shaping sex ed curriculums.

Here’s what you need to know to understand the different kinds of sex ed programs and what’s taught in your district.

What are the different types of sex education?

There are four broad categories of sex ed: abstinence only, abstinence plus, sexual risk avoidance and comprehensive sex education. The first three typically promote postponing sexual activity until after marriage to avoid risks including pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections, while comprehensive sex education focuses on equipping students with skills for staying safe when they do choose to have sex.

That said, there is no single, agreed-upon definition for any of these terms. Designers of sex ed curriculums are responsible for labeling their own programs, and the distinctions between them can be blurry. For example, comprehensive sex education programs often present abstinence as the surest way to eliminate risks, while programs in any of the categories may include information on contraception, STIs and healthy relationships.

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

What are some of the main points of contention between different types of sex education?

The main differences between the various types of sex education are in the degree of emphasis on abstinence and the ways in which teen sex and premarital sex are discussed. But there are other differences as well. For example, comprehensive sex education often includes lessons on gender identity, while other forms of sex ed typically leave that information out.

Comprehensive sex education also often includes lessons on consent. While some sexual risk avoidance and abstinence plus programs also discuss this topic, many focus on so-called refusal skills. The concepts are related — both involve teaching students that they can say no to sex. But instruction on consent often includes teaching that people can agree to have sex, whereas proponents of refusal skills say that approach ends up telling teens how to “negotiate” for sex.

What grade is sex ed taught in schools and by whom?

This varies widely. Comprehensive sex education advocates argue that courses should start as early as kindergarten, with lessons on topics like personal boundaries and names for body parts. They also say that sex ed should be taught every year; a few states, like California and Oregon, require this. In many places, however, sex ed is only taught in a few grade levels and not until middle and high school. In some districts, it’s not taught at all.

In schools that do teach it, sex ed typically takes up a small portion of a student’s overall time in school and, when taught by school staff, is often incorporated into health, physical education or science classes. Outside providers of sex education curriculums are also common, including Planned Parenthood, crisis pregnancy centers and online programs.

Related: PROOF POINTS: The research evidence for sex ed remains thin

What types of sex education are most effective?

People on all sides of this question — from proponents of comprehensive sex education to sexual risk avoidance advocates to abstinence-only supporters — say that their approach works best and often point to research. All major medical organizations recommend comprehensive sex education. But it’s difficult to conduct quality research determining which programs succeed at reducing rates of teen sex or high-risk sexual behavior. You can find more on what we do and don’t know about sex ed effectiveness here.

How do I figure out what my kid is learning in sex ed and who is teaching it?

The first step is to ask your school or district what sex ed curriculum they are using, who developed it and who will be teaching it. In some places, including Texas, districts are required to show any parent who asks a copy of the curriculum. Outside providers also often have information for parents available on their websites, and some conduct presentations for parents in advance of teaching students.

Most states allow parents to opt their children out of sex ed, while some, including Arizona, Nevada, Utah and Texas, require parents to opt in. If you live in one of those states and you want your child to participate in sex ed classes, be aware that you’ll have to give permission in order for them to do so.

This story 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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When Sarah Anderson travels to Texas middle schools to teach sex education, she brings props: a toy baby to represent unplanned pregnancy, a snake for bacterial infections, a pregnancy test for infertility, a skeleton for AIDS and cancer. 

The students are told that if they have sex before marriage, emotional risks include depression, guilt and anxiety. They’re taught that condoms — while often labeled as a method for “safe sex” — do not keep them safe from pregnancy or sometimes-incurable sexually transmitted infections. 

Her curriculum for high schoolers, meanwhile, says that people who “go from sex partner to sex partner are causing their brains to mold and gel so that it eventually begins accepting that sexual pattern as normal.” This, the curriculum says, could “interfere with the development of the neurological circuits” needed for a long-term relationship.

Anderson isn’t a school district employee. She works for the South Texas Pregnancy Care Center in Seguin, Texas, a group founded in 2001 to counsel women against getting abortions. The organization is one of dozens of crisis pregnancy centers across the state that send employees into schools to talk to students and, in some cases, teach sex education classes.

These groups, also known as pregnancy resource centers, began to sprout around the country in the late 1960s as states passed laws legalizing abortion. Sex education has sometimes been a feature of their work. But in Texas, which has among the most crisis pregnancy centers of any state and where state health standards dictate that sex education classes emphasize abstinence, those sex ed efforts are particularly widespread. A Hechinger Report investigation identified more than 35 examples of these centers involved in dozens of school districts across Texas, and the actual number is likely higher.

With the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade last summer and the near-total ban on abortion in Texas, crisis pregnancy centers are poised to play an even bigger role going forward. In April, the Texas state legislature approved $165 million over two years for the organizations through its Alternatives to Abortion program (recently rebranded as Thriving Texas Families), more than double the 2019 budgeted amount. The money funds the groups’ overall work, not sex ed, but went to at least 14 of the centers identified by Hechinger as working in schools.* 

“I’m concerned that our state is outsourcing sex education to outside groups with extreme political ideologies.”

Texas state representative and former middle school teacher James Talarico

The growing school-based work of some centers comes despite scant evidence that the sex ed they provide helps reduce teen pregnancy or sexually transmitted infections. According to public health experts, the approaches many of these groups take — such as emphasizing risks, inundating students with statistics and showing graphic pictures of STIs — aren’t effective in preventing or changing behavior. Instead, they can cause students to stop absorbing information that might help them make informed decisions about sex in the future. 

“You’ll tend to see that kind of overload on facts [that] steer into fear,” said Leslie Kantor, chair of the Department of Urban-Global Public Health at the Rutgers School of Public Health, in New Jersey. “We know very very well across many many health issues this is not what changes human behavior.”

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

Staff of crisis pregnancy centers argue that their approach works: Their students report directly to them or in internal surveys that they’ve changed their minds about having sex. Staff also say that their connections with schools grew out of a desire to teach young people how to avoid unplanned pregnancies in the first place, intervening before teens need their services. They say abstinence is the best, most effective way to prevent any risks associated with having sex and that they also teach students about healthy relationships and planning for their futures.

“We deal with unexpected pregnancies,” said Jennifer Shelton, the executive director of Real Options, a pregnancy resource center in Allen, which has taught sex ed in more than a dozen public school districts. “The best way to deal with that is at the beginning of the decision-making process.”

In Texas, sex education typically takes up just a few hours of instruction a year in a handful of grades, and many school districts use outside groups and online providers rather than hiring experts in-house or training their own staff. Sex ed curricula are recommended by councils made up primarily of parents and community members. Many pregnancy center programs, which tend to follow a “sexual risk avoidance” approach that in addition to stressing abstinence also includes discussion of birth control and the signs and symptoms of STIs, are offered for free and align with the Texas state standards requiring that abstinence be promoted as the “preferred choice.”

But some health experts, legislators and students say crisis pregnancy centers, which have been accused of offering women misleading or inaccurate information about abortion risks, have no place in public schools. They view the sex ed courses as a stealth way for the organizations to develop connections to teens so the young people will turn to crisis pregnancy centers if they do become pregnant later. 

State representative and former middle school teacher James Talarico has repeatedly introduced legislation to require all Texas districts to teach medically accurate sex education. “I’m concerned that our state is outsourcing sex education to outside groups with extreme political ideologies,” said Talarico, a Democrat who serves north Austin and surrounding areas. “If they are withholding information or emphasizing certain information to push an agenda on our kids, then that’s inappropriate.”

For three years as a student in Lewisville Independent School District, near Dallas, Nimisha Srikanth was taught by staffers of 180 Degrees, the education arm of Real Options. 

When she was in eighth grade, the group gave each student a cup and had them pour water back and forth, she said. The exercise was supposed to represent how easily they could become infected with an STI. Srikanth, who graduated from high school in 2019, said the classmates treated it as a joke and purposefully tried to maximize “infections.” 

In ninth grade, a lesson quickly derailed when the presenter started talking about how abstinence was best, and someone quipped, “I guess it’s too late for me.” The room erupted in laughter. The teacher “lost everybody’s attention after that,” Srikanth recalled.

Each year, she said, the message was always the same: “Don’t have sex before marriage. If you do, bad things will happen,” Srikanth said. “It’s so much fear-based, very opinion-based.” 

180 Degrees is among the state’s most widespread crisis pregnancy center-affiliated sex ed programs, noting on its website that it has sent presenters to 14 districts in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. In 2019, Real Options reached 18,329 students “with education presentations about sexual purity,” according to its federal tax filing.

In an emailed statement, Amanda Brim, the Lewisville district’s chief communications officer, said that 180 Degrees was never adopted districtwide, but individual schools could choose to use the program. In 2022, she wrote, Lewisville adopted a new sex ed program to meet updated state standards, which went into effect that year. 

Shelton, who taught for 180 Degrees for many years, said that her program avoids scare tactics, even if some of the statistics they share may be alarming, and that they are truthful with students about the risks associated with having sex. The program, she noted, covers many different topics beyond abstinence, including birth control, STIs and the emotional side to sex and relationships. 

Shelton said she believes that “no matter what side” people are on, they should agree abstinence is the best choice to prevent pregnancy and STIs. “We believe in raising the standard for young people,” she said. “They can and most likely will rise to that occasion.”

Related: Five things you need to know about sex ed in the US

The sex ed curriculum of 180 Degrees was one of six obtained by The Hechinger Report through public records requests and reviews of school and center websites. All of the pregnancy center curricula emphasize the potential harms of having sex and advocate waiting until marriage, suggesting that doing so will eliminate all risk. 

Seventh graders in 180 Degrees classes, according to a presentation for parents, are taught that there are 27 different STIs and that, with their various strains, the total number of sexually transmitted diseases nears 1,000. The curriculum used by South Texas Pregnancy Care Center, called SHARE, lists the potential consequences of STIs as pain and suffering, damage to organs, damage to babies, death, embarrassment and rejection.

LifeGuard, the sex ed program affiliated with the crisis pregnancy center The Source, in Austin and Houston, includes a series of graphic photos to give “a medically accurate understanding of how these STIs can impact a person’s health.” 

“They just tried to scare us,” said Samuel Ingram, a 2020 graduate of the Leander Independent School District, which says that it has used LifeGuard since 2005. Ingram added that he wished he had been given useful information on safe sex instead of being told “here’s what gonorrhea looks like, and you could have it forever.”

LifeGuard, whose curriculum says that it reaches 15,000 students annually, declined to comment for this article. Staff instructed two school districts not to provide copies of the group’s curriculum in response to Hechinger’s public records request. They also wrote to the attorney general seeking an exemption to the records law on the grounds that release of the material would “cause competitive harm” and that the curriculum contained trade secrets. The exemption was denied.

Alicia Westcot, Leander’s senior director of math, science and humanities, wrote in an email that the district uses LifeGuard because the program follows state health standards and has “created engaging content for our students at all grade levels.” She added that teachers have given positive feedback about having content experts come in to teach the courses.

Four public health experts who reviewed portions of the crisis pregnancy center curricula at the request of The Hechinger Report said the programs frequently fail to provide important context for students to assess the likelihood of various risks and that some parts were biased or misleading, including messaging on contraception effectiveness. 

The South Texas Pregnancy Care Center’s SHARE script, for example, instructs educators to tell students that teens don’t use condoms consistently because their brain is not fully developed. A copy of LifeGuard’s eighth grade curriculum instructs the presenter to read quickly through a list of bullet points about correct condom use to emphasize their number and then say, “Are you getting the idea of how consistent and correct use could be challenging?” 

While research on the effectiveness of sex ed is difficult to conduct, major  medical  organizations recommend comprehensive sex education — which typically discusses the benefits of delaying sexual intercourse along with information on methods for preventing pregnancy and STIs, gender identity and consent. They note that studies suggest such courses are more effective than abstinence-only programs at reducing teen pregnancy rates and increasing condom use if young people do choose to have sex, and that comprehensive sex ed produces other benefits, including improved interpersonal skills.

The sexual risk-avoidance approach that many crisis pregnancy centers use covers some content beyond abstinence. But health experts say the programs’ focus on the negative consequences of having sex before marriage echo strict abstinence-only approaches. 

“When we are able to show them a baby moving in the womb, it becomes a lot more tangible. This baby has its own heartbeat and fingers and toes and eyes and nose and is already developing a personality. When they can see that, suddenly things are different for them. It has planted a seed of life.”

Shannon Thompson, executive director, The Open Door, a pregnancy resource center in Cisco and Breckenridge  

They say this focus misses the chance to impart useful information and skills. Rather than presenting statistic after statistic about the ubiquitousness of STIs, for example, educators should make sure students feel equipped to talk with potential partners about protection, said Kantor. 

“If I have limited time with a young person, am I going to spend that time giving them a bunch of facts that are not very relevant to them in that moment, that frankly, if they were interested, they could look up on their phone?” Kantor said. Instructors “are making an unfortunate decision to spend precious time with a young person who really needs skills giving out what are probably going to be useless pieces of information.” 

In 2020, The Open Door, a crisis pregnancy center in Cisco and Breckenridge, tried something new. Its staff brought a mobile ultrasound unit and a volunteer pregnant woman to a school to perform a live ultrasound in front of students. 

Today, the center works with middle and high schoolers in 15 school districts in central Texas, providing education on sexuality and relationships and in some cases incorporating live ultrasounds into the instruction.

“When we are able to show them a baby moving in the womb, it becomes a lot more tangible,” said Shannon Thompson, The Open Door’s executive director. “This baby has its own heartbeat and fingers and toes and eyes and nose and is already developing a personality. When they can see that, suddenly things are different for them. It has planted a seed of life.” 

The live ultrasounds are part of a larger effort led by Thompson to “change the culture” beyond her organization’s walls, she said, rather than simply waiting for clients to come to them. Her staff tries to reach community members before they engage in “risky behavior,” teaching young people to feel empowered to “say no and mean it,” while also introducing her group as a safe place for people to turn to if they do get in trouble or become pregnant.

“I feel like it was almost a disservice to us. They might have gotten what they wanted and people to practice abstinence, but the people who didn’t weren’t really well-equipped with super good information.”

Samuel Ingram, graduate of the Leander Independent School District and Texas A&M Corpus Christi student 

To that end, The Open Door acquired a curriculum and hired an education liaison to teach sex ed in schools. Staffers have built relationships with school counselors, juvenile departments and camps, and they participate in an annual back-to-school bash.* This year, they adopted an additional curriculum to reach more grade levels and added a second education liaison to their staff, Thompson said. 

Under her leadership, Open Doors’ state funding is rising: In 2022, it received nearly $380,000 via the Alternatives to Abortion program, compared with approximately $102,000 in 2019.

Thompson said her group doesn’t engage in scare tactics, but rather focuses on “empowering” students to make smart decisions and recognize their self-worth by postponing sex.

“Student education has become a very, very important part of our focus,” Thompson said in April during a panel on her organization’s work at the annual meeting of Heartbeat International, a national network of pregnancy resource centers. “It’s a great way for us to begin to instill and teach and to educate these individuals on the pro-life message.”

Related: Inside the Christian legal campaign to return prayer to public schools

Other pregnancy center sex ed programs also use talking points associated with the anti-abortion movement and encourage students to visit their clinics.

The LifeGuard eighth grade curriculum, for instance, includes a game about fetal development in which students guess whether certain developmental milestones — such as the heart starting to beat and the brain beginning to function — occur at four, six or eight weeks. 

LifeGuard programs direct students to the affiliated clinic, The Source, if they need pregnancy tests or STI testing. “There are places like The Source that can provide all the information needed to make an informed decision about an unexpected pregnancy,” the curriculum reads. 

The Source received nearly $1.4 million in Alternatives to Abortion funding in 2022. Yet LifeGuard describes itself to parents and students as an “apolitical” program that doesn’t take a stance on controversial issues. Indeed, none of the crisis pregnancy center school curricula reviewed by The Hechinger Report contained explicit religious or anti-abortion content. 

But the groups do emphasize their religious values in other aspects of their operations, sometimes stipulating that job applicants be Christian and hold certain values. A LifeGuard job ad for a curriculum specialist noted that the new hire must have a “strong commitment and dedication to the sanctity of human life and sexual abstinence.” A job posting for an abstinence educator from 180 Degrees listed the top qualification as: “Pro-Life, Christ follower, and believes that the Bible is the inerrant word of God.”

“There is no public school district in the state of Texas that can legally screen educators based on their political beliefs. The fact that these organizations are hand-picking people that align with their extreme ideology should be incredibly concerning.”

James Talarico, Texas state representative and former middle school teacher 

Shelton of 180 Degrees said that while religion is “very important to us personally,” staff never bring “religious rhetoric” to the classroom or discuss abortion pros and cons, out of respect for students and a recognition that many come from different backgrounds. Similarly, Thompson said her group shares the “pro-life” message as “one option” but doesn’t take a “political stance” in schools. 

Speaking at the Heartbeat International conference, Thompson noted that it was, in fact, important for organizations like hers to avoid alienating young people with an anti-abortion, religious message. 

“If young women who could be your clients see you waving the pro-life flag loud and proud, remember they could feel like they can’t come to you,” said Thompson. “They are more likely to open up with you when they have a relationship with you, when they feel comfortable with you and feel like they can trust you.” 

Talarico, meanwhile, says it’s not enough for organizations to simply say that they are unbiased in the classroom. “There is no public school district in the state of Texas that can legally screen educators based on their political beliefs,” he said. “The fact that these organizations are hand-picking people that align with their extreme ideology should be incredibly concerning.”

The South Texas Pregnancy Care Center assures parents and educators that the religious beliefs that drive the group’s work do not influence its education program, SHARE.

“There is overlap between the message of abstinence from a health standpoint and the message of abstinence from a faith standpoint,” Anderson, the program’s lead teacher, said in a presentation to the Yorktown school district’s School Health Advisory Council, or SHAC, in spring 2022. “But that doesn’t discredit its value as the best message to give young people when it comes to their health,” she added. (Anderson declined interview requests for this story, but wrote in an email that many school districts had vetted and were happy with the SHARE curriculum and that it complied with state health standards.)

Related: Five things you need to know about sex ed in the U.S.

Part of Anderson’s job is to travel across central Texas attending SHAC meetings and pitching members, most of whom are district parents, on the advantages of choosing her sex ed program. The councils then make official recommendations to their school boards. 

And she’s been successful. South Texas Pregnancy Care Center’s SHARE program started in three schools in 2016; by the 2021-22 school year, two years after Anderson joined, its teachers were presenting in 10 schools.

After the 2022 meeting in Yorktown, she convinced the district to use SHARE, and this year added Seguin to the program’s growing list of districts. 

“It makes me so angry to see that crisis pregnancy centers are leading sexual education in the state and not healthcare professionals. They are taking advantage of one of the most vulnerable populations we have, which is young people.” 

Molly Davis, student, Texas A&M Corpus Christi

In that school district, Anderson plays an additional role — she serves on the SHAC. In April, at the group’s regular meeting, she encouraged its members to vote to endorse her SHARE curriculum, noting that it was one of just two under the council’s review that aligned with the state health standards. Moments later, council members voted to winnow their choices to those two, and a month later decided to officially recommend Anderson’s program. 

The case was one of two identified by The Hechinger Report of a pregnancy center employee who serves on a SHAC voting in favor of her own course, in what Talarico said appeared to be a “clear conflict of interest.” He said he plans to raise the issue with his colleagues to explore whether it needs to be addressed legislatively. 

Sean Hoffman, communications officer for the Seguin district, said that there was no evidence that Anderson had undue influence on the decision. 

“School districts and school boards have to rely on the pulse of their communities,” he said, adding that it can be difficult to find enough people to serve on SHACs and that the process of evaluating sex ed curricula took more than a year. “When folks come forward and say they want to serve, we’re going to accept them with the knowledge that the intent is to come on and do what’s best.” 

Related: Child care, car seats and other simple ways to keep teen moms in school 

Like many pregnancy resource centers, the South Texas Pregnancy Care Center has been expanding its work in the wake of the fall of Roe. This spring, it started construction on a new building, supported, in part, by donations from Seguin nonprofits and agencies. A construction class at Seguin High School is building the interior walls. 

Demand for its services is rising too. The center previously averaged around 20 pregnancy tests a month. In January 2023, it administered 41 tests, Janice Weaver, the group’s executive director, said at a city council meeting in February. “There is a big need in Seguin, and we are so excited about the possibility of a new building,” she said.

Other groups, including The Open Door, are starting prenatal care units, to position themselves as a resource for more women who need medical help. Open Door’s Thompson said the group is located in a medical desert, and it will help provide transportation for pregnant women to prenatal appointments and other support. “Abortion basically being outlawed in the state of Texas did not change the circumstances of the women who find themselves pregnant and scared and not knowing what their future looks like,” said Thompson. “If anything, it’s increased the need.” 

“Abortion basically being outlawed in the state of Texas did not change the circumstances of the women who find themselves pregnant and scared and not knowing what their future looks like. If anything, it’s increased the need.”

Shannon Thompson, executive director, The Open Door, a crisis pregnancy center that works with 15 school districts

Molly Davis is a senior at Texas A&M Corpus Christi and president of the college’s Islander Feminists club, which is leading a campaign against a crisis pregnancy center that’s expanding near campus. She said she’s troubled by the growing role of the groups in Texas and sees their work in schools as being of a piece with their larger efforts to persuade people, sometimes through misinformation, to carry pregnancies to term. 

“It makes me so angry to see that crisis pregnancy centers are leading sexual education in the state and not healthcare professionals,” said Davis, who has classmates who were taught by the groups. “They are taking advantage of one of the most vulnerable populations we have, which is young people. … They are teaching young people things to specifically lead them down roads they want them to walk down.” 

Related: Overturning Roe created new barriers, not just to abortion, but to OBGYN training

Texas has the ninth-highest teen birth rate of any state, 20.3 births per 1,000 females ages 15 to 19. And while teen birthrates have been falling in the U.S. as a whole since 1991, they remain among the highest in the developed world. 

Ingram, the student from Leander, recalls that several of his classmates went on to become pregnant in high school. 

“I feel like it was almost a disservice to us,” Ingram, now a senior at Texas A&M Corpus Christi where he is also a member of the Islander Feminists, said of the sex ed he received. “They might have gotten what they wanted and people to practice abstinence, but the people who didn’t weren’t really well-equipped with super good information.” 

Srikanth, meanwhile, says she didn’t learn useful information until she got to college at Texas A&M University and joined the campus group FREE (Feminists for Reproductive Equity And Education) Aggies. 

On a Monday morning in May, Srikanth spent two hours giving out free condoms, dental dams, pregnancy tests and Plan B in the student center. She assured people stopping by the table that they were in a “no judgment zone,” mindful that some of them likely had also had years of messages that sex was dirty and would give them a disease. 

Those middle and high school experiences helped shape her career plans: This fall, she began a master’s program at Yale University and hopes to work in the areas of sexual and reproductive health and justice.

She said, “I want people to have better information than I did growing up.” 

*Correction: This story has been updated with correct information on the Alternatives to Abortion program’s funding details and rebranded name. It has also been updated to clarify The Open Door’s involvement with the back-to-school event.

This story about sex education curriculum 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 ‘They just tried to scare us’: How anti-abortion centers teach sex ed inside public schools appeared first on The Hechinger Report.