WASHINGTON, D.C. — Apparently, there is not enough joy to go around, and some “joyful warriors” are upset about, among other things, what they see as their nickname being ripped off.

Joy has become a theme of the Democratic ticket — Vice President Kamala Harris proclaimed herself and running mate Tim Walz “joyful warriors” against their Republican opponents. The conservative parent group Moms for Liberty made a point of attacking the Democrats’ use of the phrase during its four-day annual summit over Labor Day weekend in Washington D.C.

“I want to remind people who are the OG Joyful Warriors,” Moms for Liberty co-founder Tina Descovich said Friday evening, ahead of an appearance by Republican presidential nominee Donald J. Trump.    

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As a whole, the summit sent dual messages. One cast Moms for Liberty and the broader Republican party as working to appeal across party lines. The other unleashed strikingly vitriolic language about claimed dangers of the Harris-Walz ticket — especially to parents. Leaders made one particular issue — transgender students — the focus of their messaging. Staple concerns of past years, including social emotional learning, DEI initiatives and “inappropriate” books, took a backseat. There was little talk of academics or learning.

Instead, co-founder Tiffany Justice painted schools as predatory, seeking to infect children with ideas about gender that lead them to declare they are nonbinary. And Walz, whose policies as governor of Minnesota are considered LGBTQ+-friendly, was a special target of attack. 

“Tim Walz is, I mean, what a radical, radical bad guy,” Justice said in an interview with The Hechinger Report, calling him “anti-parent” and repeating inaccurate portrayals of  Minnesota law as allowing minor children to come to the state for gender-affirming care without their parents’ consent and saying that children can be removed from their parents’ custody if they disagree with their kids’ desire for gender-affirming care. (A Minnesota law gives courts there the ability to intervene temporarily in a custody dispute across state lines when a child cannot obtain care.)

She also raised concerns about what she called “a social contagion that has taken over in our country. It’s called rapid onset gender dysphoria,” Justice said, referring to a disorder described in a paper published last year in the scientific journal Archives of Sexual Behavior that has since been retracted. 

“There’s no such thing as a transgender child. Please quote me on that,” she continued. “There are children who are experiencing mental distress and they need kindness and compassion and help to feel comfortable in their own bodies, because no child is born in the wrong body.”

Aside from a playful interlude featuring covers of John Mellencamp and Lynyrd Skynyrd that brought attendees clad in sequined MAGA wear and American Flag-inspired fashion to their feet, the event felt less organized — and less joyful — than past years.

Related: Title IX regulations on sex discrimination can be Trump-era or Biden-era, depending on your state or school

Instead, the prevailing tone was one of aggression. The us-versus-them framing is not new. At the first Moms for Liberty summit, in Tampa in 2022, attendees were invited to a well-choreographed unveiling of the alleged dangers facing children in public school — and an urgent call to get involved. The second, in Philadelphia, schooled them in real-time opposition as the extent of protests seemed to surprise attendees doing what they saw as the noble work of moms. This year, many got that this was less about gathering information or learning than rallying around your team. On the cusp of a big election, what could they do to help? How could they recruit more people to defeat a Democratic ticket cast as lethal to their children’s well-being — even as they look to be having lots of fun and supporting lunchbox issues like school meals?

“It’s crazy what’s going on,” said one Maryland mom, a first-time attendee who said she has become more active “because I can” since her youngest graduated from high school. “Moms with 5- and 6-year-olds don’t have time to fight.”

The summit gathered some 600 moms, grandmothers — and a fair number of dads, for whom an in-person appearance from Trump was perhaps the biggest draw. Even though the former president was on stage for nearly an hour, he said little about education, instead repeatedly veering to the subject of immigration regardless of what question Justice asked him. In some of his few comments on schools, he charged without evidence that public schools are aggressively involved in providing gender-affirming care.  

“The transgender thing is incredible,” Trump said. “Think of it. Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.”

Some of Trump’s remarks on immigration, meanwhile, focused on the dangers of newcomers to public education. At one point, he alleged that new arrivals bring gangs and disease into schools, and are welcomed warmly while current students are shut out. “They don’t even speak English,” he said. “It’s crazy. And we have our people that aren’t going into a classroom. We have students that were there last year that aren’t allowed into the school.”

Trump also spent time reflecting on the difficulties of being a candidate. When Justice asked Trump for his advice to busy moms considering a run for school board — some of the core work of Moms for Liberty is to encourage members to seek office — his answer was, “Don’t do it.” 

While Justice noted to the crowd that Moms for Liberty endorses candidates only in school board races, she personally endorsed Trump as she concluded her interview. 

Related: Moms For Liberty flexes its muscles — and faces pushback

Despite the clearly partisan tone of the summit, there was an effort to cross ideological lines to expand support for the Republican ticket ahead of the election. A Friday morning keynote panel featured four women whom Justice said had “chosen to walk away from the Democratic party”: Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii; Texas state Rep. Shawn Thierry, who left the Democratic party in late August; athletic clothing maker and former gymnast Jennifer Sey who has written about how she regrets voting for President Joe Biden; and New York City parent advocate and former Democratic congressional candidate Maud Maron.

Gabbard, who was recently named to be part of Trump’s transition team, said the Democratic Party “is no longer the big tent party that welcomes people from all walks of life.” She coached attendees on how to approach a person in their circle “who doesn’t quite see the truth,” and urged them to do so. “Scroll through your phone. Think about the people who may need a little bit of a nudge,” she said.

“Who’s gonna unite our country?” Gabbard called to the crowd. “We are!”  

This year’s summit lacked the hundreds of protesters who were a constant presence at the 2023 event in Philadelphia, spurring a large and visible security detail and barricades at the hotel entrance. By contrast, the streets outside of the JW Marriott in Washington, less than half a mile from the White House, were quiet.

Yet many of the same groups that had gathered to protest Moms for Liberty last year  staged a separate counter-event, “Celebration of Reading,” on Saturday at the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library in downtown Washington. Participants read aloud banned books and gave away nearly 1,000 of them to children and families who arrived in strollers and on foot.

At the same time, several dozen conservative groups, including Moms for Liberty, organized what they said would be the first annual “March for Kids” to “bring awareness to the decline of our educational system and the erosion of parental rights.” Originally planned for the National Mall, it was moved at the last minute indoors to the Daughters of the American Revolution Constitution Hall; organizers cited safety concerns. As it got underway, some 300 people populated a hall with a capacity of 3,702.

Meg Simons, digital strategy manager at the progressive advocacy group People for the American Way, said that the strong showing of protestors in Philadelphia so motivated many older members of her 40-year-old organization that they started Grandparents For Truth to counter Moms for Liberty.

Marge Baker, a founding member of the grandparent group, said it bothered her to see Moms for Liberty “out there organizing and trying to claim this mantle of freedom when what they want is the freedom to decide what all parents and children can read.” Baker spoke moments before her husband, Robert Banks, was to read aloud “The Lorax,” which has been banned in some places for promoting an environmentalist agenda and negatively depicting the logging industry.

Heidi Ross, another grandmother, traveled from Buckeye, Arizona, to help out at the event. “This is my world,” she said, holding up a screen shot of her 2-year-old granddaughter, Lili. Ross said she has been upset by the rise of school vouchers in her state and the attacks on books. “Children should know about everybody, every family,” she said, adding that, “there are different families, even in my Republican neighborhood.”

During the Moms for Liberty summit, attendees chatted at booths staffed by representatives of organizations such as Lifewise Academy, which touts a Bible education program for public school students that can be offered during the school day. Other booths plus a strategy session run by lawyers with The Heritage Foundation and Institute for Free Speech offered guidance to parents for fighting the new Biden administration Title IX regulation, which extends protection against sex discrimination to students based on gender identity and sexual orientation. Moms for Liberty helped derail the regulation, at least for now, in 26 states and thousands of schools in other states, a list that is growing by the week.

Julie Womack, head of organizing for Red, Wine & Blue, a national progressive group that helps suburban women organize, hosted an online information event about the new Title IX rules, a panel with parents of trans kids, and is planning a “Troublemaker Training” on Oct. 16 to counter disinformation about transgender individuals. “Many people in real life have very little experience,” with transgender individuals, said Womack.  Even parents of transgender youth, she said, admit “they didn’t know how to handle it. Well, we are all learning. It is OK to learn. But it is not OK to exclude.”

Liz King, who leads the education program for the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, one of the counter-event’s sponsors, said Moms for Liberty is boxing people out rather than being inclusive. As the group’s language escalates, she said, “they have resorted to the old canard of fear-mongering.”

This all comes at a critical time.“One of the questions right now is, ‘What does it mean to be a parent?’” said King. “What we see with this organization of Moms for Liberty is a betrayal of the responsibility of parents and an anti-liberty agenda.”

This story about Moms for Liberty 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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In Sheridan County School District #3 in northern Wyoming, where it can take an hour on the bus each way for students to attend the K-12 Clearmont School, the Biden administration’s rewrite of Title IX rules for addressing sex-based discrimination was welcomed — by some.  

The new rules, said Chase Christensen, the school’s principal and superintendent of the district, offer a rural community like his a streamlined process that “can alleviate the burdensome investigation process for districts and for schools.” His district spans 1,000 square miles and serves 85 pupils. 

“I think they were a large move forward,” Christensen said. 

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The regulation that took effect this month was meant to replace Trump-era rules set in 2020 that, among other conditions, typically require multiple impartial adults to investigate and respond to allegations of sex-based discrimination. That demand, Christensen said, especially strains small communities and districts with limited personnel. Plus, he said, those bringing a complaint “are not wanting a remedy four months later,” but in a few days. “They are wanting to move on.” 

But Wyoming and 25 other states sued to halt the Biden administration rules, and thus far, have succeeded in court. So in those states, plus a growing list of individual schools around the country, the new rules are blocked from taking effect.  

The result is a messy legal landscape with school officials trying to figure out their obligations. In some cases, schools in the very same district are subject to different rules. 

“It is creating so much more work and chaos,” said Emma Grasso Levine, the Title IX policy and senior program manager at the advocacy group Know Your IX. “Are we enforcing this rule or that rule?“ 

At the center of the court challenges is that the Biden administration’s new rules, issued in April, expand the definition of “sex” to include sexual orientation and gender identity. This aligns with protections extended in the workplace by a 2020 Supreme Court ruling and offers greater support for transgender students. That spurred lawsuits from political leaders in red states and groups including Moms for Liberty, explicitly objecting to this broader definition. As a result, several judges blocked the new regulations, which also are intended to protect students who are pregnant or who have terminated a pregnancy, from taking effect in certain states, as well as in schools attended by children of members of Moms for Liberty and two other groups that were plaintiffs in one of the lawsuits.  

Opponents of the Biden-era regulations have cast the court decisions as a victory. In Missouri, Attorney General Andrew Bailey described the court order blocking the law in his state as “a huge win,” arguing that the proposed new rules were “a slap in the face to every woman in America.” The rules, he said in a press release, “would have forced educational programs that receive federal money to accept a radical transgender ideology.” 

Related: ‘They’re just not enough’: Students push to improve sexual assault prevention trainings for college men 

Earlier this month, the Education Department made an emergency request to have the polarizing matter of protections based on gender identity or sexual orientation considered apart from the other provisions so that the new rule would not be on hold entirely in some states. On Aug. 16, the Supreme Court denied that request. The new rules do not address transgender athletes, which the department is taking up separately. But Grasso Levine said the rise of anti-LGBTQ sentiment around sports participation, along with laws barring transgender athletes and gender-affirming health care in some states, has helped to drive the objections to the Biden administration’s Title IX regulation. 

Now there is confusion and frustration, both from those eager to protect LGBTQ+ youth through the expanded definition of whom the law protects — and school officials hungry for more streamlined rules around Title IX complaints. 

“It would be nice if we could take a big-picture look at the update, rather than targeting a couple of words that didn’t match up ideologically,” said Christensen, the superintendent and principal in Wyoming, where a statewide injunction has kept the new rules from taking effect. 

This is also a problem in populous states like Pennsylvania, said David Conn, a lawyer who has worked on Title IX and LGBTQ+ issues in schools for over a decade. 

The old regulations “have these very detailed rules for how to handle a complaint” that, he said, are not a good fit for typical minor cases of student misconduct. Conn said the new guideline better serves the day-to-day needs at the K-12 level and “allows for informal resolution, which in school districts is a big deal.” 

When the new rules went into effect, they represented “a significant step forward in improving policies for LGBTQ students,” said Brian Dittmeier, policy director for GLSEN, a group started by teachers in 1990 that advocates for LGBTQ+ individuals in K-12 education. 

According to GLSEN data, 83 percent of LGBTQ+ students said they were assaulted or harassed because of their gender identity in school in 2021, and nearly 62 percent of them did not report it. Such findings, said Dittmeier, suggest “a gap of trust” and students “not feeling they were protected by school policies.” 

Since it was passed in 1972, Title IX — just 37 words — has leaned on regulations to shape its enforcement. Each administration has tweaked the language, but the Biden administration’s more detailed review, which included public comment, sought to give the new rules “the force of law” in contrast to the Obama administration’s “Dear Colleague” letter guidance, said Suzanne Eckes, Susan S. Engeleiter Chair in Education Law, Policy, and Practice at the University of Wisconsin.  

She said that the new rules interpreting the Title IX phrase “on the basis of sex” as including sexual orientation and gender identity are in line with the June 2020 Supreme Court decision in Bostock v. Clayton County. That ruling found that sex-based employment protections under Title VII covered sexual orientation and gender identity, stating that “it is impossible to discriminate against a person for being homosexual or transgender without discriminating against that individual based on sex.” 

Related: What education could look like under Trump and Vance 

Eckes said an August 2020 case, Grimm v. Gloucester County School Board that asserted violations of Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause, found in favor of a trans student’s right to use the restroom matching their gender identity, citing Bostock in the opinion. “Title IX cases look at Title VII and Title VII cases look at Title IX. This is nothing new,” said Eckes. 

Yet that is exactly the conflict at play. Several courts blocked the new Title IX rules because of the expanded definition of “sex.” Kansas U.S. District Court Judge John Broomes ruled that “the reasoning of Bostock does not automatically transfer for the Title IX context.” He said the new rules fail to define “gender identity” and that “the unambiguous plain language of the statutory provisions and the legislative history make clear that the term ‘sex’ means the traditional biological concept of biological sex in which there are only two sexes, male and female.” 

The case before Broomes was brought by political leaders in Kansas, Alaska, Utah and Wyoming, along with Moms for Liberty, Young America’s Foundation and Female Athletes United. Broomes ruled that his injunction applied to the four states, and to schools attended by children of members of Moms for Liberty and the suit’s other plaintiffs. Following the ruling, Moms for Liberty co-founders Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich described it as victory, stating that “gender ideology does not belong in public schools and we are glad the courts made the correct call to protect parental rights.”   

The groups have urged members to request the schools and colleges their children attend be exempt from the Biden administration rule; Broomes is allowing the list that already includes hundreds of individual schools not covered by statewide injunctions to expand. As a result, Moms for Liberty leaders, ahead of their annual gathering in Washington, D.C., this week, are pitching free membership that “ensures your child’s school is included in this exemption.” That has led to the situation where in states, including Pennsylvania, not subject to a statewide injunction, one school can be governed by the new rules while another in the same district is not. 

The key point of contention in the lawsuits, said Eckes, centers on transgender students’ use of restrooms, the most litigated issue involving transgender students in schools. While the Supreme Court has so far avoided taking up such a case, she said, “if this continues to cause chaos across the United States or another case comes up around trans access to restrooms,” that could change. Right now, as a practical matter, she said, case law has repeatedly supported the right of students to use the restroom that aligns with their gender identity.    

Some states, like Pennsylvania, have strong anti-discrimination laws. As a result, the injunction applied to individual schools “is much ado about nothing,” said Conn, the Pennsylvania attorney and Title IX expert. Plus, he said, applicable court decisions support protections for transgender students in the state. “Any school district that said, ‘What do we have to do about bathrooms?’ My answer is that you have to let those students use the bathroom consistent with their gender identity. Full stop,” he said. 

Related: How could Project 2025 change education?  

That, however, may not be the case everywhere. Plus, there is the on-the-ground reality that court cases are one thing, but life in a school for LGBTQ+ students is another. Marlene Pray, director of The Rainbow Room in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a gathering place for queer youth, said students have told her they are anxious about the start of school. Some who have already returned have faced struggles — verbal attacks and isolation, harassment, and one, she said, shared that they “had trash thrown at me in the cafeteria.” 

Pushback to the new Title IX rules is just part of a larger social challenge for LGBTQ+ students, said Pray. “Their daily experience of being bullied and being targeted has not changed. And it’s not because of some list that Moms for Liberty gave some right-wing judge.” 

The problem, said Pray, is “the hundreds of legislative plans and policies that are targeting them.” 

Although the result of the lawsuits is one set of colleges and schools operating under a four-year old regulation and another set operating under a brand new one, the underlying Title IX law is unchanged, noted Anya Marino, director of LGBTQI+ Equality at the National Women’s Law Center.  

The legal action that resulted in blocking the newer rule in some places “does not eliminate students’ ability to bring claims under the statute, and it certainly does not eliminate schools’ obligation to uphold Title IX’s dictate.” Marino pointed to a guide from the ACLU this month that states as much. “I don’t think there should be any confusion regarding schools’ obligation to protect students.” 

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

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

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

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.

The post What education could look like under Trump and Vance appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Deciding what to disclose in a personal essay for college applications has plagued students since, perhaps, the essay first became required. How should they present themselves? What do they think colleges need to know about them? Should they try to fit their whole life story onto a page and a half? Should they focus on the worst thing that’s ever happened to them, or their greatest success? 

In the first year after the Supreme Court banned the consideration of race in college admissions, how students chose to present themselves in their essay became of even greater consequence. In years past, students could write about their racial or ethnic identity if they wanted to, but colleges would know it either way and could use it as a factor in admissions. Now, it’s entirely up to students to disclose their identity or not.

Data from the Common App shows that in this admissions cycle about 12 percent of students from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups used at least one of 38 identity-related phrases in their essays, a decrease of roughly one percent from the previous year. About 20 percent of American Indian and Alaskan Native applicants used one of these phrases; 15 percent of Asian students; 14 percent of Black students; 11 percent of Latinx students and less than 3 percent of white students. 

To better understand how students were making this decision and introducing themselves to colleges, The Hechinger Report asked newly accepted students from across the country to share their college application essays with us. We read more than 50 essays and talked to many students about their writing process, who gave them advice, and how they think their choices ultimately influenced their admissions outcomes.

Here are thoughts from eight of those students, with excerpts from their essays and, if they permitted, a link to the full essay.

Jaleel Gomes Cardoso, Boston

A risky decision

As Jaleel Gomes Cardoso sat looking at the essay prompt for Yale University, he wasn’t sure how honest he should be.  “Reflect on your membership in a community to which you feel connected,” it read. “Why is this community meaningful to you?” He wanted to write about being part of the Black community – it was the obvious choice – but the Supreme Court’s decision to ban the consideration of a student’s race in admissions gave him pause.

“Ever since the decision about affirmative action, it kind of worried me about talking about race,” said Cardoso, who grew up in Boston. “That entire topic felt like a risky decision.” 

In the past, he had always felt that taking a risk produced some of his best writing, but he thought that an entire essay about being Black might be going too far.

“The risk was just so heavy on the topic of race when the Court’s decision was to not take race into account,” he said. “It was as if I was disregarding that decision. It felt very controversial, just to make it so out in the open.”

In the end, he did write an essay that put his racial identity front and center. He wasn’t accepted to Yale, but he has no regrets about his choice.

“If you’re not going to see what my race is in my application, then I’m definitely putting it in my writing,” said Cardoso, who graduated from Boston Collegiate Charter School and will attend Dartmouth College this fall, “because you have to know that this is the person who I am.”   

 – Meredith Kolodner

Excerpt:

I was thrust into a narrative of indifference and insignificance from the moment I entered this world. I was labeled as black, which placed me in the margins of society. It seemed that my destiny had been predetermined; to be part of a minority group constantly oppressed under the weight of a social construct called race. Blackness became my life, an identity I initially battled against. I knew others viewed it as a flaw that tainted their perception of me. As I matured, I realized that being different was not easy, but it was what I loved most about myself.

READ ENTIRE ESSAY

Klaryssa Cobian, Los Angeles 

A semi-nomadic mattress life

Klaryssa Cobian is Latina – a first-generation Mexican American – and so was nearly everyone else in the Southeast Los Angeles community where she grew up. Because that world was so homogenous, she really didn’t notice her race until she was a teenager.

Then she earned a scholarship to a prestigious private high school in Pasadena. For the first time, she was meaningfully interacting with people of other races and ethnicities, but she felt the greatest gulf between her and her peers came from her socioeconomic status, not the color of her skin. 

Although Cobian has generally tried to keep her home life private, she felt that colleges needed to understand the way her family’s severe economic disadvantages had affected her. She wrote about how she’d long been “desperate to feel at home.”

She was 16 years old before she had a mattress of her own. Her essay cataloged all the places she lay her head before that. She wrote about her first bed, a queen-sized mattress shared with her parents and younger sister. She wrote about sleeping in the backseat of her mother’s red Mustang, before they lost the car. She wrote about moving into her grandparents’ home and sharing a mattress on the floor with her sister, in the same room as two uncles. She wrote about the great independence she felt when she “moved out” into the living room and onto the couch. 

“Which mattress I sleep on has defined my life, my independence, my dependence,” Cobian wrote.

She’d initially considered writing about the ways she felt she’d had to sacrifice her Latino culture and identity to pursue her education, but said she hesitated after the Supreme Court ruled on the use of affirmative action in admissions. Ultimately, she decided that her experience of poverty was more pertinent. 

“If I’m in a room of people, it’s like, I can talk to other Latinos, and I can talk to other brown people, but that does not mean I’m going to connect with them. Because, I learned, brown people can be rich,” Cobian said.  She’s headed to the University of California, Berkeley, in the fall.

– Olivia Sanchez

Excerpt: 

With the only income, my mom automatically assumed custody of me and my younger sister, Alyssa. With no mattress and no home, the backseat of my mom’s red mustang became my new mattress. Bob Marley blasted from her red convertible as we sang out “could you be loved” every day on our ride back from elementary school. Eventually, we lost the mustang too and would take the bus home from Downtown Los Angeles, still singing “could you be loved” to each other.

READ ENTIRE ESSAY

Oluwademilade Egunjobi, Providence, Rhode Island

The perfect introduction

Oluwademilade Egunjobi worked on her college essay from June until November. Not every single day, and not on only one version, but for five months she was writing and editing and asking anyone who would listen for advice.

She considered submitting essays about the value of sex education, or the philosophical theory of solipsism (in which the only thing that is guaranteed to exist is your own mind). 

But most of the advice she got was to write about her identity. So, to introduce herself to colleges, Oluwademilade Egunjobi wrote about her name.

Egunjobi is the daughter of Nigerian immigrants who, she wrote, chose her first name because it means she’s been crowned by God. In naming her, she said, her parents prioritized pride in their heritage over ease of pronunciation for people outside their culture. 

And although Egunjobi loves that she will always be connected to her culture, this choice has put her in a lifelong loop of exasperating introductions and questions from non-Nigerians about her name. 

The loop often ends when the person asks if they can call her by her nickname, Demi. “I smile through my irritation and say I prefer it anyways, and then the situation repeats time and time again,” Egunjobi wrote. 

She was nervous when she learned about the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decision, wondering what it might mean for where she would get into college. Her teachers and college advisors from a program called Matriculate told her she didn’t have to write a sob story, but that she should write about her identity, how it affects the way she moves through the world and the resilience it’s taught her. 

She heeded their advice, and it worked out. In the fall, she will enter the University of Pennsylvania to study philosophy, politics and economics. 

– Olivia Sanchez

Excerpt:

I don’t think I’ve ever had to fight so hard to love something as hard as I’ve fought to love my name. I’m grateful for it because it’ll never allow me to reject my culture and my identity, but I get frustrated by this daily performance. I’ve learned that this performance is an inescapable fate, but the best way to deal with fate is to show up with joy. I am Nigerian, but specifically from the ethnic group, Yoruba. In Yoruba culture, most names are manifestations. Oluwademilade means God has crowned me, and my middle name is Favor, so my parents have manifested that I’ll be favored above others and have good success in life. No matter where I go, people familiar with the language will recognize my name and understand its meaning. I love that I’ll always carry a piece of my culture with me.

Francisco Garcia, Fort Worth, Texas 

Accepted to college and by his community

In the opening paragraph of his college application essay, Francisco Garcia quotes his mother, speaking to him in Spanish, expressing disappointment that her son was failing to live up to her Catholic ideals. It was her reaction to Garcia revealing his bisexuality. 

Garcia, 18, said those nine Spanish words were “the most intentional thing I did to share my background” with colleges. The rest of his essay delves into how his Catholic upbringing, at least for a time, squelched his ability to be honest with friends about his sexual identity, and how his relationship with the church changed. He said he had strived, however, to avoid coming across as pessimistic or sad, aiming instead to share “what I’ve been through [and] how I’ve become a better person because of it.” 

He worked on his essay throughout July, August and September, with guidance from college officials he met during campus visits and from an adviser he was paired with by Matriculate, which works with students who are high achievers from low-income families. Be very personal, they told Garcia, but within limits. 

“I am fortunate to have support from all my friends, who encourage me to explore complexities within myself,” he wrote. “My friends give me what my mother denied me: acceptance.”

He was accepted by Dartmouth, one of the eight schools to which he applied, after graduating from Saginaw High School near Fort Worth, Texas, this spring.

– Nirvi Shah

Excerpt: 

By the time I got to high school, I had made new friends who I felt safe around. While I felt I was more authentic with them, I was still unsure whether they would judge me for who I liked. It became increasingly difficult for me to keep hiding this part of myself, so I vented to both my mom and my closest friend, Yoana … When I confessed that I was bisexual to Yoana, they were shocked, and I almost lost hope. However, after the initial shock, they texted back, “I’m really chill with this. Nothing has changed Francisco:)”. The smiley face, even if it took 2 characters, was enough to bring me to tears. 

READ ENTIRE ESSAY

Hafsa Sheikh, Pearland, Texas 

Family focus above all 

Hafsa Sheikh felt her applications would be incomplete without the important context of her home life:  She became a primary financial contributor to her household when she was just 15, because her father, once the family’s sole breadwinner, could not work due to his major depressive disorder. Her work in a pizza parlor on the weekends and as a tutor after school helped pay the bills. 

She found it challenging to open up this way, but felt she needed to tell colleges that, although working two jobs throughout high school made her feel like crying from exhaustion every night, she would do anything for her family.

“It’s definitely not easy sharing some of the things that you’ve been through with, like really a stranger,” she said, “because you don’t know who’s reading it.”

And especially after the Supreme Court ruled against affirmative action, Sheikh felt she needed to write about her cultural identity. It’s a core part of who she is, but it’s also a major part of why her father’s mental illness affected her life so profoundly. 

Sheikh, the daughter of Pakistani immigrants, said her family became isolated because of the negative stigma surrounding mental health in their South Asian culture. She said they became the point of gossip in the community and even among extended family members, and they were excluded from many social gatherings. This was happening as she was watching the typical high school experiences pass her by, she wrote. Because of the long hours she had to work, she had to forgo the opportunity to try out for the girls’ basketball team and debate club, and often couldn’t justify cutting back her hours to spend time with her friends. 

She wrote that reflecting on one of her favorite passages in the Holy Quran gave her hope:

“One of my favorite ayahs, ‘verily, with every hardship comes ease,’ serves as a timeless reminder that adversity is not the end; rather, there is always light on the other side,” Sheikh wrote.

Her perseverance paid off, with admission to Princeton University.

– Olivia Sanchez

Excerpt: 

Besides the financial responsibility on my mother and I, we had to deal with the stigma surrounding mental health in South Asian culture and the importance of upholding traditional gender roles. My family became a point of great gossip within the local Pakistani community and even extended family.  Slowly, the invitations to social gatherings diminished, and I bailed on plans with friends because I couldn’t afford to miss even a single hour of earnings.

Manal Akil, Dundalk, Maryland

Life lessons from cooking

Manal Akil explores the world’s cultures without leaving her family’s kitchen in Dundalk, Maryland. 

“I believe the smartest people in all of history were those who invented dishes. The first person who decided to throw tomato and cheese on dough, the first person who decided to roll fish with rice in seaweed,” Akil wrote. “These people experimented with what they had and changed the world.” 

For Akil, cooking is about much more than preparing a meal. It’s about knowing when you have to meticulously follow directions and when you can be creative and experimental. It’s about realizing when you make a mistake, and being mentally flexible enough to salvage your ingredients with a positive attitude. And it’s about marveling at the similarities and differences of humanity across cultures. 

Akil’s parents are from Morocco, but she chose not to mention her cultural identity in her essay. Because she didn’t choose where she came from, she feels it doesn’t reveal much about who she is. In supplemental essays, Akil said she did write about her experience growing up with immigrant parents. In those essays, she wrote about how she understands her parents’ native language, but can’t speak it, and how she had to become independent as a young child. 

But the life lessons Akil has gained through cooking are so important to her that she chose to focus on them in her primary essay instead of sharing a personal narrative. When comparing essay ideas and drafts with her classmates, she realized that most of them were writing much more directly about their identities and experiences. 

She felt her nontraditional approach to personal essay writing was risky, but it worked. She was admitted to eight colleges, and in the fall she’ll enter Georgetown University. 

“​​I have never, nor will ever, regret any time spent making food; all my work in the kitchen has paid off,” Akil wrote. “I enter with ambition and leave with insight on myself and the world. Each plate served, each bite taken, and each ‘Mmmh’ has contributed to my growth.”

– Olivia Sanchez

Excerpt: 

In the comfort of my own home, I have been to many countries from all around the world. Throughout this world travel, I have picked up on different quirks unique to each region, while simultaneously connecting the dots between the world. South Asia with its warm taste profile, East Asia with its wholesome flavors, and North Africa with its savory delights. Thousands of miles apart and all so distinct in regard to culture, yet sharing similar foods, just under different names: Paratha, Diao Lu Bing, and Msemen — all flaky pancakes. I love discovering such culinary parallels that make me say, “This reminds me of that!” or “That reminds me of this!” These nuances serve as a powerful reminder that regardless of our varied backgrounds, we as humans are one because at the end of the day, food is the heart of every civilization. 

READ ENTIRE ESSAY

David Arturo Munoz-Matta, McAllen, Texas

If I’m honest, will an elite college want me?

It was Nov. 30 and David Arturo Munoz-Matta had eight college essays due the next day. He had spent the prior weeks slammed with homework while also grieving the loss of his uncle who had just died. He knew the essays were going to require all the mental energy he could muster – not to mention whatever hours were left in the day. But he got home from school to discover he had no electricity. 

“I was like, ‘What am I gonna do?’” said Munoz-Matta, who graduated from Lamar Academy in McAllen, Texas. “I was panicking for a while, and my mom was like, ‘You know what? I’m just gonna drop you off at Starbucks and then just call me when you finish with all your essays.’ And so I was there at Starbucks from 4 until 12 in the morning.” 

The personal statement he agonized over most was the one he submitted to Georgetown University. 

“I don’t want to be mean or anything, but I feel like a lot of these institutions are very elitist, and that my story might not resonate with the admissions officers,” Munoz-Matta said. “It was a very big risk, especially when I said I was born in Mexico, when I said I grew up in an abusive environment. I believed at the time that would not be good for universities, that they might feel like, ‘I don’t want this kid, he won’t be a good fit with the student body.’”

He didn’t have an adult to help him with his essay, but another student encouraged him to be honest. It worked. He got into his dream school, Georgetown University, with a full ride. Many of his peers were not as fortunate. 

“I know because of the affirmative action decision, a lot of my friends did not even apply to these universities, like the Ivies, because they felt like they were not going to get in,” he said. “That was a very big sentiment in my school.”    

– Meredith Kolodner

Excerpt:

While many others in my grade level had lawyers and doctors for parents and came from exemplary middle schools at the top of their classes, I was the opposite. I came into Lamar without middle school recognition, recalling my 8th-grade science teacher’s claim that I would never make it. At Lamar, freshman year was a significant challenge as I constantly struggled, feeling like I had reached my wit’s end. By the middle of Freshman year, I was the only kid left from my middle school, since everyone else had dropped out. Rather than following suit, I kept going. I felt like I had something to prove to myself because I knew I could make it.

READ ENTIRE ESSAY

Kendall Martin, Austin, Texas

Between straight hair and a hard place

Kendall Martin wanted to be clear with college admissions officers about one thing: She is a young Black woman, and her race is central to who she is. Martin, 18, was ranked 15th in her graduating class from KIPP Austin Collegiate. She was a key figure on her high school basketball team. She wanted colleges to know she had overcome adversity. But most importantly, Martin said, she wanted to be sure, when her application was reviewed, “Y’all know who you are accepting.”

It wouldn’t be as simple as checking a box, though, which led Martin, of Kyle, Texas, to the topic she chose for her college admissions essay, the year after the Supreme Court said race could not be a factor in college admissions. Instead, she looked at the hair framing her face, hair still scarred from being straightened time and again. 

Martin wrote about the struggles she faced growing up with hair that she says required extensive time to tame so she could simply run her fingers through it. Now headed to Rice University in Houston – her first choice from a half-dozen options – she included a photo of her braids as part of her application. Her essay described her journey from hating her hair to embracing it, from heat damage to learning to braid, from frustration to love, a feeling she now hopes to inspire in her sister.  

“That’s what I wanted to get across: my growing up, my experiences, everything that made me who I am.” 

– Nirvi Shah

Excerpt

I’m still recovering from the heat damage I caused by straightening my hair every day, because I was so determined to prove that I had length. When I was younger, a lot of my self worth was based on how long my hair was, so when kids made fun of my “short hair”, I despised my curls more and more. I begged my mom to let me get a relaxer, but she continued to deny my wish. This would make me so angry, because who was she to tell me what I could and couldn’t do with my hair? But looking back, I’m so glad she never let me. I see now that a relaxer wasn’t the key to making me prettier, and my love for my curls has reached an all-time high. 

READ ENTIRE ESSAY

This story about college admission essays 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 did students pitch themselves to colleges after last year’s affirmative action ruling? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Robert Fitzer was watching news footage of New York City firefighters rescuing people from a Manhattan apartment building on fire, a fire started by a lithium-ion battery in an electric bike. 

Fitzer, the associate vice president for public safety at Fordham University in New York, looked at the calendar. It was late 2022. With winter holidays — and the year’s biggest gift-giving season — around the corner, it was possible students would return to campus in January with their own battery-powered transit devices in tow. Fearing that the same kind of fire could occur in a campus residence hall, Fitzer crafted a policy to ban the bikes not only from buildings on Fordham’s Bronx campus but even from the university grounds — an option made possible by gates walling off its perimeter.

Since the entire length of the Bronx campus takes a mere 10 minutes to cross on foot, he said, there was little justification for needing an electricity-powered bicycle to traverse it. 

The kind of fire that spurred Fitzer to act has happened hundreds of times across the country, and especially in New York City – including on Feb. 23, in a Harlem apartment building where The Hechinger Report’s data reporter Fazil Khan lived.

It cost Khan his life.

Fordham, some other universities and some cities, including New York and San Francisco, are creating policies to regulateor ban e-bikes and their siblings, e-scooters and hoverboards powered by similar batteries, in the absence of federal or state legislation. 

Related: Interested in innovations in the field of higher education? Subscribe to our free biweekly Higher Education newsletter.

Talk of setting standards for the bikes, or more precisely for the batteries that power them, is the goal of stalled legislation in Congress. Lithium-ion batteries in e-bikes can catch fire if damaged, overcharged or overheated, according to the nonprofit National Fire Protection Association, which provides training and standards on fire safety. The fires the bikes start can produce toxic gases and burn so hot that extinguishing them can be difficult. 

The federal agency that could regulate e-bikes, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, is instead pushing companies to adhere to voluntary standards for e-bikes and their batteries, such as those set by UL Standards & Engagement.  “CPSC staff believes that products designed, manufactured, and third-party-certified to this standard, or other applicable voluntary standards, reduce the risk of fire and shock,” a spokesperson, Thaddeus Harrington, said, adding that the agency had no plans to mandate these standards.

At the University of Connecticut, a rule took effect at the start of the fall term about what it calls motorized personal transportation vehicles – they cannot enter any campus building. 

The risk of a fire from an electric bike or scooter is “a clock that’s constantly ticking,” the university’s deputy fire chief Christopher Renshaw said. 

That risk is acute when the vehicles aren’t maintained correctly, Renshaw said, or the wrong kind of battery is slipped in, or a charging cord is swapped. A plug may not meet the rating needed for the battery to charge. Students, however, “they see an outlet, and they think, always, the two are compatible,” he said. “They might not be.” 

In New York City, where the fire department said the batteries have become the area’s primary cause of fires, a law that took effect last September requires any mobility device sold or rented that uses lithium-ion batteries to be certified as complying with UL standards. The city also got a $25-million grant from the federal Department of Transportation to set up nearly 200 outdoor charging stations for e-bikes and more than 50 e-bike storage sites. 

“Most lithium-ion batteries and chargers are safe, and we need to encourage the use of more sustainable transportation alternatives moving forward,” New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand said at a press conference last year about the grant. “But we also need to make sure that these micromobility vehicles are stored and charged safely, so that faulty or improperly manufactured batteries don’t put people in harm’s way.”

Related: Remembering our friend and colleague Fazil Khan

Storage and charging, especially in residences, cause many of the fire hazards. In San Francisco, where 58 fires were started by lithium-ion batteries last year, a new law sets limits on how many scooters and bikes powered by these batteries can be charged in apartments and also requires them to have certified batteries. 

It’s in this landscape that some universities are forging their own paths.

Yale and Boston College restrict the bikes, as well as how and where they are charged. Some items, including e-scooters, are banned altogether. Quinnipiac University in Connecticut bans them from its dorms, Mark DeVilbiss, the director of housing, said.

“We definitely restrict any kind of item that’s got a lithium-ion battery,” DeVilbiss said. With 4,500 students living in university housing, his institution’s safety committee speaks often with its insurance and risk management company, United Educators, about adjustments to what’s allowed, and not allowed, in the dorms. 

When air fryers, for instance, became a popular new appliance, the committee consulted with the company and determined they are only permitted in apartment-style housing with kitchens wired for appliances.

With the e-bike restrictions, students didn’t protest much, DeVilbiss recalled, except one who insisted their e-bike was essential for traveling between the university’s two campuses, which are about a half-mile apart. Since shuttles are available for students to get back and forth, the university declined to make an exception. 

“Sure enough, they had brought it inside, plugged it in and left for spring break,” DeVilbiss said. It was confiscated and returned to the student to take home. 

United Educators, which works exclusively with education institutions, including K-12 schools, colleges and universities, advises some of its 1,600 clients how to lower risks, so that they won’t need to invoke their insurance policies. In 2020, it offered suggestions about issues institutions should consider when setting policies about e-scooters. Back then, the primary concern was accidents. United Educators suggested that schools adopt rules about helmets, parking and operating the vehicles under the influence. 

“Indoor charging was not an issue,” said Christine McHugh, senior risk management counsel for United Educators. 

Accidents remain a worry, but now the batteries and the fires they can cause are the primary concern for some college administrators. 

The liability insurance company doesn’t track college policies on the issue, however. “Every year we’re seeing new things, from drones to maker spaces to tech toys,” McHugh said. “Then schools have to wrestle with ‘What do we do with these on our campuses?’”  

This story about e-bikes on college campuses 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 Fearing fires, colleges are starting to clamp down on campus e-bikes appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

At the end of her first day as a full-time teacher, Caitlin Mercado logged out of Zoom and turned off her computer in her parents’ basement.

Then she cried.

Mercado had wanted to be a teacher ever since she’d spent time in high school working with preschool kids.

But the remote lessons she was teaching to second graders at a Silver Spring, Maryland, elementary school didn’t resemble the in-person classes where she learned her craft in college as a student teacher. Preparing for each day required creating an elaborate set of slides that would encompass more than six straight hours of lessons she’d never taught before, with contingencies for any moment a child struggled with technology or school supplies.

“I’d stay up late, wake back up, keep going,” Mercado said, telling herself, “‘I’m just going to push through and do what I have to do for these kids.’”

Still, her second graders would sometimes fall asleep in the middle of the day, tired of staring at the screen or, she guessed, from having stayed up at night playing games or watching videos on their new, school-provided Chromebooks.

On social media, Mercado glimpsed videos of other teachers who were quitting their jobs, including educators with far more experience than she had. A deluge of similar clips ended up in her feed.

She found herself, at moments, wondering whether she had made the right career choice. “This is really not what I thought it would be,” she remembers thinking.

Related: Tackling teacher shortages

The number of people studying for careers in education has been declining for years. At the same time, schools have struggled to hold on to new teachers: Studies indicate that about 44 percent of teachers leave the profession within their first five years.

Then the pandemic came along, hammering teachers and the profession as a whole. Surveys from the National Education Association and the nonprofit research organization RAND Corporation found teachers, both new and experienced, contemplating quitting in greater numbers than in the past. Research from Chalkbeat found that, in eight states, more teachers than usual made good on those feelings and left their jobs during the pandemic. Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics data show a higher rate of people working in education quitting as of February this year than in the same month in 2020. And results from a study released late last year found that teachers were 40 percent more likely to report anxiety during the pandemic than health and other workers.

“The first three years of teaching are really, really hard even in a perfect school system,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. So for teachers who entered the teaching profession at any point during the pandemic, “this has been a helluva ride.”

To learn more about the difficulties facing new teachers in the aftermath of the pandemic, and what’s needed to retain them, The Hechinger Report contacted a half-dozen schools of education to access lists of or data about graduates to see how many remain in the field. Most declined to share the information or said they didn’t keep those records, but Hechinger identified a list of 2020 graduates from the University of Maryland College of Education and attempted to track them all down. Of the 120 teachers who earned bachelor’s degrees in education that year, The Hechinger Report was able to verify that at least 77, or roughly two-thirds, are teaching now.

Hechinger spent the past year following four of those graduates: Mercado, 25; Miriam Marks, 26; Sydonne Ignacio, 26; and Tia Ouyang, 25. The reporting revealed how unprepared they felt at times, showed their feelings of anxiety and depression, and explored their thoughts about quitting as well as the moments of joy they experienced — and whether they see themselves teaching for the long term.

Of the 120 teachers who earned bachelor’s degrees in education that year, The Hechinger Report was able to verify that at least 77 are teaching now.

Yet even with teachers, new and veteran, so rattled by pandemic teaching and concurrent culture wars, districts may not be adapting. The effort put into supporting and retaining newly hired teachers rarely matches the lengths districts go with hiring in the first place, experts say. The constant churn in the teaching workforce can be destructive for students — leading to bigger class sizes, fewer class offerings and less-qualified, less-experienced candidates filling vacancies.

Yet teachers are considered the most important factor in students’ success at school.

“That new teacher is in front of our students. That person has the most power to change the trajectory,” said Sharif el-Mekki, the CEO of the nonprofit Center for Black Educator Development. These teachers require a lot of support: additional training, a sense of belonging and the right mentoring.

Many don’t get even some of that.

“If we’re too busy to do that,” el-Mekki said, “we’re too busy with the wrong things.”

Some Sunday afternoons, fifth grade math and science teacher Miriam Marks scours Amazon looking for goodies — squishy animals, sticky toys, slime — to put in her classroom prize box at Weller Road Elementary in Silver Spring. All week long, kids who participate and complete their assignments might snag a popsicle stick from Marks. She tallies them up at the end of the week, and those who have shown the right amount of effort can rake through the box of trinkets.

This is all part of a new routine for Marks.

Because Covid hijacked her final months of college, she missed key experiences before starting a full-time job. After a few months of working closely with another teacher during her senior year, Marks was supposed to take over the class for the final weeks of the semester.

“We never got to that end point,” she said. “I went from teaching the occasional lesson or two a day to Covid to, ‘Here: You’re hired.’”

After the end of the term, and a virtual graduation ceremony, she moved into her own apartment, too afraid of harming her asthmatic father’s health if she moved home. It would mean spending a lot of time alone, with occasional visits with her sister and outdoor walks with a friend before the remote teaching of the 2020-21 school year would kick off.

Once it did, she found herself laboring to make math exciting via Zoom to a group of fifth graders at a high-poverty school, some of whom sometimes failed to log on at all.

Alone in her apartment, she couldn’t simply pop into the classroom next door for quick advice. While she did meet regularly with a supportive mentor teacher assigned to her by the school, Marks struggled to gauge if she was floundering or simply facing similar hurdles as fellow teachers.

The experience stirred up anxiety and depression that she suspects she’d long had. She started to have suicidal thoughts.

“I had to start therapy,” Marks said. “It was that bad — my mental health.”

She added, “If I’m not mentally healthy, how can I be a good teacher?”

Related: What happens when teachers run the school

In addition to regular visits with a counselor, once in-person teaching resumed Marks was able to build a connection with another, more experienced coworker who was also new to the school. His support, she said, along with near-daily kickboxing sessions, have been integral to her persistence.

On a Tuesday in April, in her Weller Road classroom classroom, Marks launches into a lesson on the parts of a plant and photosynthesis, gliding through the classroom in black slip-on sneakers, her hair woven into a side braid that nearly reaches her waist. When students chatter or stop paying attention, Marks quickly steers them back on course.

“You just need to listen,” she tells Re’Niyah James, 11, who is looking down and scribbling. “If you’re too busy writing, you can’t listen.”

Then it’s time for students to label a diagram of a plant and explain how its parts work.

Dozens of clear plastic cups cover the top of bookshelves under the windows in her room. Each is stuffed with seeds nestled in damp paper towels. They are labeled — bush bean, peas, popcorn — along with students’ names.

Ivana Miranda, 10, hands in her assignment, then peers at the cups.

“Ms. Marks,” she exclaims, “the bean sprouted.”

Next it’s time for a math lesson on quadrilaterals. It’s where Marks wants to be especially sure the kids follow along, given how difficult she once found math to be.

In high school, she despised the subject. But one year, after being placed in a class for lower-performing students led by a teacher who wasn’t particularly engaged, Marks surprised herself by discovering that she had just enough of a grasp on the material to assist her classmates.

That experience catalyzed her interest in teaching. Marks said she summons her recollections of distaste for school when she teaches.

“How can I prevent that from happening?” she said later. “I relate so much more to my kids who struggle than my A+ students. I understand, and can, on a more personal level, be more real with those kids.”

The students, she said, show resilience. Many lived through countless Covid-related traumas, but “they’re still coming to school, sometimes with a smile on their face.”

Marks, too, is still finding her way. “When a kid is yelling about how much they hate your class, that’s really hard.”

She’s working on developing her skills dealing with that kind of behavior and communicating with families. 

“You do your best to build empathy,” she said, “your best to build kindness and respect. It doesn’t go through to everybody.”

Since Covid, teaching has become more challenging, in part because the troubles students bring to school have grown more intense. Misbehavior in class is on the rise, according to surveys of teachers. Tens of thousands of school-age children lost parents or other family members to Covid. National test scores show that students have backslid in many subjects. Classroom teachers at all levels of experience are under enormous pressure to make up that ground.

Despite those difficulties, and the challenges many districts have faced in filling open teaching positions, there’s been little investment in hanging on to the teachers already on staff, said el-Mekki, a veteran principal and teacher himself.

“Speaking to school and district leaders around the country who recruit, recruit, recruit, when we ask about their retention plans,” el-Mekki said, “we get blank stares.”

He said that, too often, new teachers spend little or no time with their principals, lack effective mentors, or have no feeling of community at their jobs.

They may also need help with practical skills — organization, managing students’ behavior, and communicating with parents. “It’s one thing to have it from a theoretical perspective” in college, el-Mekki said. It’s quite another to suddenly contend with the grading and family interaction for say, more than 100 students.

While the teachers in the program at Maryland noted that they started spending time in classrooms as college sophomores, “most people don’t have a whole lot of student teaching,” Weingarten said.

The quality of those experiences vary widely, but when student teaching is done right, research shows it can give a novice teacher the same kind of effectiveness as someone with far more experience.

Most new teachers, however,even those whose degrees required a lot of in-person teaching experience, which is usually unpaid, haven’t communicated with families while in training. That’s left to the teacher supervising them.

Related: Why a team approach to teaching is taking hold

And despite federal laws ensuring that employers treat mental health conditions just as they do physical health concerns, many state and local government workers, including teachers, have health plans that limit treatment or have strict preauthorization policies. A bill passed by the U.S. House last year was intended to bolster access to mental health care for educators and students, but it wasn’t taken up in the Senate.

With roughly 1,200 U.S. teacher preparation programs, more than any other country, it’s difficult to assess whether or how they are adapting to a new era of teaching. The National Council on Teacher Quality concluded in a 2022 report that undergraduate elementary preparation programs were spending 19 percent more time on math content even ahead of the pandemic and the bite it took out of students’ math skills.

“The first three years of teaching are really, really hard even in a perfect school system.”

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers

And at Maryland, there are other types of shifts. For instance, the College of Education’s avatar lab is used far more regularly, said Ebony Terrell Shockley, an associate clinical professor and executive director of educator preparation. It simulates a classroom and exposes students to situations they’ll face as full-time teachers, both common situations and the outliers they may face but may not be exposed to as part of their student teaching.

One of those is how to interact with families or work through a meeting about a plan for a student with disabilities — things they might experience when they are the primary teacher in their own classroom, Terrell Shockley said. Real actors play the role of students in real time, said Brentt Brown, vice president of sales for education for the company behind the technology, Mursion. Using the virtual classroom, teachers in training can work through situations that might be difficult, but in a psychologically safe environment.

Training like that might help teachers like Marks, the fifth grade teacher. “Fifth grade, they like to be the class clowns,” she said. “They don’t teach you this in college.”

Nothing will keep all teachers, or graduates with teaching degrees, in the classroom, however.

Maryland graduate Tia Ouyang loved her early experiences with a program aimed at recruiting more science and math teachers by drawing in students majoring in those fields.

Ouyang was a sophomore chemistry major when she added education as a second degree to ensure she would get a job after graduation. After working with middle school students, she felt high school would be a better fit.

In the classroom, she enjoyed talking about science and answering students’ questions — even planning her lessons. But Ouyang felt that the high school students were reluctant to trust her, an accented Asian woman. Her science instinct kicked in as she recalled this though, noting she had no real evidence that this was the case.

When public schools switched to remote instruction, and there were no more of those engaging conversations about science with students, she lost motivation.

With online instruction, “All you are doing is talking,” Ouyang said.

At home, disconnected from her own schooling and the high school students, she ended up applying as her final semester ended to a program at the University of Delaware Lewes in chemical oceanography.

Related: Uncertified teachers filling holes in schools across the South

Ouyang, now enjoying her doctoral program, said she never let go of the idea of being a teacher. She wants to encourage young people to study chemistry and nurture future scientists and environmental leaders — but as a college professor.

“I feel happy about my life.”

Ouyang’s choice is especially painful for the profession: Losing science and math teachers to other work is a longstanding problem for districts across the country, making these some of the hardest roles to fill. And just 2 percent of the U.S. teaching workforce is Asian.

Other Maryland College of Education grads The Hechinger Report tracked down left science and math teaching jobs too, in one case to work for an international science and medical equipment company.  Another member of the class of 2020 works as a customer service specialist for a Miami-based financial services company. One chose to work at her family’s bakery. Yet another owns a dance studio. One calls herself a former educator who left teaching after two years in search of “a remote position to pursue a more healthy work-life balance.”

Sydonne Ignacio, like Ouyang, never intended to be a teacher. When she enrolled at the University of Maryland, she was an aerospace engineering major embracing her love of science and math. But by the end of sophomore year, she was limping along.

“I was completely miserable,” said Ignacio, who also worked two jobs for much of college.

Although her advisers tried to persuade her to stick it out, Ignacio said she wasn’t sure it was worth sacrificing her mental health for her major. She chose education instead, with many of her credits neatly aligning with a middle school math and science degree.

Ignacio said she chose middle school in part because it’s such a pivotal time in children’s lives. And because she loathes the refrain “I hate math.”

“I love math. I love science. I love learning,” said Ignacio, who eventually wants to return to school and complete her engineering degree. “I want to instill that passion in my students — so maybe math sucks a little bit less.”

Ignacio, who’d wanted to teach math after graduation, ended up with an offer to teach science at the school where she student taught, Buck Lodge Middle in Adelphi, Maryland. She considered working elsewhere but said she valued the familiarity, given how much the pandemic upended everything else in her life.

Nevertheless, remote teaching that in her district dragged on for essentially all 10 months of the school year drained her. Her classes included two sessions that were a mix of students with disabilities and lower-performing students, a group with more average skills and an honors science course. Each class required a distinct set of lesson plans.

Even though she was familiar with Buck Lodge staff, Ignacio’s mentor taught math, not science, so she couldn’t go to her for lesson planning help. In addition, Buck Lodge is a Title I school, meaning many students are from low-income families. With that in mind, Ignacio tried to devise experiments that involved items almost any family would already have at home.

“I didn’t want them to have to go out and buy anything,” she said, but crafting those lessons took a lot of time-consuming research. And as a new teacher, she had no old lesson plans to fall back on or adapt from.

Related: Two campaigns are trying to keep teachers in the classroom

Most of the week, she was exhausted, and at times it was hard for her simply to get out of bed. “Sometimes I would teach from my bed,” Ignacio said. “I would have my camera off, just going through the motions.”

Even when the work day was over, she couldn’t unwind. “You couldn’t go out anywhere,” she said, without risking getting herself or her family sick.

“Thinking back on it, the only relief I felt was when the year was over: We’re finally done,” she said.

Ignacio also experienced the kind of heartbreak that often comes with teaching, pandemic or not. She powered through teaching the day her grandmother was admitted to the hospital; her grandmother died a few months later. (“I don’t want my students to ever see me in a moment of weakness.”) And when one of her former students discovered that his father had died by suicide, his attendance plunged, despite Ignacio and other teachers pressing him to come to school and checking on him as much as possible. He wound up arrested along with his older brother on an armed robbery charge. The student rarely attended after that.

“Sometimes I would feel so helpless: I can’t follow him after school and make sure he’s doing the right thing,” she said. Other students have chaotic home lives, she said. One is homeless. “If I could buy them a house, I would.”

“That’s one of the downsides. You want to do everything for the kids, but you can’t.”

Ignacio herself still lives with family, unable to afford to move out.

Still, she finds room in her budget to stock her room with Takis, granola bars and Cup Noodles, rewards for attending school all week. 

In addition to traveling and practicing yoga, one of the ways she copes is blasting R&B, dancehall reggae or as she described it, “really vulgar rap music” on the drive home.

“It depends on what comes on in the shuffle.”

Ignacio said she’s unsure teaching is what she will do forever. “The mental wear and tear is a little bit too much for me,” she said. “I don’t know if I can do this for 20 years.”

But for now, she’s tried to turn her difficult experiences into a positive: This fall, she’s set to be the Buck Lodge science department chair. And she still gets a thrill when her teaching results in a concept clicking in her students’ minds.

One lesson this spring for her sixth graders during a unit on states of matter — solids, liquids and gases — dealt with condensation. At first they didn’t understand.

When they finally did, they regaled Ignacio with their discoveries.

“When I come in from outside, my glasses get foggy,” one of them told her. “This is the water vapor in the air that is cooling into liquid.”

Exactly.

For Mercado, there have likewise been small moments as a teacher when she thought, “‘this is really not what I thought it would be.” But she said she now believes she’s found what she’s meant to do.

She too turned to therapy, in the fall of 2021, to help manage her stress. The therapist offered concrete ways to keep from getting overwhelmed. For instance, if five students swarm her desk, she asks them to take a seat and tells them she will come to their desks to answer questions instead. She started taking lunch breaks instead of working right through them. A diffuser pipes the scent of lavender into her room. Bright fabric that mimics the clouds and sky covers the fluorescent rectangles of light on her classroom ceiling.

During her second year of teaching, Mercado also recognized she needed to take another dramatic step to survive: work at a different school with fewer low-income, high-needs students. She requested a transfer and got her wish for the upcoming school year. Mercado said it is a prime reason she has stuck with teaching.

Historically, new teachers are more likely to get jobs in high-poverty schools than low-poverty ones, which also tend to have more turnover.

At her old school, “the students need a lot of support. I didn’t feel like I had enough experience to do that,” she said.

Related: How one university is creatively tackling the rural teacher shortage

Now, she is in her element in a second-grade classroom at Ritchie Park Elementary in Rockville, Maryland, but she also makes time for her boyfriend and dance — Mercado was on the college dance team — in addition to preparing her lessons each day.

For a recent assignment, her students – preschoolers when the pandemic hit – had to reflect on each year of their schooling so far. They take turns sharing their experiences about trying to learn online as kindergartners and getting to be together, sort of, as socially distant first graders.

Chris DiFrancesco, 8, stands up to share how things are going this school year.

“I feel like Covid is gone,” he says.

“Maybe put an emotion in there,” Mercado replies. “Do you feel hopeful?”

“I feel hopeful.”

Mercado does too.

If you or someone you know is having suicidal thoughts, you can call The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or reach the Crisis Text Line by texting HELLO to 741741.

Juana Castillo contributed research to this story.

This story about new teacher retention 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 These would-be teachers graduated into the pandemic. Will they stick with teaching? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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