Predicting the future is often compared to reading tea leaves. In the case of forecasting what education policies Kamala Harris might pursue as president, though, a more apt analogy might be reading her mind. Frankly it’s anyone’s guess what her education policies would be given how few clues we have.

It wasn’t always this way. Previously, presidential candidates laid out detailed plans for schools. George H. W. Bush wanted to be the education president. Bill Clinton wanted to use stronger schools to build a bridge to the 21st century. George W. Bush wanted to leave no child behind, and move the Republican party in a more compassionate direction. Barack Obama wanted Democrats to break with teacher unions by embracing merit pay.

But in more recent cycles, education has dropped from the list of voters’ top-tier issues, and candidates have become increasingly cagey about their plans.

Donald Trump’s administration was known for its advocacy of school choice, but that wasn’t something he talked much about on the campaign trail in 2015 or 2016; it only came into focus with his selection of Betsy DeVos as secretary of education.

And Joe Biden’s unwillingness to challenge progressive orthodoxy on education would have been hard to predict, given his moderate persona in 2019 and 2020. What turned out to be the best guide to his education policies was his self-identity as the “most union-friendly president in history” — plus the membership of his wife, community college professor Jill Biden, in the National Education Association.

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So here we are with another election in which education issues are barely registering, trying to predict what Harris might do if elected. She has said even less than Trump or Biden, partly because of the truncated nature of her campaign, and partly because of her strategy of leaning into positive vibes and declining to offer policy specifics in the hope that doing so will better her chances of prevailing in November. Official statements — a Harris campaign policy document and the Democratic Party Platform — are thin on details.

Making things even harder is Harris’ well-known willingness to run away from previous positions. She did that in 2019 when the Black Lives Matter movement made it awkward for her to embrace her record in law enforcement — including her tough stance on prosecuting parents of truant children.

That’s why looking at Harris’ statements from the campaign trail five years ago or her record as a U.S. senator only goes so far.

What we do know is this: She’s sitting vice president. She has positioned herself in the middle of the Democratic Party, not wanting to break with progressives on the left or business-friendly centrists in the middle.

And while her image is not blue-collar like Biden’s, she’s been careful not to put any sunlight between herself and the unions, including teachers unions. One of her first speeches as the presumptive Democratic nominee was to the American Federation of Teachers.

For these reasons, it is likely that a Harris administration would bring significant continuity with Biden’s policies, including on schools.

Picture her appointing a former teacher as secretary of education, proposing healthy increases in school spending and speaking out against privatization, book bans and the like. Call it the Hippocratic Oath approach to Democratic policymaking on education: First, do no harm.

Can those of us involved in K-12 education hope for bolder strokes from a President Harris — including some that might move the needle on reform? Anything is possible.

Her selection of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate thrust the issue of universal free school meals onto the national radar, given Minnesota’s leadership on that policy. Perhaps she will throw her support behind a congressional effort to provide federal funding for such an initiative.

The most significant play we might anticipate, though, could be on teacher pay. Boosting teacher salaries by $13,500 per year (to close the gap with other professionals) was the centerpiece of her education agenda when she ran for president in 2019.

It’s a popular idea, especially since so many Americans underestimate what teachers are paid today.

She has a ready vehicle to pursue it thanks to the looming expiration of Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which makes new legislation around tax reform a must-pass item for Congress next year. The most straightforward way for the federal government to put more money into teachers’ pockets isn’t through a complicated grant program to states and districts, but via tax credits that would flow directly to educators.

The tax code already allows teachers to deduct up to $300 for classroom expenses. There are also several student loan forgiveness programs for teachers.

A major teacher tax credit could quickly get expensive, however, given the size of America’s teaching force (3 to 4 million depending on how you count it). At, say, $10,000 per teacher, that’s $30 to $40 billion a year — in the neighborhood of what we spend on Title I and IDEA combined.

A smarter, more affordable approach would be to target only teachers serving in high-need schools — as the student loan forgiveness programs already do. Studies from Dallas and elsewhere acknowledge that great teachers will move to high-poverty schools — but only if offered significantly higher pay, in the neighborhood of $10,000 more per year.

We also know that when we pay teachers the same regardless of where they teach — the policy of almost every school district in the country — the neediest schools end up with the least-experienced teachers.

A tax credit for teachers in Title 1 schools — which get government funding for having high numbers or high percentages of students from low-income families — could transform the profession overnight, significantly closing the teacher quality gap, school funding gap and, eventually, the achievement gap, too.

Related: OPINION: If Trump wins, count on continued culture wars, school vouchers and a fixation on ending the federal Department of Education

Given Democrats’ interest in boosting the “care economy,” perhaps such a tax credit could flow to instructors in high-poverty childcare and pre-K centers, as well. This would fit well with Harris’ promise to move America toward an “opportunity economy,” including by boosting the pay of childcare and preschool teachers.

Still, a big effort on “differential pay” for teachers might be just one wonk’s wish-casting. We’ve had two presidential administrations in a row with little action on K-12 education. It’s quite likely that a Harris administration would be a third.

But here’s hoping for a pleasant surprise after November.

Michael J. Petrilli is president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. He served in the George W. Bush administration.

Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.

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

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This story was produced by Chalkbeat and reprinted with permission. Sign up for Chalkbeat Philadelphia’s free newsletter.

Sameerah Abdullah sends her three school-aged kids to a cyber charter school for some of the same familiar reasons that other families across the nation do, including the flexibility and personalization. For financial literacy class, they go to the bank to open an account. For science class, they head to a museum. On nice days, they try to get out of the city and into the woods.

But her motivations are also deeply personal, cultural, and, in some ways, unique to Philadelphia. Abdullah was an intern for a school guidance counselor in West Philly before having children and was struck by the exhausted teachers, the unappetizing cafeteria food, and the students’ cursing and bad behavior.

The city’s gun violence epidemic has only strengthened her resolve. Her nine-year-old son, Musa, was separated from his father during a mass shooting in a West Philly park during an Eid al-Fitr celebration in April and has struggled with loud sounds ever since.

Another reason, Abdullah thought, to keep her kids home. 

“The shooter actually brushed through him when he was running,” said Abdullah, whose children attend Reach Cyber and Commonwealth Charter Academy. “At that moment, it made me realize, I had to teach my kids what to do in a crisis situation.”

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Abdullah is part of a growing number of Black, brown, and low-income Philadelphians turning to cyber charters because they see them as a safe and flexible educational option for their families. Nearly 15,000 of Philadelphia’s more than 197,000 students attended a virtual cyber charter school last year — a 55 percent increase since the 2020-21 school year. 

In fact, Pennsylvania has quietly become the “cyber charter capital of the nation” according to a report from the education advocacy group Children First PA. Nearly 60,000 students statewide were enrolled full time in cyber charters in 2023-24, according data from the Pennsylvania Department of Education. Children First researchers found Pennsylvania enrolled more full-time cyber students than any other state — including ones like California, Texas, and Florida with much larger K-12 student populations. 

Like traditional charter schools, cyber charters are publicly funded but independently run schools approved by the state Department of Education. There are 13 cyber charter schools operating in Pennsylvania, as well as a smaller virtual academy run by the Philadelphia school district for the past decade. School districts across Pennsylvania collectively send those 13 schools an estimated $1 billion a year, including almost $270 million from the Philadelphia school district last fiscal year.

Philadelphia families like Abdullah’s told Chalkbeat they are increasingly choosing virtual schools for the schedule flexibility, smaller class sizes, and safety and bullying concerns at their childrens’ traditional schools. Gun violence fears in particular have driven some of the demand for online options, according to families who spoke with Chalkbeat.

While gun violence overall is down in Philadelphia, 40 percent of gun violence victims this year were younger than 18, according to city data. Though the majority of Philadelphia’s gun violence does not take place on school property, as the Trace recently reported, five Philadelphia schools were among the top 10 nationwide in experiencing shootings near their buildings in the last decade.

But as more families in Philadelphia withdraw from the traditional district in favor of these cyber charter schools, the charter operators have come under fire from public education advocates for failing to improve student performance. The state has acknowledged in its decision letters renewing several cyber schools’ charters that some of the organizations are not performing up to their standards, but has stopped short of revoking their charters.

With cyber charter enrollment rising as traditional district enrollment shrinks, education advocates say the state should be taking a more hands-on approach to ensuring the operators are delivering a quality education – and holding accountable those that don’t.

“These schools are failing to ensure that the kids they bring in are learning and will be able to graduate, ready for a productive career or higher education,” said Susan Spicka, executive director of the public education advocacy group Education Voters PA. “That is a huge problem.”

Related: How for-profit charter schools are selling parents on staying virtual

Remote learning was thrust into the public eye during the pandemic, when school closures shuttered buildings and students across the country learned online. But parents like Shawna Hinnant enrolled their children in cyber charter schools long before COVID.

A resident of the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia — a community that has grappled with a thriving open-air drug market and concentrated gun violence – Hinnant said she didn’t feel comfortable having her kids walk to school on sidewalks littered with discarded needles and other drug paraphernalia.

Additionally, her two sons had experienced bullying at both traditional public schools as well as brick and mortar charter schools.

“That’s why I decided to go with the online school because I felt like it was safer,” said Hinnant.

Hinnant said she was also drawn in by the resources the cyber charter schools offered: Free printers, gift cards to Target for school supplies, and computers.

Many Spanish-speaking Philadelphians are also choosing cyber charters run by Latino-led organizations because of gaps they say persist in the traditional district’s language and cultural services. And Muslim families like Abdullah’s likewise are moving online to incorporate more spiritual, cultural, and religious teachings alongside the traditional curriculum.

“Now that the whole COVID thing has dwindled down a little bit, it’s kind of like, ‘hey, you know what, my kids did really well,’ or ‘I liked having my student at home’ … or ‘I’m not home and I don’t want my child to walk to school.’ It’s a safety issue,” said Lisette Agosto Cintrón, principal at the district-run online school, the Philadelphia Virtual Academy, and a former principal at ASPIRA bilingual cyber charter school in the city.

Related: Communities hit hardest by the pandemic, already struggling, fear an enrollment cliff

Agosto Cintrón said she has also worked with families of students with chronic illnesses or are homebound. Her students also come from households that have been disrupted due to domestic violence, refugee situations, or threats of gun violence against families stemming from “neighborhood beefs.”

“Transiency doesn’t matter in my world,” Agosto Cintrón said. “The school travels with the child.” 

Though families told Chalkbeat they’re mostly happy with the education their children are getting online, cyber charter schools in Pennsylvania have reported lower standardized test scores and graduation rates than all schools statewide. According to a Chalkbeat analysis of 2023 Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA) test score data, 36.8% of cyber charter school students scored proficient or better in English language arts, compared to 53.5% of students statewide, and 13.7% scored proficient or above in math, compared to 33.4% statewide. (Their results are mixed when compared to the Philadelphia school district’s scores — 34.2% proficient or better in English and 20.4% proficient or better in math.) 

Sarah Cordes, an associate professor and education researcher at Temple University, has researched cyber charter high school students and found that they tend to have worse test scores and higher rates of chronic absenteeism than traditional public school students, even when controlling for the differences in student population. Students who enroll in a cyber charter school are 9.5 percentage points less likely to graduate in four years, Cordes found, and are 16.8 percentage points less likely to enroll in a postsecondary institution.

“What really stood out is just how consistently negative the results were, and that it was across populations,” Cordes said. “It didn’t seem to matter if you came from an urban district or a rural district or a suburban district, it seemed pretty equally bad.” Cordes said her results were consistent across race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, “which is unusual in education research.”   

The state has considered cyber charters’ lagging test scores when authorizing or renewing the schools, but, in most cases, has stopped short of revoking their charters.

Take Reach Cyber, the school that Musa and his brother Dawud attend. In July, Pennsylvania Education Secretary Khalid Mumin wrote in a letter to the school that for the past few years “students in all grade levels and all subjects have significantly underperformed on the PSSA and Keystone Exams, specifically when compared with traditional public schools.”

Still, despite these concerns, the education department granted Reach a five-year charter renewal.

The state education department included identical language in the renewal decision letters for PA Distance Learning Charter School and Insight PA Cyber Charter School.

To be sure, test score data comes with complexities. Unstable home situations don’t often create ideal test taking environments, cyber charter operators have said. What’s more, many families who choose cyber charter schools because of their nontraditional outlook on education are more likely to opt-out of standardized testing.

And cyber charter operators argue that students perform better on state tests the longer that they attend the schools, but their student populations tend to move in and out of virtual learning. (Cordes’ analysis, though, didn’t back up that assertion at the high school level.)

Jane Swan, CEO of Reach Cyber, said in an email that “cyber charter school student scores can’t and shouldn’t be compared to brick-and-mortar school scores.” Swan said the school conveys the importance of state tests to families but “many families invoke their right to refuse testing due to philosophical, health, or logistical reasons.” She also noted that students arrive at the school “significantly below grade-level proficiency.”

Parents like Abdullah said they look beyond test scores and overall school performance when choosing cyber charters. 

“I think that with my children, the testing is important, but at the end of the day, character building is important, being responsible is important, being a good neighbor. Community work, that’s important as well,” she said. Abdullah is also an experienced educator herself and is pursuing her doctorate in education online with a focus on student safety and mental health.

Beyond performance, critics of cyber charters accuse them of drawing vital funding away from struggling traditional public schools, since district schools send cyber charters the same per-student tuition it would spend educating a child in one of its classrooms, minus some costs for transportation and facilities. Districts must send this tuition payment for every student who lives in the city but is enrolled in a cyber charter, regardless of whether that child was ever educated by the district.  

Advocates have called foul on the state’s four largest cyber charter schools for using those funds to amass nearly $500 million in real estate, such as office space and parking lots, and more than $20 million on advertising and gift cards. Cyber charter leaders have defended their spending, saying their schools retain physical assets to protect their finances from instability. Furthermore, the operators say they need buildings to house technology infrastructure like servers, office space for school staff, and “family service centers” where parents can get in-person assistance. 

Related: Luring Covid-cautious parents back to school

A bipartisan group of lawmakers in Harrisburg has put forth efforts to reform the way cyber schools are funded and monitored, but the boldest changes haven’t gained much traction. 

The most recent state budget Gov. Josh Shapiro signed in July included $100 million to reimburse school districts for payments they make to cyber charter schools and some alterations to the way special education students are counted and funded. But the wholesale reforms some lawmakers had proposed did not make it into the final budget. 

Calls by local school boards for more oversight cross party lines, according to Lawrence Feinberg, director of the Keystone Center for Charter Change, who has been following the growth of cyber charter schools.

“I know public education is far from perfect, but theoretically, there’s accountability built into it. It seems to me that for 20 some years, accountability has been missing from the cyber charter arena, both fiscally and performance-wise,” Feinberg said.

Despite the drawbacks, parents are still seeking online learning

While advocates fight for more oversight of cyber charters, some families in Philadelphia say they’re not happy with their traditional neighborhood schools and don’t have time to wait for the district to improve. 

Still, for some students, the adjustment to online learning can be hard. 

Starlynne Santiago, 18 and an engineering technology student at Drexel University, said making the switch to a cyber charter was “scary” at first for herself and her brother, Skyler Rodriguez, 12. But she forged close bonds, even over the computer screen.

“Overall, I think the education was the same, and I feel like the connections I had with the teachers were way closer than what I had in-person school,” she said. 

Ultimately, Santiago was able to graduate a year early from Reach Cyber by taking summer classes and working with career coordinators to focus her studies on engineering.

Her brother said it’s been harder for him to make friends in online school, and while he wants to finish middle school virtually, he’s not sure it’s the right fit for him long term.

Related: How four middle schoolers are making it through the pandemic

Musa, active and gregarious, and his mom have different philosophies about his future as well.

Though he loves going to school with his siblings, “once I get to middle school, I would like to go to a real school,” Musa said. “I don’t want to be in middle school and have my whole life be on a laptop. … I like to talk and help others.”

Abdullah said she recognizes her children are outgoing and need friends, socialization, and time outdoors. She said she works hard to tailor their online school experience so that they can travel, meet up with other online families, take field trips, and play with their friends in the neighborhood.

Her goal, she said, is to one day create a space where families like hers can join up, and do online homeschooling together.

Carly Sitrin is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Philadelphia. Contact Carly at csitrin@chalkbeat.org.

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Everybody is trying to find ways to help students catch up after the pandemic. One new data analysis suggests some promising ideas. 

TNTP, a nonprofit based in New York that advocates for improving K-12 education, wanted to identify schools that are the most effective at helping kids recover academically and understand what those schools are doing differently. These are not schools where students post the highest test scores, but schools where kids learn more each school year than students typically do. 

TNTP researchers plunged into a giant pool of data housed at Stanford University that tracked hundreds of millions of students’ scores on state tests at more than half the elementary and middle schools in the nation from 2009 to 2018. The researchers found that at 28,000 of the 51,000 elementary and middle schools in the database, students entered third grade or middle school below grade level. TNTP calculated that the top 5 percent of these start-behind schools – 1,345 of them – were helping students learn at least 1.3 year’s worth of material every year, based on how test scores improved as students progressed from grade to grade. In other words, the students at the top 5 percent of the start-behind schools learned the equivalent of an extra full year or more of math and reading every three years. 

“Growing at this rate allows most students to catch up to grade level during their time in school,” concluded the report, which was released in September 2024.

Previous researchers conducted a similar analysis in 2017 with whole school districts instead of individual schools. In that study, Chicago emerged as the nation’s most effective school district. Like the schools in the 2024 analysis, Chicago didn’t post the highest test scores, but its students were progressing the most each year. 

“There are many schools that are effective at helping students learn, even in high-poverty communities,” said Sean Reardon, a Stanford sociologist who was part of the team that developed the Stanford Education Data Archive. “The TNTP report uses our data to identify some of them and then digs in to understand what makes them particularly effective. This is exactly what we hoped people would do with the data.” 

TNTP did not name all 1,345 schools that beat the odds. But they did describe their overall characteristics (see table). 

TNTP did identify seven of the 1,345 highly effective schools that it selected to study in depth. Only one of the seven schools had a majority Black population, reflecting the fact that Black students are underrepresented at the most effective schools. 

The seven schools ranged widely. Some were large. Some were small. Some were city schools with many Hispanic students. Others were mostly white, rural schools. They used different instructional materials and did a lot of things differently, but TNTP teased out three traits that it thought these schools had in common.  

Seven of the 1,345 schools where students started behind but made large learning gains over a decade from 2009 to 2018

“What we found was not a silver-bullet solution, a perfect curriculum, or a rockstar principal,” the report said. “Instead, these schools shared a commitment to doing three core things well: they create a culture of belonging, deliver consistent grade-level instruction, and build a coherent instructional program.

According to TNTP’s classroom observations, students received good or strong instruction in nine out of 10 classrooms. “Across all classrooms, the steady accumulation of good lessons—not unattainably perfect ones—sets trajectory-changing schools apart,” the report said, contrasting this consistent level of “good” with its earlier observation that most U.S. schools have some good teaching, but there is a lot of variation from one classroom to the next.

In addition to good instruction, TNTP said that students in these seven schools were receiving grade-level content in their English and math classes although most students were behind. Teachers in each school used the same shared curriculum. According to the TNTP report, only about a third of elementary school teachers nationwide say they “mostly use” the curriculum adopted by their school. At Trousdale County Elementary in Tennessee, one of the exemplar schools, 80 percent of teachers said they did. 

While many education advocates are pushing for the adoption of better curriculum as a lever to improve schools, “It’s possible to get trajectory-changing results without a perfect curriculum,” TNTP wrote in its report.

Teachers also had regular, scheduled sessions to collaborate, discuss their instruction, and note what did and did not work.  “Everyone holds the same high expectations and works together to improve,” the report said. 

The schools also gave students extra instruction to fill knowledge gaps and extra practice to solidify their skills. These extra support classes, called “intervention blocks,”  are now commonplace at many low-income schools, but TNTP noted one major difference at the seven schools they studied. The intervention blocks were connected to what students were learning in their main classrooms. That requires school leaders to make sure that interventionists, classroom aides and the main classroom teachers have time to talk and collaborate during the school day. 

These seven schools all had strong principals. Although many of the principals came and left during the decade that TNTP studied, the schools maintained strong results. 

The seven schools also emphasized student-teacher relationships and built a caring community. At Brightwood, a small charter school in Washington, D.C., that serves an immigrant population, staff members try to learn the names of every student and to be collectively responsible for both their academics and well-being. During one staff meeting, teachers wrote more than 250 student names on giant pads of paper. Teachers put check marks by each child they felt like they had a genuine relationship with and then brainstormed ways to reach the students without checks. 

At New Heights Academy Charter School in New York City, each teacher contacts 10 parents a week—by text, email, or phone—and logs the calls in a journal. Teachers don’t just call when something goes wrong. They also reach out to parents to talk about an “A” on a test, academic improvement, or good attendance, the report said. 

It’s always risky to highlight what successful schools are doing because other educators might be tempted to just copy ideas. But TNTP warns that every school is different. What works in one place might not in another. The organization’s advice for schools is to change one practice at a time, perhaps starting with a category that the school is already pretty good at, and improve it. TNTP warns against trying to change too many things at once. 

TNTP’s view is that any school can become a highly effective school, and that there aren’t particular educational philosophies or materials that a school must use to accomplish this rare feat. A lot of it is simply about increasing communication among teachers, between teachers and students, and with families. It’s a bit like weight-loss diets that don’t dictate which foods you can and cannot eat, as long as you eat less and exercise more. It’s the basic principles that matter most.

Contact staff writer Jill Barshay at (212) 678-3595 or barshay@hechingerreport.org.

This story about how to catch up at school was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters. 

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If you live in Arizona, school choice may be coming to your neighborhood soon. As someone who has had more school choice than I know what to do with, I can tell you what may feel like a shocking surprise: Private schools have the power to choose, not parents.

I live in Phoenix, where the nearby town of Paradise Valley is getting ready to offer the privatization movement’s brand of choice to families. The district has indicated that it will likely vote to close four public schools due to insufficient funds. If this happens, other districts will probably follow: The state’s recent universal voucher expansion has predictably accelerated the diversion of money from public to private schools.

Arizona approved use of school choice vouchers, called Empowerment Scholarship Accounts, or ESAs, in 2011 on the promise that they were strictly for children with special needs who were not being adequately served in the public school system. The amount of funds awarded to qualified students was based on a tiered system, according to type of disability.

Related: Arizona gave families public money for private schools. Then private schools raised tuition

Over the years, the state incrementally made more students eligible, until full expansion was finally achieved in 2022. For some students, the amount of voucher money they qualify for is only a few thousand dollars, nowhere near enough to cover tuition at a private school. Often, their parents can’t afford to supplement the balance. However, my son, who is autistic, qualified for enough to cover full tuition.

I took him out of public school in 4th grade. Every school I applied to seemed to have the capability to accommodate his intellectual disability needs but lacked the willingness. Eventually, I found a special education school willing to accept him. It was over an hour from our home, but I hoped for the best. Unfortunately, it ultimately was not a good fit.

I then thought Catholic schools would welcome my son, but none of them did. One Catholic school principal who did admit him quickly rescinded the offer after a teacher objected to having him in her class.

The long list of general, special-ed, Catholic and charter schools that turned my son away indicate how little choice actually exists, despite the marketing of ESA proponents.

There was a two-year period where I gave up and he was home without social opportunities. I was not able to homeschool, so a reading tutor and his iPad became his only access to education.

I then tried to enroll him in private schools for students with disabilities.

These schools were almost always located in former office suites in strip malls with no outdoor access. My son’s current school shares space with a dialysis center in a medical building, while a former school was located in a small second-floor suite in a Target plaza.

Once a private school admits your child, they can rescind admission without cause. Private schools are at leisure to act as virtual dictatorships, and special-ed schools in particular are notorious for keeping parents at a distance.

My son’s current school grew tired of my requests for reasonable communication about his school day or even his general progress and made his continued enrollment subject to my acceptance of their decision not to speak to me at all.

With few other choices, I acquiesced to the school’s ultimatum and am keeping my son there while I search for a better option once again — even as he gets closer to aging out of K-12 education. As of now, he has nowhere else to go. There has never been a moment when I couldn’t accept my son for who he is; why can’t private schools do the same — especially those that market themselves to the special needs demographic?

Education is a human right, and public schools, open to all, are the guardians of this right. What privatizers call choice does not really exist.

As ESAs and private schools siphon off money and public schools start closing down, parents will be horrified to discover that nothing can defeat the closely held advantages of a private system designed to keep them out, and no amount of vouchers will make a difference.

When all the public schools are closed, and you can’t get a private school to accept your child, what will you do?

Related: School choice had a big moment in the pandemic. But is it what parents want for the long run?

Vouchers gave my son social opportunities that he wouldn’t have had otherwise, along with tutors to help mitigate private education deficits. But he would rather attend a local school, with kids in his neighborhood, or at least the kind of private school ESA marketing promised him.

I hope that as more families experience the exclusion and powerlessness that we have lived with, they’ll realize that a balance between public and private is necessary and an excess of either at the expense of the other is disastrous.

Every day on our way to my son’s special education school, we drive by an elegant, sprawling private school campus. He waves at the children and pretends they’re his friends. He still asks to go there.

Pam Lang is a writer and graduate student at ASU pursuing master’s degrees in comparative literature and social work, and an advocate for public education and healthcare equality.

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

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CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Lizette Valles is a former teacher and librarian who runs a Los Angeles school that she believes represents a promising alternative to U.S. public education.

It has three fourth-grade students, including her son, and just one other teacher: her husband. There’s no building, so they share space in a warehouse with a race car garage and plant nursery – when students aren’t out hiking, fishing or cycling.

“We have ripped the doors off the classroom. We learn anywhere, anytime,” Valles told me, noting that she is looking for a new location so she can recruit more students for the so-called microschool. Interest is growing in these small, independently run  “learning pods,” which are often operated by parents and enroll an estimated 1.2 to 2.1 million U.S. students.

Valles was among the enthusiastic would-be innovators and entrepreneurs I met at least week’s Harvard Kennedy School conference, Emerging School Models: Moving From Alternative to Mainstream. The event often felt like a pep rally for options beyond traditional school districts, where enrollment fell in the pandemic and is expected to drop another five percent by 2031.

I came to learn more about some of these alternatives at a time when parents and politicians are increasingly paying attention to homeschooling and other public school substitutes, accompanied by a rise in new networks, foundations and companies like Prenda and funds like Vela that provide growing financial and logistical support.

These options include microschools like Valles’ Ellemercito Academy, homeschooling co-ops like Engaged Detroit, “classical” options such as Haven School (focused on nature) in Colorado and Bridges Virtual Academy in Wisconsin, among others that spoke about their work.

Some are nascent and small, and they don’t necessarily have much in common. It seemed a stretch to see them as becoming “mainstream” — especially because scant evidence exists of their effectiveness in serving students, or even of how many students they enroll. And most American children — close to 50 million — remain enrolled in traditional public schools.

Still, a growing number of states – more than a dozen this year – have either expanded or started voucher programs that steer taxpayer money to these new options, which can include private and religious schools. Late last month, North Carolina became the latest state to pass a universal voucher program. 

It’s not always clear, however, that this money goes directly to schools and parents: In Arizona, millions of dollars also went to businesses and non-school spending, a recent investigation found. The Network for Public Education, an advocacy group, last month published an interactive feature chronicling “voucher scams.”

And choice efforts are faltering in some parts of the country like Texas, due in large part to public support for local school systems, although Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott has called a special session later this month where lawmakers are expected to focus on school choice.

There’s also been plenty of pushback: North Carolina’s Democratic Governor Roy Cooper has declared “an emergency for public education” in the state because of diminishing funding for it, along with the legislative push for vouchers. During a virtual panel Thursday sponsored by Parents for Public Schools, Cooper insisted that “the majority of people of North Carolina and across this country still support our public schools,” while calling complaints over so-called culture wars and indoctrination of students “nonsense.”

“We have seen an erosion [of support] and a legislature that has not only underfunded our public schools but chosen to essentially choke the life out of them,” Cooper said. “We cannot give up on public education even though some government leaders have.”

Related: School choice had a big moment in the pandemic but is it what parents want for the long run?

Speakers at last week’s conference, sponsored by Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, offered no such dissenting views. They repeatedly urged the audience to “join the [school choice] movement,” one that Valles sees herself as part of, in her position as the California field coordinator for the National Microschooling Center, a support network launched with start-up funding from the Stand Together Trust.

An email sent to participants afterward called the conference “an engaging and motivating event for proponents of educational choice,” one reason why Michigan State University professor Joshua Cowen, who was not invited, dubbed it a “political operation disguised as an academic conference.”

“It’s not a movement,” he said. “It’s a coup, with the idea to overthrow existing institutional structures.”

I spoke to Cowen because he’s spent years researching choice options such as vouchers, and has concluded they do more harm than good and often lead to worse outcomes for vulnerable children. He sees the latest push as a way to create a product – then build up a demand for it.

“Instead of focusing on how to improve existing supply (public schools) what they’ve done is start from the premise that taking down public schools is the first, necessary condition,” Cowen told me. “Think about how this works with advertising in our daily lives: microschools, the solution you never knew you needed!”

Related: After decades of studying vouchers, I’m now firmly opposed to them

Vouchers have meanwhile run into snags: In Florida, they often don’t cover the full cost of private school and many parents have had trouble finding space in the schools their children need or want. Yet demand for the vouchers is such that Florida parents and schools are having trouble accessing them.

At Harvard, the state’s education commissioner, Manny Diaz Jr., chalked up any snags to “growing pains,” while bashing the state’s public school system as “an employment program” for teachers and other staff members.  When asked about evidence of school choice effectiveness, Diaz said he believes “the ultimate arbiter is the parent themselves.”

“To me, the answer is a system that is based on the needs of the students and families. If we do that, we’ll have a better society and a better structure.”

Robert Enlow, president and CEO of the advocacy group EdChoice

Conference goers also heard from (and cheered) keynote speaker Republican Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt, who said he hoped a lawsuit over the planned opening of the nation’s first religious charter school in his state would ultimately land before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Stitt called an Oklahoma state board’s approval – one being challenged by parents, clergy and education activists – a “win-win for religious and education freedom,” and repeated a popular stock line adopted by right-leaning politicians: “No parent wants to hand their kids over to a one-sized fits all education.”

Other familiar phrases spoken throughout the conference included calls for freeing students from failing schools, funding students instead of systems, supporting parent and family rights and fighting so-called “woke indoctrination.”

Related: School choice had a big moment in the pandemic but is it what parents want for the long run?

Much of what I heard dovetailed with conclusions in Cara Fitzpatrick’s exhaustively researched new book, “The Death of Public Schools:  How Conservatives Won the War Over Education in America.” In it she notes that conservatives are aiming to both “radically redefine public education in America,” and “use public dollars to pay for just about any educational option a family might envision.”

Dissent over choice options comes at a time of much hand-wringing in both political parties over how to improve lagging test scores and the country’s overall education performance. During a conversation with Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute this week, former U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan lamented a lack of bipartisan support for education initiatives, while repeating his oft-proclaimed dismay for a “one-size fits all” approach.

Duncan, who served under President Obama, also acknowledged that many parents consistently say they like their children’s schools, a conclusion supported by recent polls.

“It’s not a movement. It’s a coup, with the idea to overthrow existing institutional structures.”

Joshua Cowen, Professor, Michigan State University

Beyond the underlying politics, conference speakers pushed for removing obstacles to expanding microschools, by finding physical spaces for the schools and getting around what they described as a frustrating maze of regulations that prevents them from serving more children.

Bernita Bradley spoke passionately about ways she’s helping parents via Engaged Detroit, which offers support and coaching for homeschooling parents. “Traditional education has not worked for our children,” Bradley said, calling it “punitive for Black students.”

Choice programs “have to be based on what parents want,” said speaker Robert C. Enlow, president and CEO of the advocacy group EdChoice. “To me, the answer is a system that is based on the needs of the students and families. If we do that, we’ll have a better society and a better structure.”

Valles, meanwhile, envisions a new building with room for 10 students who, in addition to learning math and reading skills, might spend a day hiking, fishing, landscape painting or simply lying on the ground listening to the sounds of nature.

“A lot of people want this for their children,” Valles told me. “Microschooling offers a different pathway. …The questions it asks have more to do with what brings your child joy, peace, excitement and creativity, rather than rigidity, regurgitation and standardization.”

This story on microschools 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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After years of disappointing, confusing and uneven results, charter schools are generally getting better at educating students. These schools, which are publicly financed but privately run, still have shortcomings and a large subset of them fail students, particularly those with disabilities. But the latest national study from a Stanford University research group calculates that students, on average, learned more at charter schools between the years of 2014 and 2019 than similar students did at their traditional local public schools. The researchers matched charter school students with a “virtual twin”–  a composite student who is otherwise similar to the charter school student but attended traditional public schools –  and compared academic progress between the two. 

“We find that this improvement is because schools are getting better, not because newer, better schools are opening,” said Margaret Raymond, director of Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), which released its third national charter school study in June 2023. “We see that existing schools are getting better over time and that’s a hugely positive story.”

Hundreds of charter schools were not only outperforming traditional public schools, but had also lifted the achievement of Black and Hispanic students so much that they were learning as much in math and reading as white students and sometimes more, the study found. Racial gaps in learning – a stubborn problem in education – had been eliminated at these charters, which the researchers dubbed “gap busters.” Those findings may provide the best justification for establishing charters, which were intended to be laboratories of experimentation to improve public education.

Starting in the “pits”

The outlook for charter schools didn’t seem nearly this rosy back in 2009, when Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) released its first national charter school study. It was a time of bipartisan support for charter schools and rapid charter school expansion with more than 4,700 charter schools educating over 1.4 million students across 40 states. But CREDO found that the academic results for charter school students were far worse than at traditional public schools. 

Raymond, the director of CREDO, recalls the moment in less than scientific terms. “It was the pits,” she said and charter school advocates were “pissed.” 

Improvement over time: annual academic growth of charter school students compared with traditional public school students across three national studies

Four years later in 2013, as the number of charter schools swelled to 6,000 students and educated 2.3 million students, there were signs of improvement. CREDO’s second study documented that reading achievement at charters flipped from negative to positive territory. Math scores improved a lot too, but they were still slightly lower than at traditional public schools.

Though trends were heading in a positive direction, it was unclear whether the progress would continue. “In many ways, we’ve been holding our breath for the last 10 years,” said Raymond. 

Favored by Black and Hispanic families

According to the latest available data from the 2020-21 school year, there are now 7,800 charters serving 3.7 million students. That’s a big increase, but still a small number compared to the 45 million children who attend traditional public schools. 

Disadvantaged children and children of color are more likely to attend charters. Sixty percent of charter school students are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced price lunch. More than a third of charter school students are Hispanic and a quarter are Black, compared with their 26 percent and 14 percent shares of the youth population, respectively. Fewer than 30 percent of charter school students are white. 

Black and Hispanic students appear to be doing much better at charter schools, on average, than at traditional public schools. For example, a typical Black student learned the equivalent of 40 more days worth of reading at a charter school in a year, according to the third CREDO study. White students, by contrast, tended to learn no more at charter schools; their annual reading gains were the same at traditional schools and their annual math gains were significantly weaker than at traditional schools.

Despite the academic gains for Black students at charter schools, the achievement gap between Black and white students remains large. A typical Black student student learned two thirds as much in reading as a typical white student did during a school year. In traditional public schools, by comparison, Black students learned only half as much as their white peers in the subject. 

Researchers found more than 400 charter schools out of the 6800 they analyzed that managed to avoid these achievement gaps, but they declined to identify them by name. “We have a policy that we don’t name schools because we would then be potentially opening them up to very rapid consequences, both positive and negative,” said Raymond. “We don’t want to be market makers. That’s not our job.”

In the appendix to the report, CREDO identifies the names of charter management organizations (CMOs), charter school chains running multiple schools, that have succeeded in “gap busting.” They include most of the KIPP network schools, Success Academy and the Rocketship schools. 

Percentage of all public school students enrolled in public charter schools, by state: Fall 2021

Enrollment in charter schools varies regionally. More than 10 percent of all public school students attend them in California, Arizona, Utah, Nevada and Colorado. Meanwhile, there are no charter schools in the upper midwest states of Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota.

Charter schools are also primarily an urban phenomenon. More than 85 percent of charter school students are in cities and suburbs. Less than 15  percent of charter schools students are in rural areas or small towns. Los Angeles is the U.S. city with the most charter school students with over 150,000. In San Antonio, Texas, charters educate more than half of the city’s students.

No clear advice for schools

On average, students attending charter schools learned the equivalent of an extra 16 days of reading, compared to what similar students learned in 180 days in a traditional public school, and an extra six days in math. Though a few extra days worth of learning may not sound impressive, Raymond noted that this incremental progress bucks the educational stagnation and declines seen in the rest of the nation during these years, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which measures the reading and math levels of fourth and eighth graders across the country and is viewed as a reliable yardstick of academic achievement.

Urban charter schools had the best results with nearly 30 extra days of growth in reading and math, compared to students in traditional public schools. Students in rural charter schools were not doing well in math; they tended to lag behind public school peers by 10 days of learning in this subject. 

One frustrating upshot to this body of research is how little concrete advice there is in it for schools. Raymond and her colleagues primarily focused on outcomes and didn’t look under the hood to understand what curriculum and other choices schools are making to get such great results. 

“We have investigated whether there’s anything common among the schools that do really, really well and the answer is there isn’t,” said Raymond. “From a policymaker standpoint, that’s sort of a bummer. But it also means that any school can do this. You don’t have to be a particular flavor, or size or shape in order to be successful. There’s lots of pathways to success.”

Some exemplary schools had a “no excuses” strict discipline approach to education. Others had a more lenient culture. Some schools changed their approach during the study period and were able to maintain strong academic performance. 

From Raymond’s vantage point, the reason for many charters’ success lies in the combination of flexibility and accountability. Charter schools are freed from many regulations, which allow them, for example, to schedule longer school days and hold classes on weekends. New York City is now requiring elementary schools to choose from three different reading curriculums; charters are exempt. But, unlike traditional public schools, charter schools have to report on student progress every few years – the frequency varies by state and by charter authorizer  – in order to renew their charters. The threat of closure looms if results are not good. 

“It’s that balance of go out, try new things, build new ideas, test them out, tweak them, tinker, do whatever,” Raymond said. “And know that at some point, you’re going to have to be seriously reviewed for renewal.”

Online charters “devastating” for kids

Still, many charter schools of poor quality continue to operate. The worst results were posted by online charter schools, also known as virtual schools, which enroll six percent of the nation’s 3.7 million charter school students. Students at these schools learned the equivalent of 58 fewer days in reading and 124 fewer days in math than their public school peers. That’s like missing one third of the school year in reading and two thirds of the school year in math.

“The numbers are just really devastating for kids,” said Raymond. 

Schools run by charter management organizations [CMOs], the groups that operate multiple schools, generally offered a better education than single, stand-alone charter schools. But a quarter of the CMO schools were still underperforming traditional public schools.  “It was a surprise to us that there are still CMOs out there that are replicating even though they’re not doing well by kids,” she said, blaming authorizers for not cracking down on poor performance.

(The report’s appendix also lists CMOs where students aren’t doing well, as measured by student test scores, and they include several well-known charter school chains that have received positive press.)

Backsliding in Washington D.C. and New Orleans

Test scores at some previously strong charter schools declined. The largest decreases in reading and math between the second study in 2013 and the third study in 2023 were documented in Louisiana and Washington, D.C.  After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, New Orleans converted nearly all of its public schools to charter schools and its early successes were viewed as proof of the charter school concept. That strength has not persisted.

Children with disabilities are another area of “real concern,” Raymond said. They are not getting as good an education at charter schools as they are in traditional schools.

Changes in methodology

Raymond said that the third study covers over 90 percent of the nation’s charter school students, though it captures only 31 states and the District of Columbia. Some states, such as Alabama, had too few charter schools to make negotiating a data sharing agreement worthwhile. Georgia, which does have a substantial number of charter schools, declined to participate in the third study.

Some criticize the methodology used in the Stanford studies. Critics point out that charter schools cream the best students and counsel out difficult students; it might not be fair to compare charter students to those left behind in the public schools, even if they have similar demographic characteristics and initial test scores. High-achieving children from devoted families who opted for charter schools might have done just as well or better in their neighborhood schools. 

The Stanford researchers still stand by their approach, though they have refined how they match student test scores between charter and traditional public schools. In this third study, they refuted the perception that “better” students go to charter schools. They found the opposite in 17 states, where considerably lower achieving students enrolled in charter schools. Those “left behind” in traditional district schools were generally much higher achieving. 

Other researchers have taken a different analytical approach, studying lotteries for charter schools that have more applicants than seats available. Presumably all the families who enter the lottery are educationally ambitious and it’s a fairer comparison between those who win and lose seats. In many of these studies, students in charter schools outperform, too.

“Our method comes really, really close to what they find,” said Raymond. “No single study, no triplets of studies are going to be definitive. It takes all of this layering of evidence for a fairly long period of time.” 

This story about a national charter school study was written by Jill Barshay and produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Proof Points and other Hechinger newsletters. 

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With the spring semester upon us, districts across the nation are still struggling with teacher shortages. In New Jersey, it’s a crisis that is making it harder to hire and retain Black and Latino teachers.

Teacher shortages continue to disproportionately affect historically underserved communities. Black educators are leaving the profession in high numbers, and this reality harms an often vulnerable school population. Representation matters, and education is starving for it.

While districts scramble to fill vacancies, schools must do a better job not only hiring diverse teachers, but also keeping them on board. When children have exposure to school leaders from a variety of cultures, they do better both in K-12 classrooms and in our communities.

Related: Schools can’t afford to lose any more Black male educators

Study after study shows that student outcomes are affected by the existence of a demographic match between teachers and students. Black and Latino students perform better when they have at least one teacher who is the same race. A “disadvantaged” Black male’s exposure to at least one Black teacher in elementary school reduces his probability of dropping out of high school by nearly 40 percent.

I know firsthand what racial representation on campus can do for a young student. I had a single mother, and my Black male teachers stood in as father figures for me.

When children have exposure to school leaders from a variety of cultures, they demonstrate better outcomes both in K-12 classrooms and in our communities.

These adults connected with me culturally. They knew what it was like to grow up poor in the inner city. They spoke from experience, with a level of explicitness that forced me to listen when they shared advice about what to look for in friends and assured me that I would belong in college.

Their words were among the significant factors that drove me to attend college, and why I chose education as my major. I was mentored, educated and held accountable by Black males who had persevered in college and graduated. My relationships with them changed my life and shaped who I became as an adult.

That’s why at College Achieve Public Schools (CAPS) in New Jersey, where I’m now the chief academic officer and executive director of College Achieve Paterson, we’ve made it our mission to hire — and retain — teachers who represent the diversity of our students. We serve mostly Black and Latino students who fall below the poverty line, and 70 percent of the educators at CAPS Paterson identify as Black or Latino.

This type of representation isn’t the norm in New Jersey, where 6.6 percent of teachers are Black and 9.3 percent are Latino, while 15 percent of students are Black and 31 percent Latino. The discrepancy is magnified in my hometown of Paterson, where more than a quarter of the general population identifies as Black and more than 60 percent as Latino.

Related: The culture wars are driving teachers from the classroom. Two campaigns are trying to help

While at College Achieve we don’t have all the answers, we’ve seen how a representative teaching staff positively affects our students and our school community. Our academic outcomes are improving — even through the pandemic — and our students are outperforming their peers in neighboring schools in every grade level in both math and English Language Arts.

Students can envision their own paths to success through their teachers’ journeys. Here’s how we hire, and retain, teachers who reflect the diversity of our students.

First, we partner with nearby universities to hire qualified Black and Latino college students as substitute teachers and pair them with experienced school staff for mentoring.

Once they earn their bachelor’s degrees, these substitutes can earn full teaching certificates through the state’s alternate teacher pathway and return to College Achieve. Since 2018, we’ve hired 18 of these educators into full teaching positions.

Second, we encourage and facilitate a more fulfilling and innovative approach to teaching. Our teachers motivate our students, who have enormous potential but limited resources, to think critically rather than just look for the “right” answer. Our low student-to-teacher ratio allows us to provide individualized attention, including for students who are English learners or academically at-risk or have disabilities. This approach leads to teacher retention.

Finally, we cultivate an inclusive staff culture, in which teachers not only feel comfortable enough to stay, but confident enough to move up and grow their careers. We help teachers understand what it means to be anti-racist and how to communicate these practices with our students.

More than academics, it’s about sharing lived experiences. Of course, it wasn’t only Black male teachers who influenced my life. Students need diverse teachers. But when I walk into a classroom and share my story, it resonates with our students.

It ignites what’s possible, and shows our students what can happen when they believe in themselves. By replicating the CAPS model, we can ensure that teachers really connect with students and empower our next generation of leaders.

Gemar Mills is chief academic officer of College Achieve Public Schools (CAPS) in New Jersey and executive director of CAPS Paterson.

This story about diverse teachers 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.

The post OPINION: Black male teachers were my father figures. They changed my life, and we need more of them 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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In recent years, nearly half of all states have created publicly funded private K-12 tuition plans, collectively known as school vouchers.

This summer, advocates of these plans are pushing to expand their reach, boosted by the Supreme Court’s ruling in Carson v. Makin that states permitting vouchers may not exclude religious schools.

Arizona just expanded its already large voucher program; in Michigan, former U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and allies have proposed a voucher scheme modeled on plans elsewhere. In June, GOP supporters in Congress reintroduced legislation to create federal funding for voucher programs.

Vouchers are dangerous to American education. They promise an all-too-simple solution to tough problems like unequal access to high-quality schools, segregation and even school safety. In small doses, years ago, vouchers seemed like they might work, but as more states have created more and larger voucher programs, experts like me have learned enough to say that these programs on balance can severely hinder academic growth — especially for vulnerable kids.

I am an education policy professor who has spent almost two decades studying programs like these, and trying to follow the data where it leads. I started this research cautiously optimistic that vouchers could help.

But in 2022 the evidence is just too stark to justify the use of public money to fund private tuition. Particularly when other choice options like charter schools and inter-district enrollment are available to families and have a better track record. 

There’s also a moral case to be made against voucher programs. They promise low-income families solutions to academic inequality, but what they deliver is often little more than religious indoctrination to go alongside academic outcomes that are worse than before.  

Here’s how I know. From 2005 to 2010, I was part of an official evaluation of a voucher plan called the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, or MPCP, in Wisconsin. “Official” because it was required by state law, since back then even voucher advocates agreed that lawmakers and parents alike needed to know how these programs were doing.

Related: Supreme Court ruling brings an altered legal landscape for school choice

Our evaluation tracked more than 2,500 voucher kids alongside 2,500 carefully matched public school kids. After five years, we found very little difference on test scores between the two groups.

We did see some small positive results for graduation rates, and we did learn that when No Child Left Behind-style accountability was required of voucher schools, their results got better. But in a separate study we also saw low-income families as well as Black students returning to Milwaukee’s public schools — and doing much better.

Vouchers fail to deliver for the kids who are often most in need.

The end of the Milwaukee evaluation coincided almost exactly with the circulation of a report showing shockingly bad early test score results for students in the Louisiana voucher program in the years following Hurricane Katrina.

Over time, those poor test score results for vouchers held up, and were replicated by other studies.

Vouchers are dangerous to American education. They promise an all-too-simple solution to tough problems like unequal access to high-quality schools, segregation and even school safety.

Too coincidently, a group of advocates known previously for supporting test scores in standards and accountability started pushing parental satisfaction, school safety, character and “grit” — seemingly anything to move the goalposts away from academic outcomes, which had had been disastrous under the voucher program in Louisiana.

Now, it’s true that as parents we want more for our kids than the reading, math and science skills we can measure on tests. And those of us who teach for a living want to give our students more, too. But not at a cost of catastrophic academic results. Especially not for kids struggling in school to begin with.

Today we know that those bad Louisiana academic outcomes were no fluke, and indeed were beginning to appear in places like Indiana and Ohio.

All of these results have a straightforward explanation: vouchers do not work on the large scale pushed for by advocates today. While small, early pilot voucher programs showed at least modest positive results, expansions statewide have been awful for students. That’s because there aren’t enough decent private schools to serve at-risk kids.  

Many of the private schools that clamor to take voucher kids — think about the market here — are desperate for enrollment. They promise what amounts to the wide world for low-income kids. I’ve walked through hallways and seen signs promising an education of “Tradition! Discipline! Achievement!” Sometimes I’ll see a word about Christian faith and character.

But these student-desperate private schools too often fail to deliver. 

Related: COLUMN: Defund the private schools

Finally, we need to talk about money. Not public subsidies, which are inherent to vouchers, but private influence. My work has been funded by the Walton Family Foundation, for example, which has acknowledged ties to school choice reform. I believe that funding had no effect on any analysis of mine, but disclosure is always warranted.

Many pro-voucher studies have disclosed private funding— not just from Walton but, more to the point today, from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. 

In addition to funding research, the Bradley Foundation has given at least $31 million to political advocacy on behalf of vouchers. That’s like ExxonMobil or Shell funding studies that say fossil fuels are good for the environment.

This all matters because, with very few exceptions, every single study that has shown something encouraging about vouchers has been funded by these groups or their allies.  

Today those voucher funders are also funding conservative state legislative races and promotion of the Big Lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 election.

That doesn’t make positive voucher studies wrong exactly, but it further diminishes the extent to which we can take them seriously.

The bottom line is that the research case for vouchers doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, while the research case against them has been flashing warning lights for almost a decade.

It’s more than the research though. We’re talking about kids’ lives. The Covid pandemic has disrupted learning everywhere, especially for kids already struggling in school.

Advocates are re-packaging vouchers as a solution to pandemic-related learning loss, while all but insisting that low-income parents ignore the learning loss caused by vouchers themselves.

The stakes are too high, and we already know too much to believe them.

Joshua Cowen is a professor of Education Policy at Michigan State University. He also was the founding director and co-director of the Education Policy Innovation Collaborative (EPIC) from 2016 to 2020. Twitter: @joshcowenMSU

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 Hechinger’s newsletter.

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When sports practices were abruptly canceled at his school on March 12, 2020, Michael Liao, then 17, started to worry how much the pandemic would affect his school – and particularly his upcoming theater performance. The next morning, he woke to an email announcing that in-person classes would be canceled for the foreseeable future.

By mid-April, the world had changed.

Jaden Huynh, then 16 and a sophomore at Arvada West High School in a suburb northwest of Denver, circled the dinner table plating goi — a Vietnamese salad — and spring rolls for her family’s Easter dinner and silently counted all the empty seats for cousins and extended relatives.

Colorado’s lockdown had been in place for months when Michael’s classmate, Mana Setayesh, also 17 at the time and a rising senior at Peak to Peak Charter School in Lafayette, sat stunned when her doctor told her a high school swimming star had come down with Covid-19 and could no longer attend college.

All three planned to graduate at the end of the 2020-21 school year. But as spring turned to summer and the pandemic raged, unabated, each quietly realized their senior year could end far differently than they ever expected. The months of disruption continued for Michael, Jaden, Mana and the other 3.7 million teenagers preparing for a triumphant final year of high school. And it gradually became clear to all of them: The timing of this global pandemic mattered.

“You don’t get a second chance at 12th grade,” Michael said. “This is it. This is the hand we were dealt.”

Stuck at home, these students saw their future threatened by an unpredictable and deadly virus that upended the economy and possibly their hopes for college. They watched as the police murder of an unarmed Black man reignited the country’s fight for racial and social justice. And they lived through perhaps the most divisive presidential battle in American history, culminating in rioters storming the Capitol in Washington, D.C. This chaotic year is now the foundation for these young people’s transition to adulthood.

Fall

In late October, as a cold front plunged Denver into near-freezing temperatures, Jaden walked through Arvada West on one of the two days each week she attended class in person as part of the school’s hybrid schedule.

Public health officials had opened an investigation into her school for a Covid-19 outbreak just days earlier, but the hybrid schedule remained, offering Jaden the chance to meet with her English teacher for help with an essay. But the conversation soon turned, as it often did with this teacher, to Jaden’s hope of to graduating early. The teenager left the classroom feeling her teacher was “super against” her plans.

“Graduating early during a pandemic is going to be incredibly difficult,” Jaden said. “It threw a huge fork into my plans.”

3.7 million teenagers were set to graduate from high school in spring 2021

She had just applied for a full-ride scholarship that she hoped would start her on the long path to becoming a neurosurgeon. The scholarship, from the Boettcher Foundation, would pay her way to one of 16 four-year universities in Colorado, something her family could never afford without taking on debt. (She previously wanted to specialize in trauma surgery but eventually decided to avoid “the terrible rates of PTSD” in that field and instead learn how to cut into people’s brains.)

“I’ve always been obsessed with the brain,” said Jaden.

Jaden bristled at the suggestion that she reconsider her early graduation goal. She was ready to start her adult life, one she hoped would allow her to support her family. Her father lost work during the pandemic, putting the family of 14 back on food stamps and Medicaid. Jaden is the third oldest in her family and dotes on her many younger siblings, some of whom are adopted.

Related: Pandemic reduces number of high school students taking dual enrollment courses

But learning from home was hard and her slipping grades threatened her plans.

“I set deadlines for myself, but it’s hard with how many people I live with,” Jaden said in early November. “You can’t ask teachers for a later due date. They’re slammed too.”

“I’m so tired of historical things happening.”

Michael Liao

She had enrolled in nine classes to earn all the necessary credits to graduate by May. Even with a personal hotspot from the school, Jaden grew frustrated with spotty Wi-Fi during remote classes. A chemistry teacher warned that missing Zoom classes, for any reason, would result in missing credit. Meeting these requirements became even harder isolated from the supports she used to rely on. Jaden, who identifies as Hispanic, Indigenous and Vietnamese, especially missed her mentors — including a favorite teacher who quit and moved across the country mid-year and the school counselor who had been available for drop-in meetings on campus before the pandemic.

Across the U.S., learning loss during the pandemic hit children living in poverty and students of color particularly hard. Early data suggested about a third of low-income, Black and Hispanic students did not regularly log into online instruction. But despite her own challenges with remote learning, Jaden was not ready to give up.

“When I commit to something, I commit, but I’m also bound to fail at times,” she said. On her college essays, she underscored the value of resilience. One began: “I’m really good at failing.”

“It was supposed to be a hook,” she explained. Rebounding from small failures, she believed, would lead to long-term success, no matter the hurdles in her way. “I really have to kick up and dig in and dig deep if I really want this,” she said.

About 20 minutes away, in Boulder, Mana was also thinking about college.

She had entered Peak to Peak, a college prep program, as a sixth grader and never doubted her plans to apply to top tier schools after graduation. But from her bedroom — decorated with new art she painted during lockdown and a puzzle poster of the periodic table of elements — Mana began rethinking her timing once she heard from friends in the Class of 2020.

“Your whole life builds up to this point, and then it’s just nonexistent.”

Mana Setayesh

They shared horror stories of dorm life during a pandemic. One remained stuck in her room alone, with only three other people on the same floor and classes completely online. Prepackaged food was delivered to another friend in a similar set up.

“They’re basically paying money to sit in a tiny square room, not allowed to come out and no one to talk to,” Mana said. “Wouldn’t it be better to stay at home with my family?”

Related: Opening the doors to elite public schools

Mana also refined her baking skills — she tested recipes from Iran, the country her parents had emigrated from — watched movies outdoors with friends and spent time on her bed scrolling through news reports about the record number of applications to, and record low acceptance rates at, elite colleges. The pandemic also prompted many incoming freshmen to delay their enrollment for a year; many universities stopped requiring the ACT or SAT for admission.

“You don’t want to get your hopes up, especially this year,” Mana said. After years of hard work aimed at being academically prepared for a school like Stanford University, her first choice, it suddenly felt like “there was just no way I was getting in.”

She knew she’d go to college somewhere. “I just started wondering what that would look like,” she said. “Would I enjoy freshman year? Should I defer it?”

Michael, the oldest son of Chinese immigrants, was also busy with college and scholarship applications. He debated whether to prioritize liberal arts schools, where he could major in the humanities, or more research-focused universities, which his dad preferred. At least the applications offered a distraction from what he described as the “collective national trauma” of the ongoing pandemic.

Of the 56 schools in the Boulder Valley School District, Peak to Peak, where he and Mana were enrolled, was the only one to remain fully remote for most grades last fall. Michael tried to find humor and happiness in the absurdity of it all. Of PE on Zoom — “Oh, cool, I get to watch myself work out now.” Of teachers’ (animal) pet cameos — “A shot of dopamine.”

Michael sat alone in his room one day in October and recorded a violin piece. “Ugh, this is terrible,” he thought as he submitted the clip. The final performance — clipped together by his teacher from student submissions — made him feel better.

“The comfort I took in helping to create a small ensemble piece, regardless of how terrible it was performed, was not insignificant,” Michael said. (Of his own contribution — “I’m not as bad as I thought.”)

He craved playing with others in real time though. During a second quarter break, the teacher offered optional Zoom sessions on Fridays, so students wouldn’t get rusty. Michael was the only one to show.

“This is not what anyone asked for, but we’re still here, and we’re all working to make sure it’s as pain free as it can be,” he said, determined at that point in the fall to maintain his optimism. “Seeing the kind of grace that teachers offer to students, it’s really heartening. It allows me to appreciate they’re in this too.”

Related: Nation’s skeletal school mental health network will be severely tested

But as winter came on, Michael began to feel lonely and had a harder time staying optimistic. In a national poll, nearly three-quarters of the more than 2,400 high schoolers surveyed reported a poor or declining sense of mental health, with disproportionately high numbers of female and Hispanic students and students experiencing food insecurity reporting such problems. More than a year into the pandemic, the Children’s Hospital Colorado eventually declared a pediatric mental health state of emergency, as youth behavioral visits to the medical system’s emergency rooms increased more than 70 percent over early 2019.

Winter

Mana struggled with health issues of her own.

Back in December 2019, as news first started trickling in from China about a new highly infectious virus, Mana had awoken with sudden hearing loss in her left ear — her doctors were unable to explain why.

Her mother was determined to help her find a solution. She consulted experts in the United States, at the Mayo Clinic and Dartmouth University, and expanded her search for information to specialists in Iran and the United Kingdom. None of the experts were forthcoming. After a particularly disappointing appointment — her mom burst into tears of frustration, Mana burst into laughter from exhaustion — the pair visited a fortune teller to lift their spirits. Surrounded by incense smoke and Buddhist statues, the medium told the teenager to expect good news on Dec. 13, 2020 (although she failed to predict the pandemic).

“I just want to get out, not in a bad way. I just need to explore and make up for lost time.”

Mana Setayesh

Even with all the distractions — the dramatic presidential election, a third wave of Covid cases after Thanksgiving — the date stayed in Mana’s mind throughout the winter. And two days before Dec. 13, in between errands she was running for her quarantined grandmother, an email arrived from Stanford University.

It was a rejection letter.

She did get some good news on Dec. 13 though. Her hearing had recovered to 60 percent, the most it likely would. Sitting with the fortune teller nearly a year earlier, it never crossed her mind that the “good news” predicted could be merely a partial recovery of her hearing. But she was OK with it.

Related: ‘Right now is not my time’: How Covid dimmed college prospects for students who need help most

“With college, I have no gut feeling of where I’m going,” she said a few days later. But the hearing issue, she added, made her feel less pressured about the rejection. “Being in the present and being isolated made me realize that Stanford was everyone else’s dream for me … I knew this wasn’t meant for me, but I had no idea what else was. That’s pretty scary.”

Still, at the moment she received the rejection note, her whole future seemed hazy. And after losing out on key senior milestones she had anticipated since sixth grade, Mana continued to wonder whether taking a gap year would be best.

“It’s a pretty big deal,” she said. “Your whole life builds up to this point, and then it’s just nonexistent.”

Michael started hearing from schools too and received early acceptances from three.

The congratulatory letters included an initial estimate of his financial aid awards, and the offer of full-ride scholarships from Centre College, a private liberal arts school in Kentucky, and the University of Texas-Dallas left Michael pleased with himself. “It’s a good mood booster, when you’re starting to feel burned out,” he said in December.

Even as record-setting warmth melted most of the snow during the holidays, the winter surge of coronavirus cases in Colorado kept Jaden at home for her 17th birthday, on New Year’s Day.

Jaden’s family typically celebrates with some Ecuadorian friends, who burn in effigy a representation of something bad (or annoying) from the old year. But this year, Jaden joined the family friends on Zoom for the midnight countdown.

Eating vanilla cake in her room, Jaden watched shaky video of the father of the other family hanging a large paper ball, surrounded by a cluster of crowns — a portrayal of the coronavirus — from a tree in the yard. At the stroke of midnight, in keeping with the Ecuadorian New Year tradition, the dad set fire to the effigy of Covid-19.

“I spent this entire year in a constant state of I-don’t-knows.”

Jaden Huynh

“That’s the entity that we would be better off without,” Jaden said in January 2021. “Maybe this year, we won’t get rid of [Covid] but we can handle it better after burning its spirit.”

A couple weeks later, her mom was sidelined by health issues, forcing Jaden to put school aside to help her family.

Jaden began to set her alarm for about 4:00 each morning. She’d spend a few pre-dawn hours on homework before waking her younger siblings and preparing breakfasts of cereal, pancakes or ramen noodles. Chores came next: mopping, sweeping, laundry and helping her 5-, 7- and 9-year-old siblings with homework each afternoon. At night, she cajoled the kids into showers before trying to tackle more homework and finally collapsing into bed herself before 11.

Joining many of her peers across the country, Jaden dutifully accepted the role of back-up parent, even as her frequent absences and missing assignments further threatened her early graduation plans.

“I was faced with having to step up for my family or for my education, and I chose my family,” Jaden said.

In early January, Michael got little work done as he watched the storming of the Capitol on TV with his family. Of the seemingly never-ending news cycle — “I’m so tired of historical things happening.”

But even when he avoided watching the news, he faced stress at home. His father had a chronic lung condition that made it risky to interact with anyone outside their family. In between driving his mother to work at the university and picking her up later in the day, Michael busied himself with chores at his family’s rental property: shoveling the driveway, fixing a broken toilet and shutting off all the outdoor plumbing so the pipes wouldn’t burst. He stayed on top of his academics, but slowly lost interest in things he usually enjoyed, like Dungeons & Dragons online. He skipped Among Us parties — an online game that requires players to guess the identity of an assassin — arranged by the student council.

“The burnout is real,” he said in February. “I haven’t really socialized ever since cases started rising again.”

One morning, he got a text message from a friend, asking him to visit the coffee shop where his friend worked. His parents had reservations, but Michael hadn’t seen his friend since July, during a physically distanced farewell for theater kids heading to college.

With hefty textbooks in his arms, Michael nervously walked into the café and looked for his friend; whose bright shock of red hair behind the counter was like a friendly wave. Michael cleared a seat nearby, ordered a small drink and lifted his mask to take quick sips while eavesdropping on the surrounding customers.

“It was mostly about basking in the presence of other people. There’s something about that ambience that I didn’t know I missed,” Michael said. He also got a hug — an unexpected embrace in the parking lot — “which is wild, considering I don’t do that very often, even in normal times.”

The isolation, he realized later, had changed him: “I have been incredibly touch-starved.”

Related: PROOF POINTS: Depression and anxiety rise among Chinese teens during coronavirus pandemic

The restrictions of the pandemic had a significant impact on young people, who rely heavily on social connections for emotional support, according to a March 2021 survey from the University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital. About three quarters of the parents who responded said the pandemic had a negative impact on their teens’ ability to interact with friends. That held true for Michael, but therapy helped him understand the importance of human relationships.

“I find it hard to be vulnerable, and this simple act of giving a hug recognizes that person means something to you.” He’d been, he realized, “a bit of a coward in that department — until Covid hit.”

Spring

For Jaden, the anxiety continued into April, as she waited to learn if she had won the full-ride scholarship. Then, days after Colorado opened vaccine eligibility to anyone 16 or older, both her mom and dad tested positive for Covid. The diagnosis meant Jaden was back to playing back-up mom.

“I can’t afford to be a kid anymore,” she said. “I have obligations and people I need to support. I don’t have time to hang out with friends or go to a dance.”

“I was faced with having to step up for my family or for my education, and I chose my family.”

Jaden Huynh

After her parents’ recovery, Jaden sat on her bed and tried to complete yet another overdue English essay. The constant patter of her younger sister running up and down the stairs — relaying reminders from their mom that Jaden needed to scrub the kitchen counters — tested her patience and concentration.

By that point, she had considered staying at a friend’s house for some peace and quiet. Her mother rejected the request and Jaden began to lose faith that she could ever improve her failing grades. That morning, she’d had enough.

“I couldn’t stop yelling,” she said. “I needed to just be left alone. I felt so sick. I could never choose school over family, but school used to be everything to me.”

Mana and her parents, meanwhile, were fully vaccinated by April. In between hugging friends for the first time in a year and planning for actual college visits, Mana allowed herself to start imagining a future that looked more like the one she’d had in mind for years.

The arrival of acceptance letters from five schools — mostly her backup choices — made that seem even more likely.

“I want to do every single thing I can possibly do,” Mana said. “I just want to get out, not in a bad way. I just need to explore and make up for lost time.”

And as her goal of going to college has held steady, her list of what she hopes to accomplish during her first year has changed. “It was never on my freshman bucket list to visit every restaurant in town,” Mana said. “Now I’m going try every single one that sounds remotely good.”

As rained soaked the Boulder Valley in spring, the future began to look less grim. Mana got to ditch the weather — and Zoom — for in-person college visits at her three preferred schools in California. Peak to Peak announced tentative plans for an actual prom — the state would limit students to dancing in pods of 10 people or less — and an outdoor graduation ceremony.

At her desk, sitting among Harry Potter books and souvenirs from previous travels with her parents, Mana created a balance sheet to account for her final year of high school. Among the losses: Volleyball tournaments. Homecoming. A final ski season with her dad. Gains: Increased independence. A stronger sense of self. More time with her family.

“We had meals together every single day. We used to only do that on weekends,” Mana said. “It’s been a blessing especially because it’s my last year at home. A lot of times, most students pack their last year and it’s so busy and hectic, they lose out on that.”

By the final quarter of school, as vaccines allowed Peak to Peak to open its doors to in-person learning again, Michael’s father also got his first shot and traveled to California to visit with Michael’s older sister. While he was out of town, Michael’s mother decided to send Michael and his brothers back to class.

“We just show up, I open my computer and do what I would be doing at home,” Michael said of that first week. “I haven’t seen someone sit next to me for a very long time. It’s glorious.”

Related: Schools use art to help kids through trauma

But after dinner one evening, as he was about to step into the shower, Michael’s phone rang. It was his father, demanding to know why he went back to school. Halfway undressed, Michael told him to figure it out with his mom, and by the time he showered and dressed again, the mandate was set: He’d finish the year entirely from home.

Disheartened, but understanding, Michael had one lifeline that his brothers didn’t: Theater rehearsals had started again and he was allowed to go.

“You don’t get a second chance at 12th grade.”

Michael Liao

For a two-night, outdoor performance of “Matilda,” the cast started each rehearsal in a big circle.

Tongue twisters in a British accent made Michael chuckle during the vocal warmups, and transparent face masks made it easier to see his fellow actors’ smiles.

Before the closing performance, he and the other seniors gathered for the “tradition of shroses” — each held a bundle of fake roses for each show they had joined since freshman year. Michael, with “a dinky four flowers,” fought back tears as his castmates gushed about their adopted family.

“They’re all kinda wacky, and I mean that in the most endearing way. We’re all a group of misfits,” he said. “I wish I had joined theater sooner.”

Getting back to theater was “a benchmark” for Michael. “Before, I was unhappy … At least now I’m sad with friends,” he joked.

Graduation

By May, when more than 40 percent of Coloradans had received their full vaccinations, Jaden was still waiting for a shot. But she had other priorities in mind: With the support and understanding of her teachers, who bent a few rules — and some wrangling by her college counselor — Jaden got the go-ahead to finish her remaining credits over the summer and graduate a year early as planned. The scholarship foundation also announced her as a full finalist, solidifying her intent to attend the University of Colorado Denver this fall.

The 17-year-old didn’t walk with seniors at Arvada West, although she had never really expected to don a cap and gown to mark the end of her time in high school. But while she didn’t mind ditching the ceremony, Jaden was sorry she’d missed the last chance to see her teachers and counselors; she knew she wouldn’t have reached the finish line without them.

“I spent this entire year in a constant state of I-don’t-knows,” she said. “Obstacles were thrown at me left and right, and I took on more responsibility than I thought I could bear.”

Jaden said surviving the year wasn’t easy, but believes it was the perfect preparation for an early entry into college. She no longer fears asking for help.

“Putting a lot on yourself is super difficult, but not impossible, if you involve other people,” Jaden said. “The more I rely on others, the less difficult a load becomes.”

Early in May, Mana sat on the living room couch and opened her phone, expecting bad news. “Let’s just open them,” she told her mother of the application status updates from the two Ivy League schools at the top of her list. “If I didn’t get in, it’s fine. Let’s move on.”

She got in.

“I was like, ‘Waiiiiiit a second. Hold on. Did I get in? I don’t know if this is true!’” Mana recalled. “We called my dad over and he was like, ‘What! You got in?’ It was just a lot of excitement and surprise and so much after an application cycle that has been so insane and crazy.”

Mana plans to study biotechnology at Cornell University and hopes to pursue it further in graduate school.

She recently picked up her diploma from Peak to Peak and spent time visiting with teachers she hadn’t seen in a year and others she just hadn’t had the chance to say goodbye to before the school year ended for seniors on May 19.

“No one has to be as flexible or as overcoming or as persevering as we have,” Mana said of her graduating class, both at Peak to Peak and nationally.

Michael, meanwhile, will soon pack his bags to attend Centre College in Kentucky.

He’s worried about leaving his family, especially with anti-Asian hate crimes happening across the country. But he’s also ready. On the final night of “Matilda,” a sudden downpour moved the performance inside. The cast was undaunted and “played their damn hardest.”

“Life is mostly what you make of it and how you react to it,” Michael said. “As much as all of us would hope to erase the pandemic, we can’t. We all tried our best, and we’re getting close to the end, and that’s all really anyone can ask of us.”

This story about high school seniors 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 A school year like no other: The class of 2021 played ‘the hand we were dealt’ appeared first on The Hechinger Report.