Dear Reader, 

Saying it’s been a wild year in higher education news seems like the understatement of the century. (I think even non-education nerds would agree!) Thank you for sticking with The Hechinger Report as we tried to make sense of it all. 

The first half of the year felt like we were all collectively holding our breath, waiting for the United States Supreme Court to rule on two massive cases, one on student loan forgiveness and another on affirmative action in college admissions. As we waited, I wrote about the poster child of the anti-affirmative action movement, Jon Marcus broke down federal data that shows the gap between Black and white Americans with college degrees is widening, and Meredith Kolodner reported, as she has before, about the fact that many flagship universities don’t reflect their state’s Black or Latino high school graduates. 

The court ultimately ruled against student loan forgiveness and against the consideration of race in college admissions. 

Shortly thereafter, led by Jon Marcus and Fazil Khan, our team began working on The College Welcome Guide, a tool that helps students and families go beyond the rankings and understand what their life might be like on any four-year college campus in America. Jon’s reporting made it  clear that the culture wars are beginning to affect where students go to college, and we wanted to help ensure people had the many types of information they needed to make the best choice, regardless of who they are or what their political orientation is. 

All the while, we continued covering the country’s community colleges. Jill Barshay wrote about how much it costs to produce a community college graduate, and why some community colleges are choosing to drop remedial math. Jon covered the continuing enrollment struggles at these institutions. I reported on a new initiative to target job training for students at rural community colleges, as well as a guide to help community colleges make this kind of training more effective. 

We also examined some of the many routes people choose to take instead of going to college. I reported on what happens when universities get into unregulated partnerships with for-profit tech boot camps, and Meredith and Sarah Butrymowicz reported on risky, short-term career training programs that exist in a “no man’s land of accountability.” Tara García Mathewson exposed the tricky system that formerly incarcerated people have to navigate if they want to get job training and professional licenses once they’re out of prison. 

And though we love to dig deep into subjects and understand exactly how these big issues affect the lives of regular people, we also zoomed out this year. Meredith, working alongside Matthew Haag from The New York Times, discovered that Columbia University and New York University benefit massively from property tax breaks allowed for nonprofits (they saved $327 million last year alone). After their story was published, New York state legislators proposed a bill that would require these two institutions to pay those taxes and  funnel that money to the City University of New York system, the largest urban public university system in the country.

In 2024, we will continue to cover equity and innovation in higher education with nuance, care and a critical eye. Is there a story you think we should cover? Reply to this email to let us know.

For now, we hope you have a warm and restful break. See you in the new year. 

Olivia

P.S. As a nonprofit news outlet, The Hechinger Report relies on readers like you to support our journalism. If you want to ensure our coverage in 2024 is as extensive and deeply reported as possible, please consider donating.

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ATLANTA – It’s unclear to Tameka how — or even when — her children became unenrolled from Atlanta Public Schools. But it was traumatic when, in Fall 2021, they figured out it had happened. 

After more than a year of some form of pandemic online learning, students were all required to come back to school in person. Tameka was deeply afraid of COVID-19 and skeptical the schools could keep her kids safe. One morning, in a test run, she sent two kids to school. 

Her oldest daughter, then in seventh grade, and her second youngest, a boy entering first grade, boarded their respective buses. She had yet to register the youngest girl, who was entering kindergarten. And her older son, a boy with Down syndrome, stayed home because she wasn’t sure he could consistently wear masks. 

After a few hours, the elementary school called: Come pick up your son, they told her. He was no longer enrolled, they said.  

Around lunchtime, the middle school called: Come get your daughter, they told her. She doesn’t have a class schedule. 

Tameka’s children — all four of them — have been home ever since.  

Related: Millions of kids are missing school as attendance tanks across the US  

Thousands of students went missing from American classrooms during the pandemic. For some who have tried to return, a serious problem has presented itself. A corrosive combination of onerous re-enrollment requirements, arcane paperwork and the everyday obstacles of poverty — a nonworking phone, a missing backpack, the loss of a car — is in many cases preventing those children from going back. 

“One of the biggest problems that we have is kids that are missing and chronic absenteeism,” says Pamela Herd, a Georgetown University public policy professor. She studies how burdensome paperwork and processes often prevent poor people from accessing health benefits. “I’m really taken aback that a district would set forth a series of policies that make it actually quite difficult to enroll your child.” 

In Atlanta, where Tameka lives, parents must present at least eight documents to enroll their children — twice as many as parents in New York City or Los Angeles. One of the documents — a complicated certificate evaluating a child’s dental health, vision, hearing and nutrition — is required by the state. Most of the others are Atlanta’s doing, including students’ Social Security cards and an affidavit declaring residency that has to be notarized.  

The district asks for proof of residency for existing students every year at some schools, and also before beginning sixth and ninth grades, to prevent students from attending schools outside of their neighborhoods or communities. The policy also allows the district to request proof the student still lives in the attendance zone after an extended absence or many tardy arrivals. Without that proof, families say their children have been disenrolled.  

“They make it so damned hard,” says Kimberly Dukes, an Atlanta parent who co-founded an organization to help families advocate for their children.  

During the pandemic, she and her children became homeless and moved in with her brother. She struggled to convince her children’s school they really lived with him. Soon, she heard from other caregivers having similar problems. Last year, she estimates she helped 20 to 30 families re-enroll their children in Atlanta Public Schools.  

The school district pushed back against this characterization of the enrollment process. “When parents inform APS that they are unable to provide updated proof of residence, protocols are in place to support families,” Atlanta communications director Seth Coleman wrote by email. Homeless families are not required to provide documentation, he said.  

Tameka’s kids have essentially been out of school since COVID hit in March 2020. She and her kids have had a consistent place to live, but nearly everything else in their lives collapsed during the pandemic. (Tameka is her middle name. The Associated Press is withholding her full name because Tameka, 33, runs the risk of jail time or losing custody of her children since they are not in school.) 

Related: Thousands of kids are missing school. Where did they go?  

Tameka’s longtime partner, who was father to her children, died of a heart attack in May 2020 as COVID gripped the country. 

His death left her overwhelmed and penniless. Tameka never graduated from high school and has worked occasionally as a security guard or a housecleaner for hotels. She has never gotten a driver’s license. But her partner worked construction and had a car. “When he was around, we never went without,” she says. 

Suddenly, she had four young children to care for by herself, with only government cash assistance to live on. 

Schools had closed to prevent the spread of the virus, and the kids were home with her all the time. Remote learning didn’t hold their attention. Their home internet didn’t support the three children being online simultaneously, and there wasn’t enough space in their two-bedroom apartment for the kids to have a quiet place to learn. 

Because she had to watch them, she couldn’t work. The job losses put her family even further below the median income for a Black family in Atlanta — $28,105. (The median annual income for a white family in the city limits is $83,722.) 

When Tameka’s children didn’t return to school, she also worried about the wrong kind of attention from the state’s child welfare department. According to Tameka, staff visited her in Spring 2021 after receiving calls from the school complaining her children were not attending online classes. 

The social workers interviewed the children, inspected their home and looked for signs of neglect and abuse. They said they’d be back to set her up with resources to help her with parenting. For more than two years, she says, “they never came back.” 

“He wasn’t in school, and no one cared.”

Candace, mother of a seventh grader with autism 

When the kids missed 10 straight days of school that fall, the district removed them from its rolls, citing a state regulation. Tameka now had to re-enroll them.  

Suddenly, another tragedy of her partner’s death became painfully obvious. He was carrying all the family’s important documents in his backpack when he suffered his heart attack. The hospital that received him said it passed along the backpack and other possessions to another family member, Tameka says. But it was never found.  

The backpack contained the children’s birth certificates and her own, plus Medicaid cards and Social Security cards. Slowly, she has tried to replace the missing documents. First, she got new birth certificates for the children, which required traveling downtown. 

After asking for new Medicaid cards for over a year, she finally received them for two of her children. She says she needs them to take her children to the doctor for the health verifications and immunizations required to enroll. It’s possible her family’s cards have been held up by a backlog in Georgia’s Medicaid office since the state agency incorrectly disenrolled thousands of residents.  

When she called for a doctor’s appointment in October, the office said the soonest they could see her children was December. 

“That’s too late,” she said. “Half the school year will be over by then.” 

She also needs to show the school her own identification, Social Security cards, and a new lease, plus the notarized residency affidavit.   

She shakes her head. “It’s a lot.” 

Related: Civil rights at stake: Black, Hispanic students blocked from class for missing class  

Some of the enrollment requirements have exceptions buried deep in school board documents. But Tameka says no one from the district has offered her guidance. 

Contact logs provided by the district show social workers from three schools have sent four emails and called the family 19 times since the pandemic closed classrooms in 2020. Most of those calls went to voicemail or didn’t go through because the phone was disconnected. Records show Tameka rarely called back.  

The only face-to-face meeting was in October 2021, when Tameka sent her kids on the bus, only to learn they weren’t enrolled. A school social worker summarized the encounter: “Discussed students’ attendance history, the impact it has on the student and barriers. Per mom student lost father in May 2020 and only other barrier is uniforms.”  

The social worker said the school would take care of the uniforms. “Mom given enrollment paperwork,” the entry ends.  

The school’s logs don’t record any further attempts to contact Tameka.  

“Our Student Services Team went above and beyond to help this family and these children,” wrote Coleman, the district spokesperson. 

Inconsistent cell phone access isn’t uncommon among low-income Americans. Many have phones, as Tameka’s family does, but when they break or run out of prepaid minutes, communication with them becomes impossible. 

So in some cities, even at the height of the pandemic, social workers, teachers and administrators checked on families in person when they were unresponsive or children had gone missing from online learning. In Atlanta, Coleman said, the district avoided in-person contact because of the coronavirus.  

Tameka says she’s unaware of any outreach from Atlanta schools. She currently lacks a working phone with a cell plan, and she’s spent long stretches over the last three years without one. An Associated Press reporter has had to visit the family in person to communicate.  

The logs provided by Atlanta Public Schools show only one attempt to visit the family in person, in Spring 2021. A staff member went to the family’s home to discuss poor attendance in online classes by the son with Down syndrome. No one was home, and the logs don’t mention further attempts. 

The details of what the district has done to track down and re-enroll Tameka’s children, especially her son with Down syndrome, matter. Federal laws require the state and district to identify, locate and evaluate all children with disabilities until they turn 21.  

One government agency has been able to reach Tameka. A new social worker from the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services, the same agency that came years earlier, made another visit to her home in October.  

The department offered to organize a ride for her and her children to visit the doctor. But without an appointment, Tameka didn’t see the point.  

The social worker also shared a helpful tip: Tameka can enroll her children with most of the paperwork, and then she would have 30 days to get the immunizations. But she should act fast, the social worker urged, or the department might have to take action against her for “educational neglect.”  

Related: When the punishment is the same as the crime: Suspended for missing class 

To many observers, Tameka’s troubles stem from Atlanta’s rapid gentrification. The city, known for its Black professional class, also boasts the country’s largest wealth disparity between Black and white families.  

“It looks good from the curb, but when you get inside you see that Black and brown people are worse off economically than in West Virginia — and no one wants to talk about it,” says Frank Brown, who heads Communities in Schools of Atlanta, an organization that runs dropout-prevention programs in Atlanta Public Schools.  

Atlanta’s school board passed many of its enrollment policies and procedures back in 2008, after years of gentrification and a building boom consolidated upper-income and mostly white residents in the northern half of the city. The schools in those neighborhoods complained of “overcrowding,” while the schools in the majority Black southern half of the city couldn’t fill all of their seats.  

The board cracked down on “residency fraud” to prevent parents living in other parts of town from sending their children to schools located in those neighborhoods.

“This was about balancing the number of students in schools,” says Tiffany Fick, director of school quality and advocacy for Equity in Education, a policy organization in Atlanta. “But it was also about race and class.” 

Communities such as St. Louis, the Massachusetts town of Everett and Tupelo, Mississippi, have adopted similar policies, including tip lines to report neighbors who might be sending their children to schools outside of their enrollment zones. 

But the Atlanta metro area seems to be a hotbed, despite the policies’ disruption of children’s educations. In January, neighboring Fulton County disenrolled nearly 400 students from one of its high schools after auditing residency documents after Christmas vacation.   

The policies were designed to prevent children from attending schools outside of their neighborhood. But according to Dukes and other advocates, the increased bureaucracy has also made it difficult for the poor to attend their assigned schools — especially after the pandemic hit families with even more economic stress. 

Related: Many schools find ways to solve absenteeism without suspensions 

The Associated Press spoke to five additional Atlanta public school mothers who struggled with the re-enrollment process. Their children were withdrawn from school because their leases had expired or were month to month, or their child lacked vaccinations.  

Candace, the mother of a seventh grader with autism, couldn’t get her son a vaccination appointment when schools first allowed students to return in person in Spring 2021. There were too many other families seeking shots at that time, and she didn’t have reliable transportation to go further afield. The boy, then in fourth grade, missed a cumulative five months.  

“He wasn’t in school, and no one cared,” said Candace, who asked AP not to use her last name because she worries about losing custody of her child since he missed so much school. She eventually re-enrolled him with the help of Dukes, the parent advocate. 

“One of the biggest problems that we have is kids that are missing and chronic absenteeism. I’m really taken aback that a district would set forth a series of policies that make it actually quite difficult to enroll your child.”

Pamela Herd, a Georgetown University public policy professor 

Many parents who have struggled with the enrollment policies have had difficulty persuading schools to accept their proof of residency. Adding an extra burden to those who don’t own their homes, Atlanta’s policy allows principals to ask for additional evidence from renters. 

Shawndrea Gay was told by her children’s school, which is located in an upper-income neighborhood, that her month-to-month lease was insufficient. Twice, investigators came to her studio apartment to verify that the family lived there. “They looked in the fridge to make sure there was food,” she says. “It was no joke.” 

Then, in Summer 2022, the school unenrolled her children because their lease had expired. With Dukes’ help, Gay was able to get them back in school before classes started. 

Tameka hasn’t reached out for help getting her kids back in school. She doesn’t feel comfortable asking and doesn’t trust the school system, especially after they called the child welfare department. “I don’t like people knowing my business,” she says. “I’m a private person.” 

On a typical school day, Tameka’s four children — now 14, 12, 9 and 8 — sleep late and stay inside watching television or playing video games. Only the youngest — the girl who’s never been to school — has much interest in the outside world, Tameka says.  

The girl often plays kickball or runs outside with other kids in their low-income subdivision. But during the week, she has to wait for them to come home from school at around 3 p.m. 

The little girl should be in second grade, learning to master chapter books, spell, and add and subtract numbers up to 100. She has had to settle for “playing school” with her three older siblings. She practices her letters and writes her name. She runs through pre-kindergarten counting exercises on a phone. 

But even at 8, she understands that it’s not the real thing. 

“I want to go to school,” she says, “and see what it’s like.” 

This story was produced by the Associated Press and reprinted with permission. The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content. 

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Next year will mark seven decades since the U.S. Supreme Court declared racially segregated public schools to be unconstitutional. Even the current Supreme Court’s conservatives have embraced that Brown vs. Board of Education decision.

Yet, 70 years after Brown, a key obstacle to racial equality in education continues to be white resistance to racial integration and to adequate funding for the education of Black and Latino children.

In the 1950s and 1960s, white resistance took the form of a revolt against integration and busing.

Private “white academies” — also known as segregation academies — sprang up to preserve the advantages held by the previously white-only public schools.

Today, one form of ongoing resistance is what scholars label “hoarding opportunities.” By using zoning and districting to create and perpetuate overwhelmingly white spaces and declining to share resources with Black and Latino children, white Americans limit the reach of integration and perpetuate inequality.

Related: Reckoning with Mississippi’s ‘segregation academies’

Not surprisingly, in 2022, the Government Accountability Office declared that school segregation continues unabated. The agency reported that even as the nation’s student population has diversified, 43 percent of its schools are segregated, and 18.5 million students, more than one-third of all the students in the country, are enrolled in highly segregated schools (75 percent or more of the students identify as a single race or ethnicity).

The Midwest — with 59 percent of all schools classified as segregated — is the leader in segregation.

The same GAO study showed that when new school districts are formed, they tend to be far more racially homogeneous than the districts they replace.

A key obstacle to racial equality in education continues to be white resistance.

Direct evidence of white resistance to racial equity in education can be seen in a survey experiment my co-authors and I conducted in 2021 that closely replicated findings from earlier periods. The study shows that white Americans continue to be reluctant to support increased funding for schools for Black children.

In our experiment, 552 white Americans were randomly assigned to one of two groups. The first group was asked: “Do you favor or oppose expanding funding for pre-kindergarten programs so that it is available for poor children nationwide? The $24 billion a year cost would be paid for by higher taxes.”

The second group was asked the same question, except that “poor children” was replaced by “poor Black children.”

About 75 percent of respondents in the first group said they favor spending tax dollars for such a program. However, in the group asked about “poor Black children,” just 68 percent were in favor. This is a significant gap in support.

The experiment suggests that among white Americans, support for public education funding for poor children is robust. But less so for poor Black children.

White resistance to desegregation and school funding for Black students has severe consequences for racial equality and the economy.

Related: OPINION: Our education system is not setting up students for success

Research published this month shows that Black students who attended Southern desegregated schools in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s experienced positive lifelong cognitive effects.

And data from the U.S. Department of Education still shows “substantial” racial gaps in reading and math competencies, high school graduation rates and, inevitably, college entry.

A recent Brookings report estimated that if the racial gap in education and employment had been eliminated, the U.S. GDP from 1990 to 2019 would have been $22.9 trillion larger. This would benefit us all.

The great promise of Brown was one of equal access to high-quality education. The hope was that income and other social disparities among white, Black and Latino people would dissipate over time. White resistance contributed to America not keeping this promise.

Policymakers, funders and education advocates must overcome white resistance to strengthen support for programs geared toward Black and Latino children.

This will help America’s quest to fulfill the promise of Brown. It’s time.

Alexandra Filindra is an associate professor of political science and psychology at the University of Illinois Chicago and a Public Voices Fellow through The OpEd Project. She is also the author of “Race, Rights and Rifles.”

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

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SANTA CRUZ, Calif. — At 19, Elizabeth Clews knew attending community college while balancing a full-time job and caring for a newborn would be hard. But she wanted to give it a shot.

After a few months, the single mom, who had just exited the foster care system, realized she wasn’t doing well enough to pass her classes at Ventura College. “All I could really focus on was taking care of my baby and making sure that I kept a roof over our heads,” she said.

Clews thought her performance would improve if she quit work. But when she logged into the school’s online portal to register for a second semester, a message popped up that she described as saying, “You can enroll for classes, but you’re not gonna get financial aid.” Clews was in danger of failing to meet a standard called SAP, or “satisfactory academic progress,” which is attached to nearly all federal financial aid for higher education — including grants, loans and work study — and most state aid too.

“I didn’t really know it was a thing,” Clews said, “I didn’t understand any of the financial aid terminology.” But one thing she knew with utter clarity: She couldn’t pay tuition and fees out of pocket. So, she dropped out.

The number of students across the U.S. affected by satisfactory academic progress requirements each year likely runs in the hundreds of thousands, yet until recently the issue garnered almost no attention from news media, academics and policy makers. “It’s not a noisy problem” because it doesn’t impact people with social capital and power, said Christina Tangalakis, associate dean of financial aid at Glendale Community College in Southern California.

Now, a loose coalition of nonprofits, legislators and financial aid administrators are trying to reform what they describe as overly punitive, vague standards that keep many students capable of earning a degree from obtaining one. The state of Indiana was an early actor, creating a grant in 2016 for returning students who had “SAP-ed out” of federal funding. Last month, California enacted legislation to make all colleges align their requirements for “satisfactory academic progress” with the federal minimum standard.

At the federal level, 39 nonprofit organizations sent a letter in August asking the U.S. Department of Education to clarify the rules around the SAP minimum requirements. And in Congress, Sen. Cory Booker, a Democrat, is expected to re-introduce SAP-related legislation that would give students a second chance at aid.

Related: ‘Revolutionary housing’: How colleges aim to support formerly incarcerated students

The logic behind satisfactory academic progress rules is that giving aid to students who are unlikely to graduate is a bad investment, wasting students’ time and taxpayers’ dollars.

The policy was created in 1976, and at first, each college or university was left to set its own standards. Then, in a 1981 report to the Senate, the General Accounting Office said tougher ones were needed. Citing little evidence, the agency asserted that $1.28 million had been accessed inappropriately.

“It was Reaganomics and welfare reform and this idea of deserving and undeserving poor,” said Debbie Raucher, the director of education for John Burton Advocates for Youth, or JBAY, a California nonprofit. The stance was “if a student isn’t pulling their weight, they don’t deserve our help,” she said.

Under current federal rules, students must maintain a 2.0 GPA or higher, complete at least 67 percent of credits attempted and stay on track to finish a degree in no more than 150 percent of the time it usually takes (for example, six years for a four-year degree). During the Obama administration, SAP regulations were further tightened in an attempt to prevent low-performing for-profit institutions from lining their pockets with taxpayer dollars.

“SAP is my number one enemy, my arch nemesis.”

Elizabeth Clews, University of California, Santa Cruz student who was kicked off financial aid because of SAP requirements when attending community college

Once a student becomes ineligible for financial aid after failing to make SAP, that status stays with them forever.

Some students appeal, but that process can be complicated and riddled with inconsistencies. Campuses aren’t required to offer appeals. Those that do must limit  grounds to “the death of a relative, an injury or illness of the student, or other special circumstances,” according to federal regulations. What circumstances qualify as “special” varies tremendously. For example, some schools explicitly allow students to appeal if they are struggling to balance school and work demands, while others explicitly disallow appeals on the same grounds, according to a 2023 analysis by JBAY.

At 20, Clews didn’t know anything about an appeal, but two years later, she felt “this itch to try again,” and attempted to re-enroll at Ventura. When she got a similar notification, a more mature Clews “decided to do some investigating.” She had experienced homelessness and food insecurity, but didn’t see those circumstances on the appeals list. Her takeaway was: “Oh, well you didn’t die, you didn’t get your leg cut off, so there’s no reason that you shouldn’t have been successful.”

So Clews worked as a waitress and in retail for the next five years.

“It was Reaganomics and welfare reform and this idea of deserving and undeserving poor.”

Debbie Raucher, the director of education for John Burton Advocates for Youth

This turn of events was, in part, the luck of the draw. Some schools are more stringent than the federal rules require: For example, JBAY identified 10 colleges in California that mandate a course completion rate between 70 and 80 percent, not 67. Some institutions require a 2.0 GPA every term, while others consider SAP satisfied if a student’s cumulative GPA is above the threshold. In deciding whether students are progressing fast enough, some colleges include remedial coursework and classes taken in pursuit of an old major, while others don’t. Raucher, of JBAY, said Ventura’s currently posted policy isn’t significantly stricter than average, but wouldn’t have offered Clews “the full leniency allowed by federal regs.” (A Ventura representative said in an email that the school follows federal and state guidelines.)

Fearful of government audits, financial aid administrators tend to take a conservative view of the regulations, Raucher said.

Both JBAY’s analysis and a 2016 study place the number of students who don’t meet SAP requirements at more than 20 percent of Pell grant aid recipients, with that share higher for community college students.

“This is not a fringe issue that 1 percent of students are facing,” Raucher said.

Related: Overdue tuition and fees — as little as $41 — derail hundreds of thousands of California college students

Glendale Community College’s Tangalakis, who has served at four different colleges in her 22-year career, said the policy can undermine colleges’ equity efforts. Institutions must demand rigor, she said, and that’s why they have an “academic progress” requirement for all students that is distinct from SAP.

But since SAP standards are sometimes stricter than the schools’ individual policies, Tangalakis said, low-income students “have to meet a higher standard simply because they have financial need.” The appeals process also often results in staff laying “a lot of unnecessary judgment” on students, she said, and may retraumatize students, who can be asked to prove hardships such as domestic violence.

“Ultimately, it’s just a very powerful message that says you don’t belong here,” Tangalakis said.

Two analyses place the number of students who don’t meet SAP requirements at more than 20 percent of aid recipients, with that share higher for community college students

After taking on a senior role at Glendale, she made changes. Tangalakis instructed her team to assess SAP using the most liberal interpretation of the federal regulations and to handle appeals generously, allowing consideration of anything a student thinks relevant and accepting a statement completed online or via phone (rather than demanding documentation from third parties as some schools do).

The result has been striking: According to Tangalakis, the share of students who lost aid for failing to make SAP fell from 9.3 percent in 2017 to 6.4 percent in 2021. And she found that students who failed SAP in 2021 went on to complete degrees and certificates at a significantly higher rate than those who’d failed in 2017. These gains were even larger for students from traditionally disadvantaged backgrounds. 

Other research confirms SAP’s disparate impact along racial lines: In 2021, for example, JBAY found that Black students, Native American students and foster youth who received a Pell Grant ran afoul of SAP provisions at more than twice the rate of white, Filipino and Asian students.

In theory, if students who “SAP-out” find another way to pay for college, they can requalify for aid if they improve academically. But for most students, that creates a Catch-22, Raucher said: They can’t re-enroll without financial aid, and they can’t get financial aid without re-enrolling. State aid that bypasses SAP status can springboard adults returning to college out of that Catch-22. But most don’t offer it.

“Ultimately, it’s just a very powerful message that says you don’t belong here.”

Christina Tangalakis, associate dean of financial aid at Glendale Community College in Southern California

In practice, this means that students who fall short of SAP standards are significantly more likely to drop out. In the 2016 study of one unnamed community college system, for example, the majority of those who failed SAP, approximately 60 percent, dropped out. For many students, “there is no plan B,” Tangalakis said, and SAP is “just a de facto end to their academic journey a lot of times.”

Even just receiving a SAP warning can produce that result: An analysis of data from Minnesota community colleges, for example, showed that only half of students who received a notice that they were in danger of failing to make SAP in the fall of 2013 tried to return that spring.

That, it turns out, is what happened to Clews. The message she initially received from Ventura was a warning, not notice that she was already ineligible. A financial aid deposit for what would have been her second semester showed up in her bank account, but by then she’d left the area to try to find reliable shelter and employment. Of course, when she didn’t show up for those classes, she officially failed SAP. (The money was taken out of her tax refund.)

Related: Is California saving higher education?

Years later, the pandemic hit and Clews found herself in an unusual position – with free time. Yes, she was home-schooling two kids, but with restaurants and stores closed, she couldn’t work. She said she filed an appeal letter but couldn’t receive aid while it was pending. Normally, that would have meant no school, but like millions of Americans that year, Clews received pandemic stimulus checks from the federal government.

After reenrolling with that money, her GPA shot up. Clews said, “I was doing really well, and I realized, ‘Oh, it wasn’t that I wasn’t smart enough, I just didn’t have the resources and the support that I needed to be successful.’ ”

That jibes with a small 2021 interview study that did not detect a difference in motivation between Pell-eligible students who were meeting SAP and those who weren’t. The study suggests that students who fail SAP requirements often do so because their life circumstances are different, not because they’re less “cut out” to succeed academically. Other research shows that students who SAP-out stop pursuing a degree more often than their peers with similarly low GPAs who aren’t subject to SAP.

“What SAP policies end up doing is targeting students who are coming in with the biggest existing barriers, and then doubling down,” said Raucher, whose organization helped develop the California SAP reform bill.

That legislation, which passed unanimously, requires that colleges use the least stringent definition of SAP allowed by the federal regulations for state financial aid, in effect dictating how all aid is administered. It also encourages colleges to better communicate the policy to students and mandates changes to the appeal system, including creating a review process for denied appeals, and prohibits institutions from disenrolling a student for nonpayment of tuition while an appeal is pending.

The federal legislation Booker, the Democratic senator, is expected to introduce would be similar to a bill he proposed in 2020, allowing a renewal of SAP eligibility when a student “stops out” for two years or more. The 2020 bill didn’t advance in Congress, but Booker may have a co-sponsor this time around, as talks with several Republican senators are in progress.

“The satisfactory academic progress standard is not without its flaws,” said Virginia Foxx, a Republican congresswoman from North Carolina who serves as chairwoman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. “Senator Booker’s bill isn’t perfect, but I am always willing to find common ground to improve policies and outcomes for students.”

In the meantime, organizations including JBAY and the national nonprofit Higher Learning Advocates have asked Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to encourage schools to make the appeals process more user-friendly, among other changes. Tanya Ang, managing director of Higher Learning Advocates, said reforming SAP has bipartisan support because eliminating “unnecessary hoops” for degree completion helps more people gain skills they can use in the workforce.  

In theory, stringent SAP requirements tell students where they stand and force them to improve. But the 2016 study didn’t find that SAP policies had much of an incentivizing effect, on average.

The message Clews received was the opposite: Don’t try. Because if at first you don’t succeed, there’s no chance to try, try again.

In 2022, she completed her classwork at Ventura and transferred to the University of California, Santa Cruz. Clews plans to become a teacher. “I’m thankful to be where I’m at,” she said, “but I definitely feel like it shouldn’t have been so hard to get back to school.”

This story about satisfactory academic progress 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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Much attention in the post-pandemic era has been on what students have lost – days of school, psychological health, knowledge and skills. But now we have evidence that they may also have gained something: schools that address more of their needs. A majority of public schools have begun providing services that are far afield from traditional academics, including healthcare, housing assistance, childcare and food aid. 

In a Department of Education survey released in October 2023 of more than 1,300 public schools, 60 percent said they were partnering with community organizations to provide non-educational services. That’s up from 45 percent a year earlier in 2022, the first time the department surveyed schools about their involvement in these services. They include access to medical, dental, and mental health providers as well as social workers. Adult education is also often part of the package; the extras are not just for kids. 

“It is a shift,” said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, where she tracks school spending. “We’ve seen partnering with the YMCA and with health groups for medical services and psychological evaluations.”

Deeper involvement in the community started as an emergency response to the coronavirus pandemic. As schools shuttered their classrooms, many became hubs where families obtained food or internet access. Months later, many schools opened their doors to become vaccine centers. 

New community alliances were further fueled by more than $200 billion in federal pandemic recovery funds that have flowed to schools. “Schools have a lot of money now and they’re trying to spend it down,” said Roza. Federal regulations encourage schools to spend recovery funds on nonprofit community services, and unspent funds will eventually be forfeited.

The term “community school” generally refers to schools that provide a cluster of wraparound services under one roof. The hope is that students living in poverty will learn more if their basic needs are met. Schools that provide only one or two services are likely among the 60 percent of schools that said they were using a community school or wraparound services model, but they aren’t necessarily full-fledged community schools, Department of Education officials said.

The wording of the question on the federal School Pulse Panel survey administered in August 2023 allowed for a broad interpretation of what it means to be a community school. The question posed to a sample of schools across all 50 states was this: “Does your school use a “community school” or “wraparound services” model? A community school or wraparound services model is when a school partners with other government agencies and/or local nonprofits to support and engage with the local community (e.g., providing mental and physical health care, nutrition, housing assistance, etc.).” 

The most common service provided was mental health (66 percent of schools) followed by food assistance (55 percent). Less common were medical clinics and adult education, but many more schools said they were providing these services than in the past.

The number of full-fledged community schools is also believed to be growing, according to education officials and researchers. Federal funding for community schools tripled during the pandemic to $75 million in 2021-22 from $25 million in 2019-20. According to the  education department, the federal community schools program now serves more than 700,000 students in about 250 school districts, but there are additional state and private funding sources too. 

Whether it’s a good idea for most schools to expand their mission and adopt aspects of the community school model depends on one’s view of the purpose of school. Some argue that schools are taking on too many functions and should not attempt to create outposts for outside services. Others argue that strong community engagement is an important aspect of education and can improve daily attendance and learning. Research studies conducted before the pandemic have found that academic benefits from full-fledged community schools can take several years to materialize. It’s a big investment without an instant payoff.

Meanwhile, it’s unclear whether schools will continue to embrace their expanded mission after federal pandemic funds expire in March 2026. That’s when the last payments to contractors and outside organizations for services rendered can be made. Contracts must be signed by September 2024.

Edunomics’s Roza thinks many of these community services will be the first to go as schools face future budget cuts. But she also predicts that some will endure as schools raise money from state governments and philanthropies to continue popular programs.

If that happens, it will be an example of another unexpected consequence of the pandemic. Even as pundits decry how the pandemic has eroded support for public education, it may have profoundly transformed the role of schools and made them even more vital.

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

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Transportation to centers is one of the biggest barriers for families accessing Head Start programs, according to a survey from the National Head Start Association — distances that might be manageable for adults on their own can be insurmountable with a baby or toddler in tow.

A new awareness campaign sponsored by the association, which represents Head Start providers, and a philanthropic group called the Civic Mapping Initiative, is hoping to ease that burden by encouraging local transit agencies to add bus stops closer to Head Start centers.

As a kickoff to the effort, the Memphis Area Transit Authority added three bus stops to its existing routes to bring them closer to Head Start programs in the community.

A lot of parents who send their children to the Porter-Leath Early Head Start programs in Memphis rely on families and friends to help them get there, said Sheronda Smith, director of Early Head Start at Porter-Leath and president of the Tennessee Head Start Association.

Often when families can’t get a ride, their children simply don’t attend that day.

“We have had families who we’ve had to place back on the waiting list because they make the decision that it’s too hard to get to the center,” Smith said.

There are more than 16,400 Head Start centers across the United States that provide federally funded pre-K and school readiness programs for low-income families. About 42 percent of those programs are within 0.2 miles of public transit, or what the National Head Start Association considers a walkable distance for families with toddlers.

Another 29 percent of centers are not near any public transit, or more than five miles away. It makes sense that some centers are far from transit because many Head Start programs serve rural areas, said Abigail Seldin, co-founder of the Civic Mapping Initiative.

The rest of the nation’s centers, nearly 30 percent, fall somewhere in the middle: between 0.2 and five miles away from public transportation.

The Head Start association and the mapping initiative are focusing their efforts on a smaller subset of those centers –- the 19 percent that have a bus stop within a mile of their location. Simply adding a bus stop can make the distance walkable for families with toddlers, Seldin said.

“In those cases, the ask of a transit agency is to move a stop perhaps 2,000 feet,” Seldin said. “Anyone who has walked 1,000 feet with a toddler understands viscerally why this concept is so important and why these changes are essential.”

In some of these areas, local transit authorities can add bus stops without significantly changing routes or adding to their costs. In Memphis, buses were driving right past the Head Start centers before the transit agency added three stops as part of this mapping campaign.

“It’s a low-cost solution that makes a big difference for families and for early childcare workers who are commuting,” Seldin said.

Smith, with the Porter-Leath program in Memphis, hopes the added stops will help stabilize attendance for students whose families don’t have reliable transportation.

“Moving this closer to the centers and making it more accessible to them is important because now they don’t have to depend on someone else,” Smith said.

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In the heart of the Deep South, Mississippi has wrestled with enduring educational disparities, a profoundly rooted challenge passed down through generations.

The pandemic exacerbated preexisting funding inequities for high-need, under-resourced school districts, a longstanding challenge for the Magnolia State. Evidence of this persistent struggle is the distressing fact that 32 school districts remain under federal desegregation orders.

To delve deeper into how chronically under-resourced schools fared during the pandemic, the Mississippi Center for Justice (MCJ) spent over a year conducting parent focus groups and examining educational testing data in 12 predominantly Black and economically disadvantaged communities in the rural Delta, the northwestern section of the state, one of the poorest regions in the U.S.

Sadly, what we discovered was not surprising. Mississippi’s past, marked by a legacy of racial segregation and educational inequality, continues to cast a long shadow on its present and future.

Our extensive work at MCJ culminated in a report that showcased an unsettling reality: Affordability and availability are formidable barriers to internet access, while reading and math proficiency rates are significantly below the state averages in grades 3-8. In addition, special education programs and staff remain woefully under-resourced, while access to mental health professionals and support is often limited or, in some cases, entirely nonexistent. Past excuses by the state to avoid addressing these disparities are no longer acceptable.

It is past time for lawmakers to make education in Mississippi a priority for all students.

These issues, among others, further widen the chasm between the haves and have-nots in Mississippi and are creating a new generation of students failed by the system. The evidence of this gap is glaring according to the School Finance Indicators Database.

Spending in Mississippi’s highest-poverty districts is 55 percent below the estimated “adequate” level and 18 percent below adequate in the state’s wealthiest districts, according to the Database.

A significant challenge for Delta communities is the ever-growing digital divide. During the pandemic, students in better-resourced school districts had greater access to high-speed internet connections for a relatively seamless transition to remote learning, while students throughout the Delta struggled with internet accessibility, which contributed to significant learning loss.

While most students across the state received devices for virtual learning, many couldn’t use them due to poor, limited or no internet access. Our report found that this left them at a severe disadvantage.

Related: Homework in a McDonald’s parking lot: Inside one mother’s fight to help her kids get an education during coronavirus

Mississippi has one of the largest populations of K-12 students who lack broadband access; its sparsely populated rural communities are often redlined by internet service providers, leaving them grossly unserved or underserved. But it’s not just a Mississippi trend. According to a national study of the Black Rural South, nearly three-quarters, or 72.6 percent, of households in the Black Rural South do not have broadband of at least 25 Mbps — the minimum standard for broadband internet.

Compounding these challenges is the stark lack of access to mental health care, a formidable barrier for Mississippi students. According to our report, while parents described the immense toll the pandemic had on their family’s mental health, few of them sought help or had access to mental health professionals. Over 70 percent of children in Mississippi with major depression disorder do not receive treatment, surpassing the national average of 60 percent.

Unfortunately, the pandemic exacerbated this issue, with many students grappling with losing loved ones, economic instability and the social isolation imposed by remote learning. The student-to-counselor ratio in Mississippi is 398 to 1, almost 60 percent higher than the American School Counselor Association recommendation of 250 to 1, according to an analysis done by Charlie Health.

Our report also found that students with disabilities were acutely affected during the pandemic. Although Covid guidelines mandated compliance with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, many districts consistently failed to support students and their parents.

Mississippi now confronts a moral imperative to fortify its historically underserved school districts, especially those most severely impacted by the pandemic. With a $3.9 billion surplus of state revenue in 2023, legislators finally have the means to fully fund the Mississippi Adequate Education Program (MAEP) for the first time since 2008. Yet they have chosen not to do so during a time when schools need investment and support the most.

Related: OPINION: Lessons from Mississippi: Is there really a miracle here we can all learn from?

It is past time for lawmakers to make education in Mississippi a priority for all students, especially those in historically under-resourced districts. The state must begin investing in education to overcome historical inequities and post-pandemic challenges. This is the only viable path toward dismantling the systemic barriers that have perpetuated disparities for far too long.

Until then, Mississippi’s commitment to the well-being and success of all its residents, regardless of their ZIP code, will remain in question.

The time for unwavering action is now.

Kim L. Wiley is a former educator who serves as the Education Analyst & Project Coordinator for the Mississippi Center for Justice, a nonprofit, public-interest law firm committed to advancing racial and economic justice.

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House Republicans recently returned to one of their favorite targets for spending cuts: the country’s most vulnerable youth and the schools that serve them. Their plan would represent a major setback to efforts to achieve racial equity in our nation’s public schools.

During the latest battle over preventing a government shutdown, Republicans called for cutting Title 1 education grants earmarked for low-income students by 80 percent, which would mean a loss of nearly $15 billion in funding for schools with sizeable populations of these students, disproportionately affecting schools that serve more children of color.

We already see this racial logic playing out in the efforts of red states to use school funding as a political football. In Tennessee, the house speaker and lieutenant governor have teamed up to explore rejecting federal education funds altogether. They hope to shirk federal oversight on matters related to inequality, including civil rights protections based on race.

Given the patterns in funding schemes across the country, it is clear that we need to set aside targeted school funding on both the state and local levels with the express purpose of remedying injustices inflicted upon particular groups of students.

Yet the reality is that government funding decisions about education have long been a way to install and preserve racial inequality in our society. And since these inequalities have origins in funding malpractice, to remedy them, the government must use targeted funding for racial equity going forward.

Related: ‘Kids who have less, need more’: The fight over school funding

School funding stems from three major sources: federal, state and local. Looking at average breakdowns from recent data, we see that U.S. schools receive about 47 percent of their funds from their state government, 45 percent from local and 8 percent from federal.

This means that states and districts can counteract any proposed federal cuts with concerted efforts to reinvest in vulnerable youth. But even states with Democratic leadership have struggled to do so.

For example, in Pennsylvania, where I call home, the state’s funding scheme has been found unconstitutional for providing inadequate and unequal funding. Recent investigations have revealed how damaging the effects of this system have been on districts where a majority of students are students of color; one study, from the advocacy group The Education Trust, found that “districts with the most students of color on average receive substantially less (16 percent) state and local revenue than districts with the fewest students of color, equating to approximately $13.5 million for a 5,000-student district.”

Related: OPINION: Pennsylvania’s school funding is a case study in the future of inequality

The state of California, and its largest city, Los Angeles, however, have initiated thoughtful and large-scale efforts to right the wrongs of governments past. California’s funding formula and Los Angeles’ program to holistically support Black students are both concrete efforts to tinker with school funding to move towardequity, rather than away from it. In a nutshell, these programs exemplify meaningful, targeted investments in marginalized populations and represent a significant course reversal from much of United States history.

Though these two programs in California have flaws, which I detail below, there are real lessons that leaders across the country can glean from them in order to make real, lasting change in their own locales.

I spent the previous five years in California training teachers and studying school improvement. This year, we are arriving at the 10th anniversary of the state’s Local Control Funding Formula, which changed how schools were funded and allows for greater flexibility in how local education agencies meet the needs of three targeted student populations: low-income, foster youth and English learners.

These programs exemplify meaningful, targeted investments in marginalized populations and represent a significant course reversal from much of United States history.

Results so far include a demonstrable gain in test scores for these “high-need” students, including a 13 percentage point increase in the number of students meeting or exceeding standards on state tests in districts where 95 percent of students are high-need.

These numbers could have been even higher, however, had there been greater compliance at the district level. The same report noted that roughly 60 percent of districts reported spending “less money on high-need students than they were allocated for these students. Nearly 20 percent spent about half or less.”

Further, advocates argue that California’s funding formula does not do enough to target the needs of Black students in the state, who continue to face an accumulation of disadvantages both in and out of school. This was one impetus for even more targeted funding in California’s largest district: Los Angeles Unified.

In February 2021, Los Angeles approved a reform initiative known as the Black Student Achievement Plan. This plan set out to address rampant racial disparities in the district, pulling together $36.5 million in funds from the school police department budget and the district’s general fund.

The money went toward many important endeavors, including reforms of school discipline and curriculums and hiring support staff such as counselors, school climate coaches and nurses.

Additional resources were provided according to need, with schools serving the highest number of Black students also receiving psychiatric social workers, attendance counselors and funding for restorative justice programs.

Early data found some notable gains, including increases in graduation rates, completion of courses required for admission to California State universities, enrollment in Advanced Placement courses and attendance. These successes, while modest, provide evidence that targeted funding for Black students can improve how schools serve them.

But the problems with LA’s program are also instructive. An April report found that, similar to the deployment of the state funding formula, nearly 40 percent of the allocated funds were not used after the first year of the program, while the rollout and follow-through varied greatly across school campuses.

Those findings were later corroborated by an ongoing evaluation study, which noted that several LA schools dealt with unfilled positions related to the Black Student Achievement Plan while others tended to overwhelm program staff with responsibilities beyond their job descriptions.

These struggles show how, to fulfill their promise, programs like California’s targeted funding formula and Los Angeles’ plan for Black students must: (1) hire appropriate numbers of staff with clear job responsibilities, (2) communicate actively with communities about the purpose of the funds, (3) check-in regularly with schools to keep track of the funds they have left to spend and (4) consistently support the educators making use of the funds.

While there will certainly be differences in state policies, school district size and budgets, more states and districts should heed the lessons, both good and bad, from California.

Given how much pressure we collectively put on schools to improve society, setting aside specific funds for programs to support the most systematically disadvantaged students constitutes an educational imperative. These important California models can pave a path forward with more explicit commitments to racial justice.

 Julio Ángel Alicea is an assistant professor of sociology at Rutgers University-Camden. A former public school teacher, his research interests include race, urban education and organizational change.

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Early childhood care and education before pre-K or kindergarten has not traditionally been considered a public school system priority. But as school leaders tighten their budgets, they would be wise to invest money earlier, when the return on investment is highest.

After all, children who receive high-quality early childhood care and education services are more likely to enter school prepared for academic and social success in kindergarten and beyond.

When children are not ready for kindergarten, schools must use their limited resources on remediation efforts, too often with limited success. School district leaders are facing difficult spending choices, but early childhood care and education is an area to sustain and grow investment, not cut.

Building true school readiness among the youngest learners, when done right, will save school district leaders money and result in stronger outcomes later.

We are seeing this play out now across the nation with literacy rates. With our current, porous early education system, just one in three students achieve key reading benchmarks by fourth grade. State leaders are now redesigning literacy instruction in early grades to address this issue, but we know the foundation for strong reading and writing should begin earlier.

Related: Infants and toddlers in high quality child care seem to reap the benefits longer, research says

The pandemic ravaged an already-fragile early childhood care and education industry. Child care businesses all over the country shut their doors or limited their seats, and teachers fled in droves. Working families, in a desperate search for affordable child care, were forced to settle for low-quality services, leave the labor market entirely or juggle working at home and caring for their children. Their children missed valuable opportunities for learning and development.

Congress helped relieve some of these negative effects with historic investments, including relief dollars to stabilize existing services and expand service access for the families who needed it most, including frontline workers. Louisiana, for example, used their dollars to serve an additional 16,000 children from birth to age three.

But the time to use those dollars is quickly running out. The nation now faces a potential $48 billion child care fiscal cliff, and its impacts could be even more detrimental to children and families. Without this funding, states will be forced to scale back efforts that gave working families access to child care — or scrap those efforts entirely.

As school leaders tighten their budgets, they would be wise to invest money earlier, when the return on investment is highest.

Earlier this year, a handful of governors asked the federal government for more funding, but it’s uncertain whether Congress will step up. If it does not, it will be the responsibility of states and localities to prevent the worst for young learners, working families and the early childhood education workforce.

School district leaders must find dollars in their existing budgets to address the greatest needs and prioritize money for younger students. This task may feel impossible, but school district leaders should not be afraid to get creative: Title I, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and Rural Education Achievement Program dollars can all be used for pre-K.

Leaders may also be able to redirect flexible state funding to improve early childhood programs’ quality and access. And locally raised funds could be used to serve more children in early childhood settings.

Summit County in Colorado is doing this well. School district leaders there say they have combined local, state and federal funding to pay for high-quality early childhood care and education services. They have a customer service focus that ensures they are meeting the needs of families.

Without this local commitment, children in Summit would start school behind, requiring the district to work extra hard to catch them up.

But school districts can’t fix school readiness with school-run pre-K alone: They must build and strengthen local partnerships, including with public and nonpublic child care sites, local businesses and foundations.

Related: OPINION: Five lessons on how states can invest in high-quality child care and early education

In Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, school district leaders built a strong network of local partners around a vision for a high quality continuum of care and education for children from birth to age 5.

They established a clear picture of the needs of their community, and the way they can change year after year, so they are ready to meet them. If there is an influx of English language learners, for example, they are prepared to quickly open more classrooms to serve these children and their families.

The district equipped classrooms with high-quality instructional materials and provided meaningful coaching and professional development to teachers in all early childhood education settings: As a result, they’ve seen the quality ratings of their local sites increase over time.

Once funding is found and community partnerships are forged, school districts can spend money on what matters most for young learners. High-quality instructional materials and adult-child interactions play a critical role in improving academic and social outcomes.

The Dallas Independent School District, for example, invested in a suite of tools to focus, measure and improve interactions between teachers and children in their youngest classrooms. They are now seeing a climb in literacy results.

School districts have a vested interest in making sure the youngest learners have experiences that prepare them to start kindergarten, achieve key reading and writing benchmarks by third grade and progress through the rest of their academic journeys.

Nasha Patel is a managing director at Watershed Advisors, a consulting firm that helps governments design, implement and scale transformative education plans.

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Millions of working parents will face a child care emergency after pandemic-era federal funding ends Sept. 30, just two days from now. 

Whether you are one of the affected parents or not, you will feel the impact on our nation’s workforce and economy. 

According to estimates, up to 70,000 daycare facilities could close, causing three million child care slots to vanish. This is a loss of educational opportunity for children, but also a devastating loss of support for millions of working parents who may have to leave their jobs. 

All of us will surely feel the resulting blow to our economy if a projected $9 billion-plus in earnings is lost.

Related: What American can learn from Canada’s new $10 a day childcare

Sadly, this is just the latest failure in a child care system that has been broken for decades. 

As The Casey Foundation recently highlighted in our 2023 KIDS COUNT^® Data Book, shortcomings of the child care system already cost the country $122 billion a year in lost wages, tax revenue and productivity. 

We cannot allow these cascading consequences to continue.

Every other country with an economy comparable to ours has created a sustainable system that better meets the needs of families, employers and child care workers.

It’s time for policymakers to explore immediate solutions. We know they exist: Every other country with an economy comparable to ours has created a sustainable system that better meets the needs of families, employers and child care workers. 

Moreover, we already have evidence in our own economy of what can work. For example, home-based providers are more likely to operate during non-traditional hours, when shift workers, single parents and student parents need them. One thing we can do right away is to increase access to affordable startup and expansion capital for new and existing home-based centers. 

A robust, reliable care system requires investment. Average public spending on child care among the comparatively wealthy Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) nations is $16,000 a year per child. 

The United States invests a mere $500 per child. How can we invest so little in our future workforce? In the leaders of tomorrow? 

Related: A wave of childcare closures is coming as funding dries up

Families are working hard to meet their needs but costs continue to rise, putting quality care beyond their reach. Child care costs in the U.S. averaged $10,600 a year in 2021, according to an analysis by the advocacy organization Child Care Aware. That’s 10 percent of a couple’s average income — or 35 percent of a single parent’s income. 

In at least 34 states, care for the youngest children is more expensive than in-state college tuition. 

What support does exist for families is difficult to get and insufficient. As a result, only one out of every six U.S. children eligible for public subsidies receives them. 

Women, single parents, parents in poverty, families of color and immigrant families carry the heaviest burden of this crisis: An analysis of 2017 data indicated center-based care for two children absorbed 26 percent of a white working mother’s median household income. For Latino, American Indian or Alaska Native, and Black working mothers, those figures were 42 percent, 51 percent and 56 percent, respectively. 

These figures demonstrate how the cost of care can make it almost impossible for a household to meet other basic needs like housing, food and transportation — which all continue to escalate in cost.

In spite of this, providers themselves, almost all women and disproportionately women of color, are barely staying afloat, operating on one percent margins. 

No wonder so many are expected to close their doors starting next month.

In August, more than 1,500 state lawmakers from across the country gathered in Indianapolis for the annual National Conference of State Legislatures summit. 

We heard Republicans and Democrats agree that something must be done to address the child care crisis. 

They know the fallout will keep us from moving forward, from filling jobs and from ensuring that children are safe and thriving while their parents are working or completing their own education. 

It’s time to channel that consensus into urgent action and real solutions.  

This is a time for creativity and thinking big among both the private and public sector. The Casey Foundation urges lawmakers to invest in the child care sector, starting with these steps:

• Congress should reauthorize and strengthen the Child Care and Development Block Grant Act. The main reason we didn’t lose 75,000 child care centers and 3 million slots during the pandemic was the $40 billion allocated to strengthen the child care sector in the American Rescue Plan Act. We now have evidence that these investments work.

• Public and private leaders should work together specifically to improve infrastructure for home-based child care providers. Start by increasing access to affordable startup and expansion capital. 

• Governors and legislators should encourage the higher education and business communities to take steps such as co-locating child care at work and learning sites to reduce transportation challenges. 

The underpinnings of our families and our economy are too important for our elected officials to continue to ignore what is happening. The pandemic sharpened our understanding of the issues. There are good models to follow. 

Now is the moment for generational action to ensure children, parents and guardians, providers and employers are never again standing at the edge of a cliff, looking for a bridge to safety, and wondering whose kids will make it to the other side and whose will be left behind.

Lisa M. Hamilton is president and CEO of the Annie E. Casey Foundation. 

This story about the child care funding cliff 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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