Though college enrollment seems to be stabilizing after the pandemic disruptions, predictions for the next 15 years are grim. Colleges will be hurt financially by fewer tuition-paying students, and many will have to merge with other institutions or make significant changes to the way they operate if they want to keep their doors open.

At least 30 colleges closed their only or final campus in the first 10 months of 2023, including 14 nonprofit colleges and 16 for-profit colleges, according to an analysis of federal data by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, or SHEEO. Among nonprofits, this came on the heels of 2022, when 23 of them closed, along with 25 for-profit institutions. Before 2022, the greatest number of nonprofit colleges that closed in a single year was 13. 

Over the past two decades, far more for-profit colleges closed each year than nonprofits. An average of nine nonprofit colleges closed each year, compared to an average of 47 for-profit colleges. 

This time last year, experts predicted we’d see another wave of college closures, mostly institutions that were struggling before the pandemic and were kept afloat by Covid-era funding. Since then, keeping their doors open has become unrealistic for these colleges, many of which are regional private colleges. 

“It’s not corruption, it’s not financial misappropriation of funds, it’s just that they can’t rebound enrollment.”

Rachel Burns, a senior policy analyst at SHEEO. 

For many, the situation has been made worse by the enrollment declines during the pandemic. 

“It’s not corruption, it’s not financial misappropriation of funds, it’s just that they can’t rebound enrollment,” said Rachel Burns, a senior policy analyst at SHEEO. 

Data from the National Student Clearinghouse shows that undergraduate enrollment has stabilized and even slightly increased for the first time since the pandemic, but a continuing decline in birth rates means that fewer high school seniors will be graduating after 2025, so these colleges will face even greater enrollment challenges in the years to come.

Hundreds of colleges are expected to see significant enrollment declines in the coming years, according to David Attis, managing director of research at the education consulting company EAB. Among the reasons, he said, are declining birthrates, smaller shares of students choosing college, and college-going students veering toward larger and more selective institutions.

By 2030, 449 colleges are expected to see a 25 percent decline in enrollment and 182 colleges are expected to see a 50 percent decline, according to an EAB analysis of federal enrollment data. By 2035, those numbers are expected to rise to 534 colleges expecting a 25 percent decline and 227 colleges expecting a 50 percent decline; by 2040, a total of 566 colleges are expected to see a 25 percent decline and 247 are expected to see a 50 percent decline, according to  EAB’s analysis. 

These are predictions, of course, and they certainly don’t ensure that all those colleges will close. But with these drops in enrollment expected to continue, colleges need to plan now and make significant changes in order to survive, Attis said.

“Imagine if you lose half your students – that is a threat to your continued existence.”

David Attis, managing director of research at the education consulting company EAB.

“Imagine if you lose half your students – that is a threat to your continued existence,” Attis said. “You’ll have to make some pretty dramatic changes. It’s not just a ‘We’ll cut a few academic programs,’ or ‘We’ll trim our administrative staff a little bit.’ That requires a real reorientation of your whole strategy.”

Many colleges face the decision to merge with another institution or close down entirely, Attis said. And if they wait too long to find a college to merge with, they really won’t have a choice. 

“If you wait until you’re on the verge of closure, you’re not a particularly attractive partner,” Attis said. “But if you’re not on the verge of closure, then you’re not as motivated to find that partner.”

Attis said that he’s been surprised to hear from several leaders of regional colleges – both private and public – that they are in talks about mergers. 

“Whether they’ve pursued them or not, they’ve either made a call or gotten a call,” Attis said. “They’re thinking about it in a way I hadn’t heard in the past.” 

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

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As Columbia University puts the last touches on its brand-new campus in Harlem, it has reached a milestone: The university is now the largest private landowner in New York City.

In a city where land is more valuable than almost anywhere in the nation, the school now owns more than 320 properties, with a combined value of nearly $4 billion. The growth has helped it stay competitive within the Ivy League and meet its broader ambitions to become a global institution.

By many measures, those ambitions have also helped lift the city around it, attracting higher numbers of students, producing new jobs and boosting New York’s reputation as an international center of knowledge.

But as Columbia has expanded its footprint, it has also become more of a drain on the city budget because of a state law more than 200 years old that allows universities, museums and other nonprofits to pay almost no property taxes.

The law saves Columbia more than $182 million annually, according to an analysis by The New York Times. The amount has soared from $38 million just 15 years ago as the university has bought up more properties and their value has increased.

Columbia’s property tax savings, which are a fraction of its $14.3 billion endowment, far exceed the tax breaks granted to many high-profile commercial developments, including large-scale sites like Hudson Yards. They are 50 percent larger than those at Yankee Stadium and greater than the combined tax deals for Citi Field and Madison Square Garden.

Even as Columbia has swallowed up more land, it has taken fewer students from New York City. Since 2010, the number of city students enrolled in Columbia’s undergraduate ranks has declined by 37 percent.

Nearly every state has property tax exemptions for nonprofits, including universities, which are exempt from paying taxes on their academic buildings and dormitories. (Universities, including Columbia, pay tax on properties they own that are not used for educational purposes.)

But they are often contentious, and the seven other Ivy League universities pay some property taxes on those buildings or voluntarily pay millions of dollars every year to their local governments and school districts.

Not one university in New York City does, including two of the nation’s wealthiest institutions, Columbia and N.Y.U., which had property tax savings of $145 million this year.

“I call them the untouchables: I can’t think of anyone who has been willing to take on this issue,” said Harvey Robins, who worked for Mayor Edward I. Koch and Mayor David N. Dinkins and has followed the issue of tax exemptions for universities. “It’s really important that we begin a conversation finally about who pays what and who subsidizes whom.”

A Columbia University spokeswoman, Samantha Slater, pointed to $170 million in contributions the university had pledged to the community near its campuses starting in 2009, saying the investments “have been a model for similar investments by other universities.”

“The effect is the same — forging partnerships with the city and local organizations to invest in the economic development of the community,” she said in a statement. She did not respond to specific questions about the institution’s property tax savings and whether it had considered making annual payments to the city.

The debate may have been muted in New York because the city has other major revenue streams, such as Wall Street. Columbia has also spent more than $2 million over the last five years to retain some of the city’s most prominent lobbying firms, who meet with officials, including the mayor, on a number of issues, including its real estate interests.

“They have a very powerful board, they talk to the mayor. I think it should be looked at, particularly in the years coming up. If you look at the budget deficits, they’re massive.”

Gale Brewer, a councilwoman and former Manhattan borough president

But with financial challenges looming, a growing number of city and state officials are re-examining the longstanding exemptions for private universities. Property tax revenue accounts for more than 40 percent of the city’s total tax collections.

Columbia’s contribution probably would be small in the scheme of the more than $31 billion the city collects every year. But it is also significantly more than some of the expenses that city leaders haggled over during budget negotiations this year. Programs serving inmates at the troubled Rikers Island jail complex were cut, for example, and the budget for free preschool for 3-year-olds was reduced.

In the coming year, federal pandemic funds — which the city has leaned on to shore up public school budgets and other services — are drying up, even as the city says it expects to spend billions to manage an influx of migrants from the southern border. Mayor Eric Adams has asked city agencies to cut their budgets by 5 percent by November and has said the Police and Fire Departments, among others, will need to slice overtime.

Gale Brewer, a councilwoman and former Manhattan borough president, said she was among those the university has lobbied in recent years, mostly in connection with faculty housing. She said she was not sure why city officials have not asked Columbia and N.Y.U. to make annual payments.

“They have a very powerful board, they talk to the mayor,” she said. “I think it should be looked at, particularly in the years coming up. If you look at the budget deficits, they’re massive.”

‘Civic project’ or ‘land grab’?

The state’s tax breaks for nonprofits date to 1799, long before Columbia and other higher education institutions became vast enterprises with billion-dollar endowments. At the time, the country’s first universities were primarily connected to religious denominations and were deemed charitable enterprises.

Columbia opened in 1754 and moved in the early 20th century to its core Morningside Heights campus, where it confined itself for nearly a century. In 1968, it abandoned its move to construct a gym on the edge of Harlem — a project that was derided as “Gym Crow” — after enormous protests. Then, in the early 2000s, Columbia administrators, led by its president at the time, Lee C. Bollinger, said the university could no longer remain competitive without a larger campus.

To help Columbia expand, New York State condemned land in 2008 in the West Harlem neighborhood of Manhattanville and used eminent domain to seize properties for the university. The university made promises to be a good neighbor and hire local workers. 

“There was a time when Columbia really turned its back on where it was located,” Bollinger said in a 2006 interview with The Times. “I wanted to take exactly the opposite approach.”

Bollinger, who declined to comment for this article, told community leaders and neighborhood groups that the university had changed since the 1968 upheaval. 

A lawsuit briefly halted the Bollinger plan because judges agreed it was not a “civic project.” Nick Sprayregen owned self-storage warehouses in West Harlem and fought Columbia’s efforts to buy his properties. “This is a really nothing more than a land grab of the most extreme type,” Sprayregen said in 2007. He died in 2016.

A higher court allowed the project to go forward. Columbia moved several dozen residents to a 12-story condominium building and gave them $7,000 each.

As it expanded, the university said that it spent at least $600 million with local firms, many of them owned by women and people of color, for construction, maintenance and repairs at its campuses — approximately 16 percent of the total it spent during that time period.

The university has also paid out about $104 million of the $170 million it pledged to the community — to local organizations, an affordable housing fund and city agencies like the Parks Department. The university also said it had spent more than $100 million in upgrades to local infrastructure since 2009 and that it would soon pay to replace two escalators at a subway station on 125th Street.

“Columbia continues to prioritize engagement with our local community — from Morningside Heights to Harlem, Washington Heights and beyond,” Slater, the Columbia spokeswoman, said in a statement. “We focus on meaningful investments that provide local jobs and economic opportunity, along with sustainable community partnerships.”

Maritta Dunn, the former chairwoman of Community Board 9 who lives across the street from the new campus, praised it. “It gives the local community a nearby pretty park with trees, benches and tables,” she said.

But some residents said the university ultimately hired few local residents, overlooked local companies for much of the work and has not been as welcoming to neighbors as promised.

“It didn’t happen the way I thought it should have happened,” said Walter J. Edwards, the founder of the Harlem Business Alliance whose company, Full Spectrum, helped renovate a 1920s building on the new campus. “If you are displacing us, give us something.”

Altagracia Hiraldo, who runs the Dominican Community Center, said she had hoped for more, including the chance for neighborhood nonprofits like hers to work on campus.

“They forgot about us,” Hiraldo said.

Since the expansion, Columbia’s new properties in West Harlem have more than doubled the market value of the neighborhood, and they are now valued at $644 million. The centerpiece of the campus is the Jerome L. Greene Science Center, a massive glass and steel structure. Additional buildings are under construction, including a 34-story residential tower for graduate students and faculty.

Because Columbia took over properties that had been paying taxes, the city now collects half the annual property taxes that it collected on that land in 2008, The Times found.

Taking more space, but not more students

Local public schools have questioned Columbia’s commitment to its surrounding community. As recently as 2010, a quarter of Columbia’s undergraduate students came from New York City: 2,236 students. By 2022, that number had decreased to 1,416, or about 15 percent of the student body.

Several administrators at local public schools said that the university, which has been vocal in supporting diversity and affirmative action, has shown minimal interest in recruiting local students, especially children from low-income families.

Its overall student body is 7 percent Black and 15 percent Latino, and 22 percent of students receive Pell grants, which are aimed at low-income students. The racial breakdown is similar to other Ivy League universities; a higher share of Pell-eligible students attend than at some of its peers. (Columbia declined to share demographic data for its New York City students.)

Jerome Furman, a counselor at East Side Community School in the East Village of Manhattan, where about two-thirds of students are low income, said he has had students accepted to every Ivy League college except Columbia in his seven years at the school.

He said his calls and emails about college fairs or students who apply go unanswered.

“The relationship has been nonexistent,” Furman said.

“If New York is such an asset to them, then it makes sense to make sure that New York students are represented in a real capacity in the student body.”

Fred Raphael, the college and career counselor at Boerum Hill School for International Studies in Brooklyn

Columbia would not say how many New York City public school students are enrolled, but said that the number had increased in the past five years and that students from 45 of the city’s public high schools entered Columbia last year.

Fred Raphael, the college and career counselor at Boerum Hill School for International Studies in Brooklyn, where a majority of students are Black or Latino, said that acceptances have become so rare that he doesn’t see Columbia as a realistic option, even for his highest-performing students.

“If New York is such an asset to them,” he said, “then it makes sense to make sure that New York students are represented in a real capacity in the student body.”

Other urban Ivy League universities declined to share enrollment from their home cities, except for Brown University, located in Providence, R.I. A Brown spokesman said on average between 20 and 30 undergraduates from Providence public schools enrolled in a given year — slightly more than from comparably sized cities outside Rhode Island.

Other major universities in the city have a larger percentage of New Yorkers. At Fordham University in the Bronx, 23 percent of undergraduates come from New York City, a percentage that has been stable for the last decade. At N.Y.U., about 17 percent of undergraduate students are New York City residents.

Like Columbia, N.Y.U. has sought to transform itself into a national and global powerhouse. It has been expanding since the 1980s and recently began to build out its own campus, for the most part on land it already owned, including a 23-story glass and steel academic building in Greenwich Village that cost $1.2 billion to construct. After community backlash, the expansion has been scaled back, but the university will pay no property taxes.

“I would bet my life that they are nowhere near the end of their growth,” said Andrew Berman, the executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group Village Preservation.

An N.Y.U. spokesman pointed to the contributions the university makes to the city, including its students who assist in public school classrooms and its relatively large Higher Educational Opportunity Program, which provides college access for low-income New Yorkers. It also noted that the majority of its graduates stay in New York for work and that its thousands of employees pay in excess of $100 million in payroll taxes.

“We recognize the budget challenges the city faces. Nevertheless, we feel the charitable status that derives from N.Y.U.’s educational mission — and the attendant tax policies — is not a one-way exchange,” said an N.Y.U. spokesman, John Beckman. “We are deeply appreciative of those policies, but we also take some humble pride in the many, many ways, small and large, that N.Y.U. contributes to the city’s well-being and its economy.”

New York’s exceptional exceptions

New York is among 49 other states with property tax exemptions for private, nonprofit entities, which supporters say allow them to provide crucial social, economic and cultural benefits to their communities. In the case of universities, they conduct often costly research and public-policy studies and employ people who pay income taxes.

But in other cities, officials have pressured universities to make voluntary payments, known as payments in lieu of taxes, or PILOTs, or similar annual donations. Even within New York State, other cities have charted a different course.

In upstate Ithaca, Cornell University started making annual payments decades ago that have now grown to $1.6 million and are expected to climb to $4 million in October.

Columbia has sought to maintain close ties to many of the people who might put pressure on it to contribute, spending more than $2.2 million since 2017 on firms that lobby city and state officials. The university said that the firms that it employs provided other services in addition to lobbying and spent most of their lobbying efforts on education, research and health care.

A spokesman for Mayor Adams, Jonah Allon, said that the city’s financial problems meant “every option is on the table to ensure we continue to fund city services we rely on.” But he did not directly respond to questions about whether the city had considered asking the universities to make voluntary payments.

Recently, calls for the universities to pay more have been growing.

After then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo proposed a $485 million cut in 2016 to CUNY, the city’s public university system, the union that represents its professors began calling for private universities to help offset the cuts.

“CUNY is the higher education institution that serves the working people of New York,” said James Davis, the president of the union, “and those same working people are effectively subsidizing these tax breaks for Columbia and N.Y.U.”

Assemblywoman Deborah J. Glick, a Democrat who represents an area that includes New York University’s Manhattan campus, has spent a decade questioning the tax exemptions. In a recent interview, the city’s comptroller, Brad Lander, praised the universities, but said they should “step up” to help CUNY.

“There’s just more urgency than ever,” he said.

During the 2021 mayoral campaign, candidates including Andrew Yang and Curtis Sliwa called for ending the property tax exemptions altogether.

But forcing the universities to pay property taxes would require lawmakers in Albany to change state law.

Zohran Mamdani, a state assemblyman who represents parts of Queens, has said he plans to try this year, with a bill that would end property tax exemptions for private higher education institutions with exemptions of more than $50 million in real estate.*

The only private universities that meet that threshold are Columbia and N.Y.U.

Liset Cruz and Emma G. Fitzsimmons contributed reporting.

*Correction: An earlier version of this article misstated how a bill that would end property tax exemptions for private higher education institutions would determine which schools are eligible. It would be for institutions with annual property-tax exemptions of more than $50 million, not more than $50 million in real estate holdings.

This story was produced in collaboration with The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit news outlet that covers education. Hechinger is an independent unit at Teachers College, Columbia University.

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In Hopewell, Virginia, about 20 miles southeast of Richmond, Juanterria Browne spends her days providing child care for children with disabilities, a demographic for which it is notoriously difficult to find care. Browne, who opened Kidz with Goals Unlimited, LLC, in early 2020, was hit hard by the pandemic. Parents pulled their children out of care, leaving Browne, a nurse and mother of three, with nearly $15,000 in unpaid tuition bills. She borrowed money from her parents and paid herself a salary of just $500 that year, so she could continue to provide meals for the children in her care, afford rent and utilities for the center and make payroll for her employees. Even that wasn’t enough. Browne also started working night shifts at a nearby hospital, often going to her second job after spending all day at her center.  

Then, in 2021, the American Rescue Plan Act was signed into law and $39 billion was sent to states to help stabilize the child care industry. Browne received a welcome influx of funds: nearly $83,000 to help keep her business open. Browne used the money to wipe out the debt owed to her by families who struggled to pay after losing their jobs and then had to pull their children out of care completely. She raised staff pay from $10 an hour to $15-$18 an hour. She gave herself a salary of $34,000, which allowed her to quit her night job and work full time at the center. She also used funds to upgrade her playground equipment, buy cleaning supplies and provide a scholarship to a family that was struggling to make ends meet.  

Nationwide, ARPA funds helped steady a rocky industry that has historically been marked by poverty-level wages for educators and high staff turnover.

“Child care, as a field and industry, was already in crisis before the pandemic,” said Michelle Kang, chief executive officer for the National Association for the Education of Young Children. “The pandemic laid bare some of the challenges that already existed.”

While other countries provide support to sustain the operations of child care programs, the United States historically does not. The federal pandemic stabilization funds provided a rare infusion of operating money, a move reminiscent of when the federal government briefly funded child care to support working parents during World War II.

Since the pandemic, nearly 16,000 early childhood programs have shuttered. Between January 2020 and January 2022, around 120,000 child care workers left the industry, many for higher paying jobs, leading to immense staffing shortages and soaring waiting lists for parents who were unable to return to work full-time due to a lack of care. Educators and experts say the federal relief aid prevented the situation from getting worse. Those funds helped keep more than 200,000 early childhood programs open and more than 1 million early childhood educators employed, thus allowing more than 9.5 million children to receive care.

When the federal stabilization funds run out at the end of September and child care providers can no longer rely on this much-needed funding, experts say the consequences could be immense. A recent report by The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank, found an estimated 3.2 million children will eventually lose child care if those federal funds are not replaced.

That loss will hit especially hard in Virginia, where Browne works, as well as in a handful of other states, including Arkansas and West Virginia. It’s estimated that up to half of all licensed programs in those states could close. “Providers are going to do everything they can to hang on,” said Julie Kashen, director of women’s economic justice and a senior fellow at The Century Foundation. “We saw during the pandemic, they went into personal debt, they stopped paying themselves a salary, they’re going to do whatever they can because they know how important their jobs are for supporting children and parents.”

Experts warn that programs will be forced to make cuts or shut down. “Millions of parents will be impacted and some will have to leave the workforce,” Kashen added. “It matters to children, it matters to their families and it has ripple effects beyond that to the economy and states and employers.”

The effect of losing the funds could be even more grim for family child care providers, whose programs are typically smaller than center-based care and rely mostly on parent tuition payments.

“Most of the family child care educators that we work with are not in a position to raise their prices because their parents just can’t pay,” said Jessica Sager, co-founder and chief executive officer of All Our Kin, an organization that focuses on supporting family child care providers. In the years leading up to the pandemic, these programs were already struggling, with 97,000 closing between 2005 and 2017. “We’re going to lose more programs,” Sager said. “That’s a pretty dire situation to be in.” Ultimately, parents will have fewer choices for child care, she added. “These family child care programs are especially important for infants and toddlers and families working evenings and weekends. They’re going to be especially hard hit in terms of the choices available.”

In Virginia, Browne has already stopped receiving the federal stabilization funds, which means she will now go back to relying on parent tuition and state funding that only covers part of the cost for low-income children to attend child care, as well as any private or public grants and donations she can find. Nearly half of the children she enrolls are from low-income families who pay with state subsidies. But, as is the case nationwide, the reimbursement amount Browne gets per child is far less than the cost of providing care. She recently started working 12-hour nursing shifts at night again, driving straight to her center in the morning to check on her staff and the children before going home to sleep for a few hours. “It’s hard,” Browne said. “My body is not going to be able to take much more of working two full-time jobs.”

By the end of the year, Browne would like to be able to offer benefits to her staff. She is planning to open a second center this fall and hopes to earn enough from the two centers to quit her hospital job for good. Many experts and early childhood advocates say the success of programs like Browne’s, however, depends on more federal support. Congress has yet to take up legislation to allocate the needed funds to the child care industry, even though several lawmakers and the director of the United States Office of Management and Budget have called on Congress to act and voters have showed strong support for the idea in past polls.

“During the pandemic, for this brief moment, we rallied,” Sager said. “We did all these things to make programs sustainable. Now we’re taking that money away, but conditions have not fundamentally changed. The end of this funding really feels to our educators like they are no longer essential. Like they and the families in their care are being abandoned.”

This story about benefits of child care funding 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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As a professor, I’ve benefited tremendously by having racially diverse students in my classes. For me, there is no question that the U.S. Supreme Court erred by striking down affirmative action last month.

There have since been many thoughtful and persuasive pieces about the decision, including those arguing that Asian Americans have been used as a racial wedge against Black and Latino students and that “ ‘Race Neutral’ Is the New ‘Separate but Equal.’ ”

Yet the prolonged “for or against” framing of this debate has missed out on how affirmative action is a policy that attempts to address only the tip of the iceberg of racial inequity in the K–12 public school system. Driving that overall inequity is the inequity in funding.

Related: Supreme Court makes its historic ruling in affirmative action cases

Many Black and Latino students never make it to college. Nationally, 37 percent of Black youth (defined as 18-24-year-olds) and 36 percent of Latino youth enroll, compared to 42 percent of white youth and 59 percent of Asian American youth.

In Philadelphia, 49 percent of students who graduated from public high schools matriculated to a college or university, a number that does not account for the 19 percent pushout or dropout rate of students who did not graduate from high school.

Only 10 percent of Philadelphia public school students went on to earn a college degree.

Given these statistics, affirmative action is not the racial justice hill that I will die on. The debate around affirmative action threatens to obscure a broader struggle for racial justice in K-12 education — the fight for racially equitable school funding.

Affirmative action is not the racial justice hill that I will die on.

Nationwide, there is a $23 billion school funding gap between majority white and majority nonwhite districts. Addressing the K-12 racial school funding gap is a more urgent need that will make a greater impact on Black and Latino students across the country.

In Pennsylvania, a 2016 study revealed that the whiter the school district, the more state funding it received relative to its “fair share”; and the more Black and Latino students in a school district, the less state funding it received per student. The fair share calculation, defined by the state, accounts for extra costs related to poverty and the relative number of English Language Learners and other factors.

The study’s author estimated that Philadelphia, a majority-Black and Latino school district, received $400 million less than its fair share.

The inequities are so stark that a Commonwealth Court of Pennsylvania judge recently ruled that the state’s school finance system is unconstitutional and in need of reform.

Related: An analysis of achievement gaps in every school in America shows that poverty is the biggest hurdle

Why did the well-intended fair share calculation fail to promote funding equity? And, relatedly, why did some coalition “advocates” undermine equitable school funding proposals? To understand this, I conducted fieldwork and interviews with state legislators and school funding advocates.

I found that powerful state leaders and the most politically connected advocates refused to challenge Pennsylvania’s racial school funding status quo. Instead, they used their positions of power to protect the preexisting policy proven to reproduce racial school funding inequities in state aid and actively thwart racial equity proposals at every turn.

By doing so, they helped predominantly white districts, many of which were dues-paying members of advocates’ organizations, maintain the school funding privileges to which they had become accustomed.

Writing about the U.S., Cheryl Harris, a professor at UCLA, said whiteness “enshrine[s] the status quo as a neutral baseline, while masking the maintenance of white privilege and domination.”

So, while the Supreme Court ruling has placed much of the attention on affirmative action, let’s not lose sight of the fact that so few Black and Latino students make it into college in the first place.

To fight for the many and not just the few means looking beyond affirmative action and advocating for racially equitable K-12 school funding systems.

State legislators who wield tremendous power over education funding and, by extension, the quality of education that Black and Latino students receive, have escaped accountability for far too long.

It’s time to demand that they create systems of school finance that provide Black and Latino students the education they deserve.

Roseann Liu is the author of Designed to Fail: Why Racial Equity in School Funding Is So Hard to Achieve, which will be published in April 2024. She is an assistant professor of education studies at Wesleyan University and a visiting assistant professor of Asian American Studies at Swarthmore College.

This story about the K-12 racial school funding gap 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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NAPERVILLE, Ill. — Claire Considine, a teacher’s aide at Naperville North High School in a suburb about 35 miles west of Chicago, had lost count of the hardships that she and other school support staff had been through since she was hired in 2019: the trauma and disruption of Covid-19, chaotic online instruction, mask and vaccine debates, and rising behavioral and mental health issues among students.

Now, facing staffing shortages, the district of more than 16,000 students dumped extra work on those who remained. As part of her job, Considine worked closely with students with disabilities, often helping medically-fragile children ride the bus or go to the bathroom. She did this all for $14.25 an hour, bringing home an average of $650 every two weeks. She struggled to afford gas for her car.

In November 2021, she was relieved to hear her union was organizing a rally to demand higher wages for teacher’s aides (also known as paraprofessionals) and other support staff, such as secretaries, health techs, campus supervisors and information technology support workers. Finally, a raise was imminent, she thought — hopefully a substantial one: The district had a $200 million surplus in June 2021. The board had opted to refund $10 million of it to local property owners as a tax refund earlier that year.

But soon after the rally, held the same night as a district board meeting, she and her fellow support staff got their answer: The school board approved a $1 raise, bringing her wage to $15.25 an hour.

Considine, 28, was shocked. On the day of the rally, she had bundled up in her warmest coat to march with a crowd of over 100 to a school board meeting, holding a posterboard board that read: “I love my job but I also need to put gas in my car.” Though nervous, she stood tall and projected her voice behind a cloth mask during public comments.

“I want to stay, but there might be a time in the not-too-distant future where I simply cannot afford to stay,” she had told the board. “I wish it wouldn’t take all of us telling you that we need to work a second job just to barely make ends meet.”

The approved salary increase was less than the $16 an hour that many Naperville North students earned working at Target. An extra $1 an hour was hardly going to make a dent in her car payment or student loans. If she stayed another year, she’d receive another dollar, and two years later, one additional dollar. Support staff also received a one-time $1,000 bonus. In the past, that might have felt like a win, but the inflation rate hit 7 percent that month, essentially negating her 7 percent raise.

Considine began searching for jobs not long after the small raise was announced. In November 2022, she submitted her resignation. On her last day, she gifted a book to her students filled with photos of them together. Saying goodbye was heartbreaking, and she felt guilty leaving her coworkers with yet another unfilled position. “I was sad to leave, but I knew I couldn’t stay. I knew I needed to make more,” she said.

At the beginning of the 2022-23 school year, 53 percent of public schools reported being understaffed, according to the Institute of Educational Sciences. While teacher shortages often get the most attention, shortages among non-teaching staff also disrupt the smooth running of schools. Support staff members often describe themselves as a hidden workforce, blending into the background. Behind every effective teacher, they argue, is a team of support staff, who receive little acknowledgement from parents or the community.

“Teachers can do only so much, so paraprofessionals are the bridge for students to receive the individualized services they need,” said Ritu Chopra, executive director of the Paraprofessional Resource and Research Center at the University of Colorado Denver. “They become the eyes and ears of the teachers. If you’re a special education teacher with a caseload of 12 students and the students are going into general education classrooms, the teacher has to be Superman or Superwoman to be in 12 different places at once. In the absence of paraprofessionals, special education services wouldn’t be possible.”

Related: When kids go back to school, who’s going to drive the bus?

Support staff receive significantly lower pay than teachers, typically working hourly jobs, meaning no pay during summers or school holidays. The Bureau of Labor Statistics lists the median annual pay for paraprofessionals in the U.S. at $21,528, when adjusted for unpaid time off over the summer and holidays, below the poverty line for a family of three. In 2021, 37 percent of support staff worked two or more jobs. “Educational support professionals are actually earning less than they did 10 years ago when adjusted for inflation,” said Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association. “Many are on a form of assistance like Medicaid or SNAP just to make ends meet.”

“I was sad to leave, but I knew I couldn’t stay.”

Claire Considine, former teacher’s aide.

A spokesperson for the district, Alex Mayster, said the district had no comment when given a list of questions related to the school board’s decision. However, he did provide a statement from the district that was released soon after the vote, which called the agreement “fair and fiscally responsible.”

“I am so thankful to have a contract in place that shows our district’s appreciation for the valued members of our support staff,” district superintendent Dan Bridges said in the statement.

Sharon Kurolenko, the president of the union representing Considine and her coworkers, said that the union overwhelmingly voted to ratify the contract, which included additional sick time and maintaining health insurance coverage. It was “a step in the right direction, but there is more work to be done,” she said. “We are committed to continuing to advocate for the respect and wages all our hard-working education support professionals deserve.”

Schools have long relied on the nearly 2.2 million educational support workers they employ. While the number of bus drivers, secretaries and custodians has remained steady or increased modestly in the past 30 years, teachers’ aides and security guards are two of the few positions in education that have seen substantial growth. The number of teachers’ aides more than doubled between 1990 and 2018 as the teacher shortage grew and efforts to integrate more students with disabilities in general ed classrooms increased.

While support staff are often seen as unskilled or low-skilled labor, many positions require a degree, specialized training or considerable skill. Most districts require paraprofessionals to have an associate’s degree, and some states ask them to pass an exam as well. In special ed classrooms, they’re expected to manage high-needs, high-risk children. IT support requires extensive technical knowledge. Health techs are CPR-trained and undergo additional training, usually without any increase in pay, in how to resuscitate a patient after cardiac arrest, stop excessive bleeding, and manage epileptic seizures. According to the NEA, 57 percent of support staff workers in K-12 schools have an associate’s degree or higher.

Related: Tight labor market hits after school

The disruption of the pandemic elevated the importance of school employees such as school nutrition staff, who quickly revamped their programs to serve grab-and-go meals for families who needed the support, said Diane Pratt-Heavner, the director of media relations for the School Nutrition Association.

But 93 percent of school meal programs report staff shortages, and the pool of potential school nutrition employees is being drawn away by restaurants and other employers that can offer more pay, Pratt-Heavner said. For example, when Denver recently hiked its minimum wage to $17.29 — close to $4 more than the state minimum wage of $13.65 — school districts outside city limits reported that potential employees were being drawn to jobs within the city. Even though schools can offer perks, such as weekends and holidays off, they can’t match that higher pay.

“It just has been very difficult for school nutrition programs to compete with fast food restaurants for salaries and benefits,” Pratt-Heavner said.

Bus driver shortages led Massachusetts to enlist the National Guard for help, and in some districts around the country, principals and superintendents began driving buses out of desperation. The shortage of custodians has left teachers and students cleaning bathrooms and mopping floors before and after school.

As schools emerged from Covid-19, staff support jobs did not return to what they had been in 2019. The challenges piled on, and they saw wages rising nearly everywhere except in education. Considine watched three other coworkers leave before her.

“The educational environment got more difficult physically, emotionally, mentally and psychologically,” said Mark Klaisner, the president of the Illinois Association of Regional Superintendents of Schools. “People were feeling trauma. And there wasn’t extra compensation for battle fatigue.”

Educator strikes have also increased across the country since 2020, not only among teachers, but among the school staff who support them. A three-day strike in April closed school for more than 420,000 students in Los Angeles after 30,000 school custodians, bus drivers, and paraprofessionals walked out. School support staff have also gone on strike this year in Woburn, Massachusetts and in Morgan County, Ohio.

At the November school board meeting where they spoke in favor of salary increases, several Naperville support staff discussed the hardships they endured. Logan Aschom, an IT support professional for the district, and father of a 4-year-old, told the board he feared he wouldn’t be able to continue working for the district. “My cost of living is rapidly outpacing and consuming my small increases in pay,” he said.

In a conversation after the meeting, he said most of his paycheck went to his daughter’s $1,500-a-month daycare, and $9,100 in annual property taxes. If it wasn’t for the $1,250 monthly rental income from an upstairs unit in their house, he and his wife, who manages an art gallery, couldn’t pay their bills.

Former paraprofessional Shalandar Phillips, a mom of five, including 6-year-old twins, said her 12- to 14-hour days at the school often meant she wouldn’t get home until 8 p.m. and missed dinner with her family. Even after working those long hours, she struggled to pay bills. She ended up quitting in early 2022, crying with her students and coworkers on her last day. She now works as a medical receptionist, logging only 40 hours a week and making approximately $14,000 more a year than she did as an educator.

Related: ‘More than a warm body:’ schools try long-term solution to substitute teacher shortage

The support staff shortage also directly affects the wellbeing of students and teachers. Without enough teacher assistants, for example, some students don’t receive the same level of individualized attention, which is a particular concern for students with disabilities.

Noah Peterson spent his senior year in a special education classroom at Naperville North last year. He has cerebral palsy, a mild cognitive delay, and wears leg braces to assist with walking. His special education supports require the school to provide a one-on-one aide during the school day. His mother, Jen Williamson, began noticing high turnover in the aides helping her son on or off the bus after he returned to in-person instruction in fall 2021. Sometimes an assistant wasn’t available, so Williamson would have to drive her son to school.

For years, Williamson fought to have one aide stay with her son while he was at school, but as shortages grew, he began having four to five different aides, rotating throughout the day. The instability concerned Williamson. Every year, she gives the school a three-page document with her son’s photo, his diagnoses, surgeries, medications, doctors and allergies; she worries that with the high turnover, this information doesn’t trickle down.

“I’ve almost lost him so many times,” Williamson said, as she waited for her son to come home on the bus from his transitional program through the Naperville district. “The aide is who I trust the safety of my child with throughout the day. It is very important they are aware of his diagnosis and how to care for him.”

Klaisner, of the superintendent’s association, said districts are motivated to hold down salaries as much as possible to keep budgets balanced and avoid raising taxes. “With 7 and 8 percent inflation, we’re talking about a 25 percent increase in three years. Taxes are not going to go up 25 percent in that time,” he said. Insurance premiums continue to increase for districts as well. “It’s always more complicated than the general public thinks,” he said.

In April 2023, Naperville District 203 had 53 open positions for support staff.

As challenging as it can be to work in school support, the position appeals to some who want to work with young people.

Considine, for example, was drawn to the profession to help students who may be struggling, just as she was helped in school. She credits paraprofessionals with helping her learn to read and enabling her to attend college. She was diagnosed with dyslexia in fourth grade, and couldn’t read until junior high, when she received reading intervention and worked one-on-one with a paraprofessional. In high school, another aide helped her prepare for the ACT.

“Now I worry they’re so short staffed, they’re pulling aides away from the kids like me,” she said.

After high school, she hoped to become a speech pathologist, but was worried about student debt. She opted to attend community college, then graduated with a bachelor’s degree in communications in 2019 and moved back home to figure out her next step. Her mom suggested the paraprofessional job, which comes with health benefits. Eventually, Considine was putting in 50 hours a week, plus babysitting once a week for $4 an hour more than the district paid her.

Thirty-seven percent of school support staff report working two or more jobs, according to a 2021 survey by the National Education Association.

To earn a teaching credential, she’d have to return to school and take out more student loans.

“I never thought about being a teacher because I saw how hard it was. But I loved being a teacher’s aide,” she said. Considine didn’t intend to continue living with her mom, but she saw no way out. The cheapest rent she could find was $1,200 a month for a basic one-bedroom apartment outside of Naperville where rents tended to be lower. “If I didn’t have friends or my family, I’d be on the streets,” she said.

Her fears weren’t unreasonable. As in other U.S. cities, the cost of living has risen dramatically in recent years. Rents in Naperville rose 10.4 percent between June 2021 and June 2022, and home prices rose 17 percent during that time. The median household income in the quiet, affluent suburb is around $136,000, compared to $66,000 for nearby Chicago. The demographics of the top-ranked district — 60 percent white, 18 percent Asian, 12 percent Hispanic and 5 percent Black —  roughly matches that of the community as a whole. Only 15 percent of the student body is designated by the state as low-income, compared to 47 percent for Illinois.

Kathi Griffin, president of the Illinois Education Association, has been advocating for increased pay across the state, including lobbying the Illinois House to pass a bill that would raise the minimum pay for educational support staff to $20 an hour for the 2023-24 school year. “For some educational support professionals in our state, their pay doesn’t even cover their health insurance costs for their family. They can go down the street to Amazon and get paid more per hour, yet these amazing people are so important to the success of our students.”

After leaving Naperville North, Considine began working as a receptionist at a nursing home facility two miles down the road. Her starting wage was $17, and she’s already begun training in activities coordinating that she hopes will help her transition to a position earning $80,000 a year. “I just couldn’t do the 12-hour days and the lifting and toileting and bus riding anymore,” she said. “I was burnt out.” She now has more free time and extra spending money to occasionally eat out with friends. She’s even begun saving for the future.

“I have more balance and a better quality of life,” she said. “It’s 7:45 a.m. to 4 p.m. and then I’m done.”

This story was supported by the journalism non-profit the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

This story about school support staff 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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HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY, Fla. — After seeing her daughter struggle in second, then third and fourth grades, Van McCourt-Ostrand wanted options. So, last year, the St. Petersburg mother of two applied for and received a voucher that would allow her youngest child to attend a private school in Florida.

McCourt-Ostrand, whose daughter has dyslexia, had two schools in mind, including one specializing in students with the reading-centered learning disability. She imagined her 11-year-old daughter finally having “peers, teachers, kids who understand what she is going through.”

That hope quickly vanished. Despite school visits, including one after which her daughter declared she had “met nice kids and enjoyed her experience,” she was not admitted. McCourt-Ostrand applied to the other school, but was told, “there is no room for you at fifth grade.”

“We had a voucher and nowhere to go with it,” she said.

Of the roughly 2,300 private schools accepting vouchers, 69 percent are unaccredited, 58 percent are religious and nearly one-third are for-profit, according to the state education department.

Even if her daughter had gotten in, she said, the voucher would have covered only about $7,000. Tuition at the first school was $20,000. It was $18,700 at the second — not including books, supplies, uniforms, tutoring and other expenses.

“I don’t know what we would have done,” said McCourt-Ostrand, “but we would have tried.”

Around the country, the political razzle-dazzle around “school choice” — giving families who enroll in the programs vouchers to spend on a range of school options as they see fit — is electrifying conservatives, grabbing public attention and becoming a GOP campaign banner. This year, states including Iowa, Utah and Arkansas have adopted universal school vouchers, which can be used like coupons for tuition, or education savings accounts (ESAs), which put money into accounts or onto debit cards for parents to use for school costs. Arizona’s Empowerment Scholarship Account, offered starting last fall, has so far enrolled over 50,000 students, many of whom were already attending private schools. Legislatures in some 30 states are considering related moves.

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

In March, Florida became the latest state to dramatically broaden access to public money for private schooling. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation making vouchers, worth about $8,500 each, eventually available to all K-12 students, regardless of family income (or whether a child has ever attended public school). The vouchers would also be available to home-schooled students, and ESAs could be used to pay for expenses beyond tuition.

In Florida and elsewhere, the pitches are bold, claiming that: “competition breeds excellence” and that choice will “put parents firmly in the driver’s seat” and is “about giving every student the best opportunity.” Less bold: detailed discussion of real-world consequences.

What if, like McCourt-Ostrand, your child doesn’t get into the school they want or need? What if a school costs more than the voucher’s value (as many do)? How can you tell if a private school is any good? And the big challenge: What does this mean for public schools, which 90 percent of children in America attend?

This historic expansion of vouchers in Florida has many parents and education experts there worried about the impact on public schools and debating what the expansion will cost and how it should be funded. Since 2019, when DeSantis began expanding access to vouchers, they have been paid for by rerouting state money from public districts to private education.

Over the past three years, the percentage of state-formula funding redirected from public to private education has risen from 3 to 10 percent, said Norín Dollard, senior policy analyst and KIDS COUNT director at the Florida Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research and policy organization. Next year, that could reach 30 percent, or $4 billion, according to calculations by Dollard and Mary McKillip of the Education Law Center.

“I don’t think I am being overly dramatic in saying it will fundamentally change public schools to have such a huge amount of funds diverted to private schools,” said Dollard.

“We will be decimated”

Florida public schools have long faced competition. In 1999, Gov. Jeb Bush signed into law the “Opportunity Scholarship Program,” which gave students in so-called failing public schools vouchers to help pay for private or religious ones. After the state Supreme Court in 2006 ruled the program unconstitutional because of its impact on public schools, the Florida Tax Credit (FTC) scholarship, created just a few years earlier, started to grow. It is financed through donations from companies to private school scholarships for low-income students that also lower the companies’ taxes. The number of students receiving FTC scholarships has risen by 62 percent over the past decade, which has no doubt contributed to the overall growth of private school enrollments. By the 2021-22 school year, 12.8 percent of Florida students attended private schools, above the national average; a decade earlier, it was 10.6 percent of the state’s students. 

Under DeSantis, the state also created and expanded (and combined and renamed) an array of voucher programs that cover tuition or other educational needs and services. These vouchers are targeted to students who have been bullied or faced violence or have disabilities, who are low-income or “working class” or siblings of voucher recipients, or who need reading help, among others.

Data from Step Up For Students, the primary group that administers the various scholarships, shows that about 130,000 students received vouchers in 2021-22 through four key scholarship programs. More recent state data shows that, in addition, nearly 100,000 students this year received tax-credit-based tuition vouchers, 81 percent to attend religious schools.

“I don’t think I am being overly dramatic in saying it will fundamentally change public schools to have such a huge amount of funds diverted to private schools.”

Norín Dollard, senior policy analyst and KIDS COUNT director, Florida Policy Institute

With this exodus from district schools in a state where the educational brand is “choice,” ordinary public schools face serious challenges. Step Up For Students boasts that 1.6 million, or “approximately 49% of K-12 students,” already participate in some form of choice, including magnet schools and career training programs.

The challenges are certainly being felt in Hillsborough County, located in an arc around Tampa Bay that includes the palm-treed “Riverwalk” downtown, tony suburban neighborhoods with water-view homes and mobile home parks in rural areas with names like “Plantation Oaks.” A rising percentage of Hillsborough County’s diverse student population now attends private schools —10.8 percent, up from 8.7 percent a decade earlier — or charters, which are public but often run by for-profit companies.

The nation’s seventh-largest school district, Hillsborough County may offer a harbinger of the impact of universal vouchers and “choice” on public schools nationally. Even before DeSantis signed the law, Addison Davis, superintendent of Hillsborough County Public Schools, warned during a school board workshop in February that voucher expansion “will potentially cripple public education.” Similar concern has rippled through the community.

“I give us maximum two years; we will be decimated,” said Paula Castano, a public school parent who, in spring 2021, co-founded the nonprofit Hillsborough Public School Advocates. The group avoids culture war issues like book bans to focus on the threat to the existence of public education. Castano worries: “People just don’t know what is about to happen to their schools.”

One parent, Earlishia Oates, already sees stresses. “I have all the kids from the bus stop on my porch,” she said by phone one day a few weeks ago. The school bus was not just a bit late; it wasn’t showing. She had 10 children with her, she said, and “they can’t go back home. The doors are locked.”

A mother of four who parents another child in her home (“my community son”), Oates works as a community organizer and advocate for parents in public housing. She is “the bus stop lady” because she waits with children whose parents leave early for jobs at Walmart and Family Dollar. When buses don’t show (the district has a shortage of drivers, teachers and staff), Oates said, “high schoolers go back and find something else to do, which is not good.”

Even parents in the county’s wealthier neighborhoods are noticing new troubles in their district schools, said Brita Wilkins Lincoln, a parent and member of the Florida PTA state legislative committee. She cited a request her school made to the PTA to organize parents to monitor students who had to take an AP Physics class online because a teacher retired and the school couldn’t hire a replacement. (The group declined. “That is not an appropriate thing for the PTA to do,” Wilkins Lincoln said.)

When schools are beset with problems, voucher advocates say parents should be able to send their children elsewhere. As DeSantis signed the new law, he said choice forces schools to “perform better because they compete for individual students.”

But Damaris Allen, a Hillsborough County Public Schools parent and executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group Families for Strong Public Schools, said vouchers diminish resources for public schools. Her son attends her old high school and takes AP French, as she did. “My class had 24 students in it; his class has 38 students in it,” she said. “In addition to that, we are seeing reductions in programs, such as the arts and robotics.” The voucher expansion will lead to more cuts, Allen fears, and leave parents “without a real choice.”

Related: COLUMN: Do we need more ‘parental rights’ — or help fixing the real problems in education?

That message is missed by many, said Wilkins Lincoln. “People just hear headlines of ‘We are going to have more choices,’ ” she said. Parents coping with inflation and rising rents “do not realize the significance of what is happening.” Advocates, she said, “sell it as ‘choice’ and who doesn’t want choice? But that is not what this is about. It is about privatizing public education.”

“Choice is sold as a solution.”

Choice is a tough subject in Hillsborough County. The region has grown 20 percent in a decade, but that has been anything but a boon for the public schools. Data from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Florida Policy Institute shows that county public schools lost $75.7 million in state funding to private school vouchers this year — and are poised to lose more than three times that, or $309.4 million, next year. That represents more than one-quarter of the district’s state aid.

Charter school choice has been an even more dramatic challenge to Hillsborough County’s district public schools. Over the past decade, enrollment in district-run schools fell as charter enrollment nearly tripled. This year, district data show that charters serve 34,505, or 15 percent, of county public school students. Because money follows the student, in addition to losses from vouchers, the Hillsborough County district schools are also losing dollars to charters.

It’s a complicated problem. While voucher advocates say funding losses are offset because schools no longer have to educate the children who leave, Dollard says that districts like Hillsborough County cannot turn on a dime. “Public schools have fixed costs, with buildings and buses and salaries, whether the kid is there or not,” she said. Plus, unlike private schools, including religious and for-profit ones, public schools cannot cap enrollment or pick some students and reject others. They must accept and serve all.

“I wish everyone came home to a sit-down dinner with their parents. [But] we are not living in a utopic world.”

Karen Perez, Hillsborough County Public Schools board member

That’s an issue because district schools enroll a higher percentage of students who are more costly to educate. Of the county’s English Language Learners in public schools, 96 percent are enrolled in district schools, not charters. And 90 percent of those with special needs attend district schools, not charters, according to district data.

On top of funding headaches, county population growth has fed enrollment shifts. Now, with uneven moves to privates and charters, some schools are half empty (as low as 44 percent capacity), while others are busting at the seams (as high as 159 percent). District leaders are trying to redraw attendance boundaries to even out enrollments and — critically — save money. But it hasn’t gone well. Parents are upset — and therefore could leave or “choice out,” as one school board member put it, placing the district in an even more precarious position.

District stresses were on display at a Hillsborough County school board workshop in mid-February. In an administration building 15 minutes from downtown Tampa, administrators, school board members, media and 50 others convened in a mustard-walled room with drop ceilings in hopes of gaining some consensus around boundary plans. (There would be none.) Glum-faced parents propped signs before them that read “Say No to 3!” in opposition to one plan. School board members advocated for their neighborhoods. But most people acknowledged a glaring fact: The proposed reassignment plans would fall most heavily on low-income students of color by busing them to different neighborhoods.

Busing the most disadvantaged students far from where they live makes it hard for the students to fully participate in school, including in sports and clubs, objected board member Karen Perez. In many cases, grandparents are acting as parents and may not have a car or be able to drive students who come early or stay after school when there is no bus transportation. “That 70-year-old grandma with cataracts is raising grandchildren; that is a reality,” she added after the meeting. “I wish everyone came home to a sit-down dinner with their parents,” said Perez, but “we are not living in a utopic world.”

In theory, vouchers let students “vote with their feet” and force schools to improve to attract them. They also let families choose a school that seems the best fit. “My view is that these things can be good,” said Seth Zimmerman, an associate professor at Yale’s School of Organization and Management who studies the economics of education.

But details matter, he said, and effectiveness depends on ensuring that “competitive pressures are pointed in the right direction” — which means regulating or incentivizing schools in a choice system to serve at-risk students. “It’s tricky,” said Zimmerman. “What I’m not convinced works very well is saying, ‘Here are the vouchers, let it rip.’”

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

School choice, ideally, said Thomas Toch, director of FutureEd, an education think tank at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy, is not “just giving families public dollars to attend private school,” but requiring transparency — and providing good information — so parents can make informed decisions. Otherwise, said Toch, it “is largely a transfer of public monies to families without a public policy purpose.”

In Hillsborough County, surrounding Tampa, 96 percent of English Language Learners are in district public schools, not charters, and 90 percent of those with special needs attend district schools, not charters, according to district data.

That is a problem in Florida, where it is hard to tell if a private school is any good. There are no teacher certification or school accreditation requirements for private schools, no publicly available school test scores or school climate surveys. Of roughly 2,300 private schools accepting vouchers, 69 percent are unaccredited, 58 percent are religious and 30 percent are for-profit. Only 3 percent of voucher-accepting private schools are accredited, nonreligious and nonprofit, according to data on the state Department of Education website.

“Choice” and a voucher seemed like a solution to McCourt-Ostrand. Reality was different. Her daughter remained in her public magnet school. Fortunately, she is having a good year, but McCourt-Ostrand credits that to good communication with the school and getting an experienced teacher.

Oates, “the bus stop lady,” also understands the lure of vouchers. Her youngest, Russell Stanley, Jr., an eighth grader who plays football, attends a magnet school. One boundary proposal would have routed him to a high school with students from rival neighborhoods. Oates was concerned for his safety. “I would ask for a voucher” if that happened, she said. “I would not have allowed my son to attend.”

Then there’s the practical matter of who can access a private school. Never mind getting in, most do not provide transportation (many charters do not, either). Plus, vouchers often do not cover the full cost. While Oates entertained the thought, she also recently saw her electric bill hit $300 and her rent rise by $500. “It’s not a realistic choice for working parents with rent going up the way it is,” she said.

Which is why parents like Oates and Ashley Foxworth, a single mother, need the public schools to keep working. For Foxworth , who grew up as the daughter of a young single mom who moved a lot, the Hillsborough Country Public schools were a steadying force. “My school was my school and a safe place,” she said. It enabled her success. She graduated from Bethune-Cookman College, earned a master’s degree, then taught for over a decade in the same public schools she had attended. Today she is an educational tutor, adviser and coach.

Her son, Tristen, is now a precocious first grader in Hillsborough County Public Schools. “I want him to be a hawk,” she said, referring to a local high school’s mascot, a school she hopes will still be an option for him to attend.  Foxworth is anxious about what the new law will mean for public schools, and about Tristen’s shot at the same opportunities she had.

“These people who have the economic advantage of having their kids in private schools, they don’t see the effects in the public schools,” said Foxworth. “Choice is sold as a solution — when it’s not.”

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

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Here’s how decisions about schools are usually made: The same insiders call the shots behind closed doors, year after year. They make judgments about families and children based on limited data, rarely speaking to anyone directly. They write “strategic plans” that no one reads. Or, worse, they let politics prevail.

These bad habits result in schools that don’t match the needs or wants of the students, families and communities they serve. Bad leadership habits create divisions and breed distrust. They are the reason that waves of politically motivated policies and initiatives keep pounding schools but never effect real change.

As top education officials in Kentucky and Burlington, Vermont, we said: enough.

We began exploring new ways to shape schools with families and communities through our superintendents’ network, the Deeper Learning Dozen. We agreed that our school systems, in two entirely different parts of the country, needed to completely overhaul the way education is imagined and assembled, in ways we knew would mean taking big risks and upsetting entrenched practices.

Along the way, we found a huge appetite among our school families and communities to be directly engaged in the decision-making process; in both Burlington and Kentucky, they pushed hard to give far more people significant influence in shaping what we do. We aimed to reach across our divides to create real understanding.

In Vermont’s Burlington School District in mid-2020, we found an unmet desire among families to be seen and for schools to address the full needs of students.

We realized there was a need for an entirely different way to involve the community in crafting the district’s five-year strategic plan.

With the support of the Center for Innovation in Education (C!E), we assembled a coalition of residents — some who were appointed, some who applied and some who were invited from under-represented subgroups — which ultimately included families, students, school staff, community members and a school commissioner.

The coalition conducted more than 75 in-depth interviews with residents before synthesizing themes and building a strategic plan aligned to Burlington’s core needs and desires.

Bad leadership habits create divisions and breed distrust. They are the reason that waves of politically motivated policies and initiatives keep pounding schools but never effect real change.

As a result, the plan’s first priority became supporting belonging and well-being for students, families and staff — something requested over and over in the interviews.

The interviews also reflected support for deeper learning opportunities in which students feel challenged, empowered and engaged; more restorative approaches to discipline, which focus on community-building; and efforts to make each school a place where every child is valued.

The strategic plan in Burlington now includes mutual commitments and new metrics to help achieve and track all of these aspirations in the years ahead. A new committee will oversee the plan, including some original coalition members who will ensure that what was said gets done.

In Kentucky, as in so many places, major constituencies — students, teachers, parents, activists, others — feel dissatisfied and ignored. They perceive a small number of powerful people making major decisions in isolated settings, driven by their own priorities — not those of everyday families.

In the wake of the pandemic and social unrest related to the murders of George Floyd and Kentucky’s Breonna Taylor, the need to really listen to our families and communities has perhaps never been greater.

Related: New book advocates using pandemic lessons to reinvent education

Through a commissioner’s virtual listening tour, we gathered input on our education systems from thousands of Kentuckians. We then worked with C!E to support a statewide coalition of more than 50 teachers, students, families and community members from every region in the state to identify the themes in what we heard.

We learned that Kentuckians want the experiences students have in school to align more closely with the realities of the world awaiting them after graduation. Literacy and math are important, but so are deep, rich and meaningful experiences that many Kentuckians feel have been crowded out by the push to raise test scores. Moreover, Kentuckians want school to be a place where kids feel safe, surrounded by people who care about them.

These insights profoundly shifted our efforts and became the foundation for a new vision for education in Kentucky that prioritizes these goals. The state has since established another diverse council of Kentuckians to advise the department on fulfilling these promises, including a new network of districts enacting this vision in ways that make sense locally.

Already, Kentucky is rethinking major systems like state assessment and accountability, and realigning how money is spent to support the kinds of project-based, deeper-learning opportunities our families say they want.

Related: OPINION: Still skeptical about mastery-based learning? Here’s a better way of looking at what it is and does

We hope to inspire other jurisdictions to follow similar paths, recognizing that strategies must be tailored to local needs, values and sensitivities.

Change on this scale is never easy, and national partisan issues may distract from or compete with locally driven work. But the right path is one shaped hand in hand with the communities we serve. By listening and directly engaging with students, families and community members, we are building trust as leaders to act on their behalf — and to deliver on an agenda that’s not ours alone, but theirs.

Jason E. Glass is Kentucky’s commissioner of Education. Tom Flanagan is superintendent of the Burlington (Vermont) School District.

This story about community involvement in school decisions 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: Schools should be shaped with help from the people they serve appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

CENTRALIA, Wash. — At 8:01 p.m., on an unseasonably warm April evening, Lisa Grant hit refresh on her internet browser. Grant had been the superintendent of schools in this old coal and lumber town on the side of I-5, the major highway running the length of the west coast, for just 10 months. Tonight, she’d find out if she’d have the funding she needed to keep doing that job.

The Washington secretary of state’s website didn’t immediately update, so she hit refresh again, and again, until the early results of a vote on her school district’s property tax levy appeared on the screen.

Voters in the Centralia school district, it seemed, would again reject a ballot proposal to bring in $9.1 million over two years for their schools by renewing an existing property tax. It would be their third rejection in less than a year and a half. States and the federal government contribute some money to school budgets, but most are still dependent on local support to survive. Losing the revenue from the local property tax the first time had led the Centralia school board to issue pink slips to nearly 100 staff members and had even put the athletics program on the chopping block.

Managing an always-too-tight budget is just one of the challenges facing superintendents in small- and medium-size districts these days. Explosive political fights over masking, vaccines and critical race theory have resulted in superintendents in places as different as rural Oregon and suburban Maryland resigning or being forced out of their jobs under pressure from newly zealous school boards. About 25 percent of superintendents left their jobs last year, according to the American Association of School Administrators. So far, Grant has stayed.

On that anxious spring evening, Grant knew final results wouldn’t come in for at least a couple more days. But that night the proposition was failing by 23 votes. She took calls from the local newspaper and radio station, telling reporters, “We’re holding out hope.”

A former special education teacher who grew up in Oregon, Grant rarely considers a problem without mentioning how it affects students. She’s quick to list solutions and quick to laugh.

“She was brimming with enthusiasm and seemed so excited to be there,” said Lori Fast, former president of the Centralia school board, recalling Grant’s first interview. “We wanted to bottle up that energy and have her start the next day.”

But just over a year later, as she waited for the election results in April 2021, Grant was exhausted. There had been a pandemic, the district’s financial situation turned out to be as bad as Fast and other board members had warned and now she had to prepare for potentially more cuts. Before heading home, Grant phoned her husband — a pandemic routine — letting him know she was on her way. He cautiously asked, “What should I prepare for?”

“I remember feeling mixed emotions, such disappointment that we didn’t make it initially but knowing it was so close,” Grant said months later.

A 2019 study from the nonpartisan Albert Shanker Institute found only five states spend enough money to help students in high-poverty school districts achieve test scores that meet the national average; Washington ranked among the lowest spenders on that list. And while recent reforms here attempted to narrow the gulf between wealthy and low-income schools, critics question whether Washington’s complicated new funding formulas provide enough money to support all students.

“Washington … is so close and yet so far from the goal,” said Zahava Stadler, a special assistant for state funding and policy at the Education Trust, a national nonprofit that works to close opportunity gaps.

“We need to remember that there is no federal right to public education, but every single state constitution mentions a right to public schooling,” Stadler said. “It is the states that assigned themselves the responsibility of doing right and doing fairly by students, and it is appropriate and necessary to hold them to that.”

Related: “Kids who have less, need more” — The fight over school funding

Getting voter support in a cash-strapped, conservative-leaning town like Centralia is hard. The tax measure that kept Grant at work late in April 2021 first failed in February 2020, just a month after Grant accepted the job as superintendent of Centralia schools. It also failed in August 2020, a month after she’d started. And 13 months into a global pandemic, the prospect of once again banking the financial future of the town’s public school system on the will of its voters struck Grant as especially risky.

That April evening, Grant left the district complex feeling disappointed and frustrated. The two-building central office sits across the street from Centralia’s only middle school; nearby, towering Douglas firs dot the high school campus and a large boulder at the school entrance features a student’s painting of the school mascot, a tiger, wearing a face mask.

Centralia is home to about 18,000 residents, 3,400 of whom are students in the public schools. “Tiny Tigers,” whose presence is announced on lawn signs throughout the small city, attend the district’s five elementary schools. Congratulatory banners hanging from lampposts wave the senior portraits of each graduate in the Class of 2021. But in April, if history was any indication, all that school spirit wouldn’t necessarily translate to financial support.

Later that night, after exhausting her frustration on an exercise bike, Grant replayed two videos she had created to put on the school district’s social media pages. There was one to use if the tax proposal failed, the other if it somehow passed. She couldn’t remember dreaming when she finally let herself sleep. And not long after her alarm rang at 4:30 a.m., she fielded a call from a school board member angry about the vote.

“No matter what happens we’re going to move forward,” Grant remembered saying. “Everything has to move us in a positive direction, even if this isn’t a positive experience.”

The federal government moved quickly early in the pandemic to support K-12 schools, approving $13.2 billion in March 2020 to cover unanticipated costs. And by the spring of 2021, Congress had approved three separate rounds of the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief fund, known to educators as ESSER, sending a grand total of nearly $190 billion hurtling toward classrooms that have not seen such federal largesse since 2009, during the Great Recession.

But the emergency funding is temporary — the last of it must be used by 2023 — and it won’t fix the long-term problems faced by school districts like Centralia, which were broke long before the pandemic started.

$190 billion — the total amount that Congress approved in three rounds of Covid relief funding for K-12 schools

In such places, a return to normal won’t be enough. Communities like Centralia, which has a small tax-base, can’t always count on local financial support, no matter how many Tiny Tiger signs dot the lawns. For these communities, what’s needed is the realization at the state or federal level that the amount of government money required to support schools — both before and potentially after the pandemic — is many times more than what has been spent so far.

On the local level, it’s not just a matter of voters’ willingness to tax themselves. Many homeowners have little sense for why the local schools always seem broke when they keep hearing about multimillion-dollar state budgets, which their property taxes already help support.

“The federal government, given the limited tools at its disposal, did the right thing” to send so much relief money, said Stadler, of the Education Trust. “But a short-term infusion of funds in districts that have been struggling with underinvestment for a long time is not going to be a silver bullet.”

Related: Rich schools get richer

In Centralia, as she waited for the final results of the election, Grant worried the federal boon could actually jeopardize “yes” votes for continuing a local tax.

“People think we have all this money to play with,” Grant said the morning after election night. “We have these federal dollars coming in but that’s not a recurring fund.”

Meanwhile, Centralia schools were short on staff, short on community trust and very short on money. In 2018, a teacher strike over demands for a salary hike delayed the start of school for a week. The previous superintendent, who eventually signed a union contract with hefty — and unaffordable — pay raises for teachers, left the central office mired in a culture of bullying and almost nonexistent communication with the public. And a new school board, swept into power in late 2019, discovered years of red ink baked into the district budget.

Although required by law to approve a balanced budget each year, the district forecast it would overspend its revenues by about $500,000 in 2021-22. The projected shortfall would eventually top $3.5 million in 2023-24, according to budget documents.

Centralia has also been losing a couple hundred students each year, at the cost of about $8,700 per kid. During the 2020-21 school year, Grant said, the district lost a staggering 476 students — some to a better-performing district nearby, some to homeschooling and others to virtual schools — for a net loss of about $4.2 million.

“That’s a school’s worth of funding,” Grant told a budget task force in early December.

She’d also learned in her first weeks on the job that the district had virtually no cash reserves to spend in an emergency. It had no long-term facilities plan to upgrade decaying infrastructure or to replace its aging fleet of buses, Grant said. In her estimation, it also had no sense of financial responsibility.

“One of the issues of why we lost the levy in the first place [was] people felt we gave too much to teachers [when] they went on strike,” she said. “The board was spending in the red every year. You can’t sustain that.”

Related: Should rich families be able to fundraise a better public school education for their kids?

Grant attempted to speak with her predecessor, Mark Davalos, to understand the budget mess. She never succeeded. (Davalos declined an interview request for this story.)

“It is what it is,” she said of the district’s past money troubles. “We can’t change that, but how do we move forward?”

The federal money will help Centralia and other small struggling districts for a year or two, but the pressure is on superintendents to spend it wisely, said Michael Griffith, a school finance expert with the Learning Policy Institute.

“If you spend like pre-pandemic, and don’t have additional results, that’s going to come back hard,” he said. “People come back and say, ‘We gave them all this money, and there was no return. There was no long-term improvement in schools.’”

The stakes aren’t lost on Grant.

In January 2020, during the hiring process, Grant appeared at a public interview and fielded an hour’s worth of questions about sex education, student poverty, the teachers’ union and property-tax levies. She touted her experience as a special education teacher, principal, central administrator and, most recently, superintendent of the neighboring Mossyrock school district.

Grant, who commuted to Mossyrock from her home in Centralia, easily rattled off facts about Washington’s school finance system and K-12 policy — a home-field advantage that distinguished her from the other finalist, a superintendent from rural Colorado.

“I can guarantee you that I can make mistakes,” she said of her leadership style, according to The Daily Chronicle. “I can also guarantee you that I will learn from them.”

The board announced her selection that same evening. By the time she finally stepped into the role six months later, on July 1, the world had turned upside down. She walked into the central administration building that day and set down a box of family photos, desk décor and positive affirmation posters next to the desk in her new office. Instead of unpacking, Grant spent her first day in a crash course on the district’s planning for the start of school in just two months.

The box remained on her office floor, unopened and collecting dust, for the next nine months.

As the third vote on a tax levy drew closer, in spring 2021, there seemed to be a chance for victory, but a slim one. Voters had sent mixed messages in the previous two elections: A whopping 69 percent doomed the first tax measure. The second failed by less than 1 percentage point.

Related: One of the fairest school funding models in the nation might be about to fail

Mark Dulin, owner of a local construction company and vice president of the Centralia Community Foundation, always supported the school levies. (His wife, Sarah, teaches math at Centralia High and their son graduated from the school.) Nonetheless, Dulin could see why so many voters gave the levy a thumbs-down before: They were still seething over the 2018 teacher strike.

“It was very contentious,” Dulin said. “People remain offended that the schools were closed for days. [The strike] zapped what used to be a really good community rally behind the schools.”

Centralia’s failure at the ballot box also revealed an obscure quirk in Washington’s school finance system.

In Centralia’s case, the doomed February 2020 election guaranteed the school district would collect neither its local property taxes nor the additional state support. The lost revenue forced Centralia to trim a fifth of its entire budget — right at the start of a global pandemic.

“I wish our school funding wasn’t contingent on whether the community passes a levy,” said Fast, who will step down from the school board this year. “It’s really unfair that’s how the system works. Folks already feel taxed enough.”

On a sunny spring morning in March 2021, the Dulins walked through the neighborhood just west of Centralia College to try to convince voters this particular tax — one that would support the town’s Tigers — was worth extending. They paged through a stack of papers with the names and addresses of past and likely voters, hoping to convince more people to vote in favor of the levy and flip the narrow loss from August.

Front door after front door, their knocks went unanswered. Sarah Dulin tucked campaign flyers into mailboxes or between screen doors.

In 2018, she had joined the teacher walkout to secure a better contract. It’s also the reason she doubted the likelihood of a win this time.

At the time, she thought most people supported the teachers. After the strike, she said, everyone suspected the union would “raid the levy” for even more raises.

At one home, with a dog yapping behind her, a mother with a student in middle school answered the door. She listened to the campaign pitch, then asked if voting ‘yes’ meant the district would fully reopen soon.

“That needed to happen a long time ago,” said the mother. And didn’t schools just get a lot of money from the feds, she asked.

“Well,” Dulin replied, “it’s complicated.”

Months before the door-to-door campaign — in August 2020 — a Lewis County workgroup of superintendents, pediatricians and public health officials started meeting to discuss how to safely reopen schools. One of their top concerns was student mental health.

“With suicidal ideation, it’s never been at this level” said Jennifer Polley, director of the Northwest Pediatric Center in Centralia and a member of the group. Diagnoses of anxiety, depression and conduct disorder — in which children exhibit aggressive or destructive behavior — had more than doubled, she said. She even heard from pediatricians that children as young as 8 were talking about suicide.

“I don’t think we even know the depth of it yet,” Polley said.

On March 15, 2021, almost exactly a year after ordering schools to close, Gov. Jay Inslee signed an emergency proclamation citing a youth mental health crisis and requiring all public schools to at least partially reopen. That same week, Centralia middle and high schools finally welcomed students back to campus.

The year without in-person learning fueled a lot of arguing between Gloria Delgado and her youngest son, a senior at Centralia High. He had already struggled with their sudden move to the small town from the San Francisco Bay area five years ago and he was still finding it difficult to make new friends or take an interest in school.

“The pandemic just exacerbated that,” Delgado said.

Balancing the mental health of 3,400 kids against the potential for outbreaks if schools reopened took a toll on Grant.

“My hair is greyer,” she said. “It’s a heavy responsibility, and one I don’t think any of us [superintendents] ever experienced to that degree … I know I wasn’t perfect at it.”

In Lewis County, nearly two-thirds of voters supported Donald Trump’s reelection bid, even as Washington state swung 58 percent in favor of Joe Biden. The county’s most prominent landmark — a billboard of Uncle Sam — greets drivers along I-5 with what the New York Times once described as “archconservative views in big block letters.” During the pandemic and Washington’s mask mandate, Uncle Sam warned that “edicts are the tools of dictators” and asked “What will the next Wuhan chimera virus be like?”

Although he found the prevalence of anti-mask sentiment and people questioning the reality of the virus frustrating, J.P. Anderson, the deputy director of Lewis County Public Health & Social Services, also sympathized with the community’s reaction to state orders and prolonged school closures.

“It’s defined largely by economic devastation that was caused by decisions made outside of Lewis County,” he said.

Related: Progress in the Deep South — Black students combat segregation, poverty and dwindling school funding

The first blow to the economy came in 2006, when the TransAlta Centralia Power Plant shuttered its coal mine, eliminating 600 top-paying jobs in Lewis County. The Great Recession soon followed, driving unemployment here to a peak of 15.4 percent in 2009.

Those losses affected Centralia’s schools too. In 2010, about 64 percent of students qualified for subsidized meals at school, a common gauge of household poverty. A decade later, 79 percent of students were considered low-income. As the schools’ finances floundered, its reputation suffered too, driving many families away: The district lost about 100 students a year, even before the pandemic.

“There’s real historical trauma,” Anderson said, explaining the local reaction to Covid mandates. “When [a decision] comes down and shuts down the economy and folks don’t have jobs any more, that’s suspect. That’s an enemy.”

On New Year’s Eve 2020, TransAlta closed one of its two coal-burning power plants in Centralia. By the time TransAlta extinguishes its second burner in 2025, a total of nearly 200 people will have lost their jobs.

Three weeks before winter break in 2020, kids in grades 4 to 6 returned to in-person classes. Grant was there to greet them, and make sure protocols were followed. Hands shaking — either from nerves or the December morning chill — Grant fumbled to catch the batteries falling out of a digital thermometer and onto the front lawn of Jefferson Lincoln Elementary. It was the second thermometer she had borrowed from the principal’s office. The first didn’t seem to work when Grant tested it on herself while walking toward a line of cars snaking around the entrance to the school.

Replacing the batteries, Grant hustled to join the school staff who approached each vehicle with a new routine: Cheerily welcome each student back to Jefferson Lincoln. Check their temperature. Collect a declaration that they had no symptoms of Covid-19.

One mother and her kids remained in their car, appearing confused by Grant’s request.

“You don’t speak Spanish, do you?” Grant asked the school staffer standing closest to her.

Earlier in the year, Grant had convened a reopening task force, hoping to bring all secondary students back to campus by early 2021. But negotiations with the teacher union had stalled.

“We have a ways to go,” Grant said, with a deep sigh.

The impasse joined a growing list of concerns for Grant, who struggled with how to address the mental health of both students and staff, language barriers with families who didn’t speak English at home and an uptick in the number of students experiencing homelessness.

Schools were also short on para-educators, having cut that budget by $2.1 million. At Jefferson Lincoln, that meant students in kindergarten through third grade got much needed one-on-one academic help, but older kids did not. And teachers supervised recess.

Parents, meanwhile, had started calling and emailing Grant to alert her to social media posts of teachers traveling for Thanksgiving or having parties at their homes.

Grant asked principals to remind teachers of the safety protocols — and common sense. (“You can’t post that you’re at Disneyland if you’re supposed to be working,” Grant said.) Part of the problem, she added, was that about half of Centralia’s teachers didn’t live in the city or even in the county.

“There’s certainly a feeling that we have staff who bring different beliefs and ideas than our community holds, and that played out a bit in that tension between getting kids back and having staff feel safe,” Grant said.

After the first bell rang that December morning, a straggling student raced past Grant and through the front doors.

“Whoa whoa whoa!” she called after him. “Where’s your mask?”

Cursing, the boy ran back into the thick Northwest fog to check if his ride had already left.

In January 2021, the district received about $1.1 million from the first round of federal relief money passed in early 2020. Within three months of that disbursement, Grant said, the fund was about to be exhausted.

The district was spending about $18,000 each month just to cover internet access for students still learning at home, Grant said. It paid $36,250 for extra desks to bring middle and high schoolers back on a four-day hybrid schedule. And some of the federal money had simply backfilled months’ worth of spending on disinfecting classrooms, temporary custodial staff and personal protective equipment.

As school returned from winter break, Grant noticed a deep sense of fatigue creeping across the district.

Related: New data—Even within the same district some wealthy schools get millions more than poor ones

She had hoped the two weeks away from school would have recharged central office staff, teachers — and herself. Grant relied more and more on her husband, a project superintendent in construction, to make it through each dreary, cold day. But she also wondered how employees managed without a spouse or support network, especially as a third wave of cases and extended lockdowns prevented many from spending the holidays with family.

“I have a lot of energy, and I love this work. But I know I’m tired,” Grant said. “And I can tell [my husband] that I’m not thinking as quickly as normal. I mean, we’re all fatigued, right?”

The April election finally arrived. From that night when Grant repeatedly refreshed the voter results page, it would be 10 days before she knew the fate of her town’s schools.

“I don’t like that we have to rely on it,” Grant said of the levy election. “In Washington, we’re a pretty regressive tax system … so that’s a heavier burden on our community and our taxpayers.” 

In the end, Centralia voters — by a margin of just 1 percent — approved the $9.1 million tax measure. Only 38 percent of registered voters cast a ballot, but it was enough. The district was also approved by the state to receive about $4.2 million from the second round of federal emergency funding and will need to apply to receive an additional $9.5 million from the third. If the Biden administration has its way, there will be more money down the line as well as incentives for states to commit to permanently increasing funding to high-poverty districts.

“I wish our school funding wasn’t contingent on whether the community passes a levy. It’s really unfair that’s how the system works. Folks already feel taxed enough.” Lisa Fast, outgoing president, Centralia School Board

Meanwhile, to get the estimated $4.2 million that Centralia schools were eligible for under the second Covid relief package, the district would first have to submit a recovery plan detailing how it would ensure seniors graduated on time, what it would spend the money on over summer and which interventions it would prioritize in fall 2021. Hiring new staff with the one-time money, which Grant said was “tempting,” could bind the district’s budget in the future.

“We have a lot of money. It’s a ton of money,” she said at the end of the 2020-21 school year. “If we misspend it and just go back to business as usual, legislators in the future will add tighter controls … That’s always the tension.”

Grant does not expect the extra state and federal money to last. It never has before.

“We won the support of the public, barely,” she said, “but that swing to trust us isn’t permanent. We have the opportunity to prove ourselves now.”

She doesn’t plan to waste her chance. Unless the federal and state governments commit to massive, ongoing increases in school funding, Grant knows that in two years, when this latest property tax expires, she’ll have to go back to Centralia voters with her hand out, asking again for their help.

This story about public school funding 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 year in the life of a small-town superintendent shows the federal bailout won’t be enough appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

Andrea Yon is used to helping students in need. At the Williston-Elko Middle School in rural South Carolina, where she has taught for seven years, more than three out of every four students are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-priced lunch. Before the pandemic, some of her struggling seventh and eighth graders read at a fifth or sixth grade level.

“They’re now reading at a third and fourth grade level,” Yon said.

Yon used to hold silent reading time in her classroom; students could read whatever they wanted for 20 minutes. “Now,” she said, “they’re looking up after three to five minutes.”

Teachers across the country are seeing more and more students struggle with reading this school year. Pandemic school closures and remote instruction made learning to read much harder, especially for young, low-income students who didn’t have adequate technology at home or an adult who could assist them during the day. Many older students lost the daily habit of reading. Even before the pandemic, nearly two-thirds of U.S. students were unable to read at grade level. Scores had been getting worse for several years.

The pandemic made a bad situation worse.

“What’s causing these trends is no mystery.”

Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas J. Fordham Institute

More than a dozen studies have documented that students, on average, made sluggish progress in reading during the pandemic. Estimates of just how sluggish vary. Consulting firm McKinsey & Company calculated that U.S. students had lost the equivalent of almost half a school year of reading instruction. An analysis of test scores in California and South Carolina found that students had lost almost a third of a year in reading. A national analysis of the test scores of 5.5 million students calculated that in the spring of 2021 students in each grade scored three to six percentile points lower on a widely used test, the Measures of Academic Progress or MAP, than they did in 2019.

Reading achievement has even fallen in the state that ranks the highest in the nation in reading: Massachusetts. Students in grades 3 through 8 slid 6 percentage points in reading on state tests in the spring of 2021 compared to 2019.

Related: Four things you need to know about the new reading wars

Mackenzie Woll, a second-grade teacher at Abby Kelley Foster Charter Public Elementary School in Worcester, Massachusetts, said diagnostic tests at the start of the year revealed that most of her students were reading at a kindergarten or a first grade level. In previous years, some students would come in reading above grade level; this year, no one in her class did.

Woll now reviews kindergarten-level phonics with her second graders. On a recent day, a student held up flashcards at the front of the class and led her peers in a call and response chant through the alphabet. “A, apple, ah!” she said. Her classmates echoed the sounds back to her.

In a normal year, the exercise would have been scaled back by this point, Woll said. “But because of the pandemic, I’m still doing those letter sounds every day.”

Teaching aide Hannah Chancey faces the same problem in second grade classrooms at Rehobeth Elementary School in a small low-income community in southeastern Alabama, a state with reading scores near the bottom nationally.

“They couldn’t read; they couldn’t identify letters,” said Chancey, clutching a clipboard with the names of children who need extra instruction. “We couldn’t have enough help.”

Nationwide, test scores for younger students, who are just learning to read, dropped far more than for older students. The average third grader’s reading score fell 6 percentile points on the MAP test, twice the drop of the average eighth grader. In a separate pandemic study of second and third graders in 100 school districts, Stanford University researchers found that although teachers had figured out how to teach reading remotely during the 2020-21 school year, students didn’t catch up.

“They’re still behind,” said Ben Domingue, an assistant professor at Stanford who was one of the authors. Domingue said reading gaps in younger children could “mutate” into future academic problems. Students need to read in order to learn other subjects, from science to history.

Parents of young children are worried. 

Before the pandemic, Albalicia Espino often took her 6-year-old daughter Sara to the West Dallas Library. On special occasions, they’d make the trip to downtown Dallas, where the towering library building has a dedicated children’s floor.

The pandemic halted those treasured visits.

“I didn’t want her to get started on the wrong foot and lose a lot of those basic things,” Espino said. She worries Sara didn’t get enough practice learning letter sounds and other foundational reading skills.

Related: What parents need to know about the research on how kids learn to read

Sara is back at school in person for first grade, trying to learn the elements of language from behind a mask. Her Dallas elementary school extended its school year in an effort to help students make up for lost time. Sara is also getting extra help in reading through a nonprofit organization in her neighborhood.

During the pandemic, students in low-income districts, already lagging, fell even further behind students from wealthier districts. In high-poverty schools, where more than three-quarters of students are poor enough to qualify for free or reduced-priced lunch, the drop in reading scores on the MAP test was often more than three times as large as it was in low-poverty schools, where a quarter or fewer students qualify for the lunch program.

“We’re teaching kids to read in a content and motivational vacuum.”

Elena Forzani, a reading specialist at Boston University

Racial and ethnic gaps worsened too. Reading scores on the MAP test fell almost twice as much for Black and Hispanic students as they did for white and Asian students.

Researchers worry that the drop in reading achievement during the pandemic may be even worse than their figures indicate. All the estimates rely on some sort of test, but many low-income students didn’t take any tests in 2021. For the same reasons that many low-income students struggled to learn remotely during the pandemic, it was also hard, if not impossible, for students to take an online assessment of their progress.

Even before the pandemic, reading achievement was in a slump. In 2016, U.S. fourth graders slid seven points on an international reading test, the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS). Then, fourth and eighth graders — particularly eighth graders — posted lower scores on the 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a benchmark test that is taken every two years by both age groups.

Related: Why reading comprehension is deteriorating

Analysts noted that reading scores of the lowest achieving students had been declining for a decade, and that the 2019 losses — especially steep among low performers — had erased 30 years of progress. In previous tests, the gains of the highest achieving students had offset the losses at the bottom, leaving the national average steady. But in 2019, the reading performance of all students deteriorated.

“We’ve never seen a significant decline like this before,” said Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, which has been monitoring and releasing data on student achievement for decades. “All the tests are showing these patterns. We’re seeing it everywhere.”

“Because of the pandemic I’m still doing those letter sounds every day.”

Mackenzie Woll, a second grade teacher

The reason for the pandemic’s toll on reading achievement is obvious: It’s hard to learn when schools are closed. But the reason that reading scores fell before the pandemic is less straightforward. Educators and researchers are weighing three theories on what is responsible for the decline: money, instruction or reading itself.

After the 2008 recession, schools across the country cut spending by $600 per student, on average, and laid off thousands of teachers. It took state and local governments seven years to restore their tax bases, muster the political will to approve spending increases and send the money to schools.

“What’s causing these trends is no mystery,” Michael Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a think tank, posted on Twitter. “It’s almost surely the spending cuts that happened in the wake of the Great Recession. The 13-year-olds who did so poorly in 2019 would have been in grades K-2 during the worst of the cuts, from 2011-14. Those early years matter!”

Long before the pandemic, many reading experts argued that young children didn’t receive enough phonics instruction in kindergarten and first grade to become smooth, fluent readers. More than half of Black fourth-graders and 46 percent of Hispanic fourth grade students scored below the lowest level on the NAEP test. For these students, “it is likely that if fluency were improved, comprehension would also improve,” a September 2021 analysis by three prominent reading scholars concluded.

Some educators have tried to respond by emphasizing phonics. The Wenatchee School District in Washington state switched all students to phonics-based reading instruction a few months before the pandemic. The district has long struggled with low reading scores, especially among its English learners, who make up nearly a quarter of the enrollment.

Superintendent Paul Gordon recalled a moment during a visit to a fourth grade classroom that underscored why the district needed to move quickly.

“I asked the kids what they found challenging and fun,” he said. “We had a lot of stories about lunch and recess. But I will never forget at the very end, a little girl raises her hand and says, ‘I can’t read. When I go out to recess, I feel like everyone is laughing at me because I don’t know how to read.’”

Allison Hurt, a first grade teacher who has taught at Lincoln Elementary School in Wenatchee for 20 years, said the switch required a complete overhaul of the way she taught — and thought — about reading.

“I didn’t realize that there is actually a sequential order in phonology that students should be learning their sounds — biggest to smallest,” Hurt said. “They have to be able to break a sentence apart into words, and chunk them apart into syllables.”

By the end of the first full year of teaching this way, Hurt said 80 percent of her class had aced a phonology test — a rate she hadn’t seen before.

Not every student has improved as dramatically, but Hurt said this structured method has made it easier to catch students who are stuck.

Many scholars are concerned that phonics alone won’t help children read proficiently as they get older. Elena Forzani, a reading specialist at Boston University, thinks the recent slide in eighth grade test scores could reflect ineffective teaching practices.

“We tend to take those kids and throw lower-level instruction at them,” Forzani said. “They get these rote phonics programs. It’s all focused on learning to read. They’re not having complex discussions about a text. At the same time, we’re also taking away science and history instruction where kids can develop knowledge and where they can put comprehension strategies into practice. We’re teaching kids to read in a content and motivational vacuum.”

Researchers are also zeroing in on changes in home reading habits. In student surveys that accompanied the NAEP reading assessments, the percentage of eighth graders who said they read 30 minutes or more a day, excluding homework, declined by 4 percentage points from 2017 to 2019. They were less likely to say they talked about books, went to the library or considered reading one of their favorite activities.

Related: U.S. education achievement slides backwards

It’s too soon to blame the distraction of texting, TikTok and Minecraft. More time reading doesn’t necessarily produce strong readers. Researchers sometimes find instances, such as in Mississippi, where students read less but their scores actually increased slightly. In other states, such as Rhode Island, reading habits were more stable but scores slid.

The root of America’s reading problem could take years to unravel. In the meantime, teachers have to help the students sitting in front of them right now.

Back in South Carolina, Yon is trying to get her seventh and eighth graders to re-engage with literature by giving them physical books. She finds they read better if they are looking at an actual page instead of a screen.

On Saturdays, her students can get one-on-one tutoring. Yon was surprised by the high turnout at recent sessions. It’s a sign, she said, that things will eventually improve.

This story about reading proficiency was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education, in partnership with the Christian Science Monitor and the Ed Labs at AL.com, the Dallas Morning News, the Post and Courier, and the Seattle Times. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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Congress is considering President Joe Biden’s historic plan for transforming our social safety net, including the grossly underfunded care economy that includes the elderly, the disabled and young children.

All sectors of the care economy need more resources, but caregivers working as home-based child care providers, who are disproportionately women of color, need the most. Some have embarked on a shared campaign called Care Can’t Wait to fight for better pay, working conditions and respect.

There are 6.4 million children in home-based child care, including both licensed family child care and license-exempt family, friend and neighbor care.

Families choose home-based care for many reasons: responsive relationships with trusted and loving adults, continuity of care, flexibility in hours and a culturally affirming environment for their children.

Black and Latino, Spanish-speaking, rural and low-income families are especially likely to choose home-based care.

It is time for our public systems to recognize the value of home-based child care for the millions of families that choose it, and compensate providers fairly for their work.

Related: Our fragile child care ‘system’ may be about to shatter

In Bucks County, Pennsylvania, for example, the state provides just $13.63 a day for home-based child care by a relative of an infant, while paying $45.98 a day for care in a licensed child-care center. That’s less than $14 a day perinfant for a 10-12 hour workday on average.

Nationwide, home-based relative and neighbor caregivers, when paid, earn about $8,000 a year on average.

As we look to make our systems more equitable, child care advocates can find lessons in the more labor-organized elderly/disabled care sector, in which workers are better paid because there is a primary payer of care: Medicaid. Home caregivers earn about $16,200 a year.

That is still not nearly good enough for an industry that is rapidly growing and maintains extensive waiting lists for care — but stands well ahead of the state of play for home-based child care. 

Home-based relative and neighbor child care providers, when paid, earn only about $8,000 a year on average.

Elder and disabled care advocates are currently centering their advocacy around consumer choice and the desire to ensure that unpaid, unseen relative and neighbor caregivers are compensated for the care they provide.

The Care Can’t Wait coalition is advocating for $400 billion in home and community-based services (HCBS) to ensure that low-income consumers can receive the resources they need in the setting they most desire: their homes.

There is broad acceptance that institutionalizing care is not ideal for consumers or their families. These desired new investments would enable relatives and neighbors of Medicaid recipients to “bill” for care provided and ensure that caregivers can earn a living wage with benefits.

Child care advocates would do well to consider this more mature system and approach and to focus on family choice.

Half of all families with children in nonparental child care now choose relatives and neighbors to meet their care needs in a home setting. This trend has increased during the pandemic. Given that the families choosing home-based care are more likely to be Black, Latino, immigrant, rural and low-income, any equitable public system must include support for these families and caregivers.

As Congress considers making child care an entitlement and creating programs that may move us closer to a well-funded and supported sector, let us not forget what we have learned from our friends in the elder/disabled care sector.

Care decisions are personal and based on trust. Families deserve to have their babies and young children cared for in their preferred setting by the people that love them. Build Back Better can provide a rising tide of compassionate and commonsense funding to lift all boats. Let’s make sure it lifts home-based providers, including relatives and neighbors, as much as other caregivers.

Natalie Renew is the director of Home Grown, a national initiative committed to improving the quality of and access to home-based child care.

This story about home-based child care 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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