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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Candace, mother of a seventh grader with autism 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She shakes her head. “It’s a lot.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related: Many schools find ways to solve absenteeism without suspensions 

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

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

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

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

Pamela Herd, a Georgetown University public policy professor 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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NEW YORK — On a sunny Friday in early November, four 10- and 11-year-old boys stand on the corner of 26th Street and Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn, holding homemade clipboards and signs that read “Take our food equity survey.”

A young man rushes past the group, headphones on, eyes on his phone. Susan Tenner, executive director of the Brooklyn Urban Garden Charter School, or BUGS, where the boys are sixth graders, suggests they let him pass. The next passerby is a runner — even more unpromising.

When a guy in his 20s or 30s in a puffer coat with fur trim comes along a half a minute later, Elias, a 10-year-old, remarks that he looks busy too. But Tenner urges the students to pounce.

“Everyone in New York City looks busy,” she tells them. “You guys are cute; people are going to want to help you.”

And the man does. After the boys call out as he passes, the man doubles back to take the student-made survey. Their first success.

Over the next half hour, the boys and a group of girls positioned a block up will interview a postman, a construction worker, a pair of teenage girls in fleece Snoopy pants, and several others about their access to healthy, affordable food.  

BUGS, one of hundreds of “themed” middle schools spread across New York City and the nation, fully embodies the “Green” school concept. There are gardens out front and hydroponic produce growing inside, an indoor tank for raising trout and recycled furniture in the classrooms. Students take a weekly sustainability class and participate in monthly field study days that send them into the community to conduct research on topics like land use, pollution and food equity.

Adopting a theme like sustainability, the arts, or math and science can cement a middle school’s culture, give coherence to its curricula, and boost student engagement at a time when many students are losing interest in school. Done well, proponents say, a theme can help students connect what they’re learning in the classroom to some larger purpose or vision of their future.

But not all themed schools are as distinctive as BUGS, and some aren’t all that different from mainstream middles. It can be hard to tell, based on a name alone, whether a self-proclaimed “Green” school offers a fully integrated sustainability curriculum, or is simply located in a net zero building.

Attending a themed school offers no guarantee of success in the focus subject, either. At some STEM-themed schools in New York City, students score below the citywide average on the state standardized math test.

Meanwhile, some high-performing themed schools remain out of reach to many low-income students, due to screenings — such as tests or auditions — that favor families who can afford private lessons and tutors.

This variation in scope, access and outcomes means that students and parents need to do their research before choosing a school with a catchy name, said Joyce Szuflita, a longtime school consultant to Brooklyn families. “Buyer beware,” she advised. “Sometimes there will be a name on a school that has nothing to do with what’s happening in the building. It’s more like branding.”

Related: The path to a career could start in middle school

There’s no national count of the number of themed middle schools, which are less common than themed high schools. But they’re cropping up across the country, particularly in places where families aren’t limited to their neighborhood school zone, according to Andrew Maxey, a member of the board of trustees of the Association for Middle Level Education, or AMLE, an organization that supports middle school educators.

In cities like New York, where students can choose among public schools, public charters and private schools, a theme can be a way for a program to stand out from the competition. It can also help convince some middle-class parents to stick with city public schools for the middle grades, instead of fleeing for private schools or the suburbs.

A theme, said Maud Abeel, a director in the education practice at the nonprofit Jobs for the Future, “is a signal to families and educators that you’re trying to make school relevant and engaging.”

It’s also a signal to business leaders, said David Adams, the CEO of the Urban Assembly, a school support organization that has opened more than 20 career-themed public middle and high schools in New York City since 1997.

When the Urban Assembly’s founder was looking for ways to get industry more involved in public education, back in the early 90s, he settled on themes as a way “to mobilize the private sector to invest in schools,” Adams said.

But there are downsides to proclaiming a specialty. Doing so can scare away parents who worry — sometimes needlessly — that their child will be pigeonholed or miss out on opportunities to explore other areas, Szuflita said. And claiming a theme creates real pressure to “live up to the moniker,” added Abeel.

“If you’re going to put it in your name, you have to show why it’s there,” she said.

In New York City, where there are schools with straightforward names (the Middle School for Art and Philosophy), schools with clever or cute nicknames (BUGS), and schools that combine concepts in head-scratching ways (the Collegiate Academy for Mathematics and Personal Awareness), that “why” is more obvious in some cases than others.

On one end of the spectrum are schools like Ballet Tech, where middle schoolers dance five days a week, and Harbor Middle, where students pursue projects like boat-building and oyster reef monitoring.

“I would want to make sure that while there may be specialization, it’s not cutting off potential pathways.”

Nancy Deutsch, a professor of education at the University of Virginia and an editor of the Journal of Adolescent Research

On the other are schools that no longer fit their names, due to mission drift, leadership turnover or curricular change. A prime example is Brooklyn’s Math & Science Exploratory School, where leaders have asked the Department of Education for permission to drop the “Math & Science” from the name because “the curriculum has evolved” and the current name is “limiting and misaligned with the school’s value and goals,” according to a resolution in support of the change.

In between are dozens of schools that are implementing their themes in different ways and to varying degrees. Some, like the Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women, offer an additional period or two in the theme, along with extras, like hydroponics and coding.

Others focus their electives on the theme. At New Voices, in Brooklyn, students sample six arts forms in sixth grade, then pick a major for the last two years. But parents whose children attended the school said the arts theme isn’t infused into the core subjects.

Broadly speaking, themed middle schools set aside less time for their target subject than their high school counterparts. That’s mostly because the school day is “too full to pile things on,” said Maxey, who, in addition to his work as a board member for AMLE, is director of strategic initiatives at Tuscaloosa City Schools, where there is a performing arts middle school.  

Maxey said the most successful schools take an integrative, rather than an additive approach, weaving the theme across all subjects.

“You don’t carve out time for the arts,” he said. “You make them the essence of the school.”

Related: A hidden divide: How NYC’s high school system separates students by gender

The research on the effectiveness of themed schools is thin; experts on middle school teaching say they aren’t aware of any rigorous studies comparing themed and mainstream middles.

But a pair of studies by the Research Alliance for New York City Schools — one on turnaround middle schools and another on small high schools — suggest that themes can lend cohesion to the curriculum and facilitate collaboration across disciplines, said Cheri Fancsali, the Alliance’s executive director. They can attract students, as well as teachers, to a school.

Yet the studies also showed that themes sometimes lead to a narrowing of the curriculum and alienate students who aren’t interested in the theme, Fancsali said.

Nancy Deutsch, a professor of education at the University of Virginia and an editor of the Journal of Adolescent Research, said she has mixed feelings about themed middles.

On the one hand, Deutsch said, letting students select schools that align with their interests might prevent some of the drop-off in motivation and engagement that often begins in middle school. On the flip side, attending a themed school might limit students’ future options, if they can’t take courses — Algebra I, for example — that would allow them to pursue different interests in high school.

“I would want to make sure that while there may be specialization, it’s not cutting off potential pathways,” she said.

“Operating in a public school system, you can’t go as deep or be as innovative as BUGS.”

Jennifer Seydel, executive director of the Green Schools National Network

Equity can be a concern as well. Some themed schools admit students based on factors like test scores or grade point averages, or require them to submit a portfolio or undergo an audition. Ohers have moved away from such screening methods, in an effort to build more racially and socioeconomically balanced classes.

Brooklyn’s District 15, where almost half the middle schools have themes, switched to a lottery system a few years ago. The change has reduced segregation in the district’s schools, but it has also coincided with a sharp drop in test scores at some themed schools, including the Math & Science Exploratory School, which had historically drawn a disproportionate number of white and higher-income families. This has led to speculation that the move to change the school’s name was motivated by declining test scores — a charge the school has denied.

Even so, the school’s pass rate on the state math exam — 64 percent in 2021-22 — was still twice the citywide average for middle schools of 32 percent (and climbed back to 80 percent during the last academic year, recently released data show). Several STEM-themed schools weren’t even meeting that low bar.

BUGS, which shares a building with a District 15 public themed middle school, the Carroll Gardens School for Innovation, is required under state charter law to admit students by lottery, with preference given to students in the district. The school is fairly diverse — roughly half the students are white — and a quarter qualify for free and reduced lunch. Close to a third have disabilities.

Last year, according to data from the New York State Department of Education, two-thirds of BUGS students passed the state math exam, though pass rates were significantly lower for students with disabilities (48 percent), and economically disadvantaged students (32 percent). The citywide average for all middle schoolers was 46.3 percent.

Related: Can you fix middle school by getting rid of it?

When BUGS opened a little over a decade ago, its focus was squarely on environmental sustainability. But over the years, it has expanded its purview to social and economic sustainability, too, said Tenner, the executive director.

The school’s all-in embrace of the sustainability theme is fairly unusual, said Jennifer Seydel, executive director of the Green Schools National Network. The Network’s members include schools with a couple courses in environmental studies, those with after-school “green teams,” and schools with net-zero emissions, among others.

“Operating in a public school system, you can’t go as deep or be as innovative as BUGS,” she said.

Still, given the school’s name, Tenner sometimes has to correct parents’ misperception that it’s all about planting and harvesting.

“Buyer beware. Sometimes there will be a name on a school that has nothing to do with what’s happening in the building. It’s more like branding.”

Joyce Szuflita, educational consultant to Brooklyn, New York, families

“The garden is a great outdoor classroom, but it’s only one of many in the city,” she tells families.

Their confusion may not matter much, anyway. In interviews, parents whose children attend or attended themed middle schools in Brooklyn said they made their choice for a variety of reasons, often unrelated to the theme: a school’s location, academic reputation or small size.

Parents whose kids attended the Math & Science Exploratory School said it was an open secret among affluent families living near the school that the emphasis was on exploration, and not on math and science. They wondered whether families from poorer parts of the district, whose children now make up a large share of the school’s enrollment, would know that.

Sarah Russo, whose son is a seventh grader at BUGS, said it was the school’s co-teaching approach and nurturing environment that sold her. Her son has an Individualized Education Program (a plan for students with disabilities) and she worried he’d get lost in a big, competitive school.

The BUGS survey-taking sixth graders, meanwhile, had other reasons to like the school. Elias was really excited about the lockers, while Sophia, whose group had interviewed passersby on a different corner, was thrilled that they’d get released for lunch. Sena picked BUGS over New Voices, the school her two best friends planned to attend, after realizing that the arts “aren’t my thing.”

Back in the classroom after completing their survey, the students get a refresher lesson on converting ratios into percentages and tally their responses. They find that roughly half of respondents have more restaurants and fast-food chains than grocery stores in their neighborhood, and forty percent don’t know what food equity is. Three quarters spend more than $50 per person on groceries each week.

Armed with these statistics, the students take action, writing letters to Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso to urge him to bring more grocery stores to Brooklyn neighborhoods and install more community fridges in the district.

In his letter, Elias asks Reynoso to tackle inflation and add lessons on food inequity to the city’s curricula.

“Please, Mr. Reynoso, we must do something!” he concludes, and adds his signature: a smiley face giving a thumbs up.

This story about theme schools 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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Last year, Arizona became the first state in the nation to offer universal school choice for all families.

State leaders promised families roughly $7,000 a year to spend on private schools and other nonpublic education options, dangling the opportunity for parents to pull their kids out of what some conservatives called “failing government schools.”

But now, some private schools across the state are hiking their tuition by thousands of dollars. That risks pricing the students that lawmakers said they intended to serve out of private schools, in some cases limiting those options to wealthier families and those who already attended private institutions.

Critics of Arizona’s empowerment scholarship accounts, or ESAs, cite the tuition increases as evidence of what they’ve warned about for years: Universal school choice, rather than giving students living in poverty an opportunity to attend higher-quality schools, would largely serve as a subsidy for the affluent.

“The average amount of tuition is going to be more than the actual voucher, not to mention transportation and uniform costs,” said Nik Nartowicz, state policy counsel for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a legal advocacy group. “This doesn’t help low-income families.”

A Hechinger Report analysis of dozens of private school websites revealed that, among 55 that posted their tuition rates, nearly all raised their prices since 2022. Some schools made modest increases, often in line with or below the overall inflation rate last year of around 6 percent. But at nearly half of the schools, tuition increased in at least some grades by 10 percent or more. In five of those cases, schools hiked tuition by more than 20 percent – much higher than even the steep inflation that hit the Phoenix metro area and well beyond what an ESA could cover.

Nationally, a dozen other states now offer ESAs, also known as education savings accounts, that incentivize parents to withdraw their kids from the public K-12 system. Another 14 states offer vouchers, which allow families to direct most or all of their students’ per pupil funding to a private school. As the programs grow in number, they offer a test of subsidized school choice — a longtime goal of the political right — and its effectiveness in serving kids from all backgrounds.   

Related: Florida just expanded vouchers — again. What does that really mean?

As of September, nearly 62,000 students in Arizona have received an ESA — more than twice the number that received the aid in the same month last year. Participating students receive 90 percent of what the state would spend to educate them at a public school; children with disabilities can access much higher funding. Recent state data pegs the median ESA award at just under $7,200. Families can spend their ESAs on almost any education-related expenses, such as private school tuition, tutoring and homeschool supplies. 

Before Arizona expanded eligibility for ESAs last year, proponents of the program argued the median award would cover median tuition at private elementary schools and about three quarters of the median rate at private high schools. Now, the recent rise in tuition may price more Arizona families out of the nation’s most expansive experiment in school choice.

For example, the cost of enrollment for seventh and eighth graders at Arrowhead Montessori, in Peoria, soared to $15,000, an increase of $4,200. In Mesa, tuition at Redeemer Christian School rose by nearly a quarter across most grades; families of high schoolers now pay $12,979, approximately $2,500 higher than the year prior. Similarly, at Desert Garden Montessori, in Phoenix, middle and high school tuition is now $16,000, nearly 24 percent higher than last year’s tuition rate of $12,950. And Saint Theresa Catholic School, also in Phoenix, reserved its biggest price hike – of about $1,800, or nearly 15 percent – for non-Catholic students in the elementary grades. Tuition for those students is now more than $14,000.

The Arrowhead, Desert Garden, Valley Christian and Redeemer Christian schools did not respond to requests for comment. ESA proponents, meanwhile, dismissed any tuition inflation as early growing pains.

Lisa Snell, a senior fellow of education at Stand Together Trust, a libertarian think tank, said that over time more private schools and educational providers will open in the state, creating greater market competition and pushing down costs. Already, Arizona has registered more than 4,000 vendors for ESAs — including retailers, tutors and even traditional school districts — a jump of 35 percent over last year.

“There’s obviously more risk with experimentation, but the only way to improve quality is to allow people to experiment,” Snell said. “We’re at the very early days.”

Related: COLUMN: Conservatives are embracing new alternative school models. Will the public?

ESAs gained prominence with Arizona’s passage of the nation’s first such program in 2011.

The state initially reserved participation to children with disabilities, but lawmakers later expanded the program to other populations, including children of active-duty military members and those attending a school that earned a D or F on state accountability report cards. Originally, most eligible students had to attend a public school for the first 100 days of the prior school year before applying for an ESA.

Then, in 2022, state leaders expanded eligibility to all K-12 students and removed the requirement of initial public school attendance. The Arizona Department of Education, which administers the program, estimated nearly half of students with an ESA have never attended public school — suggesting the state is sending millions of dollars to families who’d previously covered private school tuition out of their own pockets.

For some families, including those already enrolled in private school, the tuition hikes have caused sticker shock.

Pam Lang previously received an ESA for her son, who has autism, to attend a private school for students with disabilities. A real estate agent in the Phoenix area, she confirmed tuition at his program rose nearly $4,000. She said families received no prior notice of the increase, which showed up in an invoice before the start of a new academic year.

“Parents are faced with the possibility of having to drop other things they use ESAs for, like tutors — an expense that also increased for my son,” Lang said.

Meanwhile, some private schools encourage currently enrolled families to secure an ESA to cover the higher tuition rates, according to Beth Lewis, executive director of Save Our School Arizona, a group that advocates for public education.

“It makes complete economic sense,” Lewis said. “If a family was already able to pay $11,000, what’s stopping the school from increasing tuition by the average ESA?”

Advocates of the program, however, argued families of varying income levels will make room in their budget for private schools.

Matt Ladner, a fellow with the nonprofit group EdChoice, said low-income parents might find second or third jobs to afford tuition for their kids. And, he added, even children whose families pay for private school on their own dime deserve some portion of state funding for education.

“Their parents pay taxes too,” Ladner said. “Everyone pays into the system, and everyone with a child should be entitled to an equitable share. We publicly fund education for all kids.”

Related: School choice had a big moment in the pandemic. Is it what parents want in the long term?

Of the 13 states with some version of ESA legislation, five — Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Utah and West Virginia — followed Arizona’s lead in granting eligibility to 100 percent of students, regardless of income level. The Grand Canyon State, though, stands apart in almost hands-off approach to the private school market.

Existing state codes set no requirements for the accreditation, approval, licensing or registration of private schools in Arizona. No public agency tracks the creation of new private schools in the state or what they charge for tuition. The state departments of education and treasury did not respond to repeated public records requests for vendor data on how families have spent their ESA awards.

“It’s a black box by design,” said Lewis.

“The average amount of tuition is going to be more than the actual voucher, not to mention transportation and uniform costs. This doesn’t help low-income families.”

Nik Nartowicz, state policy counsel for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a legal advocacy group

In contrast, Iowa requires parents to use their ESA at an accredited nonpublic school — a requirement that Snell, of the Stand Together Trust, described as limiting and rigid.

She and other fans of Arizona’s law said its looser structure will open the door to many more choices for families. One option: microschools, where families bring their children together in smaller learning communities, with or without a licensed teacher. 

“It’s kind of a great thing about demand-driven systems,” Ladner said. “We don’t know what families will value and what directions they will take things.”

He also pointed to a new report from the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, showing that increases in private school tuition over the last 10 years were smaller in states that passed school choice policies than in those that didn’t.

Dan Hungerman, an economics professor at the University of Notre Dame who has studied the impact of vouchers on private school finances, noted that the Heritage report’s main finding lacked the common elements of rigorous academic research: statistical significance and standard error.

Hungerman’s own research, conducted in partnership with an economist at the U.S. Census Bureau, found that voucher programs significantly boost the bottom line of churches that operate private schools and likely prevent church closures and mergers.

That concerns Joshua Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University. He said that high-tuition private schools were already out of reach for most students and will remain so, regardless of ESA programs. More distressing, Cowen argued, were the public campaigns — including one from a foundation backed by former U.S. education secretary Betsy Devos — aimed directly at saving Catholic education through school choice.

“Vouchers are at least partly about bailing out financially distressed church schools,” Cowen said. “Once school vouchers come to town, taxpayers become the dominant source of revenue for churches.”

In Chandler, the Seton Catholic high school sets two tuition rates: A $18,775 general rate for students enrolling in the 2023-24 academic year, and a discounted rate of $14,100 for Catholic students. The college prep academy requires families to secure verification from their parish to receive the discount.

“As a Catholic school, we work with people of all faiths, but our ministry exists to serve the Catholic church,” said Victor Serna, the school’s principal.

“If you want this to be a shining example for the country, you gotta change some things. Because right now, we’re on the fast track to disaster.”

Beth Lewis, executive director, Save our Schools Arizona

Nartowicz, with Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said he suspects that as more states pass ESA legislation like Arizona’s, the number of church-based schools offering discounts based on religion will also increase, allowing the use of public funds, in effect, to advantage those with particular religious views.

“We’ve never really encountered this before,” Nartowicz said.

Earlier this year, the Arizona department of education projected the expansion of ESAs would cost the state about $900 million — well above an original estimate of just $65 million. The ballooning price tag prompted Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs to call on lawmakers to repeal the program’s universal eligibility. Republicans in control of both legislative chambers rejected the idea. 

ESA critics had hoped a bipartisan deal to create an oversight committee would lead to reforms of the program. But earlier this month, the committee ended its work with no proposed changes. 

Lewis, with Save our Schools Arizona, had previously said that the deal indicates even some Republicans may be worried about the financial impact of school-choice-for-all.

“If you want this to be a shining example for the country, you gotta change some things,” she said. “Because right now, we’re on the fast track to disaster.” 

But the state speaker of the House, Ben Toma, a Republican who chaired the ESA oversight committee, seemed to buck expectations that the program would significantly change soon.

“School choice is here to stay,” he wrote on social media.

Amanda Chen contributed reporting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Enlow, president and CEO of the advocacy group EdChoice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joshua Cowen, Professor, Michigan State University

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

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

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

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

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

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

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RIO RANCHO, N.M. — When Ashley Daniels saw her second grade son earn a high score on a recent test, she knew he had just guessed the answers and gotten lucky. Daniels called his teacher and said he might need some extra support, despite his good performance on the test.

It wasn’t just a mother’s intuition. Daniels watched her son take the test from their dining room table.

The second grader attends SpaRRk Academy, a virtual learning program for elementary students created in 2021 by the Rio Rancho School District in New Mexico. Even as doors reopened to brick-and-mortar schools, administrators here saw the continued need for a virtual option in response to lingering concerns about Covid and to feedback from some parents that their children had thrived in online learning.

The district assigned 10 full-time teachers to provide live, online classes via Zoom. They also organized an in-person component: Once a week, students would gather in reserved classrooms in a local elementary school, for activities such as science experiments, project-based learning and reading groups. More than 250 kids signed up for SpaRRk.

But, two years in, enrollment had dropped to 87 kids, a 65 percent decrease. Costs had soared to $11,327 per pupil, a 121 percent jump from the year prior and nearly $3,000 more than the average in this district of roughly 17,000 students. SpaRRk Academy’s future sat on shaky ground; the school board announced in late 2022 that it would hold a vote this spring on whether to shutter the academy altogether.

Prior to the pandemic, virtual schools were relatively scarce: 691 fully virtual programs enrolled nearly 294,000 students, accounting for less than 1 percent of national public school enrollment, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. But after most schools shifted their classes online in early 2020, remote learning caught on with some families, including those who preferred to give their children the flexibility of learning from home, or whose children struggled with social anxiety in school buildings or hadn’t found success in traditional learning environments.

Related: Remote learning has been a disaster for many students. But some kids have thrived

Some 41 percent of districts surveyed in August 2021 by the Clayton Christensen Institute, a nonprofit think tank, said they had opened a full-time virtual school option during the pandemic, and 32 percent planned to maintain these programs after the pandemic subsided.

But today, as Covid fears have waned, many students have tired of screens and employers have begun requiring workers to return in person, a number of those virtual academies are at risk of closing. That’s leaving families like Daniels’ in the lurch, and raising questions about the future of virtual learning. The highest-quality online programs have generally demanded the most resources from school districts, making them the most likely to face closure in the face of budget constraints.

“Do we continue to fund something that is showing declining enrollment?” said Rachel Aaker, the principal of SpaRRK Academy, who spearheaded its creation. “I believe it would take commitment from the district and the board to say we may see an increasing need for this eventually, and we need some years for that to play out.”

Tucked in the foothills of the Sandia Mountains in Northern New Mexico, Rio Rancho is a small but rapidly growing school district. New schools are being built every few years to keep pace with a surge in families moving to the area due to its proximity to technology and engineering firm Sandia National Laboratories and new business hubs for companies such as Intel and NTX Bio. The high desert landscape is dotted with signs of development: brand new farmhouse-style homes, fresh asphalt still jet-black from lack of use and “for sale” placards on empty plots of land.

A longtime administrator in Rio Rancho, Aaker led the district-wide transition of elementary students to online learning when Covid struck. As public health guidelines relaxed over the course of the next school year, Aaker began to hear from parents who weren’t comfortable sending their kids back to in-person learning. She approached the board with the idea of a stand-alone hybrid program run by the district that any elementary student in Rio Rancho could attend.

Since 2005, the district had operated a virtual option, Cyber Academy, for middle and high schoolers, which relied primarily on a third-party platform, Edgenuity, for lessons students could perform on their own at their own pace and offered some in-person academic support and extracurriculars. Aaker’s new elementary option was to be different, though, with its real-time, live instruction designed by district administrators and led by district teachers.

Daniels and another parent, Nicole Garcia, who sent two children to SpaRRk, opted for the program due to Covid fears. Once enrolled, their children grew more confident and their academic performance improved, said Daniels and Garcia, and they became believers in the model for the long haul. That was true for many SpaRRk parents: District surveys of SpaRRk families found that health concerns were the biggest initial draw, but by 2022 parents instead cited the program’s quality, the school’s close collaboration with families and the flexibility as reasons why they stayed. 

Still, that enthusiasm wasn’t enough: The academy lost its biggest class, of 54 fifth graders, when they graduated to middle school in 2022, while other families moved out of the school district or returned to in-person learning as Covid fears dissipated. Enrollment at Rio Rancho’s Cyber Academy for older students also declined, from 285to205 this year.

That mirrors what’s happening in other districts. Overall, total virtual enrollment remains higher than before the pandemic, but, in some cases, it has declined relative to its pandemic peaks, according to Gary Miron, a professor with Western Michigan University’s Department of Educational Leadership, Research and Technology.

In Indianapolis Public Schools, for example, 782 families opted into the district’s full-time online offering during the 2021-22 school year; today that figure is 508. When Salt Lake Virtual Elementary in Utah’s Salt Lake City School District opened for the 2021-22 school year, 257 students enrolled, but that number plummeted to 87 students this year. This June, the school board plans to decide whether to close the school altogether. Nearby Jordan School District’s virtual elementary option, Rocky Peak Virtual Elementary, saw enrollment drop from 604 students during the height of the pandemic to 273 students this year. Wyoming Virtual Academy, a virtual option available to K-12 students statewide, saw enrollment surge from roughly 500 students every year since its founding in 2009 to nearly 1,200 students at the height of the pandemic. Enrollment fell to about 600 students for this school year.

Related: Despite mediocre records, online charter schools are selling families on staying virtual

Less than 20 miles south of Rio Rancho, the Albuquerque eCADEMY High School, a virtual program created by the Albuquerque school district in 2013, saw enrollment jump during the pandemic from 276 students to 726. Seeing this demand, the Albuquerque school board voted in June 2020 to allocate $8 million in pandemic relief to create eCADEMY K8 and expand virtual offerings to lower grades. In its first year, nearly 1,400 students enrolled, according to data made publicly available by APS.

This school year, enrollment dropped for both eCADEMY programs — to about 950 high schoolers and 747 elementary and middle schoolers, though the numbers remain well above pre-Covid figures. While many students stay enrolled in eCADEMY’s high school program for increased flexibility, principal Erin Easley said the program also sees large percentages of students who are coping with debilitating medical conditions or social anxiety, while others come from difficult home environments or have historically struggled to succeed in the classroom.

Virtual enrollment may be dropping due to questions around the quality of remote learning. Student academic performance took a beating during the online learning experiment of the pandemic. Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the nation’s report card, shows that fourth graders lost the equivalent of two decades of progress in reading and math, and eighth grade math performance fell in all but one state. And research on some online academies that existed pre-pandemic, including for-profit online charter schools, has tended to show poor student outcomes and low graduation rates.

Yet a growing number of educators and researchers caution against making conclusions about virtual learning based on that research. The transition to online learning during the pandemic was haphazard; online programs have continued to evolve and improve. Parents will increasingly expect districts to offer a virtual learning alternative as technology’s role grows and pandemic-era workplace flexibility becomes more commonplace, education experts say.

“The idea that we think our education systems are going to remain paper- and pencil-based and in this face-to-face instructional model — it’s going to change,” said Miron, the Western Michigan University professor. “It is changing.”

But the approach that districts take matters. When the time came to select a middle school for her older child, Garcia said the family chose Cyber Academy, Rio Rancho’s existing virtual program for grades 6-12. She quickly found that it was “not even comparable” to the experience at SPaRRk, she said, and withdrew her daughter after winter break in favor of the local middle school.

“SpaRRk teachers took the time to hang around to go over any questions the students had, and made themselves available throughout the day. They are wonderful. I’ve never dealt with teachers like them,” said Garcia. “At Cyber Academy, the teachers and curriculum were not great, and the teachers didn’t offer help when kids needed it.”

Education experts say the most successful online programs tend to be those that provide individual attention to students, staff the school with dedicated district employees, guarantee low teacher-to-student ratios and rely on curriculum developed by school districts rather than off-the-shelf programs run by for-profit charter schools or other companies. Hybrid programs that incorporate some in-person learning and extracurricular activities, like SPaRRk’s, have been most successful at providing the benefits of online learning while retaining the social skills some fear could be lost in a virtual environment, according to Miron and others. But as Rio Rancho is finding, such programs require significant resources that can be hard to justify if student enrollment falls.

Related: Some families don’t want to go back to in-person schooling. Here’s how one S.C. district is dealing with this demand

At the Rio Rancho Board of Education building overlooking the Sandia Mountain foothills, dozens gathered in February for a vote on the online academy’s future.

Most who spoke favored keeping it open. “At least give us a chance, give the community a chance to know about this program,” pleaded Ruby Holden, a special education teacher at SPaRRk Academy, during public comment. “We just need an opportunity to have our program open for parents and families to know about us and I just don’t feel like we’ve had the opportunity to spread the word about our program.”

But when Aaker was pressed on how many kids she could enroll in the next two years, she said about “one class per grade level,” or 20 to 25 students each, more than current enrollment but not the 300-plus target she had thought might be viable when SpaRRk Academy was first founded.

Less than an hour later, the board voted to close the school after only two years in operation.

“Enrollment is not going in the right direction,” Sue Cleveland, the Rio Rancho superintendent, said at the meeting. “It’s substantially more expensive than what we are spending on other students in the district. I wish we had enough resources that we didn’t have to make hard choices like sometimes we have to make.”

After the vote, SpaRRk families and administrators shared tears and hugs. “We wish we had more time to provide an opportunity for our school to grow,” said Aaker. 

Garcia, who was not in attendance at the meeting, said she’ll enroll her rising fourth grader in the local brick-and-mortar option, which, she said, “is not what we would want at this time.”

Daniels said she plans to homeschool her son for the upcoming school year, rather than sending him back to a local public school. “I think it’s such a loss for the district,” she said. “I feel like they are taking three steps back.”

“Ironically, one of the board members was literally attending the meeting virtually,” she added. “I guess we do board meetings virtually — but not learning.”

This story about online academies 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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Many major cities around the country, from New York and New Orleans to Denver and Los Angeles, have changed how children are assigned to public schools over the past 20 years and now allow families to send their children to a school outside of their neighborhood zone. Known as public school choice or open enrollment, this policy gives children in poor neighborhoods a chance at a better education. Many supporters hoped it could also be a way to desegregate schools even as residential neighborhoods remain racially divided.

However, a new study of public school choice in Charlotte, North Carolina, finds a deeply troubling consequence to this well-intended policy: increased crime. 

Three university economists studied the criminal justice records of 10,000 boys who were in fifth grade between 2005 and 2008. Thousands wanted to go to highly regarded middle schools, some of which were in nearby suburbs of the large Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district. Seats were allocated through a lottery.

The lucky ones, who won a seat to their first choice middle school, were less likely to be arrested or end up in prison between the ages of 16 and 22.  But the students left behind in a neighborhood school were much more likely to be arrested or imprisoned as adults. The increase in criminal activity among the 8,000 boys who hadn’t participated in the school lottery was greater than the decrease in criminal activity for the lottery winners. Public school choice ended up increasing overall arrests and days incarcerated for young men, the researchers concluded in a draft paper, “Does School Choice Increase Crime?” circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research in February 2023.

The reason, according to the researchers, is that the boys left behind were surrounded by a less desirable mix of peers. Families who placed a high value on education were more likely to enter a lottery for a well-regarded school, win it and leave the neighborhood school. In Charlotte, these kids were predominantly Black and had higher test scores. From sixth grade onward, these higher achieving kids were no longer interacting socially with the neighborhood kids all day long. Crime itself is a social activity, according to the researchers’ previous studies, and kids are more likely to commit crimes with other kids who live nearby and especially those who attend the same schools. With fewer positive influences at school, kids who might not otherwise have participated in crime were more likely to join in.

“There are many important studies that have documented important, positive effects of school choice,” said Stephen Ross, an economist at the University of Connecticut and one of the three authors. “But our paper says that one should be at least somewhat more careful prior to jumping on the school choice bandwagon because there are also significant costs that might offset the benefits.”

I know, I know. Many of you reading this have questions about the study design. So did I. Let me walk you through it.

It’s impossible to know exactly how much crime people would have committed in adulthood had there been no school choice.  But the researchers were able to estimate the influence of the school lottery policy by looking at three separate years of fifth graders in each neighborhood. These are tiny sub-neighborhoods, sometimes just a few blocks in area. The researchers tracked how future criminal activity fluctuated depending upon how many of their peers left for lottery schools. In years when more peers left for lottery schools, the adult crime figures for the children left behind increased. The following year, if fewer peers left for lottery schools, subsequent crime figures fell back again.

Researchers found that it was students they had categorized as “low risk” of getting arrested who were drawn into crime after peers left for lottery schools. The increase in criminal behavior was detected among white children and children with higher test scores. These boys racked up more arrests and days behind bars when more of their elementary school classmates left. Kids at “high risk” of arrest were less affected. Their criminal activity later in adulthood was more stable regardless of how many peers left for lottery schools.

Here are some examples from the study. On average, 44 boys among 1,000 who did not participate in the lottery lost a school peer in their neighborhood to a school lottery. That seemingly small exposure to lottery winners was associated with a 25 percent increase in arrests from an average of 55 arrests to 69 arrests among the boys who were less likely to get arrested. Most children were never arrested in their young adulthood, but the 14 extra arrests among this group of 500 boys are significant.  Most of the low-risk children were never incarcerated, but the total days in prison among 500 of them jumped from 600 days to 1,000 days behind bars.

The researchers only looked at how public school lotteries affected criminal activity. By the same logic, however, it’s reasonable to think that charter schools and private school vouchers could trigger worrisome crime increases if they siphon away the best students from the local, neighborhood schools. But that hasn’t been proven.

This isn’t the first study to notice unintended consequences from open enrollment policies. A 2018 report by The Center for New York City Affairs at The New School pointed out the “Paradox of Choice.” In New York, the siphoning off of students also siphoned the funds that schools receive. Less desirable local neighborhood schools were left with fewer resources and deteriorated even more. Also unexpected was how schools had become even more segregated. Sought-after schools had become extremely selective in choosing students with the highest grades and test scores. Fewer Black and Hispanic students were being admitted.

Charlotte introduced public school choice a few years after busing ended in 2001. It was a well intended effort to prevent schools from resegregating along racial lines, and to give children a better shot at a quality education. But this study shows that there are unexpected connections between schools and communities. A good solution for one problem can sometimes create a whole new one. 

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

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This article was produced by the Associated Press and is based on data collected by the AP and Stanford University’s Big Local News project.

She’d be a senior right now, preparing for graduation in a few months, probably leading her school’s modern dance troupe and taking art classes. 

Instead, Kailani Taylor-Cribb hasn’t taken a single class in what used to be her high school since the height of the coronavirus pandemic. She vanished from Cambridge, Massachusetts’ public school roll in 2021 and has been, from an administrative standpoint, unaccounted for since then.

She is among hundreds of thousands of students around the country who disappeared from public schools during the pandemic and didn’t resume their studies elsewhere.

An analysis by The Associated Press, Stanford University’s Big Local News project and Stanford education professor Thomas Dee found an estimated 230,000 students in 21 states whose absences could not be accounted for.* These students didn’t move out of state, and they didn’t sign up for private school or home-school, according to publicly available data.

In short, they’re missing.

“Missing” students received crisis-level attention in 2020 after the pandemic closed schools nationwide. In the years since, they have become largely a budgeting problem. School leaders and some state officials worried aloud about the fiscal challenges their districts faced if these students didn’t come back. Each student represents money from the city, state and federal governments.

Gone is the urgency to find the students who left — those eligible for free public education but who are not receiving any schooling at all. Early in the pandemic, school staff went door-to-door to reach and reengage kids. Most such efforts have ended.

“Everyone is talking about declining enrollment, but no one is talking about who’s leaving the system and why,” said Tom Sheppard, a New York City parent and representative on the city’s Panel for Educational Policy. 

“No one,” he said, “is forthcoming.”

Related: Will the students who didn’t show up for online class this spring go missing forever?

The missing kids identified by AP and Stanford represent far more than a number. The analysis highlights thousands of students who may have dropped out of school or missed out on the basics of reading and school routines in kindergarten and first grade.

That’s thousands of students who matter to someone. Thousands of students who need help re-entering school, work, and everyday life. 

“That’s the stuff that no one wants to talk about,” said Sonja Santelises, the chief executive officer of Baltimore’s public schools, speaking about her fellow superintendents. 

“We want to say it’s outside stuff” that’s keeping kids from returning to school, she said, such as caring for younger siblings or the need to work. But she worries teens sometimes lack caring adults at school who can discuss their concerns about life. 

“That’s really scary,” Santelises said.

Discussion of children's recovery from the pandemic has focused largely on test scores and performance. But Dee says the data suggests a need to understand more about children who aren’t in school and how that will affect their development. 

“This is leading evidence that tells us we need to be looking more carefully at the kids who are no longer in public schools,” he said.

Over months of reporting, the AP learned of students and families avoiding school for a range of reasons. Some are still afraid of COVID-19, are homeless or have left the country. Some students couldn’t study online and found jobs instead. Some slid into depression.

During the prolonged online learning, some students fell so far behind developmentally and academically that they no longer knew how to behave or learn at school. Many of these students, while largely absent from class, are still officially on school rosters. That makes it harder to truly count the number of missing students. The real tally of young people not receiving an education is likely far greater than the 230,000 figure calculated by the AP and Stanford.

In some cases, this wasn’t sudden. Many students were struggling well before the pandemic descended.

Kailani, for one, had begun to feel alienated at her school. In ninth grade, a few months before the pandemic hit, she was unhappy at home and had been moved to a different math class because of poor grades.

Kailani has ADHD and says the white teaching assistant assigned to help her focus in her new class targeted her because she was Black, blaming Kailani when classmates acted up. She also didn’t allow Kailani to use her headphones while working independently in class, something Kailani says was permitted in her special education plan to help her focus.

After that, Kailani stopped attending math. Instead, she cruised the hallways or read in the library. 

Ultimately, the pandemic and at-home education relieved the anxiety Kailani felt from being in the school building. Kailani preferred online school because she could turn off her camera and engage as she chose. Her grades improved.

When the school reopened, she never returned.

A Cambridge schools spokesperson looked into Kailani’s complaints. “Several individuals demonstrated great concern and compassion towards her and the challenges she was facing outside of school,” Sujata Wycoff said. She said the district has a “reputation of being deeply dedicated to the education and well-being of our students.”

Related: Communities hit hardest by the pandemic, already struggling, could face a dropout cliff

To assess just how many students have gone missing, AP and Big Local News canvassed every state in the nation to find the most recently available data on both public and non-public schools, as well as census estimates for the school-age population.

Overall, public school enrollment fell by 710,000 students between the 2019-2020 and 2021-2022 school years in the 21 states plus Washington, D.C., that provided the necessary data.

Those states saw private-school enrollment grow by over 100,000 students. Home-schooling grew even more, surging by more than 180,000.

But the data showed 240,000 students who were neither in private school nor registered for home-school. Their absences could not be explained by population loss, either — such as falling birth rates or families who moved out of state.

“Everyone is talking about declining enrollment, but no one is talking about who’s leaving the system and why.”

Tom Sheppard, a New York City parent and representative on the city's Panel for Educational Policy

States where kindergarten is optional were more likely to have larger numbers of unaccounted-for students, suggesting the missing also include many young learners kept home instead of starting school.

California alone showed over 150,000 missing students in the data, and New York had nearly 60,000. Census estimates are imperfect. So AP and Stanford ran a similar analysis for pre-pandemic years in those two states. It found almost no missing students at all, confirming something out of the ordinary occurred during the pandemic. 

The true number of missing students is likely much higher. The analysis doesn’t include data from 29 states, including Texas and Illinois, or the unknown numbers of ghost students who are technically enrolled but rarely make it to class.

For some students, it was impossible to overcome losing the physical connection with school and teachers during the pandemic's school closures.

“All they had to do was take action. There were so many times they could have done something. And they did nothing.”

Kailani Taylor-Cribb, former high school student, Cambridge, Massachusetts

José Escobar, an immigrant from El Salvador, had only recently enrolled in the 10th grade in Boston Public Schools when the campus shut down in March 2020. His school-issued laptop didn’t work, and because of bureaucratic hurdles the district didn’t issue a new one for several weeks. His father stopped paying their phone bills after losing his restaurant job. Without any working technology for months, he never logged into remote classes.

When instruction resumed online that fall, he decided to walk away and find work as a prep cook. “I can’t learn that way,” he said in Spanish. At 21, he’s still eligible for school in Boston, but says he’s too old for high school and needs to work to help his family.

Another Boston student became severely depressed during online learning and was hospitalized for months. Back home, he refuses to attend school or leave his room despite visits from at least one teacher. When his mother asked him about speaking to a reporter, he cursed her out.

These are all students who have formally left school and have likely been erased from enrollment databases. Many others who are enrolled are not receiving an education.

In Los Angeles last year, nearly half of students were chronically absent, meaning they missed more than 10 percent of the school year. For students with disabilities, the numbers are even higher: According to district data, 55 percent missed at least 18 school days. It’s not clear how many students were absent more than that. The city’s Unified School District did not respond to requests for this data. 

Related: Many schools find ways to solve absenteeism without suspensions

Los Angeles officials have spoken openly about attempts to find unschooled students and help remove obstacles that are preventing them from coming to school. Laundry services have been offered, as has help with housing. But for some students and their parents, the problem sits within a school system they say has routinely failed their children. 

“Parents are bereft,” said Allison Hertog, who represents around three dozen families whose children missed significant learning when California’s physical classrooms closed for more than a year during the early pandemic. 

Ezekiel West, 10, is in fourth grade but reads at a first grade level. Before the pandemic shutdowns, he was shuffled from school to school when educators couldn’t address his impulsive behavior. 

During online learning, his mother couldn’t get home internet and struggled with the WiFi hotspots provided by the school. She worked as a home health aide and couldn’t monitor Ezekiel online.

When he returned to school in fall 2021 as a third grader, he was frustrated that his classmates had made more progress as the years passed.

“I did not feel prepared,” he said in a recent phone interview. “I couldn’t really learn as fast as the other kids, and that kind of made me upset.”

An administrative judge ruled Los Angeles’ schools had violated Ezekiel’s rights and ordered the district to give him a spot at a new school, with a special plan to ease him back into learning and trusting teachers. The school didn’t follow the plan, so his mother stopped sending him in October.

“I can’t trust them,” Miesha Clarke said. Los Angeles school officials did not respond to requests for comment on Ezekiel’s case.

Last month, Ezekiel signed up for a public online school for California students. To enroll him, his mother agreed to give up his special education plan. His attorney, Hertog, worries the program won’t work for someone with Ezekiel’s needs and is looking for yet another option with more flexibility.

At least three of the students Hertog has represented, including Ezekiel, have disappeared from school for long periods since in-person instruction resumed. Their situations were avoidable, she said: “It’s pretty disgraceful that the school systems allowed this to go on for so long.”

When Kailani stopped logging into her virtual classes during the spring of her sophomore year, she received several emails from the school telling her she’d been truant. Between two to four weeks after she disappeared from Zoom school, her homeroom advisor and Spanish teacher each wrote to her, asking where she was. And the school’s dean of students called her great-grandmother, her legal guardian, to inform her about Kailani’s disappearance from school.

They didn’t communicate further, according to Kailani. She went to work at Chipotle, ringing up orders in Boston’s financial district.

In December, Kailani moved to North Carolina to make a new start. She teaches dance to elementary school kids now. Last month, she passed her high school equivalency exams. She plans to study choreography.

But she knows, looking back, that things could have been different. While she has no regrets about leaving high school, she says she might have changed her mind if someone at school had shown more interest and attention to her needs and support for her as a Black student.

“All they had to do was take action,” Kailani said. “There were so many times they could have done something. And they did nothing.”

*Correction: Due to an update to one state’s enrollment figures, this story has been corrected to change the estimated number of missing schoolkids in all states from 240,000 to 230,000.

This article is based on data collected by The Associated Press and Stanford University’s Big Local News project. Data was compiled by Sharon Lurye of the AP, Thomas Dee of Stanford’s Graduate School of Education and Justin Mayo of Big Local News.  

The Associated Press education team receives support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Reproduction of this story is not permitted.

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As a school board member in Arizona, I hear the concerns, hopes and frustrations that parents and citizens have about our public schools. The things that families worry about? School safety, shrinking budgets, student achievement and the accessibility of programs.

These are the issues that unite our students and families in our public schools and the kinds of problems that they want addressed. And these are the issues that I really want to work on with other policymakers who, regardless of political affiliation, care about similar things.

But the school board environments that I and so many of my colleagues from around the country work in make it seem like parents are more concerned with cultural and curriculum issues. So where is this coming from?

Recent polling of Republicans and Democrats revealed that a supermajority across both groups — approximately 76 percent — believe that their child’s school does a good job keeping them informed about the curriculum, including controversial topics. An incredible 86 percent agree that learning about the history of racism prepares children for a better future.

It’s surprising to read these results about how parents and students really feel when aggressive steps are being taken around the country to stop the teaching and discussion of race, culture and gender in public schools. Since 2021, school districts in 26 states have banned or opened investigations into more than 1,100 books dealing with those topics. Arizona has tried multiple times to pass statewide bans on ethnic studies and recently passed House Bill 2495, which severely restricts what students can be taught about sexuality and gender identity.

When I first read the results of that recent polling, I was skeptical. It’s hard to get that level of agreement on any issue, let alone on topics that we’ve been told are deeply dividing our nation’s communities. But the findings offer proof that families across the country understand why our public schools should provide an honest, accurate education to students, including exposure to diverse cultures, languages, perspectives and experiences.

Related: TEACHER VOICE: How the sad shadow of book banning shuts down conversations and lacerates librarians

Students in my district’s schools in suburban Arizona are beautifully diverse. Forty-nine percent identify as white, 36 percent as Hispanic/Latino, 4 percent as Black and 6 percent as Native American. To be a student in our schools means studying alongside other students from a wide range of ethnic and racial backgrounds, as well as those from wealthy, poor, immigrant and mixed-race families.

The diversity that my district’s students experience is likely the same they will encounter in their working and social lives after they graduate. Whether they settle in New York City, Tulsa or Phoenix, our students will be well prepared to live and work together with others who do not look like them.

This exposure to diversity of all kinds is important; similarly, students must learn to think critically about our nation’s complicated past and discuss it with educators and their peers so they can learn important lessons for the future. Discussing controversial issues in the classroom is how students learn how to handle conflict and work together peacefully and respectfully.

Research over several decades has shown clear benefits from such discussions for the development of critical thinking and decision-making abilities, and parents across the political spectrum clearly agree. Yet in 2021 alone, legislators in 35 states wrote 137 separate bills attempting to restrict teaching on race, gender, history and politics.

An incredible 86 percent of Democrats and Republicans agree that learning about the history of racism prepares children for a better future.

These bans were spearheaded by a small but powerful group of special interests who are not in alignment with the people they claim to represent. The same forces pushing these educational gag orders are also trying to dismantle public education entirely, using tactics like the “universal school voucher bill” in Arizona, which allows children to use state tax money to pay for private school tuition and other costs.

Parents, educators and district leaders must stay vigilant and take steps locally and at the state level to make sure that their elected officials understand the reasons that they support honest, accurate and fully funded public education. Book bans and educational gag orders are more easily passed when it’s assumed that few people are watching.

It’s time for the majority of parents, who want their children to develop critical thinking skills and the ability to consider different points of view, to give voice to their beliefs — and it’s time for elected officials to take note and listen to their constituents. As an elected official who is also a Black woman, I know that topics like how racism impacts our nation can be difficult to discuss publicly. Yet, it’s paramount for our public schools to lean into that discomfort.

In order for our students to learn, grow and succeed in their future personal and professional lives, we must encourage our educators to not shy away from teaching controversial topics.

Sherri Jones has been a leader in statewide efforts helping Arizona’s children, educators and families for 20 years. She is vice president of the Florence Unified School Board in Florence, Arizona, and a member of the HEAL Together initiative.

This story about controversial topics and public schools 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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MESA, Ariz. — A teacher in training darted among students, tallying how many needed his help with a history unit on Islam. A veteran math teacher hovered near a cluster of desks, coaching some 50 freshmen on a geometry assignment. A science teacher checked students’ homework, while an English teacher spoke loudly into a microphone at the front of the classroom, giving instruction, to keep students on track.

One hundred thirty-five students, four teachers, one giant classroom: This is what ninth grade looks like at Westwood High School, in Mesa, Arizona’s largest school system. There, an innovative teaching model has taken hold, and is spreading to other schools in the district and beyond.

Five years ago, faced with high teacher turnover and declining student enrollment, Westwood’s leaders decided to try something different. Working with professors at Arizona State University’s teachers college, they piloted a classroom model known as team teaching. It allows teachers to voluntarily dissolve the walls that separate their classes across physical or grade divides.

The teachers share large groups of students — sometimes 100 or more — and rotate between big group instruction, one-on-one interventions, small study groups or whatever the teachers as a team agree is a priority that day. What looks at times like chaos is in fact part of a carefully orchestrated plan: Each morning, the Westwood teams meet for two hours to hash out a personalized program for every student on their shared roster, dictating the lessons, skills and assignments the team will focus on that day.

By giving teachers more opportunity to collaborate and greater control over how and what they teach, Mesa’s administrators hoped to fill staffing gaps and boost teacher morale and retention. Initial research suggests the gamble could pay off. This year, the district expanded the concept to a third of its 82 schools. (Westwood uses the model for all freshmen classes and is expanding it to the upper grades soon.) The team-teaching strategy is also drawing interest from school leaders across the U.S., who are eager for new approaches at a time when the effects of the pandemic have dampened teacher morale and worsened staff shortages.

“The pandemic taught us two things: One is people want flexibility, and the other is people don’t want to be isolated,” said Carole Basile, dean of ASU’s teachers college, who helped design the teaching model. “The education profession is both of those. It is inflexible, and it is isolating.”

Team teaching, she said, turns these ideas on their head.

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ASU and surrounding school districts started investigating team teaching about six years ago. Enrollment at teacher preparation programs around the country was plummeting, as more young people sought out careers that offered better pay, more flexibility and less stress.

Team teaching, a concept first introduced in schools in the 1960s, appealed to the ASU researchers because they felt its unusual staffing structure could help revitalize teachers. And it resonated with school district leaders, who’d come to believe the model of one teacher lecturing at the front of a classroom to many kids wasn’t working.

“Teachers are doing fantastic things, but it’s very rare a teacher walks into another room to see what’s happening,” said Andi Fourlis, superintendent of Mesa Public Schools, one of 10 Arizona districts that have adopted the model. “Our profession is so slow to advance because we are working in isolation.”

Fourlis and others also see team teaching as a way to set their schools apart as a new universal voucher program in Arizona goes into effect, potentially drawing more families and teachers away to private schools. And proponents of the classroom model say it empowers educators at a time when Republicans in Arizona and other states are targeting schools in a growing culture war, passing legislation to restrict what teachers can say about topics such as gender identity and race.

Peggy Beesley, a math teacher now in her fifth year with Westwood’s team, recalled feeling that parents and politicians gave little consideration to her health and safety as they debated school closures. “It’s almost like we have to give up our humanity to become a teacher,” she said. The team, however, made it easier to tune out what was happening outside classroom walls. And her teammates offer built-in, daily training on new ways to teach.

“I’m, what, 16 or 17 years in and I’m still struggling,” Beesley said. “Without my team, I would have quit — long ago. My teammates make me better.”

Of course, revamping teaching approaches can’t fix some of the biggest frustrations many teachers have about their profession, such as low pay. But early results from Mesa show team teaching may be helping to reverse low morale. In a survey of hundreds of the district’s teachers last year, researchers from Johns Hopkins University found that those who worked on teams reported greater satisfaction with their job, more frequent collaborations with colleagues and more positive interactions with students. Data on the impact on teacher vacancies, however, remains limited.

School districts that have adopted the model are meanwhile beginning to collect data on its impact on students. A district in southeastern Arizona randomly assigned children to classrooms with the team-teaching model, to test whether it improves student performance. Early data from Westwood show on-time course completion — a strong predictor of whether freshmen will graduate — improved after the high school started using the team approach for all ninth graders. ASU has found that students in team-based classrooms have better attendance, earn more credits toward graduation and post higher GPAs.

The model is not for everyone. Beesley has tried to recruit other math teachers to volunteer for a team, but many tell her they prefer to work alone. Team teaching can also be a scheduling nightmare, especially at schools like Westwood where only some staff work in teams, and principals have to balance their time and needs with those of other teachers. School leaders in Mesa stress they would never force teachers to participate on a team; the district only plans to expand the model to half of its schools.

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On a recent morning at Westwood High, the four teachers and 135 freshmen on the team settled into a boisterous routine.

They ignored the Halloween music that blared from the school speakers, marking a new period for older students at the school. As their peers in the higher grades shuffled to another 50-minute class, the freshmen continued into a second hour of their work. Most students busied themselves with the day’s assignments, alone or in pairs, while others waited for a specific teacher’s help.

The team regularly welcomes other educators into the classroom, for bilingual or special education services and other one-on-one support. But substitute teachers are rare, since teachers can plan their schedules to accommodate their teammates’ absences.

Another benefit of teams, teachers say, is that they can help each other improve their instruction. During the planning session earlier that morning, English teacher Jeff Hall shared a critique with science teacher Kelsey Meeks: Her recent lecture, on something she called “the central dogma of biology,” had befuddled him and their other teammates.

“If the science is too confusing for me, can you imagine the frustration you feel as kids?” Hall said. “She would never know that on her own.”

Hall, who moonlights as an improv comic, had quit teaching right before Covid. He worked odd jobs during his time out of the classroom and realized what those jobs offered that teaching didn’t: a chance to work alongside other adults and collaborate. The need for a steadier paycheck convinced Hall to return to the classroom last year, but he only applied for positions to teach on a team.

“Why don’t we do this for every teacher?” Hall said. “Why was I — a student teacher with zero experience teaching English — handed the keys to an entire class of kids on day one? All alone? That doesn’t work for anyone.”

At nearby Whittier Elementary School, the team teaching model looks somewhat different.

In some cases, teams span grade levels. A group of more than 100 fourth and fifth graders, led by a team of seven educators, was spread out across two classrooms one recent weekday. Teacher Karly LaOrange sat in a circle with three English learners who were struggling with phonics, while a student teacher paged through the same workbook as LaOrange with a larger group of readers, already on grade level. A third instructor nudged another set of kids toward the proper pronunciation of difficult words in another book, “All about Manatees.” Across the hall, another group of students worked with a second set of teachers.

Principal Andrea Lang Sims said she likes the model because she doesn’t have to worry much about new teachers; they can learn from the mentors on their teams. The team approach also allows teachers to pool their skills and work more effectively with students and their parents, she said. A quarter of the school’s families don’t speak English as their primary language, so Lang Sims tries to place a bilingual educator on each team. 

“Not every teacher’s good with parents on day one, or ever,” said Lang Sims. “Not every teacher can speak Spanish or Mandarin or Vietnamese. Not every teacher can do everything every day.”

Proponents of the ASU model acknowledge it doesn’t work perfectly in a system built around the assumption that every classroom has one teacher. The model presents thorny questions, for example, about how to evaluate four teachers on the performance of 135 students. And teachers on the Westwood team argue they receive too little training on the model.

Students, however, have noticed a difference.

Quinton Rawls attended a middle school with no teams and not enough teachers. Two weeks into eighth grade, his science teacher quit — and was replaced by a series of subs. “I got away with everything,” recalled the 14-year-old.

That’s not the case in ninth grade, said Rawls. He said he appreciates the extra attention that comes with being in a class with so many teachers at once.

“There’s four of them watching me all the time,” he said. “I think that’s a good thing. I’m not really wasting time.”

This story on team teaching was produced by The Hechinger Report as part of the ongoing series Tackling Teacher Shortages, a collaboration between Hechinger and Education Labs and journalists at The Associated Press, AL.com, The Christian Science Monitor, The Dallas Morning News in Texas, The Fresno Bee in California, The Seattle Times and The Post and Courier in Charleston, South Carolina. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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