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"content": "\u003cp>For two decades, New York City’s small high schools stood out as one of the nation’s most ambitious — and controversial — urban education reforms. Now, a \u003ca href=\"https://www.mdrc.org/work/publications/enduring-success\">long-term study\u003c/a> provides a clearer picture of their successes and disappointments.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the early 2000s, under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the city closed dozens of large high schools with high dropout rates in low-income neighborhoods and, with \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/once-sold-as-the-solution-small-high-schools-are-now-on-the-back-burner/\">$150 million\u003c/a> from the Gates Foundation, replaced them with smaller ones, often located in the same buildings. Admission to more than 120 of the most popular new small schools was determined by lottery, creating the kind of random assignment researchers prize. (That represented the vast majority of the city’s 140 new small schools.) MDRC, a nonprofit research organization, followed four cohorts of students from the classes of 2009 through 2012 for six years after high school. (Disclosure: The \u003ca href=\"https://www.mdrc.org/work/publications/enduring-success\">MDRC analysis\u003c/a> was funded by the Gates and Spencer foundations, which are among the many funders of The Hechinger Report.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The early gains were substantial. Two-thirds of students entered high school below grade level in reading or math. Yet 76 percent of students admitted to small schools graduated, compared with 68 percent of those who lost the lottery — an 8 percentage point increase. Because more students finished in four years, the schools were cheaper on a per-graduate basis, MDRC found, even though they cost more per student and required more administrators overall.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>College enrollment rose sharply as well. Fifty-three percent of small-school students enrolled in postsecondary education after high school, compared with 43 percent of the comparison group — a nearly 10 percentage point difference. Most attended a college within the City University of New York system.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Small schools enrolled roughly 100 students per grade, creating tighter communities where teachers and students were more likely to know one another. Rebecca Unterman, the MDRC researcher who led the study, said the relationships formed in these environments may help explain the graduation and college-going gains. Many schools also built advisory systems in which teachers met regularly with the same students to guide them through academic and emotional challenges and the college process.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The longer-term picture is more sobering.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Although more students enrolled in both four- and two-year colleges, small school alumni did not complete community college in greater numbers than the comparison group. After six years, about 10 percent of students had earned an associate degree, roughly the same share as students who did not attend the small schools. Researchers also found no differences in employment or earnings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There was one notable exception. Students who enrolled in four-year colleges were more likely to complete a bachelor’s degree if they had attended a small high school. Almost 15 percent of the small-school students earned a four-year degree within six years, compared with 12 percent of their peers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Joel Klein was the New York City schools chancellor from 2002 to 2011 during the overhaul. Klein said the data shows that the small school effort was worthwhile. He considers it one of his most important accomplishments, along with the expansion of charter schools. Closing large high schools and replacing them with new ones required significant political will, he said, when it sparked resistance from the teachers union. Teachers weren’t guaranteed jobs in the new smaller schools and had to apply again or find another school to hire them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>New York wasn’t the only city to try small schools. Baltimore and Oakland, California, among others, also used Gates Foundation money to experiment with the concept. The \u003ca href=\"https://docs.gatesfoundation.org/documents/year4evaluationairsri.pdf\">results\u003c/a> were not encouraging.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Klein argues other cities failed to replicate New York’s success because they simply divided large schools into smaller units without building new cultures. In New York, aspiring principals submitted detailed proposals, just like charter schools, and schools opened gradually, adding one grade at a time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There were unintended consequences in New York too. During the transition years between the closure of the old school and the slow ramp-up of the new small schools, seats were limited. Enrollments in the \u003ca href=\"https://www.centernyc.org/collateral-damage/\">remaining large schools\u003c/a> in the city rose. While some students enjoyed the intimacy of the new small schools, many more students suffered overcrowding.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Whether because of political resistance, replication challenges or shifting philanthropic priorities, the small-school movement eventually sputtered out. By the 2010s, would-be reformers had shifted their attention toward evaluating teacher effectiveness and school turnaround strategies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today, with enrollment declining in many districts, school consolidation, not expansion, dominates the conversation. MDRC’s Unterman said some districts are now exploring whether elements of the small school model — advisory systems or “schools within schools” — can be recreated inside larger campuses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By all accounts, New York City’s small schools were a vast improvement over the foundering schools they replaced. A majority remain in operation, a testament to their staying power. However, the evidence they leave behind also underscores a hard truth. Improving high school can move important milestones, like getting more students to go to college. Altering students’ economic trajectories may require more radical change.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about small high schools was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Jill Barshay’s \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The longer-term picture is more sobering.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Although more students enrolled in both four- and two-year colleges, small school alumni did not complete community college in greater numbers than the comparison group. After six years, about 10 percent of students had earned an associate degree, roughly the same share as students who did not attend the small schools. Researchers also found no differences in employment or earnings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There was one notable exception. Students who enrolled in four-year colleges were more likely to complete a bachelor’s degree if they had attended a small high school. Almost 15 percent of the small-school students earned a four-year degree within six years, compared with 12 percent of their peers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Joel Klein was the New York City schools chancellor from 2002 to 2011 during the overhaul. Klein said the data shows that the small school effort was worthwhile. He considers it one of his most important accomplishments, along with the expansion of charter schools. Closing large high schools and replacing them with new ones required significant political will, he said, when it sparked resistance from the teachers union. Teachers weren’t guaranteed jobs in the new smaller schools and had to apply again or find another school to hire them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>New York wasn’t the only city to try small schools. Baltimore and Oakland, California, among others, also used Gates Foundation money to experiment with the concept. The \u003ca href=\"https://docs.gatesfoundation.org/documents/year4evaluationairsri.pdf\">results\u003c/a> were not encouraging.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Klein argues other cities failed to replicate New York’s success because they simply divided large schools into smaller units without building new cultures. In New York, aspiring principals submitted detailed proposals, just like charter schools, and schools opened gradually, adding one grade at a time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There were unintended consequences in New York too. During the transition years between the closure of the old school and the slow ramp-up of the new small schools, seats were limited. Enrollments in the \u003ca href=\"https://www.centernyc.org/collateral-damage/\">remaining large schools\u003c/a> in the city rose. While some students enjoyed the intimacy of the new small schools, many more students suffered overcrowding.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Whether because of political resistance, replication challenges or shifting philanthropic priorities, the small-school movement eventually sputtered out. By the 2010s, would-be reformers had shifted their attention toward evaluating teacher effectiveness and school turnaround strategies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Today, with enrollment declining in many districts, school consolidation, not expansion, dominates the conversation. MDRC’s Unterman said some districts are now exploring whether elements of the small school model — advisory systems or “schools within schools” — can be recreated inside larger campuses.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By all accounts, New York City’s small schools were a vast improvement over the foundering schools they replaced. A majority remain in operation, a testament to their staying power. However, the evidence they leave behind also underscores a hard truth. Improving high school can move important milestones, like getting more students to go to college. Altering students’ economic trajectories may require more radical change.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about small high schools was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Jill Barshay’s \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In recent years, public interest in school boards has dropped, and what we do hear about usually has to do with a meeting gone rogue. And voter turnout for school board elections remains really low at an average of about 10 percent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scott R. Levy, a lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, argues that this is an issue worth paying attention to because restoring power to school boards would hold the answer to public education reform and create true positive change.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Levy spent the first 20 years of his professional career as an investment banker, but he left his job on Wall Street after volunteering at his kids’ public school. That’s where he fell in love with the world of school governance. In 2015 he won his first elected seat on a school board, a seat that he held for the next 10 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In this episode we discuss his new book, “\u003ca href=\"https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262552721/why-school-boards-matter/\">Why School Boards Matter: Reclaiming The Heart of American Education and Democracy.\u003c/a>”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC5042213997\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marlena Jackson-Retondo:\u003c/strong> So just to get us launched into the topic, can you give me a brief and basic explanation of the configuration and function of a school board?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Levy:\u003c/strong> Sure. So think of the board as a governance body. The board is not supposed to be running the schools day to day. Anytime you see a board member as a person running the school day to day, that’s a problem. They’re there to oversee budget allocation and to think about policy and think about strategic priorities and to ultimately choose a superintendent and then manage the superintendent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I think it’s safe to say that there are very few people that are doing school board service for the money because it really is a labor of love. Board members come from all walks of life. There’s really no requirements per se, other than you have to be 18 years old in most places. You have to be a citizen and be able to vote and you have to certainly have residency in that community. So there are some restrictions, but otherwise it’s open to anyone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You don’t need to have a student in the public schools. It could be that their kids attend private school. There aren’t rules around that. And so it’s really meant to be little “d” democracy. It’s whoever the public believes should be in that seat. In a school board, you really don’t have power over who’s serving with you. It’s decided by the public as it should be through the voting process.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marlena Jackson-Retondo: \u003c/strong>You state in the introduction of your book that school boards are the vital organ for education decision making. Why do you think that there seems to be this broad lack of awareness or misunderstanding about how a school board might serve the public?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Levy: \u003c/strong>Well, I’ll tell you a story about when I first won my local election and became a school board member. I was walking down the street in my town and I got stopped by somebody that I knew. And they came up to me and they said, “Oh, congratulations, Scott. I heard you won the school board race. And that’s great because I’m going to be watching you on the web because, you know, the meetings are streamed so that any citizen can watch the meetings.” And I was really excited. I’m like, “wow, somebody actually watches these meetings.” And then he went on to say, yeah, yeah. I’ve been having trouble falling asleep. And so it’s super helpful to watch these meetings, because they’re really boring.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And many board meetings are somewhat routine. And that may be why there’s not a lot of attention on it. You’re going through budget line items, and it’s very technical. But I think, certainly, things changed in 2020 when COVID hit. And there were a lot of extremely important decisions that had to be made, and they had to be made very quickly. And they were decisions that there was a lot of attention over. And so the spotlight started to shine on school board rooms where a lot of these debates were happening. And then ever since 2020, there have been this constant stream of issues that have been adjudicated in boardrooms that have gotten a lot of attention.\u003cem> \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So I think now people have more awareness, but having said that, people are, I think, generally focused on the clips that we may see on social media that sometimes have millions of hits where there’s arguments and they’re talking about really contentious cultural issues that divide us. But at the end of the day, if you walk into most school board meetings, whether it’s policy, budget. High level curriculum decisions, you’re focusing on various programs and initiatives. That’s what most of the discussion will be about.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marlena Jackson-Retondo:\u003c/strong> That’s the gist that I get. I’ve seen those viral moments online, but when I have clicked into a live stream of a school board meeting, it is probably what most might say is a mundane meeting of a couple folks in the room trying to make decisions. Maybe a couple people show up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s only recent, and when I say recent, recent in American history that school boards have lost some of their power, sometimes due to school reform policy. Can you explain some of that historical significance of this loss of power and where the power that school boards used to hold has now been delegated to?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Levy:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. It’s so interesting when you look back to early American history, school boards existed and they did absolutely everything. The states would ultimately have power to be responsible for public education, but they delegated authority to school boards to not only govern the schools, but even do the administration work because back in early days there was not even a superintendency.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And now in the days that we’ve seen of the 21st century, to your point, there’s been an incredible shift of power to states, mostly, and to some extent, the federal government. And there’s some really good and legitimate reasons for this.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Think about Brown versus Board of Education, where from a civil rights perspective, the federal judiciary decided to step in and make things right because it wasn’t happening correctly at the local level and there was inequity. Think about the way schools are funded, which historically was property taxes, where in many states there were communities that just simply could not fund the public schools to any sort of a basic level. So in many respects, there were a series of lawsuits that came about that really, you know, demanded that the state step in and be that equilibrating mechanism to fund schools to a level where students are getting a very appropriate public education, regardless of where they live. And so there are a lot of good reasons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then there are also probably some more sinister reasons. Education is a very large component of our economy. People care deeply about education. It affects a lot of families. And so certainly governors, legislators at the state level and at the federal level, look at that and say, ooh, maybe I should also be charged with having a role in education. So a lot the power has shifted to state and federal players. So I think we all need to step back and think about the fact of whether or not we agree with the particular approach any state is taking. Is that the right mechanism to have all that happen at the state level?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marlena Jackson-Retondo: \u003c/strong>I also just wanted to ask you very quickly about the power that school boards hold after the dismantling of the Department of Education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Levy: \u003c/strong>I think there’s been a general sense that when certainly the current administration, the Trump administration, they were campaigning, they’re campaigning on pushing a lot of power back to states and localities, which in many respects would be commensurate with my thesis of how local districts should have a degree of autonomy. And boards are really important and can do a lot of good in trying to steer American education in a positive direction.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But I think what we’ve certainly seen over the last bunch of months is a continuation of the fact that the federal government is quite involved. So regardless of what we hear about the Department of Education shrinking or potentially being abolished, we’ve seen examples of where the federal government has certainly exerted power in places that they see something they don’t like. And I think that’s what we’ve seen in many administrations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marlena Jackson-Retondo:\u003c/strong> I wanted to ask about education reform policy and some of the tensions that we see between these big reforms that might happen, one that just always sticks in my mind as common core. What would you say to someone, and I’m talking about voters, who believe that reform policy is the way forward and have kind of lost faith in the school board as an institution.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Levy: \u003c/strong>The first thing I would say is that school boards are far from perfect. And there are many boards that certainly make decisions that many of us may look at and say are flawed. And I think there’s no perfect system to govern schools. Having said all that, I think in my mind, school boards are the place where governance can happen in a way that involves the community. And also provides a deep understanding of the district itself, because school boards are part of the districts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the end of the day, districts are very different in this country and they don’t have the same problems. You may have a district that has enrollment that’s dramatically increasing. You may have a district next door that has declining enrollment. That means incredibly different things in terms of how to manage a budget, how to manage operations, how to manage personnel. You could have a district in the same county that is in the 99th percentile in academic outcomes but has a stress and anxiety issue in their high school. And then the district next door might be below proficiency in math and reading. And you need to think about solutions that are very different in those two schools. And it’s extremely hard, I think, to come up with good one-size-fits-all policies that are gonna solve all our problems. And if you do, inevitably, you’re going to hit a roadblock.\u003cem> \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When the local communities aren’t vested in these programs, in these policies, and we see time and time again, Common Core being an example where it backfires. Because I think it’s so important to have people on the ground that are going to be affected be part of the process to come up with, ultimately, the solutions. And so that’s why I keep coming back to the fact that with all of its flaws, school boards are places that I think we should invest in. So if we started to focus our reform attention there, I actually think we could do a lot of good. And the funny thing is that reformers have looked at every place in the universe except for school boards.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marlena Jackson-Retondo: \u003c/strong>You brought up something that kind of reminded me of a huge issue that I hear from, and I think a lot of people have heard from educators when it comes to education reform policy is that the experts who are the teachers in the classroom are not being consulted for these massive changes, or they are not been consulted in the ways that, you know, I think most of them would feel is appropriate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Can you talk a little bit about the partnership that teachers and educators might have with school boards on the granular level where teachers don’t have to remain in this frustrated state of not seeing any change or not seeing any trust in their expertise or professionalism.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Levy:\u003c/strong> Yes. And I will start by saying that my mom was a kindergarten teacher in public school for over 30 years and I talked to her a lot about what her experience was like when I first became a school board member and ever since then I’ve looked at a lot of the research on teacher attrition and teacher satisfaction which should trouble all of us because the numbers are as we know not what they should be for a profession that’s so noble and and so important. And I think that one of the things that always comes out of studies that are done is the lack of autonomy that teachers feel, to your point, that their expertise isn’t valued, that they don’t have a say over what they’re doing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And one of things that I talk about in my book is initiative fatigue. And it’s something that I always knew about because corporations have initiative fatigue, but when I got to education and my mom told me about this, I realized it was at a different level. And by the time you get to a classroom, if you think about all of the people that throw initiatives at schools, you have federal initiatives, you have state legislative initiatives, you have governors that come in with initiatives, every state has of course a regulatory body, a state school board in New York State and California, we have the regions, and they have initiatives. Then you have board members and the board as a whole that have initiatives, you have administrators at the centralized level, and then of course you have building administrators. And so that’s true. It’s very suffocating.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so one of the things I talk about is how, again, if we try to be mindful of getting a better balance between state, federal, and local control, where the local governance entity does have more say over initiative flow, and then you had boards that were thoughtful about having a reasonable number of initiatives at any one time, I think naturally what’s gonna happen is that teachers have a better voice. Because a good board knows that board members are not professional educators and boards have to listen to administrators and teachers in their district. When decisions are made up above, it’s incredibly hard. You might have a committee of a teacher from here and a teacher from there, but we know that it’s not a grassroots effort when a decision’s made at a state or even a national level.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marlena Jackson-Retondo: \u003c/strong>Can you explain what it takes to establish and maintain that relationship between local teachers and the school board? What does that look like?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Levy: \u003c/strong>With teachers in particular, if you think about it, boards often have committees, and committees might have representation of teachers and of administrators from different buildings. That’s one way that there could be a really good dialog. There’s often groups like, for instance, the PTA, where you’ll have teachers, and you’ll have parents together, and board members can be a liaison to that group or present, and update on what’s going on at the district level.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In many districts, there’s a tradition of board members visiting schools once a year. So you get to maybe go into a classroom and see what’s going on. You would never do that every day, but to do that, to get a sense and a flavor for what’s happening in classrooms, that’s an amazing way to do it as well. Some districts have maybe the board president address teachers once a year. And that’s a really interesting and helpful way, I think also to build a relationship. So there are many ways and it’s important. It’s super important.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marlena Jackson-Retondo: \u003c/strong>So we just talked about partnership between educators and school boards, and you do say in your book that school boards are a mechanism for parent influence. Can you explain that mechanism, what that might look like coming from a parent who has maybe never voted in a local election, seeing an issue with their school and then becoming involved? What does that pathway look like?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Levy:\u003c/strong> So one of the things that I did, which I think was the most fun when I was researching for the book was I went back into the archives and I did ask the question, it seems like there are so many scenes around the country of very angry parents really yelling and screaming at school boards, has it always been this way or is this something new? And there’s no doubt what I found when you look back is that there have always been points in history where you’ve seen parent anger come out. And I think there’s a very natural question that underlies all of these battles, which is where is the line between parent rights and government control? And I do think that sometimes we’re very quick to either dismiss or to re-emphasize some parent point that is being espoused. But all of us, if we sat in the room and we polled 10 of us, let’s say, and we said, okay, where is that line? We might delineate that line at a slightly different point.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So if you go back to the early 1900s, and I do this in my book, and it’s quite extraordinary, you could see the same exact language being used by parents at school board meetings saying, you can’t vaccinate my kids. If you vaccinate, my kids, you’re violating my rights and their rights, and you’re evaluating my constitutional rights. And they were doing that over the smallpox vaccine. And during COVID, we saw the same thing around the COVID vaccine. And that’s just one example. And so throughout American history, we’ve had this tension. So I think it’s very natural.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I think the other bit of tension is indoctrination versus education. Where is that line? And so I think we just have to have a little bit of grace in a way. And I think, the best we could do is say that sometimes people are going to be disagreeing on these subjects. And how do we want to resolve them? I think there’s no better way than with full transparency. In your local community. I think the other piece of your question, though, is if I’m a parent and I’m angry about something, what do I do? Start out, if it’s an issue in a classroom, with the teacher. Go to the teacher, have a conversation, and if that doesn’t work and you’re not satisfied, of course you have the right to talk to the principal or talk to the assistant principal. And if you’re still very unsatisfied, then you can bring it up, but you really don’t want to jump to the school board over the backs of many teachers, administrators that then will not have a chance to solve that problem with you first. If it’s an issue about, let’s say policy or budget allocation that clearly falls in the realm of the board, then of course, um, you have every right to go to the board, but you can also call a board member. If you see a board member at a soccer match or in church, you can certainly have discussions about things that are on your mind and air them, and then of course you have that right to be part of the public comment period too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And the other thing that I would also add which is I think something that you always have to think about when you’re a school board member is If somebody comes to public comment and they express concern about a particular issue You always want to listen. It’s incredibly important to listen and to decide, um, you know whether you understand that viewpoint whether you agree with that viewpoint or not, but you don’t know for sure whether or not that viewpoint is 1% of your community or whether it represents 65% of your community. And I just believe that you have to be in touch with your community in lots of different ways and just have lots of data points so that you do get a sense of what the sentiment is like out there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marlena Jackson-Retondo: \u003c/strong>Also, speaking of parent influence, we’ve seen a lot of what I think would have been referred to as fringe movements of charter schools and homeschooling. We’re seeing that become a lot more mainstream, not just to talk about, but to practice. And obviously, the system of charter schools is becoming heavily influenced by school systems and there is a relationship between school boards. Charter schools, and also homeschooling.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So can you kind of explain some of the influence or partnership that school boards have on those types of systems, and what people and voters can pay attention to when it comes to those educational practices?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Levy:\u003c/strong> Particularly with charter schools, the rules are different depending on what state you’re in. And sometimes school boards have a very influential role in whether or not a charter school can exist. And in other cases, the school board may have absolutely no power and no say. And really what happens is the charter decision is made more centrally at the state level by maybe the state board or one of the state entities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I also think that there are a lot of interesting implications when you think about this long term. And I’ll give you one case study that happened in New York that I think could be an interesting microcosm of the situation that can happen in other parts of the country if you fast forward 10, 20 years from now and school choice and vouchers become more commonplace. And it’s actually a district that I attended when I was a kid and now is governed by board, the majority of whom send their kids to private school and it’s created an incredibly complex situation where there is a tremendous rift and rift is an understatement between the public school community and the private school community around the way the public district is being managed. On the one hand these are people that pay taxes and they have every right to, you know, run for school board and they’re winning the elections fair and square. On the other hand, you have individuals that are making decisions about a public school system, where many in the public school community argue are not in the best interest of public school students. And so there’s just incredible amounts of tension. And so you can see this being something that could happen in many communities down the road, if we have many, many more students that are not in the public system, and you might have the preponderance of voters that are in the not public system.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marlena Jackson-Retondo: \u003c/strong>I wanted to end on something that maybe is a little bit uplifting and positive and what you hope to see. Who should care about school boards or how should they care?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Levy:\u003c/strong> So to end on a positive note, I think that one thing that I would think that all listeners may agree with is that when we look at our national politics, regardless of what side you’re on, I think it is clear that we have more polarization than we’ve ever had in recent history. And I do believe that when we look at local school districts, the reason that everybody should care is because they are a mechanism to potentially reduce polarization.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On the one hand, I know we see these scenes of people fighting in boardrooms here, like, how could they reduce polarization? It looks like boardrooms are incredibly polarized. But I would contend that they are the one place where people that have differences of opinion actually come together in person. And because everything is transparent and because local community members have a voice at the microphone, people can actually express their view. And if that view is diametrically different, others have to listen. And there is something incredibly American about that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And I think that there’s this healing process in the fact that we can unify around what happens in a school board room, which is that people of all walks of life that have very different political beliefs can come express their view and have to be listened to. And maybe, just maybe we can realize that sometimes people with very opposing views from a policy perspective might be both coming from a good place, it’s just different places.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marlena Jackson-Retondo:\u003c/strong> This does seem like a giant lesson in civics. I really appreciate your time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Levy: \u003c/strong>Oh, it’s my pleasure being with you.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In recent years, public interest in school boards has dropped, and what we do hear about usually has to do with a meeting gone rogue. And voter turnout for school board elections remains really low at an average of about 10 percent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scott R. Levy, a lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, argues that this is an issue worth paying attention to because restoring power to school boards would hold the answer to public education reform and create true positive change.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Levy spent the first 20 years of his professional career as an investment banker, but he left his job on Wall Street after volunteering at his kids’ public school. That’s where he fell in love with the world of school governance. In 2015 he won his first elected seat on a school board, a seat that he held for the next 10 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In this episode we discuss his new book, “\u003ca href=\"https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262552721/why-school-boards-matter/\">Why School Boards Matter: Reclaiming The Heart of American Education and Democracy.\u003c/a>”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC5042213997\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marlena Jackson-Retondo:\u003c/strong> So just to get us launched into the topic, can you give me a brief and basic explanation of the configuration and function of a school board?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Levy:\u003c/strong> Sure. So think of the board as a governance body. The board is not supposed to be running the schools day to day. Anytime you see a board member as a person running the school day to day, that’s a problem. They’re there to oversee budget allocation and to think about policy and think about strategic priorities and to ultimately choose a superintendent and then manage the superintendent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I think it’s safe to say that there are very few people that are doing school board service for the money because it really is a labor of love. Board members come from all walks of life. There’s really no requirements per se, other than you have to be 18 years old in most places. You have to be a citizen and be able to vote and you have to certainly have residency in that community. So there are some restrictions, but otherwise it’s open to anyone.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You don’t need to have a student in the public schools. It could be that their kids attend private school. There aren’t rules around that. And so it’s really meant to be little “d” democracy. It’s whoever the public believes should be in that seat. In a school board, you really don’t have power over who’s serving with you. It’s decided by the public as it should be through the voting process.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marlena Jackson-Retondo: \u003c/strong>You state in the introduction of your book that school boards are the vital organ for education decision making. Why do you think that there seems to be this broad lack of awareness or misunderstanding about how a school board might serve the public?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Levy: \u003c/strong>Well, I’ll tell you a story about when I first won my local election and became a school board member. I was walking down the street in my town and I got stopped by somebody that I knew. And they came up to me and they said, “Oh, congratulations, Scott. I heard you won the school board race. And that’s great because I’m going to be watching you on the web because, you know, the meetings are streamed so that any citizen can watch the meetings.” And I was really excited. I’m like, “wow, somebody actually watches these meetings.” And then he went on to say, yeah, yeah. I’ve been having trouble falling asleep. And so it’s super helpful to watch these meetings, because they’re really boring.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And many board meetings are somewhat routine. And that may be why there’s not a lot of attention on it. You’re going through budget line items, and it’s very technical. But I think, certainly, things changed in 2020 when COVID hit. And there were a lot of extremely important decisions that had to be made, and they had to be made very quickly. And they were decisions that there was a lot of attention over. And so the spotlight started to shine on school board rooms where a lot of these debates were happening. And then ever since 2020, there have been this constant stream of issues that have been adjudicated in boardrooms that have gotten a lot of attention.\u003cem> \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So I think now people have more awareness, but having said that, people are, I think, generally focused on the clips that we may see on social media that sometimes have millions of hits where there’s arguments and they’re talking about really contentious cultural issues that divide us. But at the end of the day, if you walk into most school board meetings, whether it’s policy, budget. High level curriculum decisions, you’re focusing on various programs and initiatives. That’s what most of the discussion will be about.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marlena Jackson-Retondo:\u003c/strong> That’s the gist that I get. I’ve seen those viral moments online, but when I have clicked into a live stream of a school board meeting, it is probably what most might say is a mundane meeting of a couple folks in the room trying to make decisions. Maybe a couple people show up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s only recent, and when I say recent, recent in American history that school boards have lost some of their power, sometimes due to school reform policy. Can you explain some of that historical significance of this loss of power and where the power that school boards used to hold has now been delegated to?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Levy:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. It’s so interesting when you look back to early American history, school boards existed and they did absolutely everything. The states would ultimately have power to be responsible for public education, but they delegated authority to school boards to not only govern the schools, but even do the administration work because back in early days there was not even a superintendency.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And now in the days that we’ve seen of the 21st century, to your point, there’s been an incredible shift of power to states, mostly, and to some extent, the federal government. And there’s some really good and legitimate reasons for this.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Think about Brown versus Board of Education, where from a civil rights perspective, the federal judiciary decided to step in and make things right because it wasn’t happening correctly at the local level and there was inequity. Think about the way schools are funded, which historically was property taxes, where in many states there were communities that just simply could not fund the public schools to any sort of a basic level. So in many respects, there were a series of lawsuits that came about that really, you know, demanded that the state step in and be that equilibrating mechanism to fund schools to a level where students are getting a very appropriate public education, regardless of where they live. And so there are a lot of good reasons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then there are also probably some more sinister reasons. Education is a very large component of our economy. People care deeply about education. It affects a lot of families. And so certainly governors, legislators at the state level and at the federal level, look at that and say, ooh, maybe I should also be charged with having a role in education. So a lot the power has shifted to state and federal players. So I think we all need to step back and think about the fact of whether or not we agree with the particular approach any state is taking. Is that the right mechanism to have all that happen at the state level?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marlena Jackson-Retondo: \u003c/strong>I also just wanted to ask you very quickly about the power that school boards hold after the dismantling of the Department of Education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Levy: \u003c/strong>I think there’s been a general sense that when certainly the current administration, the Trump administration, they were campaigning, they’re campaigning on pushing a lot of power back to states and localities, which in many respects would be commensurate with my thesis of how local districts should have a degree of autonomy. And boards are really important and can do a lot of good in trying to steer American education in a positive direction.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But I think what we’ve certainly seen over the last bunch of months is a continuation of the fact that the federal government is quite involved. So regardless of what we hear about the Department of Education shrinking or potentially being abolished, we’ve seen examples of where the federal government has certainly exerted power in places that they see something they don’t like. And I think that’s what we’ve seen in many administrations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marlena Jackson-Retondo:\u003c/strong> I wanted to ask about education reform policy and some of the tensions that we see between these big reforms that might happen, one that just always sticks in my mind as common core. What would you say to someone, and I’m talking about voters, who believe that reform policy is the way forward and have kind of lost faith in the school board as an institution.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Levy: \u003c/strong>The first thing I would say is that school boards are far from perfect. And there are many boards that certainly make decisions that many of us may look at and say are flawed. And I think there’s no perfect system to govern schools. Having said all that, I think in my mind, school boards are the place where governance can happen in a way that involves the community. And also provides a deep understanding of the district itself, because school boards are part of the districts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the end of the day, districts are very different in this country and they don’t have the same problems. You may have a district that has enrollment that’s dramatically increasing. You may have a district next door that has declining enrollment. That means incredibly different things in terms of how to manage a budget, how to manage operations, how to manage personnel. You could have a district in the same county that is in the 99th percentile in academic outcomes but has a stress and anxiety issue in their high school. And then the district next door might be below proficiency in math and reading. And you need to think about solutions that are very different in those two schools. And it’s extremely hard, I think, to come up with good one-size-fits-all policies that are gonna solve all our problems. And if you do, inevitably, you’re going to hit a roadblock.\u003cem> \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When the local communities aren’t vested in these programs, in these policies, and we see time and time again, Common Core being an example where it backfires. Because I think it’s so important to have people on the ground that are going to be affected be part of the process to come up with, ultimately, the solutions. And so that’s why I keep coming back to the fact that with all of its flaws, school boards are places that I think we should invest in. So if we started to focus our reform attention there, I actually think we could do a lot of good. And the funny thing is that reformers have looked at every place in the universe except for school boards.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marlena Jackson-Retondo: \u003c/strong>You brought up something that kind of reminded me of a huge issue that I hear from, and I think a lot of people have heard from educators when it comes to education reform policy is that the experts who are the teachers in the classroom are not being consulted for these massive changes, or they are not been consulted in the ways that, you know, I think most of them would feel is appropriate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Can you talk a little bit about the partnership that teachers and educators might have with school boards on the granular level where teachers don’t have to remain in this frustrated state of not seeing any change or not seeing any trust in their expertise or professionalism.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Levy:\u003c/strong> Yes. And I will start by saying that my mom was a kindergarten teacher in public school for over 30 years and I talked to her a lot about what her experience was like when I first became a school board member and ever since then I’ve looked at a lot of the research on teacher attrition and teacher satisfaction which should trouble all of us because the numbers are as we know not what they should be for a profession that’s so noble and and so important. And I think that one of the things that always comes out of studies that are done is the lack of autonomy that teachers feel, to your point, that their expertise isn’t valued, that they don’t have a say over what they’re doing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And one of things that I talk about in my book is initiative fatigue. And it’s something that I always knew about because corporations have initiative fatigue, but when I got to education and my mom told me about this, I realized it was at a different level. And by the time you get to a classroom, if you think about all of the people that throw initiatives at schools, you have federal initiatives, you have state legislative initiatives, you have governors that come in with initiatives, every state has of course a regulatory body, a state school board in New York State and California, we have the regions, and they have initiatives. Then you have board members and the board as a whole that have initiatives, you have administrators at the centralized level, and then of course you have building administrators. And so that’s true. It’s very suffocating.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so one of the things I talk about is how, again, if we try to be mindful of getting a better balance between state, federal, and local control, where the local governance entity does have more say over initiative flow, and then you had boards that were thoughtful about having a reasonable number of initiatives at any one time, I think naturally what’s gonna happen is that teachers have a better voice. Because a good board knows that board members are not professional educators and boards have to listen to administrators and teachers in their district. When decisions are made up above, it’s incredibly hard. You might have a committee of a teacher from here and a teacher from there, but we know that it’s not a grassroots effort when a decision’s made at a state or even a national level.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marlena Jackson-Retondo: \u003c/strong>Can you explain what it takes to establish and maintain that relationship between local teachers and the school board? What does that look like?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Levy: \u003c/strong>With teachers in particular, if you think about it, boards often have committees, and committees might have representation of teachers and of administrators from different buildings. That’s one way that there could be a really good dialog. There’s often groups like, for instance, the PTA, where you’ll have teachers, and you’ll have parents together, and board members can be a liaison to that group or present, and update on what’s going on at the district level.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In many districts, there’s a tradition of board members visiting schools once a year. So you get to maybe go into a classroom and see what’s going on. You would never do that every day, but to do that, to get a sense and a flavor for what’s happening in classrooms, that’s an amazing way to do it as well. Some districts have maybe the board president address teachers once a year. And that’s a really interesting and helpful way, I think also to build a relationship. So there are many ways and it’s important. It’s super important.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marlena Jackson-Retondo: \u003c/strong>So we just talked about partnership between educators and school boards, and you do say in your book that school boards are a mechanism for parent influence. Can you explain that mechanism, what that might look like coming from a parent who has maybe never voted in a local election, seeing an issue with their school and then becoming involved? What does that pathway look like?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Levy:\u003c/strong> So one of the things that I did, which I think was the most fun when I was researching for the book was I went back into the archives and I did ask the question, it seems like there are so many scenes around the country of very angry parents really yelling and screaming at school boards, has it always been this way or is this something new? And there’s no doubt what I found when you look back is that there have always been points in history where you’ve seen parent anger come out. And I think there’s a very natural question that underlies all of these battles, which is where is the line between parent rights and government control? And I do think that sometimes we’re very quick to either dismiss or to re-emphasize some parent point that is being espoused. But all of us, if we sat in the room and we polled 10 of us, let’s say, and we said, okay, where is that line? We might delineate that line at a slightly different point.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So if you go back to the early 1900s, and I do this in my book, and it’s quite extraordinary, you could see the same exact language being used by parents at school board meetings saying, you can’t vaccinate my kids. If you vaccinate, my kids, you’re violating my rights and their rights, and you’re evaluating my constitutional rights. And they were doing that over the smallpox vaccine. And during COVID, we saw the same thing around the COVID vaccine. And that’s just one example. And so throughout American history, we’ve had this tension. So I think it’s very natural.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I think the other bit of tension is indoctrination versus education. Where is that line? And so I think we just have to have a little bit of grace in a way. And I think, the best we could do is say that sometimes people are going to be disagreeing on these subjects. And how do we want to resolve them? I think there’s no better way than with full transparency. In your local community. I think the other piece of your question, though, is if I’m a parent and I’m angry about something, what do I do? Start out, if it’s an issue in a classroom, with the teacher. Go to the teacher, have a conversation, and if that doesn’t work and you’re not satisfied, of course you have the right to talk to the principal or talk to the assistant principal. And if you’re still very unsatisfied, then you can bring it up, but you really don’t want to jump to the school board over the backs of many teachers, administrators that then will not have a chance to solve that problem with you first. If it’s an issue about, let’s say policy or budget allocation that clearly falls in the realm of the board, then of course, um, you have every right to go to the board, but you can also call a board member. If you see a board member at a soccer match or in church, you can certainly have discussions about things that are on your mind and air them, and then of course you have that right to be part of the public comment period too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And the other thing that I would also add which is I think something that you always have to think about when you’re a school board member is If somebody comes to public comment and they express concern about a particular issue You always want to listen. It’s incredibly important to listen and to decide, um, you know whether you understand that viewpoint whether you agree with that viewpoint or not, but you don’t know for sure whether or not that viewpoint is 1% of your community or whether it represents 65% of your community. And I just believe that you have to be in touch with your community in lots of different ways and just have lots of data points so that you do get a sense of what the sentiment is like out there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marlena Jackson-Retondo: \u003c/strong>Also, speaking of parent influence, we’ve seen a lot of what I think would have been referred to as fringe movements of charter schools and homeschooling. We’re seeing that become a lot more mainstream, not just to talk about, but to practice. And obviously, the system of charter schools is becoming heavily influenced by school systems and there is a relationship between school boards. Charter schools, and also homeschooling.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So can you kind of explain some of the influence or partnership that school boards have on those types of systems, and what people and voters can pay attention to when it comes to those educational practices?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Levy:\u003c/strong> Particularly with charter schools, the rules are different depending on what state you’re in. And sometimes school boards have a very influential role in whether or not a charter school can exist. And in other cases, the school board may have absolutely no power and no say. And really what happens is the charter decision is made more centrally at the state level by maybe the state board or one of the state entities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I also think that there are a lot of interesting implications when you think about this long term. And I’ll give you one case study that happened in New York that I think could be an interesting microcosm of the situation that can happen in other parts of the country if you fast forward 10, 20 years from now and school choice and vouchers become more commonplace. And it’s actually a district that I attended when I was a kid and now is governed by board, the majority of whom send their kids to private school and it’s created an incredibly complex situation where there is a tremendous rift and rift is an understatement between the public school community and the private school community around the way the public district is being managed. On the one hand these are people that pay taxes and they have every right to, you know, run for school board and they’re winning the elections fair and square. On the other hand, you have individuals that are making decisions about a public school system, where many in the public school community argue are not in the best interest of public school students. And so there’s just incredible amounts of tension. And so you can see this being something that could happen in many communities down the road, if we have many, many more students that are not in the public system, and you might have the preponderance of voters that are in the not public system.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marlena Jackson-Retondo: \u003c/strong>I wanted to end on something that maybe is a little bit uplifting and positive and what you hope to see. Who should care about school boards or how should they care?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Levy:\u003c/strong> So to end on a positive note, I think that one thing that I would think that all listeners may agree with is that when we look at our national politics, regardless of what side you’re on, I think it is clear that we have more polarization than we’ve ever had in recent history. And I do believe that when we look at local school districts, the reason that everybody should care is because they are a mechanism to potentially reduce polarization.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On the one hand, I know we see these scenes of people fighting in boardrooms here, like, how could they reduce polarization? It looks like boardrooms are incredibly polarized. But I would contend that they are the one place where people that have differences of opinion actually come together in person. And because everything is transparent and because local community members have a voice at the microphone, people can actually express their view. And if that view is diametrically different, others have to listen. And there is something incredibly American about that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And I think that there’s this healing process in the fact that we can unify around what happens in a school board room, which is that people of all walks of life that have very different political beliefs can come express their view and have to be listened to. And maybe, just maybe we can realize that sometimes people with very opposing views from a policy perspective might be both coming from a good place, it’s just different places.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Marlena Jackson-Retondo:\u003c/strong> This does seem like a giant lesson in civics. I really appreciate your time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scott Levy: \u003c/strong>Oh, it’s my pleasure being with you.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Lynette Duncan didn’t expect to spend 20 hours over the past two weeks digging through a mothballed computer system, trying to retrieve admissions data from 2019.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Duncan is the director of institutional research at John Brown University, a small Christian university in northwest Arkansas, an hour’s drive from Walmart’s headquarters. She runs a one-person office that handles university data collections and analyses, both for internal use and to meet government mandates. Just last year, she spent months collecting and crunching new data to comply with \u003ca href=\"https://fsapartners.ed.gov/knowledge-center/topics/financial-value-transparency-and-gainful-employment-information\">a new federal rule\u003c/a> requiring that colleges show that their graduates are prepared for good jobs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then, in mid-December, another mandate abruptly arrived — this one at the \u003ca href=\"https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/08/ensuring-transparency-in-higher-education-admissions/\">request of President Donald Trump\u003c/a>. Colleges were ordered to compile seven years of admissions data, broken down by race, sex, grades, SAT or ACT scores, and family income.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s like one more weight on our backs,” Duncan said. “The workload – it’s not fun.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>John Brown University is one of almost 2,200 colleges and universities nationwide now scrambling to comply by March 18 with the new federal reporting requirement, formally known as the \u003ca href=\"https://surveys.nces.ed.gov/ipeds/public/survey-materials/instructions?instructionid=30156\">Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement\u003c/a>, or ACTS. By all accounts, it’s a ton of work, and at small institutions, the task falls largely on a single administrator or even the registrar. Failure to submit the data can bring steep fines and, ultimately, the loss of access to federal aid for students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision banning affirmative action in college admissions, the Trump administration suspected that colleges might covertly continue to give racial preferences. To police compliance, the White House directed the Department of Education to collect detailed admissions data from colleges nationwide.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The data collection was unusual not only in its scope, but also in its speed. Federal education data collections typically take years to design, with multiple rounds of analysis, technical review panels, and revisions. This one moved from announcement to launch in a matter of months.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>A rush job\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>One tiny indication that this was a rush job is in the \u003ca href=\"https://www.regulations.gov/document/ED-2025-SCC-0382-0001\">Federal Register notice\u003c/a>. Both enforce and admissions are misspelled in a proposal that’s all about admissions enforcement. Those words are spelled “admssions” and “enforece.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A December \u003ca href=\"https://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/PRAViewDocument?ref_nbr=202512-1850-002\">filing\u003c/a> with the Office of Management and Budget incorrectly lists the number of institutions that are subject to the new data collection. It is nearly 2,200, not 1,660, according to the Association for Institutional Research, which is advising colleges on how to properly report the data. Community colleges are exempt, but four-year institutions with selective admissions or those that give out their own financial aid must comply. Graduate programs are included as well. That adds up to about 2,200 institutions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In another filing with the Office of Management and Budget, the administration disclosed that none of the five remaining career Education Department officials with statistical experience had reviewed the proposal, including Matt Soldner, the acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. Most of the department’s \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-chaos-confusion-statistics-education/\">statistical staff were fired \u003c/a>earlier this year as a first step to eliminating the Education Department, one of Trump’s campaign promises. RTI International, the federal contractor in North Carolina that already manages other higher education data collections for the Education Department, is also handling the day-to-day work of this new college admissions collection.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During \u003ca href=\"https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/search?conditions%5Bdocket_id%5D=Docket+No.%3A+ED-2025-SCC-0382&conditions%5Bsearch_type_id%5D=3&order=newest\">two public comment\u003c/a> periods, colleges and higher-education trade groups raised concerns about data quality and missing records, but there is little evidence those concerns substantially altered the final design. One change expanded the retrospective data requirement from five to six years so that at least one cohort of students would have a measurable six-year graduation rate. A second relieved colleges of the burden of making hundreds of complex statistical calculations themselves, instead instructing them to upload raw student data to an “aggregator tool” that would do all the math for them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Trump administration’s goal is to generate comparisons across race and sex categories, with large gaps potentially triggering further scrutiny.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Missing data\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The results are unlikely to be reliable, experts told me, given how much of the underlying data is missing or incomplete. In a public \u003ca href=\"https://www.aacrao.org/docs/default-source/statements-and-letters/acts-survey-comments-round-2.pdf?sfvrsn=6caf499c_1#:~:text=Some%20state%2Dlevel%20data%20retention,an%20undue%20burden%20on%20institutions.&text=1%20American%20Association%20of%20Collegiate,and%20Archive%20of%20Student%20Records.\">comment letter\u003c/a>, Melanie Gottlieb, executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, warned that entire years of applicant data may not exist at many institutions. Some states advise colleges to delete records for applicants who never enrolled after a year. “If institutions are remaining compliant with their state policies, they will not have five years of data,” Gottlieb wrote.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The organization’s own guidance recommends that four-year colleges retain admissions records for just one year after an application cycle. One reason is privacy. Applicant files contain sensitive personal information, and purging unneeded records reduces the risk of exposing this data in breaches.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In other cases, especially at smaller institutions, admissions offices may offload applicant data simply to make room for new student records. Duncan said John Brown University has all seven years of required data, but a switch to a new computer system in 2019 has made it difficult to retrieve the first year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even when historical records are available, key details may be missing or incompatible with federal requirements, said Christine Keller, executive director of the Association for Institutional Research, which previously received a federal contract to train college administrators on accurate data collection until DOGE eliminated it. (The organization now receives some private funds for a reduced amount of training.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Standardized test scores are unavailable for many students admitted under test-optional policies. The department is asking colleges to report an unweighted grade-point average on a four-point scale, even though many applicants submit only weighted GPAs on a five-point scale. In those cases, and there may be many of them, colleges are instructed to report the GPA as “unknown.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some students decline to report their race. Many holes are expected for family income. Colleges generally have income data only for students who completed federal financial-aid forms, which many applicants never file.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ellen Keast, a spokeswoman for the Education Department, said in an email, “Schools are not expected to provide data they don’t have.” She added, “We know that some schools may have missing data for some data elements. We’ll review the extent of missing data before doing further calculations or analyses.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Male or female\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Even the category of sex poses problems. The Education Department’s spreadsheet allows only two options: male or female. Colleges, however, may collect sex or gender information using additional categories, such as nonbinary.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That data is going to be, in my estimation, pretty worthless when it comes to really showing the different experiences of men and women,” Keller said. She is urging the department to add a “missing” option to avoid misleading results. “I think some people in the department may be misunderstanding that what’s needed is a missing-data option, not another sex category.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The new “aggregator tool” itself is another source of anxiety. Designed to spare colleges from calculating quintile buckets for grades and test scores by race and sex, it can feel like a black box. Colleges are supposed to fill rows and rows of detailed student data into \u003ca href=\"https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/4roixwdh9g257tn944bpx/ACTS_Template_AY2024-25.xlsx?rlkey=76gp3ljxd2d4gsofkyjjp2fc3&st=h4vyr446&dl=0\">spreadsheets\u003c/a> and then upload the spreadsheets into the tool. The tool generates pooled summary statistics, such as the number of Black female applicants and admitted students who score in the top 20 percent at the college. Only the aggregated data will be reported to the federal government.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At John Brown University, Duncan worries about what those summaries might imply. Her institution is \u003ca href=\"https://www.jbu.edu/biblical-diversity-intercultural-engagement/\">predominantly white\u003c/a> and has never practiced affirmative action. But if high school grades or test scores differ by race — as they often do nationwide — the aggregated results could suggest bias where none was intended.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That’s a concern,” Duncan said. “I’m hopeful that looking across multiple years of data, it won’t show that. You could have an anomaly in one year.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The problem is that disparities are not anomalies. Standardized test scores and academic records \u003ca href=\"https://www.brookings.edu/articles/sat-math-scores-mirror-and-maintain-racial-inequity/\">routinely vary by race and sex\u003c/a>, making it difficult for almost any institution to avoid showing gaps.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>A catch-22 for colleges\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The stakes are high. In an emailed response to my questions, the Education Department pointed to \u003ca href=\"https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/08/ensuring-transparency-in-higher-education-admissions/\">Trump’s Aug. 7 memorandum\u003c/a>, which directs the agency to take “remedial action” if colleges fail to submit the data on time or submit incomplete or inaccurate information.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Under federal law, each violation of these education data-reporting requirements can carry a fine of up to \u003ca href=\"https://surveys.nces.ed.gov/ipeds/public/survey-materials/faq?faqid=1\">$71,545\u003c/a>. Repeated noncompliance can ultimately lead to the loss of access to federal student aid, meaning students could no longer use Pell Grants or federal loans to pay tuition.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That leaves colleges in a bind. Failing to comply is costly. Complying, meanwhile, could produce flawed data that suggests bias and invites further scrutiny.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The order itself contradicts another administration goal. President Trump campaigned on reducing federal red tape and bureaucratic burden. Yet ACTS represents a significant expansion of paperwork for colleges. The Office of Management and Budget estimates that each institution will spend roughly 200 hours completing the survey this year — a figure that higher-education officials say may be an understatement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Duncan is hoping she can finish the reporting in less than 200 hours, if there are no setbacks when she uploads the data. “If I get errors, it could take double the time,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For now, she is still gathering and cleaning old student records and waiting to see the results… all before the March 18 deadline.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about\u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-admissions-data-collection-strains-colleges/\"> \u003cem>college admissions data\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for\u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\"> \u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Lynette Duncan didn’t expect to spend 20 hours over the past two weeks digging through a mothballed computer system, trying to retrieve admissions data from 2019.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Duncan is the director of institutional research at John Brown University, a small Christian university in northwest Arkansas, an hour’s drive from Walmart’s headquarters. She runs a one-person office that handles university data collections and analyses, both for internal use and to meet government mandates. Just last year, she spent months collecting and crunching new data to comply with \u003ca href=\"https://fsapartners.ed.gov/knowledge-center/topics/financial-value-transparency-and-gainful-employment-information\">a new federal rule\u003c/a> requiring that colleges show that their graduates are prepared for good jobs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then, in mid-December, another mandate abruptly arrived — this one at the \u003ca href=\"https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/08/ensuring-transparency-in-higher-education-admissions/\">request of President Donald Trump\u003c/a>. Colleges were ordered to compile seven years of admissions data, broken down by race, sex, grades, SAT or ACT scores, and family income.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s like one more weight on our backs,” Duncan said. “The workload – it’s not fun.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>John Brown University is one of almost 2,200 colleges and universities nationwide now scrambling to comply by March 18 with the new federal reporting requirement, formally known as the \u003ca href=\"https://surveys.nces.ed.gov/ipeds/public/survey-materials/instructions?instructionid=30156\">Admissions and Consumer Transparency Supplement\u003c/a>, or ACTS. By all accounts, it’s a ton of work, and at small institutions, the task falls largely on a single administrator or even the registrar. Failure to submit the data can bring steep fines and, ultimately, the loss of access to federal aid for students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision banning affirmative action in college admissions, the Trump administration suspected that colleges might covertly continue to give racial preferences. To police compliance, the White House directed the Department of Education to collect detailed admissions data from colleges nationwide.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The data collection was unusual not only in its scope, but also in its speed. Federal education data collections typically take years to design, with multiple rounds of analysis, technical review panels, and revisions. This one moved from announcement to launch in a matter of months.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>A rush job\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>One tiny indication that this was a rush job is in the \u003ca href=\"https://www.regulations.gov/document/ED-2025-SCC-0382-0001\">Federal Register notice\u003c/a>. Both enforce and admissions are misspelled in a proposal that’s all about admissions enforcement. Those words are spelled “admssions” and “enforece.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A December \u003ca href=\"https://www.reginfo.gov/public/do/PRAViewDocument?ref_nbr=202512-1850-002\">filing\u003c/a> with the Office of Management and Budget incorrectly lists the number of institutions that are subject to the new data collection. It is nearly 2,200, not 1,660, according to the Association for Institutional Research, which is advising colleges on how to properly report the data. Community colleges are exempt, but four-year institutions with selective admissions or those that give out their own financial aid must comply. Graduate programs are included as well. That adds up to about 2,200 institutions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In another filing with the Office of Management and Budget, the administration disclosed that none of the five remaining career Education Department officials with statistical experience had reviewed the proposal, including Matt Soldner, the acting commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics. Most of the department’s \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-chaos-confusion-statistics-education/\">statistical staff were fired \u003c/a>earlier this year as a first step to eliminating the Education Department, one of Trump’s campaign promises. RTI International, the federal contractor in North Carolina that already manages other higher education data collections for the Education Department, is also handling the day-to-day work of this new college admissions collection.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During \u003ca href=\"https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/search?conditions%5Bdocket_id%5D=Docket+No.%3A+ED-2025-SCC-0382&conditions%5Bsearch_type_id%5D=3&order=newest\">two public comment\u003c/a> periods, colleges and higher-education trade groups raised concerns about data quality and missing records, but there is little evidence those concerns substantially altered the final design. One change expanded the retrospective data requirement from five to six years so that at least one cohort of students would have a measurable six-year graduation rate. A second relieved colleges of the burden of making hundreds of complex statistical calculations themselves, instead instructing them to upload raw student data to an “aggregator tool” that would do all the math for them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Trump administration’s goal is to generate comparisons across race and sex categories, with large gaps potentially triggering further scrutiny.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Missing data\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The results are unlikely to be reliable, experts told me, given how much of the underlying data is missing or incomplete. In a public \u003ca href=\"https://www.aacrao.org/docs/default-source/statements-and-letters/acts-survey-comments-round-2.pdf?sfvrsn=6caf499c_1#:~:text=Some%20state%2Dlevel%20data%20retention,an%20undue%20burden%20on%20institutions.&text=1%20American%20Association%20of%20Collegiate,and%20Archive%20of%20Student%20Records.\">comment letter\u003c/a>, Melanie Gottlieb, executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers, warned that entire years of applicant data may not exist at many institutions. Some states advise colleges to delete records for applicants who never enrolled after a year. “If institutions are remaining compliant with their state policies, they will not have five years of data,” Gottlieb wrote.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The organization’s own guidance recommends that four-year colleges retain admissions records for just one year after an application cycle. One reason is privacy. Applicant files contain sensitive personal information, and purging unneeded records reduces the risk of exposing this data in breaches.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In other cases, especially at smaller institutions, admissions offices may offload applicant data simply to make room for new student records. Duncan said John Brown University has all seven years of required data, but a switch to a new computer system in 2019 has made it difficult to retrieve the first year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even when historical records are available, key details may be missing or incompatible with federal requirements, said Christine Keller, executive director of the Association for Institutional Research, which previously received a federal contract to train college administrators on accurate data collection until DOGE eliminated it. (The organization now receives some private funds for a reduced amount of training.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Standardized test scores are unavailable for many students admitted under test-optional policies. The department is asking colleges to report an unweighted grade-point average on a four-point scale, even though many applicants submit only weighted GPAs on a five-point scale. In those cases, and there may be many of them, colleges are instructed to report the GPA as “unknown.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some students decline to report their race. Many holes are expected for family income. Colleges generally have income data only for students who completed federal financial-aid forms, which many applicants never file.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ellen Keast, a spokeswoman for the Education Department, said in an email, “Schools are not expected to provide data they don’t have.” She added, “We know that some schools may have missing data for some data elements. We’ll review the extent of missing data before doing further calculations or analyses.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Male or female\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Even the category of sex poses problems. The Education Department’s spreadsheet allows only two options: male or female. Colleges, however, may collect sex or gender information using additional categories, such as nonbinary.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That data is going to be, in my estimation, pretty worthless when it comes to really showing the different experiences of men and women,” Keller said. She is urging the department to add a “missing” option to avoid misleading results. “I think some people in the department may be misunderstanding that what’s needed is a missing-data option, not another sex category.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The new “aggregator tool” itself is another source of anxiety. Designed to spare colleges from calculating quintile buckets for grades and test scores by race and sex, it can feel like a black box. Colleges are supposed to fill rows and rows of detailed student data into \u003ca href=\"https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/4roixwdh9g257tn944bpx/ACTS_Template_AY2024-25.xlsx?rlkey=76gp3ljxd2d4gsofkyjjp2fc3&st=h4vyr446&dl=0\">spreadsheets\u003c/a> and then upload the spreadsheets into the tool. The tool generates pooled summary statistics, such as the number of Black female applicants and admitted students who score in the top 20 percent at the college. Only the aggregated data will be reported to the federal government.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At John Brown University, Duncan worries about what those summaries might imply. Her institution is \u003ca href=\"https://www.jbu.edu/biblical-diversity-intercultural-engagement/\">predominantly white\u003c/a> and has never practiced affirmative action. But if high school grades or test scores differ by race — as they often do nationwide — the aggregated results could suggest bias where none was intended.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“That’s a concern,” Duncan said. “I’m hopeful that looking across multiple years of data, it won’t show that. You could have an anomaly in one year.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The problem is that disparities are not anomalies. Standardized test scores and academic records \u003ca href=\"https://www.brookings.edu/articles/sat-math-scores-mirror-and-maintain-racial-inequity/\">routinely vary by race and sex\u003c/a>, making it difficult for almost any institution to avoid showing gaps.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>A catch-22 for colleges\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The stakes are high. In an emailed response to my questions, the Education Department pointed to \u003ca href=\"https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/08/ensuring-transparency-in-higher-education-admissions/\">Trump’s Aug. 7 memorandum\u003c/a>, which directs the agency to take “remedial action” if colleges fail to submit the data on time or submit incomplete or inaccurate information.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Under federal law, each violation of these education data-reporting requirements can carry a fine of up to \u003ca href=\"https://surveys.nces.ed.gov/ipeds/public/survey-materials/faq?faqid=1\">$71,545\u003c/a>. Repeated noncompliance can ultimately lead to the loss of access to federal student aid, meaning students could no longer use Pell Grants or federal loans to pay tuition.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That leaves colleges in a bind. Failing to comply is costly. Complying, meanwhile, could produce flawed data that suggests bias and invites further scrutiny.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The order itself contradicts another administration goal. President Trump campaigned on reducing federal red tape and bureaucratic burden. Yet ACTS represents a significant expansion of paperwork for colleges. The Office of Management and Budget estimates that each institution will spend roughly 200 hours completing the survey this year — a figure that higher-education officials say may be an understatement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Duncan is hoping she can finish the reporting in less than 200 hours, if there are no setbacks when she uploads the data. “If I get errors, it could take double the time,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For now, she is still gathering and cleaning old student records and waiting to see the results… all before the March 18 deadline.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about\u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-admissions-data-collection-strains-colleges/\"> \u003cem>college admissions data\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for\u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\"> \u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "The Risks of AI in Schools Outweigh the Benefits, Report Says",
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"content": "\u003cp>The risks of using \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/65296/with-ai-changing-everything-heres-how-teachers-can-shape-the-new-culture-of-learning\">generative artificial intelligence\u003c/a> to educate children and teens currently overshadow the benefits, according to a new study by the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The sweeping study includes focus groups and interviews with K-12 students, parents, educators and tech experts in 50 countries, as well as a literature review of hundreds of research articles. It found that using AI in education can “undermine children’s foundational development” and that “the damages it has already caused are daunting,” though “fixable.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-embed npr-promo-card insettwocolumn\">\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\u003c/div>\n\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Because generative AI is still young — ChatGPT was released \u003ca href=\"https://openai.com/index/chatgpt/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">just over three years ago\u003c/a> — the report’s authors dubbed their review a “premortem” intended to study AI’s potential in the classroom without a postmortem’s benefits of time, long-term data or hindsight.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here are some of the pros and cons that the report lays out, along with a sampling of the study’s recommendations for teachers, parents, school leaders and government officials:\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Pro: AI can help students learn to read and write\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Teachers surveyed for the report said AI can be useful when it comes to language acquisition, especially for students learning a second language. For example, AI can adjust the complexity of a passage depending on the reader’s skill, and it offers privacy for students who struggle in large-group settings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Teachers reported that AI can also help improve students’ writing, so long as it is used to support students’ efforts and not to do the work for them: “Teachers report that AI can ‘spark creativity’ and help students overcome writer’s block. … At the drafting stage, it can help with organization, coherence, syntax, semantics, and grammar. At the revision stage, AI can support the editing and rewriting of ideas as well as help with … punctuation, capitalization, and grammar.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But, if there is a refrain in the report, it is this: AI is most useful when it’s supplementing, not replacing, the efforts of a flesh-and-blood teacher.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Con: AI poses a grave threat to students’ cognitive development\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>At the top of Brookings’ list of risks is the negative effect AI can have on children’s cognitive growth — how they learn new skills and perceive and solve problems.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The report describes a kind of doom loop of AI dependence, where students increasingly off-load their own thinking onto the technology, leading to the kind of cognitive decline or atrophy more commonly associated with aging brains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rebecca Winthrop, one of the report’s authors and a senior fellow at Brookings, warns, “When kids use generative AI that tells them what the answer is … they are not thinking for themselves. They’re not learning to parse truth from fiction. They’re not learning to understand what makes a good argument. They’re not learning about different perspectives in the world because they’re actually not engaging in the material.\u003cem>“\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cognitive off-loading isn’t new. The report points out that keyboards and computers reduced the need for handwriting, and calculators automated basic math. But AI has “turbocharged” this kind of off-loading, especially in schools where learning can feel transactional.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As one student told the researchers, “It’s easy. You don’t need to (use) your brain.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The report offers a surfeit of evidence to suggest that students who use generative AI are already seeing declines in content knowledge, critical thinking and even creativity. And this could have enormous consequences if these young people grow into adults without learning to think critically.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Pro: AI can make teachers’ jobs a little easier\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The report says another benefit of AI is that it allows teachers to automate some tasks: “generating parent emails … translating materials, creating worksheets, rubrics, quizzes, and lesson plans” — and more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The report cites multiple research studies that found important time-saving benefits for teachers, including one U.S. study that found that teachers who use AI save an average of nearly six hours a week and about six weeks over the course of a full school year.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Pro/Con: AI can be an engine of equity — or inequity\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>One of the strongest arguments in favor of AI’s educational use, according to the Brookings report, is its ability to reach children who have been excluded from the classroom. The researchers cite Afghanistan, where girls and women have been denied access to formal, postprimary education by the Taliban.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to the report, \u003ca href=\"https://www.sola-afghanistan.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">one program for Afghan girls\u003c/a> “has employed AI to digitize the Afghan curriculum, create lessons based on this curriculum, and disseminate content in Dari, Pashto, and English via WhatsApp lessons.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>AI can also help make classrooms more accessible for students with a wide range of learning disabilities, including dyslexia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But “AI can massively increase existing divides” too, Winthrop warns. That’s because the free AI tools that are most accessible to students and schools can also be the least reliable and least factually accurate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We know that richer communities and schools will be able to afford more advanced AI models,” Winthrop says, “and we know those more advanced AI models are more accurate. Which means that this is the first time in ed-tech history that schools will have to pay more for more accurate information. And that really hurts schools without a lot of resources.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Con: AI poses serious threats to social and emotional development\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Survey responses revealed deep concern that use of AI, particularly chatbots, “is undermining students’ emotional well-being, including their ability to form relationships, recover from setbacks, and maintain mental health,” the report says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of the many problems with kids’ overuse of AI is that the technology is inherently sycophantic — it has been designed to reinforce users’ beliefs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Winthrop says that if children are building social-emotional skills largely through interactions with chatbots that were designed to agree with them, “it becomes very uncomfortable to then be in an environment when somebody doesn’t agree with you.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Winthrop offers an example of a child interacting with a chatbot, “complaining about your parents and saying, ‘They want me to wash the dishes — this is so annoying. I hate my parents.’ The chatbot will likely say, ‘You’re right. You’re misunderstood. I’m so sorry. I understand you.’ Versus a friend who would say, ‘Dude, I wash the dishes all the time in my house. I don’t know what you’re complaining about. That’s normal.’ That right there is the problem.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/10/08/nx-s1-5561981/ai-students-schools-teachers\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">recent survey\u003c/a> from the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit that advocates for civil rights and civil liberties in the digital age, found that nearly 1 in 5 high schoolers said they or someone they know has had a romantic relationship with artificial intelligence. And 42% of students in that survey said they or someone they know has used AI for companionship.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The report warns that AI’s echo chamber can stunt a child’s emotional growth: “We learn empathy not when we are perfectly understood, but when we misunderstand and recover,” one of the surveyed experts said.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>What to do about it\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The Brookings report offers a long list of recommendations to help parents, teachers and policymakers — not to mention tech companies themselves — harness the good of AI without subjecting children to the risks that the technology currently poses. Among those recommendations:\u003c/p>\n\u003cul class=\"rte2-style-ul\">\n\u003cli>Schooling itself could be less focused on what the report calls “transactional task completion” or a grade-based endgame and more focused on fostering curiosity and a desire to learn. Students will be less inclined to ask AI to do the work for them if they feel engaged by that work.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>AI designed for use by children and teens should be less sycophantic and more “antagonistic,” pushing back against preconceived notions and challenging users to reflect and evaluate.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Tech companies could collaborate with educators in “co-design hubs.” In the Netherlands, a government-backed hub already brings together tech companies and educators to develop, test and evaluate new AI applications in the classroom.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Holistic AI literacy is crucial — both for teachers and students. Some countries, including China and Estonia, have comprehensive, national AI literacy guidelines.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>As schools continue to embrace AI, it’s important that underfunded districts in marginalized communities are not left behind, allowing AI to further drive inequity.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Governments have a responsibility to regulate the use of AI in schools, making sure that the technology being used protects students’ cognitive and emotional health, as well as their privacy. In the U.S., the Trump administration has \u003ca href=\"https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/12/eliminating-state-law-obstruction-of-national-artificial-intelligence-policy/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">tried to prohibit\u003c/a> states from regulating AI on their own, even as Congress has so far failed to create a federal regulatory framework.\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With this “premortem,” the authors argue, the time to act is now. AI’s risks to children and teens are already abundant and obvious. The good news is: so are many of the remedies.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The risks of using \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/65296/with-ai-changing-everything-heres-how-teachers-can-shape-the-new-culture-of-learning\">generative artificial intelligence\u003c/a> to educate children and teens currently overshadow the benefits, according to a new study by the Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The sweeping study includes focus groups and interviews with K-12 students, parents, educators and tech experts in 50 countries, as well as a literature review of hundreds of research articles. It found that using AI in education can “undermine children’s foundational development” and that “the damages it has already caused are daunting,” though “fixable.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure class=\"wp-block-embed npr-promo-card insettwocolumn\">\n\u003cdiv class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\u003c/div>\n\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Because generative AI is still young — ChatGPT was released \u003ca href=\"https://openai.com/index/chatgpt/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">just over three years ago\u003c/a> — the report’s authors dubbed their review a “premortem” intended to study AI’s potential in the classroom without a postmortem’s benefits of time, long-term data or hindsight.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here are some of the pros and cons that the report lays out, along with a sampling of the study’s recommendations for teachers, parents, school leaders and government officials:\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Pro: AI can help students learn to read and write\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Teachers surveyed for the report said AI can be useful when it comes to language acquisition, especially for students learning a second language. For example, AI can adjust the complexity of a passage depending on the reader’s skill, and it offers privacy for students who struggle in large-group settings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Teachers reported that AI can also help improve students’ writing, so long as it is used to support students’ efforts and not to do the work for them: “Teachers report that AI can ‘spark creativity’ and help students overcome writer’s block. … At the drafting stage, it can help with organization, coherence, syntax, semantics, and grammar. At the revision stage, AI can support the editing and rewriting of ideas as well as help with … punctuation, capitalization, and grammar.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But, if there is a refrain in the report, it is this: AI is most useful when it’s supplementing, not replacing, the efforts of a flesh-and-blood teacher.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Con: AI poses a grave threat to students’ cognitive development\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>At the top of Brookings’ list of risks is the negative effect AI can have on children’s cognitive growth — how they learn new skills and perceive and solve problems.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The report describes a kind of doom loop of AI dependence, where students increasingly off-load their own thinking onto the technology, leading to the kind of cognitive decline or atrophy more commonly associated with aging brains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Rebecca Winthrop, one of the report’s authors and a senior fellow at Brookings, warns, “When kids use generative AI that tells them what the answer is … they are not thinking for themselves. They’re not learning to parse truth from fiction. They’re not learning to understand what makes a good argument. They’re not learning about different perspectives in the world because they’re actually not engaging in the material.\u003cem>“\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cognitive off-loading isn’t new. The report points out that keyboards and computers reduced the need for handwriting, and calculators automated basic math. But AI has “turbocharged” this kind of off-loading, especially in schools where learning can feel transactional.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As one student told the researchers, “It’s easy. You don’t need to (use) your brain.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The report offers a surfeit of evidence to suggest that students who use generative AI are already seeing declines in content knowledge, critical thinking and even creativity. And this could have enormous consequences if these young people grow into adults without learning to think critically.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Pro: AI can make teachers’ jobs a little easier\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The report says another benefit of AI is that it allows teachers to automate some tasks: “generating parent emails … translating materials, creating worksheets, rubrics, quizzes, and lesson plans” — and more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The report cites multiple research studies that found important time-saving benefits for teachers, including one U.S. study that found that teachers who use AI save an average of nearly six hours a week and about six weeks over the course of a full school year.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Pro/Con: AI can be an engine of equity — or inequity\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>One of the strongest arguments in favor of AI’s educational use, according to the Brookings report, is its ability to reach children who have been excluded from the classroom. The researchers cite Afghanistan, where girls and women have been denied access to formal, postprimary education by the Taliban.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to the report, \u003ca href=\"https://www.sola-afghanistan.org/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">one program for Afghan girls\u003c/a> “has employed AI to digitize the Afghan curriculum, create lessons based on this curriculum, and disseminate content in Dari, Pashto, and English via WhatsApp lessons.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>AI can also help make classrooms more accessible for students with a wide range of learning disabilities, including dyslexia.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But “AI can massively increase existing divides” too, Winthrop warns. That’s because the free AI tools that are most accessible to students and schools can also be the least reliable and least factually accurate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We know that richer communities and schools will be able to afford more advanced AI models,” Winthrop says, “and we know those more advanced AI models are more accurate. Which means that this is the first time in ed-tech history that schools will have to pay more for more accurate information. And that really hurts schools without a lot of resources.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>Con: AI poses serious threats to social and emotional development\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Survey responses revealed deep concern that use of AI, particularly chatbots, “is undermining students’ emotional well-being, including their ability to form relationships, recover from setbacks, and maintain mental health,” the report says.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of the many problems with kids’ overuse of AI is that the technology is inherently sycophantic — it has been designed to reinforce users’ beliefs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Winthrop says that if children are building social-emotional skills largely through interactions with chatbots that were designed to agree with them, “it becomes very uncomfortable to then be in an environment when somebody doesn’t agree with you.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Winthrop offers an example of a child interacting with a chatbot, “complaining about your parents and saying, ‘They want me to wash the dishes — this is so annoying. I hate my parents.’ The chatbot will likely say, ‘You’re right. You’re misunderstood. I’m so sorry. I understand you.’ Versus a friend who would say, ‘Dude, I wash the dishes all the time in my house. I don’t know what you’re complaining about. That’s normal.’ That right there is the problem.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2025/10/08/nx-s1-5561981/ai-students-schools-teachers\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">recent survey\u003c/a> from the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit that advocates for civil rights and civil liberties in the digital age, found that nearly 1 in 5 high schoolers said they or someone they know has had a romantic relationship with artificial intelligence. And 42% of students in that survey said they or someone they know has used AI for companionship.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The report warns that AI’s echo chamber can stunt a child’s emotional growth: “We learn empathy not when we are perfectly understood, but when we misunderstand and recover,” one of the surveyed experts said.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>What to do about it\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The Brookings report offers a long list of recommendations to help parents, teachers and policymakers — not to mention tech companies themselves — harness the good of AI without subjecting children to the risks that the technology currently poses. Among those recommendations:\u003c/p>\n\u003cul class=\"rte2-style-ul\">\n\u003cli>Schooling itself could be less focused on what the report calls “transactional task completion” or a grade-based endgame and more focused on fostering curiosity and a desire to learn. Students will be less inclined to ask AI to do the work for them if they feel engaged by that work.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>AI designed for use by children and teens should be less sycophantic and more “antagonistic,” pushing back against preconceived notions and challenging users to reflect and evaluate.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Tech companies could collaborate with educators in “co-design hubs.” In the Netherlands, a government-backed hub already brings together tech companies and educators to develop, test and evaluate new AI applications in the classroom.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Holistic AI literacy is crucial — both for teachers and students. Some countries, including China and Estonia, have comprehensive, national AI literacy guidelines.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>As schools continue to embrace AI, it’s important that underfunded districts in marginalized communities are not left behind, allowing AI to further drive inequity.\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Governments have a responsibility to regulate the use of AI in schools, making sure that the technology being used protects students’ cognitive and emotional health, as well as their privacy. In the U.S., the Trump administration has \u003ca href=\"https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/12/eliminating-state-law-obstruction-of-national-artificial-intelligence-policy/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">tried to prohibit\u003c/a> states from regulating AI on their own, even as Congress has so far failed to create a federal regulatory framework.\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>BATON ROUGE, La. — About two dozen second graders sat on the carpet at the front of Jacquelyn Anthony’s classroom, reviewing how to make tens. “Two needs eight!” the students yelled out together. “Six needs four!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The numbers may get a little trickier,” Anthony told them next. “But remember, the numbers we need to make 10 are still there.” The students then turned confidently to bigger calculations: Forty-six needs four ones to make a new number divisible by 10; 128 needs two to make 13 tens.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the end of the hour, the second graders slung on their backpacks, gathered their Chromebooks and lined up at the door before heading to English and social studies class across the hall. While most schools wait until middle school to transition students from one class to another, kids at Louisiana’s Baton Rouge Center for Visual and Performing Arts do so starting at age 6 or 7. It’s part of a strategy known as departmentalizing, or platooning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Anthony, rather than teaching all four core subjects, specializes in math. The school’s new facility, built in 2025, was designed with departmentalizing in mind: The classrooms have huge glass windows, so teachers can see their next class preparing to line up in the hallway.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Teaching today is so different than it was a long time ago, and there are so many demands on them. And the demand to be an expert in your content area is very high,” said Sydney Hebert, magnet site coordinator for the art-focused public school in the East Baton Rouge Parish school district. “We want to make sure that our teachers are experts in what they’re teaching so that they can do a good job of teaching it to the kids.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As schools contend with a decades-long slump in math scores — exacerbated by the pandemic — some are turning to this classroom \u003ca href=\"https://www.the74million.org/article/why-the-kids-in-my-school-move-from-class-to-class-as-young-as-kindergarten/\">strategy even for very young students\u003c/a>. In recent years, \u003ca href=\"https://ies.ed.gov/use-work/evaluations/evaluation-departmentalized-instruction-elementary-schools\">more e\u003c/a>\u003ca href=\"https://ies.ed.gov/use-work/evaluations/evaluation-departmentalized-instruction-elementary-schools\">lementary schools have opted to departmentalize\u003c/a> some grade levels in an attempt to boost academic achievement. The share of fourth and fifth grade classrooms operating on this schedule has doubled since the year 2000, from 15 percent to 30 percent in 2021. Often, that means educators will specialize in one or two subjects at most, such as fourth grade English language arts and social studies, or fifth grade math and science. The theory is that teachers who specialize will be more familiar with the content and better able to teach it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That may be particularly important for math: Studies have shown that some early \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/teachers-conquering-their-math-anxiety/\">elementary school teachers experience anxiety\u003c/a> about the subject and question their ability to teach it. Educators also say that the curriculum and standards for math and English in the early grades are changing rapidly in some districts and have become more complicated over time. In a departmentalized setup, it’s also far less likely that math instruction will get shortchanged by an educator who prefers spending time on other subjects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But while some schools swear by this model, the research on it is mixed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One prominent 2018 study on the practice in Houston public schools \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/two-studies-point-to-the-power-of-teacher-student-relationships-to-boost-learning/\">found it had\u003c/a> a negative effect on test scores, behavior and attendance. The study doesn’t explain why that was the case, but the researcher said it could be because teachers on this schedule spend less time with individual students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another \u003ca href=\"https://caldercenter.org/sites/default/files/2024-11/CALDER%20WP%20298-0424.pdf\">study published in 2024\u003c/a> analyzing Massachusetts schools had different outcomes: Researchers found moderate gains in academic achievement for ELA and a significant boost to science scores for students in departmentalized classes. The results in math, however, showed few gains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Generally, teachers specialize in the subject they are most comfortable teaching. When a school departmentalizes for the first time, principals typically look at each educator’s test score data over time to determine whether they should specialize in math or reading.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There are some arguments that, at least if it’s someone who likes the subject, who is passionate about the subject, you have a greater chance of them doing a better job of delivering instruction,” said Latrenda Knighten, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. “But you’ll find mixed reviews.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_66049\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-66049\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/k12-departmentalizing-math-1-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"Woman teaches at front of classroom\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1707\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/k12-departmentalizing-math-1-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/k12-departmentalizing-math-1-2000x1334.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/k12-departmentalizing-math-1-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/k12-departmentalizing-math-1-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/k12-departmentalizing-math-1-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/k12-departmentalizing-math-1-2048x1366.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Ms. Anthony teaches math and science at Baton Rouge Center for Visual and Performing Arts on December 9, 2025 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. \u003ccite>(Annie Flanagan for The Hechinger Report)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Yet there are a few reasons why the strategy is typically reserved for students in older grades, according to school leaders: Spending all day with one teacher increases the bond between the teacher and student, which is important for younger children. In Baton Rouge, Anthony teaches 50 students throughout the day instead of the same 25 students all day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Teachers want to get to know their students,” said Dennis Willingham, superintendent of Walker County Schools in Alabama. The district departmentalized some fifth grade classrooms decades ago, but recently added third and fourth grade classes on this schedule. “You tend to see less departmentalization below third grade because of the nurturing element.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s also generally more challenging for young students to quickly change classrooms, even for electives, which means lost instructional time. Smaller elementary schools may also struggle to hire enough teachers to schedule all of them on a departmentalized setup.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But increasingly, schools that are satisfied with this approach for older grade levels are trying it out with their younger grades, too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After the pandemic, the San Tan Heights Elementary School in Arizona changed its curriculum to one that was more rigorous, and it became harder for the third grade educators to master the standards of all four subject areas, said Henry Saylor-Scheetz, principal at the time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He proposed that third graders be taught by separate math, English language arts and reading teachers. “I told them, let’s try it for a semester. If it doesn’t work at the end of the year, we’ll go back,” Saylor-Scheetz said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ten days into the experiment, teachers told him they never wanted to return to the old schedule. In the subsequent years, the school added more classrooms on this model until, by 2023, all K-8 students were departmentalized. For the last few years, teacher retention at the school was 95 percent, according to Saylor-Scheetz.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Saylor-Scheetz, who last year became principal of a nearby middle school, credited the change for helping the school improve from a C rating on its state report card — a rating it had stagnated at every year since 2018 — to a B rating as of 2022. Since then, more schools in his Arizona school district have shifted to this schedule.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’d love to see this become something we do as a nation, but it is a paradigm shift,” Saylor-Scheetz said. “There’s merit in doing it, but there has to be a commitment to it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At Baton Rouge Center for Visual and Performing Arts, students in first through third grades have two partner teachers, one for math and science and another for ELA and social studies. The school has been operating on this schedule for third through fifth grade students for more than a decade. Eight years ago, its leaders decided to try it for first and second grade students, too, and were pleased with the results.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On a December morning at the school, young students talked quietly with each other in the hall as they lined up to go from math class to English language arts. All told, the switch took less than five minutes. “We’re at the end of the second nine weeks, so we’ve had a lot of practice,” said GiGi Boudreaux, the assistant principal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The strategy has not always been successful, though.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During the pandemic, administrators also attempted to departmentalize its kindergarten classes. It didn’t work as they’d hoped: It was a challenge to get the 5-year-olds to quickly change classes and focus on classwork again once they did. Parents also didn’t like it. The school then tried moving teachers from classroom to classroom instead of moving students, but the educators hated it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was too much, so we didn’t do it after that,” said Hebert.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Baton Rouge school doesn’t have comparison data to show that students perform better in a departmentalized setup, but most educators in the school prefer it, Hebert said. Third grade test scores from 2015 — before the school departmentalized its younger grade levels — showed 73 percent scored “advanced” and “mastery” level on the state ELA test, and 56 percent scored advanced or mastery on the math test. In 2025, 80 percent of third grade students scored advanced or mastery in ELA and 55 percent in math.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I know that the teachers like it better, and the kids have adapted to it,” Hebert said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Teachers meet weekly with their partner teachers and grade-level counterparts to discuss their classes and progress on the state standards. Once a quarter, all of the math teachers across the grades meet to talk about strategies and student performance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At Deer Valley Unified School District in Arizona, departmentalizing some classrooms has helped reduce teacher turnover, said Superintendent Curtis Finch, particularly for early career educators, who can find it challenging to master the content and standards of all four subjects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If you’re not confident in your subject, then you don’t have good examples off the top of your head. You can’t control the room, can’t pull the students in,” Finch said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are drawbacks though, Finch acknowledged. In a self-contained classroom, teachers can more easily integrate their different lessons, so that a math lesson might refer back to a topic covered in reading.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_66051\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1707px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-66051\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/k12-departmentalizing-math-2-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"Woman leaning on desk\" width=\"1707\" height=\"2560\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/k12-departmentalizing-math-2-scaled.jpg 1707w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/k12-departmentalizing-math-2-2000x2999.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/k12-departmentalizing-math-2-160x240.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/k12-departmentalizing-math-2-768x1152.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/k12-departmentalizing-math-2-1024x1536.jpg 1024w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/k12-departmentalizing-math-2-1366x2048.jpg 1366w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1707px) 100vw, 1707px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Ms. Anthony poses for a portrait at Baton Rouge Center for Visual and Performing Arts on December 9, 2025 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. \u003ccite>(Annie Flanagan for The Hechinger Report)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>And even though Anthony, the second grade math and science teacher in Baton Rouge, loves teaching math, she also misses the extra time she could spend with each student when she had the same 25 children in her class all day for the entire school year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was a joy for me to be self-contained and to build that little family,” Anthony said. “I think the social emotional needs of students are best met in that type of environment. But being solely a math teacher, I do get to just dig in and focus on the nuance of the content.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For Anthony’s partner teacher across the hall, Holley McArthur, teaching 50 students ELA and social studies is easier than having to teach 25 students math.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This is my thing: reading books, comprehending and finding answers, meeting their goals,” said McArthur, who has taught in both kinds of classrooms over three decades in education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While McArthur’s kids were at recess this mid-December day, the veteran teacher was grading their reading worksheets. A new student had transferred in from out of state midyear, and she was still evaluating his reading skills.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think you still get to know the kids, even if you just have them for three hours a day, because I’m not doing the hard math with them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Contact staff writer Ariel Gilreath on Signal at arielgilreath.46 or at \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"mailto:gilreath@hechingerreport.org\">\u003cem>gilreath@hechingerreport.org\u003c/em>\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/the-schools-where-even-young-children-change-classes/\">\u003cem>departmentalizing\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/weeklynewsletter/\">\u003cem>the Hechinger newsletter\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>BATON ROUGE, La. — About two dozen second graders sat on the carpet at the front of Jacquelyn Anthony’s classroom, reviewing how to make tens. “Two needs eight!” the students yelled out together. “Six needs four!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The numbers may get a little trickier,” Anthony told them next. “But remember, the numbers we need to make 10 are still there.” The students then turned confidently to bigger calculations: Forty-six needs four ones to make a new number divisible by 10; 128 needs two to make 13 tens.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the end of the hour, the second graders slung on their backpacks, gathered their Chromebooks and lined up at the door before heading to English and social studies class across the hall. While most schools wait until middle school to transition students from one class to another, kids at Louisiana’s Baton Rouge Center for Visual and Performing Arts do so starting at age 6 or 7. It’s part of a strategy known as departmentalizing, or platooning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Anthony, rather than teaching all four core subjects, specializes in math. The school’s new facility, built in 2025, was designed with departmentalizing in mind: The classrooms have huge glass windows, so teachers can see their next class preparing to line up in the hallway.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Teaching today is so different than it was a long time ago, and there are so many demands on them. And the demand to be an expert in your content area is very high,” said Sydney Hebert, magnet site coordinator for the art-focused public school in the East Baton Rouge Parish school district. “We want to make sure that our teachers are experts in what they’re teaching so that they can do a good job of teaching it to the kids.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As schools contend with a decades-long slump in math scores — exacerbated by the pandemic — some are turning to this classroom \u003ca href=\"https://www.the74million.org/article/why-the-kids-in-my-school-move-from-class-to-class-as-young-as-kindergarten/\">strategy even for very young students\u003c/a>. In recent years, \u003ca href=\"https://ies.ed.gov/use-work/evaluations/evaluation-departmentalized-instruction-elementary-schools\">more e\u003c/a>\u003ca href=\"https://ies.ed.gov/use-work/evaluations/evaluation-departmentalized-instruction-elementary-schools\">lementary schools have opted to departmentalize\u003c/a> some grade levels in an attempt to boost academic achievement. The share of fourth and fifth grade classrooms operating on this schedule has doubled since the year 2000, from 15 percent to 30 percent in 2021. Often, that means educators will specialize in one or two subjects at most, such as fourth grade English language arts and social studies, or fifth grade math and science. The theory is that teachers who specialize will be more familiar with the content and better able to teach it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That may be particularly important for math: Studies have shown that some early \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/teachers-conquering-their-math-anxiety/\">elementary school teachers experience anxiety\u003c/a> about the subject and question their ability to teach it. Educators also say that the curriculum and standards for math and English in the early grades are changing rapidly in some districts and have become more complicated over time. In a departmentalized setup, it’s also far less likely that math instruction will get shortchanged by an educator who prefers spending time on other subjects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But while some schools swear by this model, the research on it is mixed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One prominent 2018 study on the practice in Houston public schools \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/two-studies-point-to-the-power-of-teacher-student-relationships-to-boost-learning/\">found it had\u003c/a> a negative effect on test scores, behavior and attendance. The study doesn’t explain why that was the case, but the researcher said it could be because teachers on this schedule spend less time with individual students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another \u003ca href=\"https://caldercenter.org/sites/default/files/2024-11/CALDER%20WP%20298-0424.pdf\">study published in 2024\u003c/a> analyzing Massachusetts schools had different outcomes: Researchers found moderate gains in academic achievement for ELA and a significant boost to science scores for students in departmentalized classes. The results in math, however, showed few gains.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Generally, teachers specialize in the subject they are most comfortable teaching. When a school departmentalizes for the first time, principals typically look at each educator’s test score data over time to determine whether they should specialize in math or reading.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There are some arguments that, at least if it’s someone who likes the subject, who is passionate about the subject, you have a greater chance of them doing a better job of delivering instruction,” said Latrenda Knighten, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. “But you’ll find mixed reviews.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_66049\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2560px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-66049\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/k12-departmentalizing-math-1-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"Woman teaches at front of classroom\" width=\"2560\" height=\"1707\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/k12-departmentalizing-math-1-scaled.jpg 2560w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/k12-departmentalizing-math-1-2000x1334.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/k12-departmentalizing-math-1-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/k12-departmentalizing-math-1-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/k12-departmentalizing-math-1-1536x1024.jpg 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/k12-departmentalizing-math-1-2048x1366.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2560px) 100vw, 2560px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Ms. Anthony teaches math and science at Baton Rouge Center for Visual and Performing Arts on December 9, 2025 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. \u003ccite>(Annie Flanagan for The Hechinger Report)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Yet there are a few reasons why the strategy is typically reserved for students in older grades, according to school leaders: Spending all day with one teacher increases the bond between the teacher and student, which is important for younger children. In Baton Rouge, Anthony teaches 50 students throughout the day instead of the same 25 students all day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Teachers want to get to know their students,” said Dennis Willingham, superintendent of Walker County Schools in Alabama. The district departmentalized some fifth grade classrooms decades ago, but recently added third and fourth grade classes on this schedule. “You tend to see less departmentalization below third grade because of the nurturing element.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s also generally more challenging for young students to quickly change classrooms, even for electives, which means lost instructional time. Smaller elementary schools may also struggle to hire enough teachers to schedule all of them on a departmentalized setup.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But increasingly, schools that are satisfied with this approach for older grade levels are trying it out with their younger grades, too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After the pandemic, the San Tan Heights Elementary School in Arizona changed its curriculum to one that was more rigorous, and it became harder for the third grade educators to master the standards of all four subject areas, said Henry Saylor-Scheetz, principal at the time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He proposed that third graders be taught by separate math, English language arts and reading teachers. “I told them, let’s try it for a semester. If it doesn’t work at the end of the year, we’ll go back,” Saylor-Scheetz said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ten days into the experiment, teachers told him they never wanted to return to the old schedule. In the subsequent years, the school added more classrooms on this model until, by 2023, all K-8 students were departmentalized. For the last few years, teacher retention at the school was 95 percent, according to Saylor-Scheetz.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Saylor-Scheetz, who last year became principal of a nearby middle school, credited the change for helping the school improve from a C rating on its state report card — a rating it had stagnated at every year since 2018 — to a B rating as of 2022. Since then, more schools in his Arizona school district have shifted to this schedule.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’d love to see this become something we do as a nation, but it is a paradigm shift,” Saylor-Scheetz said. “There’s merit in doing it, but there has to be a commitment to it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At Baton Rouge Center for Visual and Performing Arts, students in first through third grades have two partner teachers, one for math and science and another for ELA and social studies. The school has been operating on this schedule for third through fifth grade students for more than a decade. Eight years ago, its leaders decided to try it for first and second grade students, too, and were pleased with the results.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On a December morning at the school, young students talked quietly with each other in the hall as they lined up to go from math class to English language arts. All told, the switch took less than five minutes. “We’re at the end of the second nine weeks, so we’ve had a lot of practice,” said GiGi Boudreaux, the assistant principal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The strategy has not always been successful, though.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During the pandemic, administrators also attempted to departmentalize its kindergarten classes. It didn’t work as they’d hoped: It was a challenge to get the 5-year-olds to quickly change classes and focus on classwork again once they did. Parents also didn’t like it. The school then tried moving teachers from classroom to classroom instead of moving students, but the educators hated it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was too much, so we didn’t do it after that,” said Hebert.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Baton Rouge school doesn’t have comparison data to show that students perform better in a departmentalized setup, but most educators in the school prefer it, Hebert said. Third grade test scores from 2015 — before the school departmentalized its younger grade levels — showed 73 percent scored “advanced” and “mastery” level on the state ELA test, and 56 percent scored advanced or mastery on the math test. In 2025, 80 percent of third grade students scored advanced or mastery in ELA and 55 percent in math.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I know that the teachers like it better, and the kids have adapted to it,” Hebert said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Teachers meet weekly with their partner teachers and grade-level counterparts to discuss their classes and progress on the state standards. Once a quarter, all of the math teachers across the grades meet to talk about strategies and student performance.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At Deer Valley Unified School District in Arizona, departmentalizing some classrooms has helped reduce teacher turnover, said Superintendent Curtis Finch, particularly for early career educators, who can find it challenging to master the content and standards of all four subjects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If you’re not confident in your subject, then you don’t have good examples off the top of your head. You can’t control the room, can’t pull the students in,” Finch said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are drawbacks though, Finch acknowledged. In a self-contained classroom, teachers can more easily integrate their different lessons, so that a math lesson might refer back to a topic covered in reading.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_66051\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 1707px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-66051\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/k12-departmentalizing-math-2-scaled.jpg\" alt=\"Woman leaning on desk\" width=\"1707\" height=\"2560\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/k12-departmentalizing-math-2-scaled.jpg 1707w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/k12-departmentalizing-math-2-2000x2999.jpg 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/k12-departmentalizing-math-2-160x240.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/k12-departmentalizing-math-2-768x1152.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/k12-departmentalizing-math-2-1024x1536.jpg 1024w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/k12-departmentalizing-math-2-1366x2048.jpg 1366w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 1707px) 100vw, 1707px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Ms. Anthony poses for a portrait at Baton Rouge Center for Visual and Performing Arts on December 9, 2025 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. \u003ccite>(Annie Flanagan for The Hechinger Report)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>And even though Anthony, the second grade math and science teacher in Baton Rouge, loves teaching math, she also misses the extra time she could spend with each student when she had the same 25 children in her class all day for the entire school year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was a joy for me to be self-contained and to build that little family,” Anthony said. “I think the social emotional needs of students are best met in that type of environment. But being solely a math teacher, I do get to just dig in and focus on the nuance of the content.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For Anthony’s partner teacher across the hall, Holley McArthur, teaching 50 students ELA and social studies is easier than having to teach 25 students math.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This is my thing: reading books, comprehending and finding answers, meeting their goals,” said McArthur, who has taught in both kinds of classrooms over three decades in education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While McArthur’s kids were at recess this mid-December day, the veteran teacher was grading their reading worksheets. A new student had transferred in from out of state midyear, and she was still evaluating his reading skills.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I think you still get to know the kids, even if you just have them for three hours a day, because I’m not doing the hard math with them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Contact staff writer Ariel Gilreath on Signal at arielgilreath.46 or at \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"mailto:gilreath@hechingerreport.org\">\u003cem>gilreath@hechingerreport.org\u003c/em>\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/the-schools-where-even-young-children-change-classes/\">\u003cem>departmentalizing\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/weeklynewsletter/\">\u003cem>the Hechinger newsletter\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "conservatives-see-two-parent-households-as-a-solution-to-student-achievement-its-not-that-simple",
"title": "Conservatives See Two-parent Households as a Solution to Student Achievement. It’s Not That Simple",
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"content": "\u003cp>Conservatives have long argued that unwed motherhood and single parenting are major drivers of poor student achievement. They contend that traditional two-parent families — ideally with a married mother and father — provide the stability children need to succeed in school. Single-parent households, more common among low-income families, are blamed for weak academic outcomes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That argument has resurfaced prominently in Project 2025, a policy blueprint developed by the conservative Heritage Foundation that calls for the federal government to collect and publish more \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/2025_MandateForLeadership_CHAPTER-11.pdf\">education data broken out by family structure\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/trump-administration-makes-good-on-many-project-2025-education-goals/\">Project 2025\u003c/a> acknowledges that the Education Department already collects some of this data, but asserts that it doesn’t make it public. That’s not true, though you need expertise to extract it. When I contacted the Heritage Foundation, the organization responded that the family-structure data should still be “readily available” to a layman, just like student achievement by race and sex. Fair point.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With some help, I found the figures and the results complicate the conservative claim.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since 2013, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often called the Nation’s Report Card, has asked students about who lives in their home. While the question does not capture every family arrangement, the answers provide a reasonable, albeit imperfect, proxy for family structure and it allows the public to examine how a nationally representative sample of students from different types of households perform academically.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I wanted to look at the relationship between family structure and student achievement by family income. Single-parent families are far more common in low-income communities and I didn’t want to conflate achievement gaps by income with achievement gaps by family structure. For example, 43 percent of low-income eighth graders live with only one parent compared with 13 percent of their high-income peers. I wanted to know whether kids who live with only one parent perform worse than kids with the same family income who live with both parents.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To analyze the most recent data from the 2024 NAEP exam, I used the \u003ca href=\"https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ndecore/landing\">NAEP Data Explorer\u003c/a>, a public tool developed by testing organization ETS for the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). I told an ETS researcher what I wanted to know and he showed me how to generate the cross-tabulations, which I then replicated independently across four tests: fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math. Finally, I vetted the results with a former senior official at NCES and with a current staff member at the governing board that oversees the NAEP assessment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The analysis reveals a striking pattern.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among low-income students, achievement differs little by family structure. Fourth- and eighth-grade students from low-income households score at roughly the same level whether they live with both parents or with only one parent. Two-parent households do not confer a measurable academic advantage in this group. Fourth-grade reading is a great example. Among the socioeconomic bottom third of students, those who live with both parents scored a 199. Those who live with just mom scored 200. The results are almost identical and, if anything, a smidge higher for the kids of single moms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As socioeconomic status rises, however, differences by family structure become more pronounced. Among middle- and high-income students, those living with both parents tend to score higher than their peers living with only one parent. The gap is largest among the most affluent students. In fourth grade reading, for example, higher income kids who live with both parents scored a 238, a whopping 10 points higher than their peers who live with only their moms. Experts argue over the meaning of a NAEP point, but some equate 10 NAEP points to a school year’s worth of learning. It’s substantial.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Family structure matters less for low-income student achievement\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_66044\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 936px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-66044 size-full\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/Family-Structure.png\" alt=\"Spreadsheet listing family structure with test scores\" width=\"936\" height=\"432\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/Family-Structure.png 936w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/Family-Structure-160x74.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/Family-Structure-768x354.png 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 936px) 100vw, 936px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Note: Socioeconomic status (SES) combines family income, parents’ educational attainment and the number of books in the home. “Lives with mother and father” may include students in shared-custody households. Data source: National Center for Education Statistics, NAEP Data Explorer (2024). \u003ccite>(Table by Jill Barshay/The Hechinger Report)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Still, it’s better to be rich in a single-parent household than poor in a two-parent household. High-income students raised by a single parent substantially outperform low-income students who live with both parents by at least 20 points, underscoring that money and the advantages it brings — such as access to resources, stable housing, and educational support — matter far more than household composition alone. In other words, income far outweighs family structure when it comes to student achievement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite the NAEP data, Jonathan Butcher, acting director of the center for education policy at the Heritage Foundation, stands by the contention that family structure matters greatly for student outcomes. He points out that research since the landmark \u003ca href=\"https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED012275\">Coleman report of 1966\u003c/a> has consistently found a relationship between the two. Most recently, in a \u003ca href=\"https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/ES_20220228_Rebalancing_Children_First.pdf\">2022 American Enterprise Institute-Brookings report\u003c/a>, 15 scholars concluded that children “raised in stable, married-parent families are more likely to excel in school, and generally earn higher grade point averages” than children who are not. Two recent books, Brad Wilcox’s “Get Married” (2024) and Melissa Kearney’s “The Two-Parent Privilege” (2023), make the case, too, and they point out that children raised by married parents are about twice as likely to graduate from college than children who are not. However, it’s unclear to me if all of this analysis has disaggregated student achievement by family income as I did with the NAEP data.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Family structure is a persistent theme for conservatives. Just last week the Heritage Foundation released a \u003ca href=\"https://www.heritage.org/press/saving-the-american-family-heritage-releases-landmark-report-rebuilding-and-strengthening-us\">report on strengthening and rebuilding U.S. families\u003c/a>. In a July 2025 \u003ca href=\"https://thenext30years.substack.com/p/family-structure-matters-to-student?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email\">newsletter\u003c/a>, Robert Pondiscio, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, wrote that “the most effective intervention in education is not another literacy coach or SEL program. It’s dad.” He cited a June 2025 report, “\u003ca href=\"https://nationalmarriageproject.org/sites/g/files/jsddwu1276/files/2025-06/UVA%20-%20Good%20Fathers%2C%20Flourishing%20Kids%20Report.pdf\">Good Fathers, Flourishing Kids,\u003c/a>” by scholars and advocates. (Disclosure: A group led by one of the authors of this report, Richard Reeves, is among the funders of The Hechinger Report.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That conclusion is partially supported by the NAEP data, but only for a relatively small share of students from higher income families (The share of high income children living with only their mother ranges between 7 and 10 percent. The single-parent rate is higher for eighth graders than for fourth graders.) For low income students, who are Pondiscio’s and the scholars’ main concern, it’s not the case.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The data has limitations. The NAEP survey does not distinguish among divorced families, grandparent-led households or same-sex parents. Joint custody arrangements are likely grouped with two-parent households because children may say that they live with both mother and father, if not at the same time. Even so, these nuances are unlikely to alter the core finding: For low-income students, academic outcomes are largely similar regardless of whether they live with both parents all of the time, some of the time or only live with one parent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The bottom line is that calls for new federal data collection by family structure, like those outlined in Project 2025, may not reveal what advocates expect. A family’s bank account matters more than a wedding ring.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-family-structure-student-achievement/\">\u003cem>family structure and student achievement\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Conservatives have long argued that unwed motherhood and single parenting are major drivers of poor student achievement. They contend that traditional two-parent families — ideally with a married mother and father — provide the stability children need to succeed in school. Single-parent households, more common among low-income families, are blamed for weak academic outcomes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That argument has resurfaced prominently in Project 2025, a policy blueprint developed by the conservative Heritage Foundation that calls for the federal government to collect and publish more \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/2025_MandateForLeadership_CHAPTER-11.pdf\">education data broken out by family structure\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/trump-administration-makes-good-on-many-project-2025-education-goals/\">Project 2025\u003c/a> acknowledges that the Education Department already collects some of this data, but asserts that it doesn’t make it public. That’s not true, though you need expertise to extract it. When I contacted the Heritage Foundation, the organization responded that the family-structure data should still be “readily available” to a layman, just like student achievement by race and sex. Fair point.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>With some help, I found the figures and the results complicate the conservative claim.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since 2013, the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often called the Nation’s Report Card, has asked students about who lives in their home. While the question does not capture every family arrangement, the answers provide a reasonable, albeit imperfect, proxy for family structure and it allows the public to examine how a nationally representative sample of students from different types of households perform academically.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I wanted to look at the relationship between family structure and student achievement by family income. Single-parent families are far more common in low-income communities and I didn’t want to conflate achievement gaps by income with achievement gaps by family structure. For example, 43 percent of low-income eighth graders live with only one parent compared with 13 percent of their high-income peers. I wanted to know whether kids who live with only one parent perform worse than kids with the same family income who live with both parents.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To analyze the most recent data from the 2024 NAEP exam, I used the \u003ca href=\"https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ndecore/landing\">NAEP Data Explorer\u003c/a>, a public tool developed by testing organization ETS for the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). I told an ETS researcher what I wanted to know and he showed me how to generate the cross-tabulations, which I then replicated independently across four tests: fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math. Finally, I vetted the results with a former senior official at NCES and with a current staff member at the governing board that oversees the NAEP assessment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The analysis reveals a striking pattern.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Among low-income students, achievement differs little by family structure. Fourth- and eighth-grade students from low-income households score at roughly the same level whether they live with both parents or with only one parent. Two-parent households do not confer a measurable academic advantage in this group. Fourth-grade reading is a great example. Among the socioeconomic bottom third of students, those who live with both parents scored a 199. Those who live with just mom scored 200. The results are almost identical and, if anything, a smidge higher for the kids of single moms.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As socioeconomic status rises, however, differences by family structure become more pronounced. Among middle- and high-income students, those living with both parents tend to score higher than their peers living with only one parent. The gap is largest among the most affluent students. In fourth grade reading, for example, higher income kids who live with both parents scored a 238, a whopping 10 points higher than their peers who live with only their moms. Experts argue over the meaning of a NAEP point, but some equate 10 NAEP points to a school year’s worth of learning. It’s substantial.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Family structure matters less for low-income student achievement\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_66044\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 936px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-66044 size-full\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/Family-Structure.png\" alt=\"Spreadsheet listing family structure with test scores\" width=\"936\" height=\"432\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/Family-Structure.png 936w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/Family-Structure-160x74.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2026/01/Family-Structure-768x354.png 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 936px) 100vw, 936px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Note: Socioeconomic status (SES) combines family income, parents’ educational attainment and the number of books in the home. “Lives with mother and father” may include students in shared-custody households. Data source: National Center for Education Statistics, NAEP Data Explorer (2024). \u003ccite>(Table by Jill Barshay/The Hechinger Report)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Still, it’s better to be rich in a single-parent household than poor in a two-parent household. High-income students raised by a single parent substantially outperform low-income students who live with both parents by at least 20 points, underscoring that money and the advantages it brings — such as access to resources, stable housing, and educational support — matter far more than household composition alone. In other words, income far outweighs family structure when it comes to student achievement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Despite the NAEP data, Jonathan Butcher, acting director of the center for education policy at the Heritage Foundation, stands by the contention that family structure matters greatly for student outcomes. He points out that research since the landmark \u003ca href=\"https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED012275\">Coleman report of 1966\u003c/a> has consistently found a relationship between the two. Most recently, in a \u003ca href=\"https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/ES_20220228_Rebalancing_Children_First.pdf\">2022 American Enterprise Institute-Brookings report\u003c/a>, 15 scholars concluded that children “raised in stable, married-parent families are more likely to excel in school, and generally earn higher grade point averages” than children who are not. Two recent books, Brad Wilcox’s “Get Married” (2024) and Melissa Kearney’s “The Two-Parent Privilege” (2023), make the case, too, and they point out that children raised by married parents are about twice as likely to graduate from college than children who are not. However, it’s unclear to me if all of this analysis has disaggregated student achievement by family income as I did with the NAEP data.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Family structure is a persistent theme for conservatives. Just last week the Heritage Foundation released a \u003ca href=\"https://www.heritage.org/press/saving-the-american-family-heritage-releases-landmark-report-rebuilding-and-strengthening-us\">report on strengthening and rebuilding U.S. families\u003c/a>. In a July 2025 \u003ca href=\"https://thenext30years.substack.com/p/family-structure-matters-to-student?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email\">newsletter\u003c/a>, Robert Pondiscio, senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank, wrote that “the most effective intervention in education is not another literacy coach or SEL program. It’s dad.” He cited a June 2025 report, “\u003ca href=\"https://nationalmarriageproject.org/sites/g/files/jsddwu1276/files/2025-06/UVA%20-%20Good%20Fathers%2C%20Flourishing%20Kids%20Report.pdf\">Good Fathers, Flourishing Kids,\u003c/a>” by scholars and advocates. (Disclosure: A group led by one of the authors of this report, Richard Reeves, is among the funders of The Hechinger Report.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That conclusion is partially supported by the NAEP data, but only for a relatively small share of students from higher income families (The share of high income children living with only their mother ranges between 7 and 10 percent. The single-parent rate is higher for eighth graders than for fourth graders.) For low income students, who are Pondiscio’s and the scholars’ main concern, it’s not the case.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The data has limitations. The NAEP survey does not distinguish among divorced families, grandparent-led households or same-sex parents. Joint custody arrangements are likely grouped with two-parent households because children may say that they live with both mother and father, if not at the same time. Even so, these nuances are unlikely to alter the core finding: For low-income students, academic outcomes are largely similar regardless of whether they live with both parents all of the time, some of the time or only live with one parent.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The bottom line is that calls for new federal data collection by family structure, like those outlined in Project 2025, may not reveal what advocates expect. A family’s bank account matters more than a wedding ring.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-family-structure-student-achievement/\">\u003cem>family structure and student achievement\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "As Public Transitional Kindergarten Thrives, Child Care Centers Are Closing",
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"headTitle": "As Public Transitional Kindergarten Thrives, Child Care Centers Are Closing | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>California finally rolled out free preschool for all 4-year-olds in the 2025-26 school year, after more than a decade of expanding what the state calls transitional kindergarten. Many advocates hoped the move would ease child care shortages and close learning gaps between rich and poor. But a new University of California, Berkeley, \u003ca href=\"https://drive.google.com/file/d/18KAT7-aXb1DoHDiFzaknPL9dNXgipri1/view\">study of Los Angeles\u003c/a> shows the opposite happened: More than 150 child care centers closed, and the biggest beneficiaries were families in the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Why does free preschool sometimes backfire? The Berkeley report can’t definitively answer that, but the study’s lead author, Bruce Fuller, a retired Berkeley sociologist who has studied early childhood education for decades, says the new public school seats siphoned 4-year-olds away from community child care centers and private preschools. Many centers lost revenue when children left, and it wasn’t easy to pivot to serving younger toddlers or infants.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We found this worrisome finding that the death rate, so to speak, of pre-K centers has accelerated since the governor moved toward universal access” to transitional kindergarten, Fuller said. “Private pay centers can’t survive.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(California calls it \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/universal-prekindergarten-is-coming-to-california-bumpy-rollout-and-all/\">transitional kindergarten\u003c/a> because it was originally a bridge between preschool and kindergarten for the youngest kindergarteners. But its expansion, quite rapid since 2022, has transformed it into what the rest of the country would call preschool for 4-year-olds.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>From 2020 to 2024, 167 Los Angeles County pre-K centers closed their doors or let their preschool licenses expire. That erased 12,000 child care slots. Many communities lost more child care seats than they gained in new public preschool ones. For example, public preschool enrollments climbed by 152 children in the Rolling Hills-Palos Verdes area, but the community then lost four pre-K centers or licensees, eliminating 316 child slots. In middle-class regions, such as Northridge, public preschool enrollments climbed by 96 children, while three pre-K centers shut down, a loss of 184 spaces for preschool children.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>As transitional kindergarten increased, slots for 3- and 4-year-olds in public and private pre-K centers decreased\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_66013\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 936px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-66013\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/12/Hechinger-TK-enrollment.png\" alt=\"Graph showing one line trend down and the other go up\" width=\"936\" height=\"660\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/12/Hechinger-TK-enrollment.png 936w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/12/Hechinger-TK-enrollment-160x113.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/12/Hechinger-TK-enrollment-768x542.png 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 936px) 100vw, 936px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The red line shows the decline in child care center slots. The blue line shows enrollment in transitional kindergarten classes at public schools. Enrollment temporarily dipped when the pandemic erupted, but then recovered and continued to grow Source: Figure 9 in “Pre-K Pivot? How Preschools Shift to Younger Children in Los Angeles,” UC Berkeley Equity and Excellence in Early Childhood, December 2025\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Fuller’s team also found that families in the highest-income communities were the most likely to apply for the new preschool seats at public schools. In the wealthiest fifth of ZIP codes of Los Angeles County, such as Brentwood, demand for public preschool skyrocketed 148 percent as families opted for a free program instead of paying as much as $36,000 a year for private preschool.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meanwhile, enrollment rose just 50 percent in the poorest fifth of ZIP codes, where many families stuck with subsidized child care centers or relatives — especially since some public schools offered only a half-day option.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The full effect on the child care sector is still uncertain. California allowed child care centers that receive subsidies to retain their pre-pandemic budgets even as they lost 4-year-olds. That “hold harmless” subsidy is slated to end in July 2026, and more closures are expected to follow.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Policymakers hoped the new public school seats would free up scarce child care slots for younger children, as 4-year-olds flocked to the public schools. But there were many regulatory and financial hurdles that hindered pivoting to younger children.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s not just flipping a switch to say this classroom is now going to serve 2- year-olds,” said Nina Buthee, executive director of EveryChild California, which advocates for publicly funded child care and early education. Operators need to reconfigure classrooms, install new sprinkler systems and hire a lot more teachers, Buthee explained.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s a nightmare,” she said. “You need to get the OK by the fire marshal, and you need to get the OK by the community care licensing division of the Department of Social Services. That, in itself, takes six to 12 months, and that’s only if you have the money to be able to close that classroom and pay for those renovations, and then have new children ready for when you’re reopening.” Many operators decided it was easier to shut down, she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More importantly, Buthee said the economics of child care centers rely on older 3- and 4-year-olds, who are cheaper to take care of. State regulations require one teacher for every three or four infants or toddlers. For 4-year-olds, it’s one teacher for every 12 children.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to Buthee, most child care centers operate their infant programs at a slight loss and offset that with revenue from their preschoolers. “When you’re losing those preschoolers, there are no funds to make up,” said Buthee. “The whole business model completely falls apart.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Los Angeles officials are aware of the problems. ”The expansion of transitional kindergarten across California has many benefits, as well as unintended consequences,” a spokesperson from the Office for the Advancement of Early Care and Education within the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health said in an email. That office is trying to help child care and early education operators navigate the challenging market and published a new \u003ca href=\"https://childcare.lacounty.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Navigating-Universal-Pre-K-in-LA-Guidebook-FINAL_10.21.25_online.pdf\">guidebook\u003c/a> of financial and business resources in October 2025.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One clear lesson, according to both Fuller and Buthee, is to allow community child care centers to be part of the expansion of publicly funded preschool programs rather than just public schools. That way, instead of losing children and revenue, these centers can hold on to older kids and continue operating. When Oklahoma expanded its preschool program in 1998, the state also experienced widespread closures of existing centers. Oklahoma then decided to open funding to community providers. Both Fuller and Buthee praised New York City for including community centers in its pre-K expansion from the start. Still, there were problems there too. As public subsidies rose for 4-year-olds, \u003ca href=\"https://policyequity.com/universal-pre-k-only-works-if-states-also-stabilize-infant-and-toddler-care-otherwise-it-can-be-detrimental/\">infant and toddler slots\u003c/a> shrunk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fuller remains a proponent of early childhood education, and agrees that middle class families need relief from child care expenses, but he warns there can be harmful consequences when well-intentioned ideas are poorly implemented.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Education systems are complicated and when you tinker with one small part, there can be a ripple effect. Fuller doesn’t have a quick fix. Policymakers have to balance the sometimes conflicting goals of improving education for low-income children and offering relief from the high cost of childcare. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Contact staff writer \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/author/jill-barshay/\">\u003cem>Jill Barshay\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or \u003c/em>\u003cem>barshay@hechingerreport.org\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-la-preschool/\">\u003cem>free preschool\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Child care centers that also served infants and toddlers became harder to keep open when 4-year-olds went to transitional kindergarten. Universal preschool promised equity but benefits went to the wealthy.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>California finally rolled out free preschool for all 4-year-olds in the 2025-26 school year, after more than a decade of expanding what the state calls transitional kindergarten. Many advocates hoped the move would ease child care shortages and close learning gaps between rich and poor. But a new University of California, Berkeley, \u003ca href=\"https://drive.google.com/file/d/18KAT7-aXb1DoHDiFzaknPL9dNXgipri1/view\">study of Los Angeles\u003c/a> shows the opposite happened: More than 150 child care centers closed, and the biggest beneficiaries were families in the city’s wealthiest neighborhoods.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Why does free preschool sometimes backfire? The Berkeley report can’t definitively answer that, but the study’s lead author, Bruce Fuller, a retired Berkeley sociologist who has studied early childhood education for decades, says the new public school seats siphoned 4-year-olds away from community child care centers and private preschools. Many centers lost revenue when children left, and it wasn’t easy to pivot to serving younger toddlers or infants.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We found this worrisome finding that the death rate, so to speak, of pre-K centers has accelerated since the governor moved toward universal access” to transitional kindergarten, Fuller said. “Private pay centers can’t survive.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(California calls it \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/universal-prekindergarten-is-coming-to-california-bumpy-rollout-and-all/\">transitional kindergarten\u003c/a> because it was originally a bridge between preschool and kindergarten for the youngest kindergarteners. But its expansion, quite rapid since 2022, has transformed it into what the rest of the country would call preschool for 4-year-olds.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>From 2020 to 2024, 167 Los Angeles County pre-K centers closed their doors or let their preschool licenses expire. That erased 12,000 child care slots. Many communities lost more child care seats than they gained in new public preschool ones. For example, public preschool enrollments climbed by 152 children in the Rolling Hills-Palos Verdes area, but the community then lost four pre-K centers or licensees, eliminating 316 child slots. In middle-class regions, such as Northridge, public preschool enrollments climbed by 96 children, while three pre-K centers shut down, a loss of 184 spaces for preschool children.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>As transitional kindergarten increased, slots for 3- and 4-year-olds in public and private pre-K centers decreased\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_66013\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 936px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-66013\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/12/Hechinger-TK-enrollment.png\" alt=\"Graph showing one line trend down and the other go up\" width=\"936\" height=\"660\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/12/Hechinger-TK-enrollment.png 936w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/12/Hechinger-TK-enrollment-160x113.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/12/Hechinger-TK-enrollment-768x542.png 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 936px) 100vw, 936px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">The red line shows the decline in child care center slots. The blue line shows enrollment in transitional kindergarten classes at public schools. Enrollment temporarily dipped when the pandemic erupted, but then recovered and continued to grow Source: Figure 9 in “Pre-K Pivot? How Preschools Shift to Younger Children in Los Angeles,” UC Berkeley Equity and Excellence in Early Childhood, December 2025\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Fuller’s team also found that families in the highest-income communities were the most likely to apply for the new preschool seats at public schools. In the wealthiest fifth of ZIP codes of Los Angeles County, such as Brentwood, demand for public preschool skyrocketed 148 percent as families opted for a free program instead of paying as much as $36,000 a year for private preschool.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Meanwhile, enrollment rose just 50 percent in the poorest fifth of ZIP codes, where many families stuck with subsidized child care centers or relatives — especially since some public schools offered only a half-day option.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The full effect on the child care sector is still uncertain. California allowed child care centers that receive subsidies to retain their pre-pandemic budgets even as they lost 4-year-olds. That “hold harmless” subsidy is slated to end in July 2026, and more closures are expected to follow.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Policymakers hoped the new public school seats would free up scarce child care slots for younger children, as 4-year-olds flocked to the public schools. But there were many regulatory and financial hurdles that hindered pivoting to younger children.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s not just flipping a switch to say this classroom is now going to serve 2- year-olds,” said Nina Buthee, executive director of EveryChild California, which advocates for publicly funded child care and early education. Operators need to reconfigure classrooms, install new sprinkler systems and hire a lot more teachers, Buthee explained.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s a nightmare,” she said. “You need to get the OK by the fire marshal, and you need to get the OK by the community care licensing division of the Department of Social Services. That, in itself, takes six to 12 months, and that’s only if you have the money to be able to close that classroom and pay for those renovations, and then have new children ready for when you’re reopening.” Many operators decided it was easier to shut down, she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More importantly, Buthee said the economics of child care centers rely on older 3- and 4-year-olds, who are cheaper to take care of. State regulations require one teacher for every three or four infants or toddlers. For 4-year-olds, it’s one teacher for every 12 children.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to Buthee, most child care centers operate their infant programs at a slight loss and offset that with revenue from their preschoolers. “When you’re losing those preschoolers, there are no funds to make up,” said Buthee. “The whole business model completely falls apart.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Los Angeles officials are aware of the problems. ”The expansion of transitional kindergarten across California has many benefits, as well as unintended consequences,” a spokesperson from the Office for the Advancement of Early Care and Education within the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health said in an email. That office is trying to help child care and early education operators navigate the challenging market and published a new \u003ca href=\"https://childcare.lacounty.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Navigating-Universal-Pre-K-in-LA-Guidebook-FINAL_10.21.25_online.pdf\">guidebook\u003c/a> of financial and business resources in October 2025.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One clear lesson, according to both Fuller and Buthee, is to allow community child care centers to be part of the expansion of publicly funded preschool programs rather than just public schools. That way, instead of losing children and revenue, these centers can hold on to older kids and continue operating. When Oklahoma expanded its preschool program in 1998, the state also experienced widespread closures of existing centers. Oklahoma then decided to open funding to community providers. Both Fuller and Buthee praised New York City for including community centers in its pre-K expansion from the start. Still, there were problems there too. As public subsidies rose for 4-year-olds, \u003ca href=\"https://policyequity.com/universal-pre-k-only-works-if-states-also-stabilize-infant-and-toddler-care-otherwise-it-can-be-detrimental/\">infant and toddler slots\u003c/a> shrunk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fuller remains a proponent of early childhood education, and agrees that middle class families need relief from child care expenses, but he warns there can be harmful consequences when well-intentioned ideas are poorly implemented.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Education systems are complicated and when you tinker with one small part, there can be a ripple effect. Fuller doesn’t have a quick fix. Policymakers have to balance the sometimes conflicting goals of improving education for low-income children and offering relief from the high cost of childcare. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Contact staff writer \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/author/jill-barshay/\">\u003cem>Jill Barshay\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or \u003c/em>\u003cem>barshay@hechingerreport.org\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-la-preschool/\">\u003cem>free preschool\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Inauguration Day was a time of hope for the MAGA faithful who watched President Donald Trump take his second oath of office in the Capitol rotunda. But less than a mile away, at the Department of Education, fear and uncertainty reigned.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Researchers, contractors and federal staff — the corner of the Education Department that I cover — braced for potentially devastating upheaval. Would the department itself be eliminated, as Trump had promised during the campaign? Would congressionally mandated research and statistical programs move to other agencies? And, if so, which ones?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Amid the unease, a small but determined force was already at work. The consequences would be profound. As many as 16 members from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team embedded within the agency in early February, according to news reports. These Young Turks reviewed contracts, identified vulnerabilities and quietly plotted what some would later call a blitzkrieg against federal research. As one senior researcher told me, decades of painstaking work vanished overnight in an attack by an inexperienced and ideologically driven staff intent on dismantling the bureaucracy without understanding its purpose.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>February: The carnage begins\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The first blow came in early February. In a single week, DOGE terminated more than \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-doge-death-blow-education-studies/\">100 research contracts\u003c/a> collectively worth over a billion dollars on paper. The consequences were immediate and staggering. Ten Regional Educational Laboratories (RELs), which had helped states pilot literacy and math interventions, were among these early casualties. Mississippi’s remarkable turnaround in reading achievement, commonly called the “Mississippi Miracle,” was nurtured by the Southeast laboratory, and the sudden loss of this infrastructure created uncertainty for other states in the midst of trying to copy Mississippi.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>DOGE canceled an 11-year longitudinal study tracking youth with disabilities through high school into college and the workforce. Data painstakingly collected over five years was effectively discarded overnight. Instruction and support was suddenly yanked from 1,000 students in the study. Disability advocates described it as a “crushing loss.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even core federal datasets were not spared. The termination of a contract for EDFacts, which collects demographic data about students, was inconceivable. The data is essential for administering the highly regarded National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the federal test that tracks reading and math achievement. It is also critical for allocating $18 billion for the Title I program, which gives federal subsidies to high-poverty schools. DOGE killed evidence-based teacher guides for math instruction. Even data on homeschooling — long a conservative priority — was cut. A department spokeswoman said the cuts eliminated “waste, fraud and abuse.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Much of the agency’s work is conducted by outside contractors, and DOGE pressured vendors to accept massive contract reductions; some payments were frozen entirely. The ripple effects were immediate: Research labs, university offices and federal contractors were thrown into chaos, scrambling to save data and unsure of their jobs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The month ended with a shocking firing at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a major source of reliable data. The commissioner, \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-peggy-carr-interview-nces/\">Peggy Carr\u003c/a>, was escorted out of the building by a security guard under circumstances that remain unclear. She was one of the first in a string of senior Black officials across the federal government who were tossed out by the Trump administration. Former department employees told me Carr had resisted DOGE’s demand to make severe cuts to NAEP. Her removal sent a clear signal that resistance would have consequences.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>March: Mass firings\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The unprecedented devastation continued in March, when nearly half of the Education Department’s workers lost their jobs, including almost 90 percent of staffers assigned to the research and statistics division. The agency Carr led was reduced to a skeletal staff of \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-chaos-confusion-statistics-education/\">three employees\u003c/a> from about 100. In another sign of the internal chaos, Chris Chapman, who had been installed to replace Carr, was fired after only 15 days, adding to the confusion about who, if anyone, was in charge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Linda McMahon, newly confirmed as education secretary, publicly defended the cuts, describing them as “a first step” toward closing the agency. With so few staffers to oversee contracts, NAEP test development stalled. DOGE even suggested substituting off-the-shelf tests from private vendors, sources said, undermining decades of federal assessment development.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“My job was to make sure that the limited public dollars for education research were spent as best as they could be,” a former education official said in March. Her job was to issue grants for the development of new innovations. “We make sure there’s no fraud, waste and abuse. Now there’s no watchdog to oversee it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>April: More cuts, more chaos\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>By April, the board that oversees the NAEP exam reluctantly killed more than a \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-smaller-naep/\">dozen assessments\u003c/a> scheduled over the next seven years. The cuts were painful. They meant not measuring how much American students know in science and history or measuring writing skills. They also meant eliminating some state comparisons, diminishing the ability to highlight states that are making progress. But board members described how DOGE threatened the whole NAEP program, and they hoped that these cuts would be enough to preserve the quality of the main biennial tests in math and reading. The board had effectively amputated limbs to save the brain and heart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The destruction spread beyond the Education Department. At the National Science Foundation, DOGE-directed cuts targeted education more than any other area. Of the billion dollars in NSF grants that DOGE eliminated, \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-three-fourths-nsf-funding-cuts-education/\">three-quarters were for education\u003c/a> research, largely conducted at universities. Many of the killed projects focused on increasing the participation of women and minorities in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics and on combating misinformation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By chance, thousands of researchers and statisticians were in Denver for the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) as DOGE was destroying their field. They fought back. Three lawsuits, including one led by AERA, challenged the legality of contract terminations and mass firings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Public outcry grew. McMahon publicly admitted that some cuts had gone too far. “When you are restructuring a company, you hope that you’re just cutting fat,” McMahon said before Congress. “Sometimes you cut a little in the muscle.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But by then the damage was deep and far-reaching. Data collections were paused midstream, rendering them useless. Evaluations of efforts to improve teaching and learning were left incomplete.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Years of work have gone into these studies,” said Dan McGrath, a Democracy Forward lawyer who is representing plaintiffs in one of the lawsuits. “At some point it won’t be possible to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Researchers were left navigating a landscape that had been transformed overnight, with no clear road map for survival. LinkedIn was flooded with new “open to work” updates. Many fled Washington and the field of education altogether, taking decades of institutional knowledge with them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the destruction continued, public scrutiny began to influence the department’s actions. Two days after I wrote a \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-eric-under-threat/\">column on the defunding\u003c/a> of the Education Resources Information Center, an online library of critical educational documents known as ERIC, the department restarted it — albeit with only half its previous budget.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>May and June: Mixed signals\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>By late spring, the relentless onslaught of destruction shifted into a more confusing narrative of tentative reversals, with some contracts restarted and some staff rehired. The flagship “Condition of Education” report, a comprehensive data compilation about U.S. schools, students and teachers, wasn’t published by its June 1 deadline for the first time in history. Hours after I wrote \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-condition-of-education/\">about the missed deadline\u003c/a>, which is mandated by Congress, the department hastily posted some “coming soon” declarations on its website, but the information was late and incomplete. The 2025 report remains unfinished.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>McMahon recognized that she could not operate her agency on such a thin staff. In May, she disclosed that she had quietly brought back \u003ca href=\"https://www.nasfaa.org/news-item/36360/McMahon_Defends_President_Trump_s_Skinny_Budget_and_ED_s_Restructuring_at_House_Appropriations_Hearing#:~:text=During%20questioning%2C%20McMahon%20confirmed%20that%20the%20department,who%20were%20initially%20eliminated%20as%20part%20of\">74 of those who had\u003c/a> been fired. Five employees of the board that oversees NAEP were loaned to the Education Department to keep the 2026 exam in reading and math on track. Of course, these numbers are a tiny fraction of the 2,000 employees who were let go, but they were also a sign that the Trump administration saw value in some of the department’s work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More reversals — at least partial ones — followed. Lawsuits and public scrutiny prompted the \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-restart-ed-contracts/\">restart of roughly 20 research and data contracts\u003c/a> and the preservation of data access for researchers. EDFacts was among them. Even so, restorations were often incomplete, sometimes no more than symbolic and with little practical effect.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In one example, the department said it was reinstating a contract for operating the What Works Clearinghouse, a website that informs schools about evidence-based teaching practices, a congressionally mandated function. But, in that same legal disclosure, the department also said that it was not planning to reinstate any of the contracts to produce new content for the site.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Throughout the Institute of Education Sciences, budgets were slashed, leaving programs under-resourced. And no new research was being reviewed or approved for funding. Trump’s budget proposed slashing IES’ 2026 budget by two-thirds, a move that Republican Senate appropriators would later reject.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, there was a glimmer of hope: At the end of May, McMahon tapped Amber Northern, a respected researcher, to lead an effort to revamp and modernize IES.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>July–September: A Supreme Court ruling\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The fallout continued in July. NAEP scores were delayed because of a leadership vacuum. Matt Soldner, juggling multiple roles inside the Education Department, was assigned yet another one — acting director of NCES — in order to release reports. In August, the administration ordered a new data collection on college admissions, a politically charged project undertaken without sufficient staff or funding. Experts warned it could be weaponized to accuse universities of reverse discrimination. Still, it was an indication that the Trump administration had discovered that the Education Department could be useful in enforcing its political priorities, even if it wasn’t yet willing to fund them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By September, some NAEP results were finally released, three months behind schedule. Higher education data slowly emerged, albeit incomplete. New job postings and public comment requests hinted at a slow rebuilding, but the system remained fragile. Across states, districts and universities, the consequences of eight months of disruption were already visible: delayed reports, stalled research and weakened trust in federal statistics.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the spring, a federal court in Boston ordered the return of fired staffers, but in July, the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration: The employees would remain fired. In addition, the vast majority of the research contracts would remain terminated while lawsuits slowly moved through the court system — which could take years. The damage was done and probably irreversible.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>October and November: Shutdown and uncertainty\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>On Oct. 1, everything stopped. More than \u003ca href=\"https://www.regulations.gov/docket/ED-2025-IES-0844\">400 comments\u003c/a> on how to reform IES poured in by the Oct. 15 deadline, but the department couldn’t post them because of the government shutdown.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Nov. 18, McMahon announced she was outsourcing a host of Education Department functions to other agencies, creating an end-run around Congress because she wasn’t technically transferring these divisions. (Only Congress has the authority to eliminate the department or transfer its congressionally mandated activities elsewhere.) But research and statistics weren’t mentioned on McMahon’s outsourcing list, and the fate of IES remained unclear. The Education Department didn’t respond to my requests in November to interview an official about IES’ future.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Looking ahead\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Federal education research occupies a narrow but indispensable space. Unlike private foundations, which often chase novelty or seek to make a visible mark on the field, the federal system is designed for the slow, unglamorous work of establishing baseline data in reading and math, conducting large-scale evaluations and studying interventions that schools actually adopt. The system had its flaws — outdated methodologies, expensive vendor contracts, research adrift from classroom needs — and critics had long pushed for reform. But even those critics agreed that you don’t fix a system by gutting it midstream. Real reform requires investment, not indiscriminate cuts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some consequences are already evident. Almost no new grants or contracts for fresh research were awarded in 2025, meaning that a generation of studies may never materialize. There were exceptions. On the eve of the shutdown, IES quietly pushed through \u003ca href=\"https://ies.ed.gov/search-results?searchTerms=From%20Seedlings%20to%20Scale%20Grants%20Program%20(ALN%2084.305J)\">nine small education technology innovation grants\u003c/a>, initiated during the Biden administration, totaling $450,000. Then after the shutdown, IES announced \u003ca href=\"https://ies.ed.gov/funding/research/programs/small-business-innovation-research-sbir/sbir-awards?&mcontenttype=Contract&lawardstatus=Open&lyearaward=2025&pageNum=1\">$14 million in contracts \u003c/a>to 25 small businesses to develop and test new ed tech products.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Public confidence in federal data faltered as publications arrived late, abbreviated or not at all. What had once been the backbone of the American educational system began to feel fragile and unreliable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Partial restorations have taken place, but they reveal the limits of what can be reclaimed. The online library ERIC survived on half its funding; NAEP continued, though scaled back; and the regional laboratories that were slated to restart still haven’t. Inside IES, the workforce had been gutted, leaving few people to execute the remaining programs. These restorations highlight the importance of public scrutiny, lawsuits and reporting, yet they cannot undo the carnage.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The damage is cumulative and will unfold over years. Longitudinal studies were cut off midstream, multiyear research programs collapsed, and promising lines of inquiry vanished before they could mature. Careers were derailed, but the deeper loss belongs to the children and teachers who will never benefit from the knowledge that would have been generated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a fragmented system where every district makes its own choices, evidence is one of the few forces capable of offering coherence. And the statistics that track the nation’s schools — achievement, inequality, enrollment, finances — are irreplaceable. As it stands now, there is a lot we won’t know, measure or trust in the future of education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The deeper irony is that the cuts did not simply weaken the field of education research, they compromised the country’s ability to see its own school system clearly. Reform may indeed be overdue. But rebuilding confidence in federal data — and recovering the institutional knowledge lost in a single chaotic year — will take far longer than the dismantling.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about the \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-trump-upended-education-research-2025/\">\u003cem>Trump administration and the Education Department\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Inauguration Day was a time of hope for the MAGA faithful who watched President Donald Trump take his second oath of office in the Capitol rotunda. But less than a mile away, at the Department of Education, fear and uncertainty reigned.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Researchers, contractors and federal staff — the corner of the Education Department that I cover — braced for potentially devastating upheaval. Would the department itself be eliminated, as Trump had promised during the campaign? Would congressionally mandated research and statistical programs move to other agencies? And, if so, which ones?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Amid the unease, a small but determined force was already at work. The consequences would be profound. As many as 16 members from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team embedded within the agency in early February, according to news reports. These Young Turks reviewed contracts, identified vulnerabilities and quietly plotted what some would later call a blitzkrieg against federal research. As one senior researcher told me, decades of painstaking work vanished overnight in an attack by an inexperienced and ideologically driven staff intent on dismantling the bureaucracy without understanding its purpose.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>February: The carnage begins\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The first blow came in early February. In a single week, DOGE terminated more than \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-doge-death-blow-education-studies/\">100 research contracts\u003c/a> collectively worth over a billion dollars on paper. The consequences were immediate and staggering. Ten Regional Educational Laboratories (RELs), which had helped states pilot literacy and math interventions, were among these early casualties. Mississippi’s remarkable turnaround in reading achievement, commonly called the “Mississippi Miracle,” was nurtured by the Southeast laboratory, and the sudden loss of this infrastructure created uncertainty for other states in the midst of trying to copy Mississippi.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>DOGE canceled an 11-year longitudinal study tracking youth with disabilities through high school into college and the workforce. Data painstakingly collected over five years was effectively discarded overnight. Instruction and support was suddenly yanked from 1,000 students in the study. Disability advocates described it as a “crushing loss.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even core federal datasets were not spared. The termination of a contract for EDFacts, which collects demographic data about students, was inconceivable. The data is essential for administering the highly regarded National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the federal test that tracks reading and math achievement. It is also critical for allocating $18 billion for the Title I program, which gives federal subsidies to high-poverty schools. DOGE killed evidence-based teacher guides for math instruction. Even data on homeschooling — long a conservative priority — was cut. A department spokeswoman said the cuts eliminated “waste, fraud and abuse.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Much of the agency’s work is conducted by outside contractors, and DOGE pressured vendors to accept massive contract reductions; some payments were frozen entirely. The ripple effects were immediate: Research labs, university offices and federal contractors were thrown into chaos, scrambling to save data and unsure of their jobs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The month ended with a shocking firing at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a major source of reliable data. The commissioner, \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-peggy-carr-interview-nces/\">Peggy Carr\u003c/a>, was escorted out of the building by a security guard under circumstances that remain unclear. She was one of the first in a string of senior Black officials across the federal government who were tossed out by the Trump administration. Former department employees told me Carr had resisted DOGE’s demand to make severe cuts to NAEP. Her removal sent a clear signal that resistance would have consequences.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>March: Mass firings\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The unprecedented devastation continued in March, when nearly half of the Education Department’s workers lost their jobs, including almost 90 percent of staffers assigned to the research and statistics division. The agency Carr led was reduced to a skeletal staff of \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-chaos-confusion-statistics-education/\">three employees\u003c/a> from about 100. In another sign of the internal chaos, Chris Chapman, who had been installed to replace Carr, was fired after only 15 days, adding to the confusion about who, if anyone, was in charge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Linda McMahon, newly confirmed as education secretary, publicly defended the cuts, describing them as “a first step” toward closing the agency. With so few staffers to oversee contracts, NAEP test development stalled. DOGE even suggested substituting off-the-shelf tests from private vendors, sources said, undermining decades of federal assessment development.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“My job was to make sure that the limited public dollars for education research were spent as best as they could be,” a former education official said in March. Her job was to issue grants for the development of new innovations. “We make sure there’s no fraud, waste and abuse. Now there’s no watchdog to oversee it.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>April: More cuts, more chaos\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>By April, the board that oversees the NAEP exam reluctantly killed more than a \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-smaller-naep/\">dozen assessments\u003c/a> scheduled over the next seven years. The cuts were painful. They meant not measuring how much American students know in science and history or measuring writing skills. They also meant eliminating some state comparisons, diminishing the ability to highlight states that are making progress. But board members described how DOGE threatened the whole NAEP program, and they hoped that these cuts would be enough to preserve the quality of the main biennial tests in math and reading. The board had effectively amputated limbs to save the brain and heart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The destruction spread beyond the Education Department. At the National Science Foundation, DOGE-directed cuts targeted education more than any other area. Of the billion dollars in NSF grants that DOGE eliminated, \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-three-fourths-nsf-funding-cuts-education/\">three-quarters were for education\u003c/a> research, largely conducted at universities. Many of the killed projects focused on increasing the participation of women and minorities in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics and on combating misinformation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By chance, thousands of researchers and statisticians were in Denver for the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) as DOGE was destroying their field. They fought back. Three lawsuits, including one led by AERA, challenged the legality of contract terminations and mass firings.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Public outcry grew. McMahon publicly admitted that some cuts had gone too far. “When you are restructuring a company, you hope that you’re just cutting fat,” McMahon said before Congress. “Sometimes you cut a little in the muscle.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But by then the damage was deep and far-reaching. Data collections were paused midstream, rendering them useless. Evaluations of efforts to improve teaching and learning were left incomplete.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Years of work have gone into these studies,” said Dan McGrath, a Democracy Forward lawyer who is representing plaintiffs in one of the lawsuits. “At some point it won’t be possible to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Researchers were left navigating a landscape that had been transformed overnight, with no clear road map for survival. LinkedIn was flooded with new “open to work” updates. Many fled Washington and the field of education altogether, taking decades of institutional knowledge with them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As the destruction continued, public scrutiny began to influence the department’s actions. Two days after I wrote a \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-eric-under-threat/\">column on the defunding\u003c/a> of the Education Resources Information Center, an online library of critical educational documents known as ERIC, the department restarted it — albeit with only half its previous budget.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>May and June: Mixed signals\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>By late spring, the relentless onslaught of destruction shifted into a more confusing narrative of tentative reversals, with some contracts restarted and some staff rehired. The flagship “Condition of Education” report, a comprehensive data compilation about U.S. schools, students and teachers, wasn’t published by its June 1 deadline for the first time in history. Hours after I wrote \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-condition-of-education/\">about the missed deadline\u003c/a>, which is mandated by Congress, the department hastily posted some “coming soon” declarations on its website, but the information was late and incomplete. The 2025 report remains unfinished.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>McMahon recognized that she could not operate her agency on such a thin staff. In May, she disclosed that she had quietly brought back \u003ca href=\"https://www.nasfaa.org/news-item/36360/McMahon_Defends_President_Trump_s_Skinny_Budget_and_ED_s_Restructuring_at_House_Appropriations_Hearing#:~:text=During%20questioning%2C%20McMahon%20confirmed%20that%20the%20department,who%20were%20initially%20eliminated%20as%20part%20of\">74 of those who had\u003c/a> been fired. Five employees of the board that oversees NAEP were loaned to the Education Department to keep the 2026 exam in reading and math on track. Of course, these numbers are a tiny fraction of the 2,000 employees who were let go, but they were also a sign that the Trump administration saw value in some of the department’s work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>More reversals — at least partial ones — followed. Lawsuits and public scrutiny prompted the \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-restart-ed-contracts/\">restart of roughly 20 research and data contracts\u003c/a> and the preservation of data access for researchers. EDFacts was among them. Even so, restorations were often incomplete, sometimes no more than symbolic and with little practical effect.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In one example, the department said it was reinstating a contract for operating the What Works Clearinghouse, a website that informs schools about evidence-based teaching practices, a congressionally mandated function. But, in that same legal disclosure, the department also said that it was not planning to reinstate any of the contracts to produce new content for the site.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Throughout the Institute of Education Sciences, budgets were slashed, leaving programs under-resourced. And no new research was being reviewed or approved for funding. Trump’s budget proposed slashing IES’ 2026 budget by two-thirds, a move that Republican Senate appropriators would later reject.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, there was a glimmer of hope: At the end of May, McMahon tapped Amber Northern, a respected researcher, to lead an effort to revamp and modernize IES.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>July–September: A Supreme Court ruling\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>The fallout continued in July. NAEP scores were delayed because of a leadership vacuum. Matt Soldner, juggling multiple roles inside the Education Department, was assigned yet another one — acting director of NCES — in order to release reports. In August, the administration ordered a new data collection on college admissions, a politically charged project undertaken without sufficient staff or funding. Experts warned it could be weaponized to accuse universities of reverse discrimination. Still, it was an indication that the Trump administration had discovered that the Education Department could be useful in enforcing its political priorities, even if it wasn’t yet willing to fund them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>By September, some NAEP results were finally released, three months behind schedule. Higher education data slowly emerged, albeit incomplete. New job postings and public comment requests hinted at a slow rebuilding, but the system remained fragile. Across states, districts and universities, the consequences of eight months of disruption were already visible: delayed reports, stalled research and weakened trust in federal statistics.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the spring, a federal court in Boston ordered the return of fired staffers, but in July, the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration: The employees would remain fired. In addition, the vast majority of the research contracts would remain terminated while lawsuits slowly moved through the court system — which could take years. The damage was done and probably irreversible.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>October and November: Shutdown and uncertainty\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>On Oct. 1, everything stopped. More than \u003ca href=\"https://www.regulations.gov/docket/ED-2025-IES-0844\">400 comments\u003c/a> on how to reform IES poured in by the Oct. 15 deadline, but the department couldn’t post them because of the government shutdown.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On Nov. 18, McMahon announced she was outsourcing a host of Education Department functions to other agencies, creating an end-run around Congress because she wasn’t technically transferring these divisions. (Only Congress has the authority to eliminate the department or transfer its congressionally mandated activities elsewhere.) But research and statistics weren’t mentioned on McMahon’s outsourcing list, and the fate of IES remained unclear. The Education Department didn’t respond to my requests in November to interview an official about IES’ future.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Looking ahead\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Federal education research occupies a narrow but indispensable space. Unlike private foundations, which often chase novelty or seek to make a visible mark on the field, the federal system is designed for the slow, unglamorous work of establishing baseline data in reading and math, conducting large-scale evaluations and studying interventions that schools actually adopt. The system had its flaws — outdated methodologies, expensive vendor contracts, research adrift from classroom needs — and critics had long pushed for reform. But even those critics agreed that you don’t fix a system by gutting it midstream. Real reform requires investment, not indiscriminate cuts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some consequences are already evident. Almost no new grants or contracts for fresh research were awarded in 2025, meaning that a generation of studies may never materialize. There were exceptions. On the eve of the shutdown, IES quietly pushed through \u003ca href=\"https://ies.ed.gov/search-results?searchTerms=From%20Seedlings%20to%20Scale%20Grants%20Program%20(ALN%2084.305J)\">nine small education technology innovation grants\u003c/a>, initiated during the Biden administration, totaling $450,000. Then after the shutdown, IES announced \u003ca href=\"https://ies.ed.gov/funding/research/programs/small-business-innovation-research-sbir/sbir-awards?&mcontenttype=Contract&lawardstatus=Open&lyearaward=2025&pageNum=1\">$14 million in contracts \u003c/a>to 25 small businesses to develop and test new ed tech products.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Public confidence in federal data faltered as publications arrived late, abbreviated or not at all. What had once been the backbone of the American educational system began to feel fragile and unreliable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Partial restorations have taken place, but they reveal the limits of what can be reclaimed. The online library ERIC survived on half its funding; NAEP continued, though scaled back; and the regional laboratories that were slated to restart still haven’t. Inside IES, the workforce had been gutted, leaving few people to execute the remaining programs. These restorations highlight the importance of public scrutiny, lawsuits and reporting, yet they cannot undo the carnage.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The damage is cumulative and will unfold over years. Longitudinal studies were cut off midstream, multiyear research programs collapsed, and promising lines of inquiry vanished before they could mature. Careers were derailed, but the deeper loss belongs to the children and teachers who will never benefit from the knowledge that would have been generated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a fragmented system where every district makes its own choices, evidence is one of the few forces capable of offering coherence. And the statistics that track the nation’s schools — achievement, inequality, enrollment, finances — are irreplaceable. As it stands now, there is a lot we won’t know, measure or trust in the future of education.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The deeper irony is that the cuts did not simply weaken the field of education research, they compromised the country’s ability to see its own school system clearly. Reform may indeed be overdue. But rebuilding confidence in federal data — and recovering the institutional knowledge lost in a single chaotic year — will take far longer than the dismantling.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about the \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-trump-upended-education-research-2025/\">\u003cem>Trump administration and the Education Department\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "deborah-farmer-kris-how-awe-helps-us-flourish",
"title": "Deborah Farmer Kris: How Awe Helps Us Flourish",
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"headTitle": "Deborah Farmer Kris: How Awe Helps Us Flourish | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In recent years, educators and academics have studied many aspects of how students learn. The role of grit, resilience and growth mindset, for example, have been closely studied and strategies to develop them widely shared.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Additionally, the connection between \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/45201/why-emotions-are-integral-to-learning\">emotions and learning\u003c/a> has acquired more attention, as has the role of \u003ca href=\"https://ggsc.berkeley.edu/images/uploads/GGSC-JTF_White_Paper-Awe_FINAL.pdf\">awe in human development\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>K-12 educator Deborah Farmer Kris wrote about the benefits of awe in our daily lives in her book, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.teachercreatedmaterials.com/products/raising-awe-seekers-how-the-science-of-wonder-helps-our-kids-thrive-153673\">Raising Awe Seekers: How The Science of Wonder Helps our Kids Thrive,\u003c/a>” and joined the MindShift Podcast to talk about her surprising findings. She also has tips on how to\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/65520/how-experiencing-wonder-helps-kids-learn\"> cultivate awe in children and adults\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And as someone who has taught for two decades, she has advice on what educators can do to find the wonder in subjects they teach several times a day, year over year, to a large number of students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"200\" scrolling=\"no\" src=\"https://playlist.megaphone.fm?e=KQINC9148141574\" width=\"100%\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ki Sung:\u003c/strong> Welcome to the MindShift Podcast where we explore the future of learning and how we raise our kids. I’m Ki Sung. Today I’m speaking to longtime MindShift contributor Debra Farmer Kris. She’s a child development expert and author of the book, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.teachercreatedmaterials.com/products/raising-awe-seekers-how-the-science-of-wonder-helps-our-kids-thrive-153673\">Raising Awe Seekers: How The Science of Wonder Helps our Kids Thrive\u003c/a>.” During the depths of pandemic-era parenting, Deborah Farmer Kris discovered that awe is an often overlooked but powerful emotion. We’ll discuss how parents and educators can use awe to drive engagement with classroom materials and connection with the world around us. That conversation, coming up right after this.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ki Sung: \u003c/strong>Let’s start by diving right into the title of your book, “Raising Awe Seekers.” We hear the word awe and its variations like awesome all the time, but let’s take a step back and have you define for us what awe is and why it’s important for human development.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Deborah Farmer Kris :\u003c/strong> So first awe is an emotion, and that is important because as an emotion, it is something we can feel, uh, and we can recognize when we’re feeling it. And so when you look at emotions, um, you have kind of your core four, like happy, mad, sad, scared, and you have variations of those. So underneath mad, you might have irate or frustrated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Awe is more of a subset of surprise and a is what you feel when you encounter something that is vast. That is, um, wondrous, that is beyond your ordinary frame of reference. You might see something new that moves you, that touches you, that excites you. And the way researchers often talk about how you know you’re feeling it is things like, uh, chills or goosebumps for some people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Um, maybe your eyes involuntarily spring you with tears, uh, the sound. Wow. Or whoa, you know, you have somebody choose a half court shot and it goes in and people aren’t saying That was an amazing shot. Now they’re making a all guttural sound of Wow. And I think for children as a, as an educator and as a parent, I would put in that category, this wide eyes that it’s almost like they want to absorb what they’re seeing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The really neat thing about this particular emotion is that there is a wealth of research, uh, about 25 years now, most of it out of the \u003ca href=\"https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/topic/awe\">Greater Good Science Center at University of California Berkeley\u003c/a>,\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>and it turns out that, most good things we want for our kids from, uh, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/38260/whats-going-on-inside-the-brain-of-a-curious-child\">curiosity and cognitive development\u003c/a> to a sense of mental and emotional wellness, to a sense of connectedness, awe supports all of those outcomes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ki Sung:\u003c/strong> it’s interesting that the research has been out for 25 years or around for 25 years because, you know, we see a lot of different types of behaviors getting academic and media scrutiny, like, you know, the popular ones :grit, resilience, anxiety, growth, mindset, but all doesn’t quite get as much attention. Do you know why?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Deborah Farmer Kris :\u003c/strong> You know, I think there wasn’t really the popularized book for the moment, you know, \u003ca href=\"https://ggsc.berkeley.edu/images/uploads/GGSC-JTF_White_Paper-Awe_FINAL.pdf\">Dacher Keltner\u003c/a>, who’s the main researcher on this, one of the lead ones, a year and a half ago, came out with a \u003ca href=\"https://www.amazon.com/Awe-Science-Everyday-Wonder-Transform/dp/1984879685\">wonderful book\u003c/a> that has been getting more press.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So I think awe is beginning to have a bit of a moment now. But before then you had to kind of be like me, the, the kind of the nerd looking through the journals and looking through the articles and, you know, I was always kind of, because I write for Mind Shift and other sources on the lookout for good research that could be translated, for teachers and parents. And so while it was there, it really hadn’t had its, um, you know it, it’s social moment yet, and I think hopefully we’re at the beginnings of that right now\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ki Sung:\u003c/strong> What does awe have to do with, say, being able to pay attention in class, especially for kids who are overscheduled or have a high amount of screen time?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Deborah Farmer Kris :\u003c/strong> Mm-hmm. So where awe is really helpful. Academically is that it is highly correlated with curiosity. And one thing we know about curiosity from reams of research is that curiosity is a key indicator of academic success. ’cause it relates to internal motivation. I mean, think about it. You have curious about something, you want to learn it, you’re motivated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Um, and so the link between awe and curiosity is just really tight because you see something you don’t understand. And awe is often related to this wow moment of, you know, I’m, I’m looking at these stars and I’m wondering, I have these, I, I wish I knew more. And that feeling, that curiosity is what propels kids to, to want to learn. And one of the really cool pieces of research that I describe in the book was that when you’re curious about something, it actually primes the brain to remember things. And I, I think about this often with very young children, how you might have a 4-year-old who can memorize the names of all the dinosaurs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So they might be talking about the diplodocus. But they might be struggling with some of their other more basic vocabulary, but because their interest level is so high, they are primed to remember. And so really deep learning often happens at this intersection of, you know, of focus and interest. And so, um, one of the things they have.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Researchers have also found is that when the brain is primed with curiosity on wonder that even say 30 minutes later when you’re engaged in an activity that’s not as interesting, not as awe inspiring, your brain is still primed to learn. And so that gets me thinking about how it maybe a class is organized, right?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So am I doing something at the beginning of class that’s really capturing the imagination or the wonder, um, or the curiosity of students, uh. To prime their brain to remember something that later in the class may be important, but not necessarily as, um, wondrous for them. And so I think this is an interesting way for us to think about students who may not be as engaged,\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If they’re not as engaged in everything, can we find the one thing? Can we find the thing that excites them, that sparks that awe, that lights them up, and use that as kind of a foundation for other academic learning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ki Sung:\u003c/strong> I wanna talk about parents real quick. Um, when you talk about wonder, I don’t know if I have time for it, because we’re literally so busy. Um, what is the benefit of making the time to wonder, um, how should I exercise restraint in not wanting to rush, Um, tell me how to restrain myself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Deborah Farmer Kris :\u003c/strong> So researching awe has absolutely in subtle but profound ways transformed how I parent my kids, um, partly because it has made me more attentive to the world around me. Many of the sources of awe are deeply tied to our sensory system, so sounds, sight, smells, what we’re taking in. One of the great things about awe that you, you don’t need to go to the Sistine Chapel or the Grand Canyon, that it’s a very everyday ordinary emotion, and it’s more about putting ourselves in, in the path of it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So for me as a parent, the first thing I had to do was make sure I was making some space for it myself. And the simplest way I, I did this, um, was by adopting, um, one of the practices from research, which was taking an a walk. Now I have a dog, so I am outside with the dog at least three times a day, usually morning, midday, and evening.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And I made the decision that one of those. Times I was outside, even for five or 10 minutes, I would not have my phone on, I would not be listening to music. I would just be paying attention. I’d be looking up, uh, I would be looking at the trees. Um, and I, I, I literally call it my awe walk, right? Five minutes a day, 10 minutes a day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And I noticed that. Over the course of nearly two years now, this has transformed my relationship with my neighborhood. And I don’t just mean my neighbors, although being outside has helped me connect with them. But the trees, the, the birds who I really didn’t even notice were in the neighborhood. And now I can identify so many of them, the, the changing of the seasons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Um, and then I made the very conscious decision as a parent that when I did notice these things, I was going to be more active about sharing them. Uh, and that means that, you know, if I hear a story that of say a human being kind or brave, which is a key source of awe and wonder. Um, I’m gonna talk to my kids about it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Um, if I see a really beautiful sunset, I am going to be the mom who says, come out and look. Just the other day we were driving home and there was a incredible double rainbow. And I pulled over, I was driving my son home from piano lessons and behind me another parent pulled over with their four or 5-year-old and the two of us were standing out there with our two children in the drizzling rain looking at this gorgeous rainbow.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And I just, you know, thought this was a moment where it’s gonna take me two minutes longer to get home, but this will be something my child remembers where typically a drive home you don’t remember. so it, it’s really not about the big experience, it’s about the little moments in the day of the song, the what you see, the smell that you pause, you notice, and then you take the next step to share.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Uh, because one of the things I have found slowly over time is that because I do so much sharing of my awe moments, and Itry to just be super authentic in how I do it, because I. Do love sharing and talking to my kids. They are much more likely to share them with me, to tell me their stories or to send me the picture they find or the song they think I will like.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so for me, it becomes almost this very authentic way of just sharing our day together and paying attention to what lights me up and what lights my kids up. And yes, that requires a little bit of slowing down, but it doesn’t require. You know, this is gonna be a day of no screens and nothing, or we’re gonna get, take an entirely unplugged vacation for a week, which none of us have the time or resources to do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ki Sung:\u003c/strong> It’s quite, um. Uh, contrast I think to maybe how our brains are wired to think about only bad things that are very sticky or, um, uh, the worst things that can happen to us. I think a lot of us are just inclined to, um, you know, think negatively, um, and dwell on those things, but seeing the beautiful positive things in the world, um, may also provide a more accurate. Picture or depiction of our daily lives that there are beautiful wonder, wonderful things around us if we just take the time, uh, time to look.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Deborah Farmer Kris :\u003c/strong> Yeah, sometimes I describe awe as the ultimate and emotion. So, you know, awe is different than gratitude. Gratitude is actually, um, it can be quite a cerebral. Emotion where you think back and even though in the moment you didn’t appreciate it, now you do and you’re grateful for that. Um, awe is very involuntary emotion, right?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You see something beautiful, you feel it. And you know, for me, I call it the “and” emotion because you know, I may be having a really tough day and I’m disturbed by something on the news and just before coming up here, Ki, there was this mass of robins, um, outside that was chattering so loudly. I didn’t actually think they were robins because it was midday. And normally they’re not as that loud midday. And I pulled out my Merlin app to see what they were, and I’m watching them hovering. And I’m wondering, like, I actually Googled, like, why would there be the swarm of Robin’s midday? Um, and it was just a, a brief moment where it was. Again, this, you know, the world is difficult. The world is messy. The world is complicated, and people are doing brave, kind, wonderful things every day. And there are artists making incredible works that will move us. And there’s a natural world out there that is. You know, still full of such mystery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so it’s not, you know, as somebody would talk about toxic positivity saying, you know, just look on the bright side, it’s more of just acknowledging that you can have a difficult day and, you know, taking a step outside, taking a deep breath and hearing that bird song or getting that text from a friend who brings you a moment of, of, of warmth and kindness. Um, those moments can coexist.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ki Sung:\u003c/strong> So speaking of bird song or something that has that resonant rhythm, um, you interviewed Dacher Keltner of UC, Berkeley, and he had some advice on finding awe that you wrote about a. In your book, uh, can you read to me what his advice was?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Deborah Farmer Kris :\u003c/strong> Yes, I actually structure it like a poem, uh, in the book. And while I was interviewing him, he was actually out on a walk, which I find quite lovely. And so I said to him, you know, what is your best advice for finding awe? And this is what he said. How do you find awe? You allow unstructured time. How do you find awe?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You wander, you drift through. You take a walk with no aim. How do you find awe? You slow things down. You allow for mystery and open questions rather than test driven answers, you allow people to engage in the humanities of dance and visual art and music.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ki Sung:\u003c/strong> That really is beautiful. so let’s break it down a little bit. Uh, you have spent 20 years as a K to 12 teacher. What does awe look like for the different age groups? for elementary years, the middle school years, or maybe even the high school years?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Deborah Farmer Kris :\u003c/strong> That’s a great question, and I think to answer this, I, I first need to just very briefly talk about the sources because some of these sources will look different at different ages. So when you think about. General categories where people find awe. You have nature and music, the arts, big questions, big ideas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Uh, that feeling of belonging and this, uh, this life cycle. And of course kinda human goodness. So people being kind and brave, and I think at different ages, different of those take priorities. So, you know, for a 4-year-old, one of the things they’re really driven by are why questions. You know, why is this happening?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In fact, there’s some research. That shows, depending on the source, that four year olds can ask, you know, between kind of 70 and a hundred questions a day. Uh, and if you’re raising a kid that age that may actually feel like, you know, a low estimate, but they’re really trying to understand their world and so they’re constantly asking questions, engaging with their world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so. That’s really exciting and, and in fact, one of the challenges I think for educators and parents are how do you get high schoolers to still want to have that sense of wonder and engagement with their world? You know, when your kids are hitting the, the middle of high school years, the. The wonder of belonging.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Um, there’s a, an expression from Émile Durkheim called Collective Effervescence. Um, that is really key because they want to be part of a group. And collective effervescence basically means that you’re part of a group that is doing, uh, engaged harmoniously toward a common good cause. And so you might think of a sports team or a choral group, or even a Model UN or d and d or robotics club where people are working together toward this common aim, and that feels really good. Um, so when kids, especially teenagers, don’t find that they’re missing out on a. A source of wonder that they’re actually biologically primed for, because this is an age where they’re pulling away from parents and looking to be part of a peer group.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so that becomes a really important thing to help kids navigate. How do you find the in-person, peer group?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Deborah Farmer Kris :\u003c/strong> Um, I think. You know, for any age group being out in nature, um, engaging with art, finding music that speaks to them and that may change dramatically their musical tastes. Um. Those are all kind of ready-made sources of awe that we can be tapping into as, as teachers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of the things I really love about the whole developmental range of childhood is that interest change and that what makes them tick, what lights them up, change, and, um I’ve taught almost every grade K through 12, and really one of my favorites is middle school, partly because it’s such a time of intense change.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And I think for parents and educators, it can feel tricky when it looks like they are, um, letting go of things that used to make them happy with sources of awe and, and, and wonder for them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so it might look like they’re just getting jaded or cynical when in fact they’re undergoing a very natural transition into. Perhaps what is going to be the new face. And so being patient with them and kind of going with it and getting curious, um, have practicing some radical curiosity about, okay, so your kid doesn’t really like soccer anymore after all these years on a, you know, soccer squad, but it looks like they might be interested in joining, um, a drama troupe. And so I’m gonna take a deep breath and go with that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Or there might be a sticky time in between where they don’t know who their friend group is and what their interests are. But that is such a great identity formation time, and I feel like awe and wonder are a great tool for parents during that identity formation because if you can start just paying attention to, okay, so what is sparking their interests? What does light them up? What? Where can I see that their eyes did grow wide? And maybe we explore that a little bit. Maybe it sticks, maybe it doesn’t, and that’s okay. But these are all pathways in to mental wellness, emotional wellness, and even academic growth.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ki Sung:\u003c/strong> That sounds like great advice and you cited, uh, Benjamin Bloom’s research, I believe, when describing that spark.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Deborah Farmer Kris :\u003c/strong> Yeah\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ki Sung:\u003c/strong> Um, and parents, you know, encouraging kids along that path. Uh. I do have a question for you, for educators. What amazes me whenever I observe teachers in the classroom is how they can be still enthusiastic teaching the same topic, bringing the sense of awe to 30 different kids six times a day for the many, many years they’ve been teaching. How do awe and wonder continue to exist in a classroom when one might get a little tired of doing the same thing over and over again?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Deborah Farmer Kris :\u003c/strong> I love that question. I was an English teacher for years as well as an elementary school teacher. And I, I think between reflecting on my own teaching experience. And now this research, I had a bit of an aha moment\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>uh, what kept it fresh was watching my students first encounter with it. their moments of awe, I remember a student coming in and we had just finished Taylor two cities, and she came in and she was crying and she was angry and she threw the book down. She had finished the book in the hallway and she said. It’s not supposed to end this way. And I thought, you know, I’ve read this book a dozen times, but for the first time here, she’s experiencing this emotional catharsis of seeing this kind of final sacrifice of the, the protagonist of this book. And, um, you know, that’s a really exciting thing as a teacher.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You know, I, I write about my freshman year in college ’cause it’s still so transformational to me. I had this professor who took us out of the classroom. He was an education professor, but he took us to the Museum of Fine Arts. He took us to the Isabella Stewart Garden Museum in Boston. And, um. At one point, uh, you know, I, it was several weeks later I was reading, uh, I, I went to the Isabella Stewart Gardner to, to do some homework.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was cold in Boston. It was a beautiful courtyard. Um, and he ended up capturing a picture of, of me reading something and giving that to me as a gift. This kind of emblem of, you know, me reading a book in an art museum. And I actually kept that picture in my classroom for years as kind of this reminder of a teacher who saw me, a teacher, introduced me to beauty, uh, and that that was the type, even though I didn’t have the word awe for it at the time, it was absolutely what drew me back to that place. Um, and so I knew almost intuitively that that was the emotion that I wanted to connect with, with the students. And so, you know, if I am bored with what I’m teaching, I need to freshen it up a little bit. Um, but it may be that I just. I also need to tune into the kids in front of me in a way that what sparks me is their spark, um, more than the content itself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ki Sung:\u003c/strong> I think what I’m hearing you say is awe is this connective feeling that motivates you, motivates the students, um, and maybe motivates a lot of people to shape their worlds into something different than what they had before or had been expecting for themselves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Deborah Farmer Kris :\u003c/strong> I think that’s fair because one of the characteristics of awe is what scientists call the small self, uh, which is when you know. I think about this with teenagers where they, they think everybody’s staring at them. Uh, I think a lot of adults feel that too, right? I, I made a mistake. Everybody’s thinking about that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And anything that helps you zoom out and get a broader perspective, uh, is something that can help quiet that kind of internal chatter that we have, um, and just kind of realign. Our understanding of the world and our place in it. And one of my favorite pieces of research, uh, and I, I share this with kids a lot and they love it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/strong>Um, it, it was conducted at uc, Berkeley, and there’s a science building, which from the back is really a nondescript brick building. Nothing particularly awe inspiring about that architecture. But if you turn your body around, there’s this grove of, um, old growth trees. And so the researchers had their subjects one by one come out and either face the nondescript brick building or face the beautiful grove of trees.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And then after a span of time, somebody else in the study, unbeknownst to the test subject, wanders by and drops things. And they were measuring like, well, who’s gonna help the stranger pick up their things? And it turns out. At a statistically significant level, those who were staring at the trees, uh, were more likely to help a stranger than those staring at a brick building.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And what I love about the study is that it’s just, it’s such a metaphor for life in the sense that we can be standing in the exact same place. Right, the same circumstances, but where we direct our gaze, um, what we choose to see also can increase our sense of connectedness, um, to people around us. And one of the other things we know is that, um performing acts of kindness, right? That is a boost to wellbeing as well. Uh, that when somebody is feeling lonely or down or depressed, that acts of service turned out to be a really, really effective and powerful intervention. And so, you know, I. Researchers speculate. Why have we evolved to feel this?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because all feelings have functions, right? Disgust is there because we don’t want to eat the rotten chicken and fear motivates us to avoid danger. Uh, so the hypothesis is that awe is designed to help us um be more connected to our communities, um, to kind of bind people toward a common purpose, right? If you know, I, I think about the eclipse and how I was near the path of totality and how the entire neighborhood came out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And here we are, the whole neighborhood staring up at the sky together. Like these are moments. Um. You think of all the people who, who go to a World Series game, um, to cheer together that are, are binding us as a community. And those are things that help us with wellbeing and even survival. And so that’s, that’s a hypothesis and it’s, it’s one I, I think we should continue to explore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ki Sung:\u003c/strong> Deborah, thanks so much for bringing awe to our attention. I hope that just by bringing this topic into the world or sharing it more with a wider audience, that more people create this positive impact to create a better world. It sounds like we’re already on our way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Deborah Farmer Kris :\u003c/strong> Thanks so much.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ki Sung: \u003c/strong>Debra Farmer Kris is a child development expert and author of “\u003ca href=\"https://www.teachercreatedmaterials.com/products/raising-awe-seekers-how-the-science-of-wonder-helps-our-kids-thrive-153673\">Raising Awe Seekers, how The Science of Wonder Helps our Kids Thrive\u003c/a>.” She’s also a longtime MindShift contributor who’s written a lot about emotion so I encourage you to look up those stories. And she also works for PBS Kids as a show consultant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You can also check out her children’s book series “All the Time” and “I See You”.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ki Sung\u003c/strong>\u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/strong>The MindShift team includes me, Ki Sung, Nimah Gobir, Marlena Jackson-Retondo and Marnette Federis. Our editor is Chris Hambrick. Seth Samuel is our sound designer. Jen Chien is our head of podcasts. Katie Sprenger is podcast operations manager and Ethan Toven Lindsey is our editor in chief. We receive additional support from Maha Sanad.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MindShift is supported in part by the generosity of the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and members of KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. San Francisco Northern California Local.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thanks for listening to MindShift.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"title": "Deborah Farmer Kris: How Awe Helps Us Flourish | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003ci>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/i>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In recent years, educators and academics have studied many aspects of how students learn. The role of grit, resilience and growth mindset, for example, have been closely studied and strategies to develop them widely shared.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Additionally, the connection between \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/45201/why-emotions-are-integral-to-learning\">emotions and learning\u003c/a> has acquired more attention, as has the role of \u003ca href=\"https://ggsc.berkeley.edu/images/uploads/GGSC-JTF_White_Paper-Awe_FINAL.pdf\">awe in human development\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>K-12 educator Deborah Farmer Kris wrote about the benefits of awe in our daily lives in her book, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.teachercreatedmaterials.com/products/raising-awe-seekers-how-the-science-of-wonder-helps-our-kids-thrive-153673\">Raising Awe Seekers: How The Science of Wonder Helps our Kids Thrive,\u003c/a>” and joined the MindShift Podcast to talk about her surprising findings. She also has tips on how to\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/65520/how-experiencing-wonder-helps-kids-learn\"> cultivate awe in children and adults\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And as someone who has taught for two decades, she has advice on what educators can do to find the wonder in subjects they teach several times a day, year over year, to a large number of students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-content post-body\">\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ki Sung:\u003c/strong> Welcome to the MindShift Podcast where we explore the future of learning and how we raise our kids. I’m Ki Sung. Today I’m speaking to longtime MindShift contributor Debra Farmer Kris. She’s a child development expert and author of the book, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.teachercreatedmaterials.com/products/raising-awe-seekers-how-the-science-of-wonder-helps-our-kids-thrive-153673\">Raising Awe Seekers: How The Science of Wonder Helps our Kids Thrive\u003c/a>.” During the depths of pandemic-era parenting, Deborah Farmer Kris discovered that awe is an often overlooked but powerful emotion. We’ll discuss how parents and educators can use awe to drive engagement with classroom materials and connection with the world around us. That conversation, coming up right after this.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ki Sung: \u003c/strong>Let’s start by diving right into the title of your book, “Raising Awe Seekers.” We hear the word awe and its variations like awesome all the time, but let’s take a step back and have you define for us what awe is and why it’s important for human development.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Deborah Farmer Kris :\u003c/strong> So first awe is an emotion, and that is important because as an emotion, it is something we can feel, uh, and we can recognize when we’re feeling it. And so when you look at emotions, um, you have kind of your core four, like happy, mad, sad, scared, and you have variations of those. So underneath mad, you might have irate or frustrated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Awe is more of a subset of surprise and a is what you feel when you encounter something that is vast. That is, um, wondrous, that is beyond your ordinary frame of reference. You might see something new that moves you, that touches you, that excites you. And the way researchers often talk about how you know you’re feeling it is things like, uh, chills or goosebumps for some people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Um, maybe your eyes involuntarily spring you with tears, uh, the sound. Wow. Or whoa, you know, you have somebody choose a half court shot and it goes in and people aren’t saying That was an amazing shot. Now they’re making a all guttural sound of Wow. And I think for children as a, as an educator and as a parent, I would put in that category, this wide eyes that it’s almost like they want to absorb what they’re seeing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The really neat thing about this particular emotion is that there is a wealth of research, uh, about 25 years now, most of it out of the \u003ca href=\"https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/topic/awe\">Greater Good Science Center at University of California Berkeley\u003c/a>,\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>and it turns out that, most good things we want for our kids from, uh, \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/38260/whats-going-on-inside-the-brain-of-a-curious-child\">curiosity and cognitive development\u003c/a> to a sense of mental and emotional wellness, to a sense of connectedness, awe supports all of those outcomes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ki Sung:\u003c/strong> it’s interesting that the research has been out for 25 years or around for 25 years because, you know, we see a lot of different types of behaviors getting academic and media scrutiny, like, you know, the popular ones :grit, resilience, anxiety, growth, mindset, but all doesn’t quite get as much attention. Do you know why?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Deborah Farmer Kris :\u003c/strong> You know, I think there wasn’t really the popularized book for the moment, you know, \u003ca href=\"https://ggsc.berkeley.edu/images/uploads/GGSC-JTF_White_Paper-Awe_FINAL.pdf\">Dacher Keltner\u003c/a>, who’s the main researcher on this, one of the lead ones, a year and a half ago, came out with a \u003ca href=\"https://www.amazon.com/Awe-Science-Everyday-Wonder-Transform/dp/1984879685\">wonderful book\u003c/a> that has been getting more press.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So I think awe is beginning to have a bit of a moment now. But before then you had to kind of be like me, the, the kind of the nerd looking through the journals and looking through the articles and, you know, I was always kind of, because I write for Mind Shift and other sources on the lookout for good research that could be translated, for teachers and parents. And so while it was there, it really hadn’t had its, um, you know it, it’s social moment yet, and I think hopefully we’re at the beginnings of that right now\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ki Sung:\u003c/strong> What does awe have to do with, say, being able to pay attention in class, especially for kids who are overscheduled or have a high amount of screen time?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Deborah Farmer Kris :\u003c/strong> Mm-hmm. So where awe is really helpful. Academically is that it is highly correlated with curiosity. And one thing we know about curiosity from reams of research is that curiosity is a key indicator of academic success. ’cause it relates to internal motivation. I mean, think about it. You have curious about something, you want to learn it, you’re motivated.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Um, and so the link between awe and curiosity is just really tight because you see something you don’t understand. And awe is often related to this wow moment of, you know, I’m, I’m looking at these stars and I’m wondering, I have these, I, I wish I knew more. And that feeling, that curiosity is what propels kids to, to want to learn. And one of the really cool pieces of research that I describe in the book was that when you’re curious about something, it actually primes the brain to remember things. And I, I think about this often with very young children, how you might have a 4-year-old who can memorize the names of all the dinosaurs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So they might be talking about the diplodocus. But they might be struggling with some of their other more basic vocabulary, but because their interest level is so high, they are primed to remember. And so really deep learning often happens at this intersection of, you know, of focus and interest. And so, um, one of the things they have.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Researchers have also found is that when the brain is primed with curiosity on wonder that even say 30 minutes later when you’re engaged in an activity that’s not as interesting, not as awe inspiring, your brain is still primed to learn. And so that gets me thinking about how it maybe a class is organized, right?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So am I doing something at the beginning of class that’s really capturing the imagination or the wonder, um, or the curiosity of students, uh. To prime their brain to remember something that later in the class may be important, but not necessarily as, um, wondrous for them. And so I think this is an interesting way for us to think about students who may not be as engaged,\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If they’re not as engaged in everything, can we find the one thing? Can we find the thing that excites them, that sparks that awe, that lights them up, and use that as kind of a foundation for other academic learning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ki Sung:\u003c/strong> I wanna talk about parents real quick. Um, when you talk about wonder, I don’t know if I have time for it, because we’re literally so busy. Um, what is the benefit of making the time to wonder, um, how should I exercise restraint in not wanting to rush, Um, tell me how to restrain myself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Deborah Farmer Kris :\u003c/strong> So researching awe has absolutely in subtle but profound ways transformed how I parent my kids, um, partly because it has made me more attentive to the world around me. Many of the sources of awe are deeply tied to our sensory system, so sounds, sight, smells, what we’re taking in. One of the great things about awe that you, you don’t need to go to the Sistine Chapel or the Grand Canyon, that it’s a very everyday ordinary emotion, and it’s more about putting ourselves in, in the path of it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So for me as a parent, the first thing I had to do was make sure I was making some space for it myself. And the simplest way I, I did this, um, was by adopting, um, one of the practices from research, which was taking an a walk. Now I have a dog, so I am outside with the dog at least three times a day, usually morning, midday, and evening.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And I made the decision that one of those. Times I was outside, even for five or 10 minutes, I would not have my phone on, I would not be listening to music. I would just be paying attention. I’d be looking up, uh, I would be looking at the trees. Um, and I, I, I literally call it my awe walk, right? Five minutes a day, 10 minutes a day.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And I noticed that. Over the course of nearly two years now, this has transformed my relationship with my neighborhood. And I don’t just mean my neighbors, although being outside has helped me connect with them. But the trees, the, the birds who I really didn’t even notice were in the neighborhood. And now I can identify so many of them, the, the changing of the seasons.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Um, and then I made the very conscious decision as a parent that when I did notice these things, I was going to be more active about sharing them. Uh, and that means that, you know, if I hear a story that of say a human being kind or brave, which is a key source of awe and wonder. Um, I’m gonna talk to my kids about it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Um, if I see a really beautiful sunset, I am going to be the mom who says, come out and look. Just the other day we were driving home and there was a incredible double rainbow. And I pulled over, I was driving my son home from piano lessons and behind me another parent pulled over with their four or 5-year-old and the two of us were standing out there with our two children in the drizzling rain looking at this gorgeous rainbow.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And I just, you know, thought this was a moment where it’s gonna take me two minutes longer to get home, but this will be something my child remembers where typically a drive home you don’t remember. so it, it’s really not about the big experience, it’s about the little moments in the day of the song, the what you see, the smell that you pause, you notice, and then you take the next step to share.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Uh, because one of the things I have found slowly over time is that because I do so much sharing of my awe moments, and Itry to just be super authentic in how I do it, because I. Do love sharing and talking to my kids. They are much more likely to share them with me, to tell me their stories or to send me the picture they find or the song they think I will like.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so for me, it becomes almost this very authentic way of just sharing our day together and paying attention to what lights me up and what lights my kids up. And yes, that requires a little bit of slowing down, but it doesn’t require. You know, this is gonna be a day of no screens and nothing, or we’re gonna get, take an entirely unplugged vacation for a week, which none of us have the time or resources to do.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ki Sung:\u003c/strong> It’s quite, um. Uh, contrast I think to maybe how our brains are wired to think about only bad things that are very sticky or, um, uh, the worst things that can happen to us. I think a lot of us are just inclined to, um, you know, think negatively, um, and dwell on those things, but seeing the beautiful positive things in the world, um, may also provide a more accurate. Picture or depiction of our daily lives that there are beautiful wonder, wonderful things around us if we just take the time, uh, time to look.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Deborah Farmer Kris :\u003c/strong> Yeah, sometimes I describe awe as the ultimate and emotion. So, you know, awe is different than gratitude. Gratitude is actually, um, it can be quite a cerebral. Emotion where you think back and even though in the moment you didn’t appreciate it, now you do and you’re grateful for that. Um, awe is very involuntary emotion, right?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You see something beautiful, you feel it. And you know, for me, I call it the “and” emotion because you know, I may be having a really tough day and I’m disturbed by something on the news and just before coming up here, Ki, there was this mass of robins, um, outside that was chattering so loudly. I didn’t actually think they were robins because it was midday. And normally they’re not as that loud midday. And I pulled out my Merlin app to see what they were, and I’m watching them hovering. And I’m wondering, like, I actually Googled, like, why would there be the swarm of Robin’s midday? Um, and it was just a, a brief moment where it was. Again, this, you know, the world is difficult. The world is messy. The world is complicated, and people are doing brave, kind, wonderful things every day. And there are artists making incredible works that will move us. And there’s a natural world out there that is. You know, still full of such mystery.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so it’s not, you know, as somebody would talk about toxic positivity saying, you know, just look on the bright side, it’s more of just acknowledging that you can have a difficult day and, you know, taking a step outside, taking a deep breath and hearing that bird song or getting that text from a friend who brings you a moment of, of, of warmth and kindness. Um, those moments can coexist.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ki Sung:\u003c/strong> So speaking of bird song or something that has that resonant rhythm, um, you interviewed Dacher Keltner of UC, Berkeley, and he had some advice on finding awe that you wrote about a. In your book, uh, can you read to me what his advice was?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Deborah Farmer Kris :\u003c/strong> Yes, I actually structure it like a poem, uh, in the book. And while I was interviewing him, he was actually out on a walk, which I find quite lovely. And so I said to him, you know, what is your best advice for finding awe? And this is what he said. How do you find awe? You allow unstructured time. How do you find awe?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You wander, you drift through. You take a walk with no aim. How do you find awe? You slow things down. You allow for mystery and open questions rather than test driven answers, you allow people to engage in the humanities of dance and visual art and music.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ki Sung:\u003c/strong> That really is beautiful. so let’s break it down a little bit. Uh, you have spent 20 years as a K to 12 teacher. What does awe look like for the different age groups? for elementary years, the middle school years, or maybe even the high school years?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Deborah Farmer Kris :\u003c/strong> That’s a great question, and I think to answer this, I, I first need to just very briefly talk about the sources because some of these sources will look different at different ages. So when you think about. General categories where people find awe. You have nature and music, the arts, big questions, big ideas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Uh, that feeling of belonging and this, uh, this life cycle. And of course kinda human goodness. So people being kind and brave, and I think at different ages, different of those take priorities. So, you know, for a 4-year-old, one of the things they’re really driven by are why questions. You know, why is this happening?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In fact, there’s some research. That shows, depending on the source, that four year olds can ask, you know, between kind of 70 and a hundred questions a day. Uh, and if you’re raising a kid that age that may actually feel like, you know, a low estimate, but they’re really trying to understand their world and so they’re constantly asking questions, engaging with their world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so. That’s really exciting and, and in fact, one of the challenges I think for educators and parents are how do you get high schoolers to still want to have that sense of wonder and engagement with their world? You know, when your kids are hitting the, the middle of high school years, the. The wonder of belonging.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Um, there’s a, an expression from Émile Durkheim called Collective Effervescence. Um, that is really key because they want to be part of a group. And collective effervescence basically means that you’re part of a group that is doing, uh, engaged harmoniously toward a common good cause. And so you might think of a sports team or a choral group, or even a Model UN or d and d or robotics club where people are working together toward this common aim, and that feels really good. Um, so when kids, especially teenagers, don’t find that they’re missing out on a. A source of wonder that they’re actually biologically primed for, because this is an age where they’re pulling away from parents and looking to be part of a peer group.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so that becomes a really important thing to help kids navigate. How do you find the in-person, peer group?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Deborah Farmer Kris :\u003c/strong> Um, I think. You know, for any age group being out in nature, um, engaging with art, finding music that speaks to them and that may change dramatically their musical tastes. Um. Those are all kind of ready-made sources of awe that we can be tapping into as, as teachers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of the things I really love about the whole developmental range of childhood is that interest change and that what makes them tick, what lights them up, change, and, um I’ve taught almost every grade K through 12, and really one of my favorites is middle school, partly because it’s such a time of intense change.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And I think for parents and educators, it can feel tricky when it looks like they are, um, letting go of things that used to make them happy with sources of awe and, and, and wonder for them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And so it might look like they’re just getting jaded or cynical when in fact they’re undergoing a very natural transition into. Perhaps what is going to be the new face. And so being patient with them and kind of going with it and getting curious, um, have practicing some radical curiosity about, okay, so your kid doesn’t really like soccer anymore after all these years on a, you know, soccer squad, but it looks like they might be interested in joining, um, a drama troupe. And so I’m gonna take a deep breath and go with that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Or there might be a sticky time in between where they don’t know who their friend group is and what their interests are. But that is such a great identity formation time, and I feel like awe and wonder are a great tool for parents during that identity formation because if you can start just paying attention to, okay, so what is sparking their interests? What does light them up? What? Where can I see that their eyes did grow wide? And maybe we explore that a little bit. Maybe it sticks, maybe it doesn’t, and that’s okay. But these are all pathways in to mental wellness, emotional wellness, and even academic growth.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ki Sung:\u003c/strong> That sounds like great advice and you cited, uh, Benjamin Bloom’s research, I believe, when describing that spark.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Deborah Farmer Kris :\u003c/strong> Yeah\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ki Sung:\u003c/strong> Um, and parents, you know, encouraging kids along that path. Uh. I do have a question for you, for educators. What amazes me whenever I observe teachers in the classroom is how they can be still enthusiastic teaching the same topic, bringing the sense of awe to 30 different kids six times a day for the many, many years they’ve been teaching. How do awe and wonder continue to exist in a classroom when one might get a little tired of doing the same thing over and over again?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Deborah Farmer Kris :\u003c/strong> I love that question. I was an English teacher for years as well as an elementary school teacher. And I, I think between reflecting on my own teaching experience. And now this research, I had a bit of an aha moment\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>uh, what kept it fresh was watching my students first encounter with it. their moments of awe, I remember a student coming in and we had just finished Taylor two cities, and she came in and she was crying and she was angry and she threw the book down. She had finished the book in the hallway and she said. It’s not supposed to end this way. And I thought, you know, I’ve read this book a dozen times, but for the first time here, she’s experiencing this emotional catharsis of seeing this kind of final sacrifice of the, the protagonist of this book. And, um, you know, that’s a really exciting thing as a teacher.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You know, I, I write about my freshman year in college ’cause it’s still so transformational to me. I had this professor who took us out of the classroom. He was an education professor, but he took us to the Museum of Fine Arts. He took us to the Isabella Stewart Garden Museum in Boston. And, um. At one point, uh, you know, I, it was several weeks later I was reading, uh, I, I went to the Isabella Stewart Gardner to, to do some homework.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was cold in Boston. It was a beautiful courtyard. Um, and he ended up capturing a picture of, of me reading something and giving that to me as a gift. This kind of emblem of, you know, me reading a book in an art museum. And I actually kept that picture in my classroom for years as kind of this reminder of a teacher who saw me, a teacher, introduced me to beauty, uh, and that that was the type, even though I didn’t have the word awe for it at the time, it was absolutely what drew me back to that place. Um, and so I knew almost intuitively that that was the emotion that I wanted to connect with, with the students. And so, you know, if I am bored with what I’m teaching, I need to freshen it up a little bit. Um, but it may be that I just. I also need to tune into the kids in front of me in a way that what sparks me is their spark, um, more than the content itself.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ki Sung:\u003c/strong> I think what I’m hearing you say is awe is this connective feeling that motivates you, motivates the students, um, and maybe motivates a lot of people to shape their worlds into something different than what they had before or had been expecting for themselves.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Deborah Farmer Kris :\u003c/strong> I think that’s fair because one of the characteristics of awe is what scientists call the small self, uh, which is when you know. I think about this with teenagers where they, they think everybody’s staring at them. Uh, I think a lot of adults feel that too, right? I, I made a mistake. Everybody’s thinking about that.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And anything that helps you zoom out and get a broader perspective, uh, is something that can help quiet that kind of internal chatter that we have, um, and just kind of realign. Our understanding of the world and our place in it. And one of my favorite pieces of research, uh, and I, I share this with kids a lot and they love it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/strong>Um, it, it was conducted at uc, Berkeley, and there’s a science building, which from the back is really a nondescript brick building. Nothing particularly awe inspiring about that architecture. But if you turn your body around, there’s this grove of, um, old growth trees. And so the researchers had their subjects one by one come out and either face the nondescript brick building or face the beautiful grove of trees.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And then after a span of time, somebody else in the study, unbeknownst to the test subject, wanders by and drops things. And they were measuring like, well, who’s gonna help the stranger pick up their things? And it turns out. At a statistically significant level, those who were staring at the trees, uh, were more likely to help a stranger than those staring at a brick building.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And what I love about the study is that it’s just, it’s such a metaphor for life in the sense that we can be standing in the exact same place. Right, the same circumstances, but where we direct our gaze, um, what we choose to see also can increase our sense of connectedness, um, to people around us. And one of the other things we know is that, um performing acts of kindness, right? That is a boost to wellbeing as well. Uh, that when somebody is feeling lonely or down or depressed, that acts of service turned out to be a really, really effective and powerful intervention. And so, you know, I. Researchers speculate. Why have we evolved to feel this?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because all feelings have functions, right? Disgust is there because we don’t want to eat the rotten chicken and fear motivates us to avoid danger. Uh, so the hypothesis is that awe is designed to help us um be more connected to our communities, um, to kind of bind people toward a common purpose, right? If you know, I, I think about the eclipse and how I was near the path of totality and how the entire neighborhood came out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And here we are, the whole neighborhood staring up at the sky together. Like these are moments. Um. You think of all the people who, who go to a World Series game, um, to cheer together that are, are binding us as a community. And those are things that help us with wellbeing and even survival. And so that’s, that’s a hypothesis and it’s, it’s one I, I think we should continue to explore.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ki Sung:\u003c/strong> Deborah, thanks so much for bringing awe to our attention. I hope that just by bringing this topic into the world or sharing it more with a wider audience, that more people create this positive impact to create a better world. It sounds like we’re already on our way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Deborah Farmer Kris :\u003c/strong> Thanks so much.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ki Sung: \u003c/strong>Debra Farmer Kris is a child development expert and author of “\u003ca href=\"https://www.teachercreatedmaterials.com/products/raising-awe-seekers-how-the-science-of-wonder-helps-our-kids-thrive-153673\">Raising Awe Seekers, how The Science of Wonder Helps our Kids Thrive\u003c/a>.” She’s also a longtime MindShift contributor who’s written a lot about emotion so I encourage you to look up those stories. And she also works for PBS Kids as a show consultant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You can also check out her children’s book series “All the Time” and “I See You”.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ki Sung\u003c/strong>\u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\n\u003c/strong>The MindShift team includes me, Ki Sung, Nimah Gobir, Marlena Jackson-Retondo and Marnette Federis. Our editor is Chris Hambrick. Seth Samuel is our sound designer. Jen Chien is our head of podcasts. Katie Sprenger is podcast operations manager and Ethan Toven Lindsey is our editor in chief. We receive additional support from Maha Sanad.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MindShift is supported in part by the generosity of the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation and members of KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. San Francisco Northern California Local.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Thanks for listening to MindShift.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>"
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"content": "\u003cp>Even with the government shut down, lots of people are thinking about how to reimagine federal education research. Public comments on how to reform the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the Education Department’s research and statistics arm, were due on Oct. 15. A total of 434 suggestions were submitted, but no one can read them because the department isn’t allowed to post them publicly until the government reopens. (We know the number because the \u003ca href=\"https://www.regulations.gov/docket/ED-2025-IES-0844\">comment entry page\u003c/a> has an automatic counter.)\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>A complex numbers game \u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>There’s broad agreement across the political spectrum that federal education statistics are essential. Even many critics of the Department of Education want its data collection efforts to survive — just somewhere else. Some have suggested moving the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to another agency, such as the Commerce Department, where the U.S. Census Bureau is housed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Diane Cheng, vice president of policy at the Institute for Higher Education Policy, a nonprofit organization that advocates for increasing college access and improving graduation rates, warns that shifting NCES risks the quality and usefulness of higher education data. Any move would have to be done carefully, planning for future interagency coordination, she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Many of the federal data collections combine data from different sources within ED,” Cheng said, referring to the Education Department. “It has worked well to have everyone within the same agency.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She points to the \u003ca href=\"https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/\">College Scorecard\u003c/a>, the website that lets families compare colleges by cost, student loan debt, graduation rates, and post-college earnings. It merges several data sources, including the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), run by NCES, and the National Student Loan Data System, housed in the Office of Federal Student Aid. Several other higher ed data collections on \u003ca href=\"https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/npsas/\">student aid\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/bps/\">students’ pathways through college\u003c/a> also merge data collected at the statistical unit with student aid figures. Splitting those across different agencies could make such collaboration far more difficult.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If those data are split across multiple federal agencies,” Cheng said, “there would likely be more bureaucratic hurdles required to combine the data.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Information sharing across federal agencies is notoriously cumbersome, the very problem that led to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Hiring and $4.5 million in fresh research grants\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Even as the Trump administration publicly insists it intends to shutter the Department of Education, it is quietly rebuilding small parts of it behind the scenes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In September, the department \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-reforming-ies-education-research/\">posted eight new jobs\u003c/a> to replace fired staff who oversaw the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the biennial test of American students’ achievement. In November, it advertised \u003ca href=\"https://www.usajobs.gov/job/849436800?fromemail=true\">four more openings for statisticians\u003c/a> inside the Federal Student Aid Office. Still, nothing is expected to be quick or smooth. The government shutdown stalled hiring for the NAEP jobs, and now a new Trump administration directive to form \u003ca href=\"https://www.semafor.com/article/11/05/2025/trump-administration-requires-federal-employee-hiring-committees-by-nov-17\">hiring committees by Nov. 17\u003c/a> to approve and fill open positions may further delay these hires.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the same time, the demolition continues. Less than two weeks after the Oct. 1 government shutdown, 466 additional Education Department employees were terminated — on top of the roughly 2,000 lost since March 2025 through firings and voluntary departures. (The department employed about 4,000 at the start of the Trump administration.) A federal judge temporarily \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/15/us/politics/government-shutdown-trump-layoffs-unions.html\">blocked these latest layoffs\u003c/a> on Oct. 15.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are also other small new signs of life. On Sept. 30 — just before the shutdown — the department quietly awarded \u003ca href=\"https://ies.ed.gov/search-results?searchTerms=From%20Seedlings%20to%20Scale%20Grants%20Program%20(ALN%2084.305J)\">nine new research and development grants\u003c/a> totaling $4.5 million. The grants, listed on the department’s website, are part of a new initiative called, “\u003ca href=\"https://ies.ed.gov/funding/research/programs/seedlings-scale-grants-program\">From Seedlings to Scale Grants Program\u003c/a>” (S2S), launched by the Biden administration in \u003ca href=\"https://ies.ed.gov/funding/grants/2025/seedlings-scale-84-305j\">August 2024\u003c/a> to test whether the Defense Department’s DARPA-style innovation model could work in education. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, invests in new technologies for national security. Its most celebrated project became the basis for the internet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Each new project, mostly focused on AI-driven personalized learning, received $500,000 to produce early evidence of effectiveness. Recipients include universities, research organizations and ed tech firms. Projects that show promise could be eligible for future funding to scale up with more students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to a person familiar with the program who spoke on background, the nine projects had been selected before President Donald Trump took office, but the formal awards were delayed amid the department’s upheaval. The Institute of Education Sciences — which lost roughly 90 percent of its staff — was one of the hardest hit divisions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Granted, $4.5 million is a rounding error compared with IES’s official annual budget of $800 million. Still, these are believed to be the first new federal education research grants of the Trump era and a faint signal that Washington may not be abandoning education innovation altogether.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-risks-higher-ed-data/\">\u003cem>risks to federal education data\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Even with the government shut down, lots of people are thinking about how to reimagine federal education research. Public comments on how to reform the Institute of Education Sciences (IES), the Education Department’s research and statistics arm, were due on Oct. 15. A total of 434 suggestions were submitted, but no one can read them because the department isn’t allowed to post them publicly until the government reopens. (We know the number because the \u003ca href=\"https://www.regulations.gov/docket/ED-2025-IES-0844\">comment entry page\u003c/a> has an automatic counter.)\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>A complex numbers game \u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>There’s broad agreement across the political spectrum that federal education statistics are essential. Even many critics of the Department of Education want its data collection efforts to survive — just somewhere else. Some have suggested moving the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to another agency, such as the Commerce Department, where the U.S. Census Bureau is housed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Diane Cheng, vice president of policy at the Institute for Higher Education Policy, a nonprofit organization that advocates for increasing college access and improving graduation rates, warns that shifting NCES risks the quality and usefulness of higher education data. Any move would have to be done carefully, planning for future interagency coordination, she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Many of the federal data collections combine data from different sources within ED,” Cheng said, referring to the Education Department. “It has worked well to have everyone within the same agency.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>She points to the \u003ca href=\"https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/\">College Scorecard\u003c/a>, the website that lets families compare colleges by cost, student loan debt, graduation rates, and post-college earnings. It merges several data sources, including the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), run by NCES, and the National Student Loan Data System, housed in the Office of Federal Student Aid. Several other higher ed data collections on \u003ca href=\"https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/npsas/\">student aid\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/bps/\">students’ pathways through college\u003c/a> also merge data collected at the statistical unit with student aid figures. Splitting those across different agencies could make such collaboration far more difficult.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If those data are split across multiple federal agencies,” Cheng said, “there would likely be more bureaucratic hurdles required to combine the data.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Information sharing across federal agencies is notoriously cumbersome, the very problem that led to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security after 9/11.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Hiring and $4.5 million in fresh research grants\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Even as the Trump administration publicly insists it intends to shutter the Department of Education, it is quietly rebuilding small parts of it behind the scenes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In September, the department \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-reforming-ies-education-research/\">posted eight new jobs\u003c/a> to replace fired staff who oversaw the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the biennial test of American students’ achievement. In November, it advertised \u003ca href=\"https://www.usajobs.gov/job/849436800?fromemail=true\">four more openings for statisticians\u003c/a> inside the Federal Student Aid Office. Still, nothing is expected to be quick or smooth. The government shutdown stalled hiring for the NAEP jobs, and now a new Trump administration directive to form \u003ca href=\"https://www.semafor.com/article/11/05/2025/trump-administration-requires-federal-employee-hiring-committees-by-nov-17\">hiring committees by Nov. 17\u003c/a> to approve and fill open positions may further delay these hires.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the same time, the demolition continues. Less than two weeks after the Oct. 1 government shutdown, 466 additional Education Department employees were terminated — on top of the roughly 2,000 lost since March 2025 through firings and voluntary departures. (The department employed about 4,000 at the start of the Trump administration.) A federal judge temporarily \u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/15/us/politics/government-shutdown-trump-layoffs-unions.html\">blocked these latest layoffs\u003c/a> on Oct. 15.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There are also other small new signs of life. On Sept. 30 — just before the shutdown — the department quietly awarded \u003ca href=\"https://ies.ed.gov/search-results?searchTerms=From%20Seedlings%20to%20Scale%20Grants%20Program%20(ALN%2084.305J)\">nine new research and development grants\u003c/a> totaling $4.5 million. The grants, listed on the department’s website, are part of a new initiative called, “\u003ca href=\"https://ies.ed.gov/funding/research/programs/seedlings-scale-grants-program\">From Seedlings to Scale Grants Program\u003c/a>” (S2S), launched by the Biden administration in \u003ca href=\"https://ies.ed.gov/funding/grants/2025/seedlings-scale-84-305j\">August 2024\u003c/a> to test whether the Defense Department’s DARPA-style innovation model could work in education. DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, invests in new technologies for national security. Its most celebrated project became the basis for the internet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Each new project, mostly focused on AI-driven personalized learning, received $500,000 to produce early evidence of effectiveness. Recipients include universities, research organizations and ed tech firms. Projects that show promise could be eligible for future funding to scale up with more students.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to a person familiar with the program who spoke on background, the nine projects had been selected before President Donald Trump took office, but the formal awards were delayed amid the department’s upheaval. The Institute of Education Sciences — which lost roughly 90 percent of its staff — was one of the hardest hit divisions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Granted, $4.5 million is a rounding error compared with IES’s official annual budget of $800 million. Still, these are believed to be the first new federal education research grants of the Trump era and a faint signal that Washington may not be abandoning education innovation altogether.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-risks-higher-ed-data/\">\u003cem>risks to federal education data\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Timothy Shanahan, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has spent his career evaluating education research and helping teachers figure out what works best in the classroom. A leader of the National Reading Panel, whose 2000 report helped shape what’s now known as the “science of reading,” Shanahan has long influenced literacy instruction in the United States. He also served on the National Institute for Literacy’s advisory board in both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shanahan is a scholar whom I regularly consult when I come across a reading study, and so I was eager to interview him about his new book, “\u003ca href=\"https://hep.gse.harvard.edu/9798895570036/leveled-reading-leveled-lives/\">Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives\u003c/a>.” (Harvard Education Press, September 2025). In it, Shanahan takes aim at one of the most common teaching practices in American classrooms: matching students with “just-right” books.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_65926\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 512px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-65926\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Timothy-Shanahan.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"512\" height=\"384\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Timothy-Shanahan.jpg 512w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Timothy-Shanahan-160x120.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 512px) 100vw, 512px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Book cover credit: Harvard Education Press. Photo courtesy of Timothy Shanahan.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>He argues that the approach — where students read different texts depending on their assessed reading level — is holding many children back. Teachers spend too much time testing students and assigning leveled books, he says, instead of helping all students learn how to understand challenging texts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“American children are being prevented from doing better in reading by a longstanding commitment to a pedagogical theory that insists students are best taught with books they can already read,” Shanahan writes in his book. “Reading is so often taught in small groups — not so teachers can guide efforts to negotiate difficult books, but to ensure the books are easy enough that not much guidance is needed.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Comprehension, he says, doesn’t grow that way.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The trouble with leveled reading\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Grouping students by ability and assigning easier or harder books — a practice known as leveled reading — remains deeply embedded in U.S. schools. A 2018 Thomas B. Fordham Institute \u003ca href=\"https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/research/reading-and-writing-instruction-americas-schools\">survey\u003c/a> found that 62 percent of upper elementary teachers and more than half of middle school teachers teach at students’ reading level rather than at grade level.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That may sound sensible, but Shanahan says it’s not helping anyone and is even leading teachers to dispense with reading altogether. “In social studies and science, and these days, even in English classes,” he said in an interview, “teachers either don’t assign any readings or they read the texts to the students.” Struggling readers aren’t being given the chance — or the tools — to tackle complex material on their own.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead, Shanahan believes all students should read grade-level texts together, with teachers providing more support for those who need it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What I’m recommending is instructional differentiation,” he said in our interview. “Everyone will have the same instructional goal — we’re all going to learn to read the fourth-grade text. I might teach a whole-class lesson and then let some kids move on to independent work while others get more help. Maybe the ones who didn’t get it, read the text again with my support. By the end, more students will have reached the learning goal — and tomorrow the whole class can take on another text.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>27 different ways\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Shanahan’s approach doesn’t mean throwing kids into the deep end without help. His book outlines a toolbox of strategies for tackling difficult texts, such as looking up unfamiliar vocabulary, rereading confusing passages, or breaking down long sentences. “You can tip over into successful reading 27 different ways,” he said, and he hopes future researchers discover many more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He is skeptical of drilling students on skills like identifying the main idea or making inferences. “We’ve treated test questions as the skill,” he said. “That doesn’t work.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There is widespread frustration over the \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/naep-test-2024-dismal-report/\">deterioration of American reading achievement\u003c/a>, especially among middle schoolers. (Thirty-nine percent of eighth graders cannot reach the lowest of three achievement levels, called “basic,” on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.) But there is little agreement among reading advocates on how to fix the problem. Some argue that what children primarily need is \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-content-knowledge-reading/\">more knowledge to grasp unfamiliar ideas\u003c/a> in a new reading passage, but Shanahan argues that background knowledge won’t be sufficient or as powerful as explicit comprehension instruction. Other reading experts agree. Nonie Lesaux, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education who specializes in literacy in her own academic work, endorsed Shanahan’s argument in an \u003ca href=\"https://calendar.gse.harvard.edu/en/36YmkP6/g/QjQ0gt02WZ/gutman-library-virtual-book-talk-leveled-reading-leveled-lives-4a5YUYbVxh/overview\">October 2025 online discussion of the new book. \u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shanahan is most persuasive in pointing out that there isn’t strong experimental evidence to show that reading achievement goes up more when students read a text at their individual level. By contrast, a 2024 analysis found that the \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-tntp-effective-schools/\">most effective schools\u003c/a> are those that keep instruction at grade level. Still, Shanahan acknowledges that more research is needed to pinpoint which comprehension strategies work best for which students and in which circumstances.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Misunderstanding Vygotsky\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Teachers often cite the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development” to justify giving students books that are neither too easy nor too hard. But Shanahan says that’s a misunderstanding of Vygotsky’s work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Vygotsky believed teachers should guide students to learn challenging things they cannot yet do on their own, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He offers an analogy: a mother teaching her child to tie their shoes. At first, she demonstrates while narrating the steps aloud. Then the child does one step, and she finishes the rest. Over time, the mother gradually releases control and the child ties a bow on his own. “Leveled reading,” Shanahan said, “is like saying, ‘Why don’t we just get Velcro?’ This is about real teaching. ‘Boys and girls, you don’t know how to ride this bike yet, but I’m going to make sure you do by the time we’re done.’ ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shanahan’s critique of reading instruction applies mainly from second grade onward, after children learn how to read and are focusing on understanding what they read. In kindergarten and first grade, when children are still learning phonics and how to decode the words on the page, the research evidence against small group instruction with different level texts isn’t as strong, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Learning to read first – decoding – is important. Shanahan says there are rare exceptions to teaching all children at grade level.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If a fifth grader still can’t read,” Shanahan said, “I wouldn’t make that child read a fifth-grade text.” That child might need separate instruction from a reading specialist.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Advanced readers, meanwhile, can be challenged in other ways, Shanahan suggests, through independent reading time, skipping ahead to higher-grade reading classes, or by exploring complex ideas within grade-level texts.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The role of AI — and parents\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used to rewrite texts for different difficulty levels. Shanahan is skeptical of that approach. Simpler texts, whether written by humans or generated by AI, don’t teach students to improve their reading ability, he argues.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, he’s intrigued by the idea of using AI to help students “climb the stairs” by instantly modifying a single text to a range of reading levels, say, to third-, fifth- and seventh-grade levels, and having students read them in quick succession. Whether that boosts comprehension is still unknown and needs to be studied.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>AI might be most helpful to teachers, Shanahan suspects, to help point to a sentence or a passage that tends to confuse students or trip them up. The teacher can then address those common difficulties in class.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shanahan worries about what happens outside of school: Kids aren’t reading much at all.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He urges parents to let children read whatever they enjoy — regardless if it’s above or below their level — but to set consistent expectations. “Nagging may not be effective,” he said. “But you can be specific: ‘After dinner Thursday, read the first chapter. When you’re done, we’ll talk about it, and then you can play a computer game or go on your phone.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Too often, he says, parents back down when kids resist. “They are the kids. We are the adults,” Shanahan said. “We’re responsible. Let’s step up and do what’s right for them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-shanahan-leveled-reading/\">\u003cem>reading levels\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "In a new book, researcher Timothy Shanahan argues that giving students easy texts is holding back US reading achievement.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Timothy Shanahan, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has spent his career evaluating education research and helping teachers figure out what works best in the classroom. A leader of the National Reading Panel, whose 2000 report helped shape what’s now known as the “science of reading,” Shanahan has long influenced literacy instruction in the United States. He also served on the National Institute for Literacy’s advisory board in both the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shanahan is a scholar whom I regularly consult when I come across a reading study, and so I was eager to interview him about his new book, “\u003ca href=\"https://hep.gse.harvard.edu/9798895570036/leveled-reading-leveled-lives/\">Leveled Reading, Leveled Lives\u003c/a>.” (Harvard Education Press, September 2025). In it, Shanahan takes aim at one of the most common teaching practices in American classrooms: matching students with “just-right” books.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_65926\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 512px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-65926\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Timothy-Shanahan.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"512\" height=\"384\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Timothy-Shanahan.jpg 512w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Timothy-Shanahan-160x120.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 512px) 100vw, 512px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Book cover credit: Harvard Education Press. Photo courtesy of Timothy Shanahan.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>He argues that the approach — where students read different texts depending on their assessed reading level — is holding many children back. Teachers spend too much time testing students and assigning leveled books, he says, instead of helping all students learn how to understand challenging texts.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“American children are being prevented from doing better in reading by a longstanding commitment to a pedagogical theory that insists students are best taught with books they can already read,” Shanahan writes in his book. “Reading is so often taught in small groups — not so teachers can guide efforts to negotiate difficult books, but to ensure the books are easy enough that not much guidance is needed.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Comprehension, he says, doesn’t grow that way.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The trouble with leveled reading\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Grouping students by ability and assigning easier or harder books — a practice known as leveled reading — remains deeply embedded in U.S. schools. A 2018 Thomas B. Fordham Institute \u003ca href=\"https://fordhaminstitute.org/national/research/reading-and-writing-instruction-americas-schools\">survey\u003c/a> found that 62 percent of upper elementary teachers and more than half of middle school teachers teach at students’ reading level rather than at grade level.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That may sound sensible, but Shanahan says it’s not helping anyone and is even leading teachers to dispense with reading altogether. “In social studies and science, and these days, even in English classes,” he said in an interview, “teachers either don’t assign any readings or they read the texts to the students.” Struggling readers aren’t being given the chance — or the tools — to tackle complex material on their own.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead, Shanahan believes all students should read grade-level texts together, with teachers providing more support for those who need it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What I’m recommending is instructional differentiation,” he said in our interview. “Everyone will have the same instructional goal — we’re all going to learn to read the fourth-grade text. I might teach a whole-class lesson and then let some kids move on to independent work while others get more help. Maybe the ones who didn’t get it, read the text again with my support. By the end, more students will have reached the learning goal — and tomorrow the whole class can take on another text.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>27 different ways\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Shanahan’s approach doesn’t mean throwing kids into the deep end without help. His book outlines a toolbox of strategies for tackling difficult texts, such as looking up unfamiliar vocabulary, rereading confusing passages, or breaking down long sentences. “You can tip over into successful reading 27 different ways,” he said, and he hopes future researchers discover many more.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He is skeptical of drilling students on skills like identifying the main idea or making inferences. “We’ve treated test questions as the skill,” he said. “That doesn’t work.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>There is widespread frustration over the \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/naep-test-2024-dismal-report/\">deterioration of American reading achievement\u003c/a>, especially among middle schoolers. (Thirty-nine percent of eighth graders cannot reach the lowest of three achievement levels, called “basic,” on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.) But there is little agreement among reading advocates on how to fix the problem. Some argue that what children primarily need is \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-content-knowledge-reading/\">more knowledge to grasp unfamiliar ideas\u003c/a> in a new reading passage, but Shanahan argues that background knowledge won’t be sufficient or as powerful as explicit comprehension instruction. Other reading experts agree. Nonie Lesaux, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education who specializes in literacy in her own academic work, endorsed Shanahan’s argument in an \u003ca href=\"https://calendar.gse.harvard.edu/en/36YmkP6/g/QjQ0gt02WZ/gutman-library-virtual-book-talk-leveled-reading-leveled-lives-4a5YUYbVxh/overview\">October 2025 online discussion of the new book. \u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shanahan is most persuasive in pointing out that there isn’t strong experimental evidence to show that reading achievement goes up more when students read a text at their individual level. By contrast, a 2024 analysis found that the \u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-tntp-effective-schools/\">most effective schools\u003c/a> are those that keep instruction at grade level. Still, Shanahan acknowledges that more research is needed to pinpoint which comprehension strategies work best for which students and in which circumstances.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>Misunderstanding Vygotsky\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Teachers often cite the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky’s “zone of proximal development” to justify giving students books that are neither too easy nor too hard. But Shanahan says that’s a misunderstanding of Vygotsky’s work.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Vygotsky believed teachers should guide students to learn challenging things they cannot yet do on their own, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He offers an analogy: a mother teaching her child to tie their shoes. At first, she demonstrates while narrating the steps aloud. Then the child does one step, and she finishes the rest. Over time, the mother gradually releases control and the child ties a bow on his own. “Leveled reading,” Shanahan said, “is like saying, ‘Why don’t we just get Velcro?’ This is about real teaching. ‘Boys and girls, you don’t know how to ride this bike yet, but I’m going to make sure you do by the time we’re done.’ ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shanahan’s critique of reading instruction applies mainly from second grade onward, after children learn how to read and are focusing on understanding what they read. In kindergarten and first grade, when children are still learning phonics and how to decode the words on the page, the research evidence against small group instruction with different level texts isn’t as strong, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Learning to read first – decoding – is important. Shanahan says there are rare exceptions to teaching all children at grade level.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If a fifth grader still can’t read,” Shanahan said, “I wouldn’t make that child read a fifth-grade text.” That child might need separate instruction from a reading specialist.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Advanced readers, meanwhile, can be challenged in other ways, Shanahan suggests, through independent reading time, skipping ahead to higher-grade reading classes, or by exploring complex ideas within grade-level texts.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch2>\u003cstrong>The role of AI — and parents\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\u003cp>Artificial intelligence is increasingly being used to rewrite texts for different difficulty levels. Shanahan is skeptical of that approach. Simpler texts, whether written by humans or generated by AI, don’t teach students to improve their reading ability, he argues.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, he’s intrigued by the idea of using AI to help students “climb the stairs” by instantly modifying a single text to a range of reading levels, say, to third-, fifth- and seventh-grade levels, and having students read them in quick succession. Whether that boosts comprehension is still unknown and needs to be studied.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>AI might be most helpful to teachers, Shanahan suspects, to help point to a sentence or a passage that tends to confuse students or trip them up. The teacher can then address those common difficulties in class.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Shanahan worries about what happens outside of school: Kids aren’t reading much at all.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He urges parents to let children read whatever they enjoy — regardless if it’s above or below their level — but to set consistent expectations. “Nagging may not be effective,” he said. “But you can be specific: ‘After dinner Thursday, read the first chapter. When you’re done, we’ll talk about it, and then you can play a computer game or go on your phone.’”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Too often, he says, parents back down when kids resist. “They are the kids. We are the adults,” Shanahan said. “We’re responsible. Let’s step up and do what’s right for them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-shanahan-leveled-reading/\">\u003cem>reading levels\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"slug": "school-cellphone-bans-can-help-kids-learn-but-black-students-suspended-at-higher-rates",
"title": "School Cellphone Bans Can Help Kids Learn — But Black Students Suspended at Higher Rates",
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"headTitle": "School Cellphone Bans Can Help Kids Learn — But Black Students Suspended at Higher Rates | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://ballotpedia.org/State_policies_on_cellphone_use_in_K-12_public_schools\">Thirty states\u003c/a> now limit or ban cellphone use in classrooms, and teachers are noticing children paying attention to their lessons again. But it’s not clear whether this policy — unpopular with students and a headache for teachers to enforce — makes an academic difference.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If student achievement goes up after a cellphone ban, it’s tough to know if the ban was the reason. Some other change in math or reading instruction might have caused the improvement. Or maybe the state assessment became easier to pass. Imagine if politicians required all students to wear striped shirts and test scores rose. Few would really think that stripes made kids smarter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Two researchers from the University of Rochester and RAND, a nonprofit research organization, figured out a clever way to tackle this question by taking advantage of cellphone activity data in one large school district in Florida, which in 2023 became the first state to institute school cellphone restrictions. The researchers compared schools that had high cellphone activity before the ban with those that had low cellphone usage to see if the ban made a bigger difference for schools that had high usage.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Indeed, it did.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Student test scores rose a bit more in high cellphone usage schools two years after the ban compared with schools that had lower cellphone usage to start. Students were also attending school more regularly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The policy also came with a troubling side effect. The cellphone bans led to a significant increase in student suspensions in the first year, especially among Black students. But disciplinary actions declined during the second year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Cellphone bans are not a silver bullet,” said David Figlio, an economist at the University of Rochester and one of the study’s co-authors. “But they seem to be helping kids. They’re attending school more, and they’re performing a bit better on tests.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Figlio said he was “worried” about the short-term 16 percent increase in suspensions for Black students. What’s unclear from this data analysis is whether Black students were more likely to violate the new cellphone rules, or whether teachers were more likely to single out Black students for punishment. It’s also unclear from these administrative behavior records if students were first given warnings or lighter punishments before they were suspended.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The data suggest that students adjusted to the new rules. A year later, student suspensions, including those of Black students, fell back to what they had been before the cellphone ban.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What we observe is a rocky start,” Figlio added. “There was a lot of discipline.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The study, “The Impact of Cellphone Bans in Schools on Student Outcomes: Evidence from Florida,” is a draft working paper and has not been peer-reviewed. It was slated to be circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research on Oct. 20 and the authors shared a draft with me in advance. Figlio and his co-author Umut Özek at RAND believe it is the first study to show a causal connection between cellphone bans and learning rather than just a correlation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The academic gains from the cellphone ban were small, less than a percentile point, on average. That’s the equivalent of moving from the 50th percentile on math and reading tests (in the middle) to the 51st percentile (still close to the middle), and this small gain did not emerge until the second year for most students. The academic benefits were strongest for middle schoolers, white students, Hispanic students and male students. The academic gains for Black students and female students were not statistically significant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I was surprised to learn that there is data on student cellphone use in school. The authors of this study used information from Advan Research Corp., which collects and analyzes data from mobile phones around the world for business purposes, such as figuring out how many people visit a particular retail store. The researchers were able to obtain this data for schools in one Florida school district and estimate how many students were on their cellphones before and after the ban went into effect between the hours of 9 a.m. and 1 p.m.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The data showed that more than 60 percent of middle schoolers, on average, were on their phones at least once during the school day before the 2023 ban in this particular Florida district, which was not named but described as one of the 10 largest districts in the country. (Five of the nation’s \u003ca href=\"https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_215.30.asp\">10 largest school districts\u003c/a> are in Florida.) After the ban, that fell in half to 30 percent of middle schoolers in the first year and down to 25 percent in the second year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Elementary school students were less likely to be on cellphones to start with and their in-school usage fell from about 25 percent of students before the ban to 15 percent after the ban. More than 45 percent of high schoolers were on their phones before the ban and that fell to about 10 percent afterwards.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Average daily smartphone visits in schools, by year and grade level\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_65891\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2412px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-65891 size-full\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Cellphone-ban-Chart.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"2412\" height=\"1366\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Cellphone-ban-Chart.png 2412w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Cellphone-ban-Chart-2000x1133.png 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Cellphone-ban-Chart-160x91.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Cellphone-ban-Chart-768x435.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Cellphone-ban-Chart-1536x870.png 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Cellphone-ban-Chart-2048x1160.png 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2412px) 100vw, 2412px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Average daily smartphone visits during regular school days (relative to teacher workdays without students) between 9am and 1pm (per 100 enrolled students) in the two months before and then after the 2023 ban took effect in one large urban Florida school district. Source: Figlio and Özek, October 2025 draft paper, figure 2C, p. 23.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Florida did not enact a complete cellphone ban in 2023, but imposed severe restrictions. Those restrictions were \u003ca href=\"https://www.mysuncoast.com/2025/08/06/new-florida-law-bans-use-cell-phones-elementary-middle-schools/\">tightened in 2025\u003c/a> and that additional tightening was not studied in this paper.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Anti-cellphone policies have become increasingly popular since the pandemic, largely based on our collective adult gut hunches that kids are not learning well when they are consumed by TikTok and SnapChat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is perhaps a rare case in public policy, Figlio said, where the “data back up the hunches.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Contact staff writer \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/author/jill-barshay/\">\u003cem>Jill Barshay\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or \u003c/em>\u003cem>barshay@hechingerreport.org\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-cellphone-bans/\">\u003cem>cellphone bans\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Analysis of Florida school district after 2023 classroom cellphone restrictions shows reading and math test score gains. The policy also came with a troubling side effect.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"https://ballotpedia.org/State_policies_on_cellphone_use_in_K-12_public_schools\">Thirty states\u003c/a> now limit or ban cellphone use in classrooms, and teachers are noticing children paying attention to their lessons again. But it’s not clear whether this policy — unpopular with students and a headache for teachers to enforce — makes an academic difference.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If student achievement goes up after a cellphone ban, it’s tough to know if the ban was the reason. Some other change in math or reading instruction might have caused the improvement. Or maybe the state assessment became easier to pass. Imagine if politicians required all students to wear striped shirts and test scores rose. Few would really think that stripes made kids smarter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Two researchers from the University of Rochester and RAND, a nonprofit research organization, figured out a clever way to tackle this question by taking advantage of cellphone activity data in one large school district in Florida, which in 2023 became the first state to institute school cellphone restrictions. The researchers compared schools that had high cellphone activity before the ban with those that had low cellphone usage to see if the ban made a bigger difference for schools that had high usage.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Indeed, it did.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Student test scores rose a bit more in high cellphone usage schools two years after the ban compared with schools that had lower cellphone usage to start. Students were also attending school more regularly.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The policy also came with a troubling side effect. The cellphone bans led to a significant increase in student suspensions in the first year, especially among Black students. But disciplinary actions declined during the second year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Cellphone bans are not a silver bullet,” said David Figlio, an economist at the University of Rochester and one of the study’s co-authors. “But they seem to be helping kids. They’re attending school more, and they’re performing a bit better on tests.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Figlio said he was “worried” about the short-term 16 percent increase in suspensions for Black students. What’s unclear from this data analysis is whether Black students were more likely to violate the new cellphone rules, or whether teachers were more likely to single out Black students for punishment. It’s also unclear from these administrative behavior records if students were first given warnings or lighter punishments before they were suspended.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The data suggest that students adjusted to the new rules. A year later, student suspensions, including those of Black students, fell back to what they had been before the cellphone ban.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What we observe is a rocky start,” Figlio added. “There was a lot of discipline.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The study, “The Impact of Cellphone Bans in Schools on Student Outcomes: Evidence from Florida,” is a draft working paper and has not been peer-reviewed. It was slated to be circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research on Oct. 20 and the authors shared a draft with me in advance. Figlio and his co-author Umut Özek at RAND believe it is the first study to show a causal connection between cellphone bans and learning rather than just a correlation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The academic gains from the cellphone ban were small, less than a percentile point, on average. That’s the equivalent of moving from the 50th percentile on math and reading tests (in the middle) to the 51st percentile (still close to the middle), and this small gain did not emerge until the second year for most students. The academic benefits were strongest for middle schoolers, white students, Hispanic students and male students. The academic gains for Black students and female students were not statistically significant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I was surprised to learn that there is data on student cellphone use in school. The authors of this study used information from Advan Research Corp., which collects and analyzes data from mobile phones around the world for business purposes, such as figuring out how many people visit a particular retail store. The researchers were able to obtain this data for schools in one Florida school district and estimate how many students were on their cellphones before and after the ban went into effect between the hours of 9 a.m. and 1 p.m.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The data showed that more than 60 percent of middle schoolers, on average, were on their phones at least once during the school day before the 2023 ban in this particular Florida district, which was not named but described as one of the 10 largest districts in the country. (Five of the nation’s \u003ca href=\"https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_215.30.asp\">10 largest school districts\u003c/a> are in Florida.) After the ban, that fell in half to 30 percent of middle schoolers in the first year and down to 25 percent in the second year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Elementary school students were less likely to be on cellphones to start with and their in-school usage fell from about 25 percent of students before the ban to 15 percent after the ban. More than 45 percent of high schoolers were on their phones before the ban and that fell to about 10 percent afterwards.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Average daily smartphone visits in schools, by year and grade level\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_65891\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 2412px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-65891 size-full\" src=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Cellphone-ban-Chart.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"2412\" height=\"1366\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Cellphone-ban-Chart.png 2412w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Cellphone-ban-Chart-2000x1133.png 2000w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Cellphone-ban-Chart-160x91.png 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Cellphone-ban-Chart-768x435.png 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Cellphone-ban-Chart-1536x870.png 1536w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/23/2025/10/Cellphone-ban-Chart-2048x1160.png 2048w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 2412px) 100vw, 2412px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Average daily smartphone visits during regular school days (relative to teacher workdays without students) between 9am and 1pm (per 100 enrolled students) in the two months before and then after the 2023 ban took effect in one large urban Florida school district. Source: Figlio and Özek, October 2025 draft paper, figure 2C, p. 23.\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Florida did not enact a complete cellphone ban in 2023, but imposed severe restrictions. Those restrictions were \u003ca href=\"https://www.mysuncoast.com/2025/08/06/new-florida-law-bans-use-cell-phones-elementary-middle-schools/\">tightened in 2025\u003c/a> and that additional tightening was not studied in this paper.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Anti-cellphone policies have become increasingly popular since the pandemic, largely based on our collective adult gut hunches that kids are not learning well when they are consumed by TikTok and SnapChat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is perhaps a rare case in public policy, Figlio said, where the “data back up the hunches.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Contact staff writer \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/author/jill-barshay/\">\u003cem>Jill Barshay\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> at 212-678-3595, jillbarshay.35 on Signal, or \u003c/em>\u003cem>barshay@hechingerreport.org\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>This story about \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-cellphone-bans/\">\u003cem>cellphone bans\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> was produced by \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/special-reports/higher-education/\">The Hechinger Report\u003c/a>\u003cem>, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/proofpoints/\">\u003cem>Proof Points\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem> and other \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://hechingerreport.org/newsletters/\">\u003cem>Hechinger newsletters\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"info": "\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em>, which listeners will hear in the first part of the hour, has fearless and much-needed conversations about race. Hosted by journalists of color, the show tackles the subject of race head-on, exploring how it impacts every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, sports and more.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em>, which will be in the second part of the hour, guides you through spaces and feelings no one prepares you for — from finances to mental health, from workplace microaggressions to imposter syndrome, from relationships to parenting. The show features experts with real world experience and shares their knowledge. Because everyone needs a little help being human.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510312/codeswitch\">\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/lifekit\">\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />",
"airtime": "SUN 9pm-10pm",
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"meta": {
"site": "radio",
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"id": "commonwealth-club",
"title": "Commonwealth Club of California Podcast",
"info": "The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum. As a non-partisan forum, The Club brings to the public airwaves diverse viewpoints on important topics. The Club's weekly radio broadcast - the oldest in the U.S., dating back to 1924 - is carried across the nation on public radio stations and is now podcasting. Our website archive features audio of our recent programs, as well as selected speeches from our long and distinguished history. This podcast feed is usually updated twice a week and is always un-edited.",
"airtime": "THU 10pm, FRI 1am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Commonwealth-Club-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.commonwealthclub.org/podcasts",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "Commonwealth Club of California"
},
"link": "/radio/program/commonwealth-club",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5jb21tb253ZWFsdGhjbHViLm9yZy9hdWRpby9wb2RjYXN0L3dlZWtseS54bWw",
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}
},
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"id": "forum",
"title": "Forum",
"tagline": "The conversation starts here",
"info": "KQED’s live call-in program discussing local, state, national and international issues, as well as in-depth interviews.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 9am-11am, 10pm-11pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Forum-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED Forum with Mina Kim and Alexis Madrigal",
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 9
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM5NTU3MzgxNjMz",
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"id": "freakonomics-radio",
"title": "Freakonomics Radio",
"info": "Freakonomics Radio is a one-hour award-winning podcast and public-radio project hosted by Stephen Dubner, with co-author Steve Levitt as a regular guest. It is produced in partnership with WNYC.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/05/freakonomicsRadio.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://freakonomics.com/",
"airtime": "SUN 1am-2am, SAT 3pm-4pm",
"meta": {
"site": "radio",
"source": "WNYC"
},
"link": "/radio/program/freakonomics-radio",
"subscribe": {
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/freakonomics-radio/id354668519",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/podcasts/WNYC-Podcasts/Freakonomics-Radio-p272293/",
"rss": "https://feeds.feedburner.com/freakonomicsradio"
}
},
"fresh-air": {
"id": "fresh-air",
"title": "Fresh Air",
"info": "Hosted by Terry Gross, \u003cem>Fresh Air from WHYY\u003c/em> is the Peabody Award-winning weekday magazine of contemporary arts and issues. One of public radio's most popular programs, Fresh Air features intimate conversations with today's biggest luminaries.",
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"link": "/radio/program/fresh-air",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=214089682&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/381444908/podcast.xml"
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"id": "here-and-now",
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"info": "A live production of NPR and WBUR Boston, in collaboration with stations across the country, Here & Now reflects the fluid world of news as it's happening in the middle of the day, with timely, in-depth news, interviews and conversation. Hosted by Robin Young, Jeremy Hobson and Tonya Mosley.",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510051/podcast.xml"
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},
"hidden-brain": {
"id": "hidden-brain",
"title": "Hidden Brain",
"info": "Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/05/hiddenbrain.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/series/423302056/hidden-brain",
"airtime": "SUN 7pm-8pm",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "NPR"
},
"link": "/radio/program/hidden-brain",
"subscribe": {
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"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/podcasts/Science-Podcasts/Hidden-Brain-p787503/",
"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510308/podcast.xml"
}
},
"how-i-built-this": {
"id": "how-i-built-this",
"title": "How I Built This with Guy Raz",
"info": "Guy Raz dives into the stories behind some of the world's best known companies. How I Built This weaves a narrative journey about innovators, entrepreneurs and idealists—and the movements they built.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/05/howIBuiltThis.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this",
"airtime": "SUN 7:30pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "npr"
},
"link": "/radio/program/how-i-built-this",
"subscribe": {
"npr": "https://rpb3r.app.goo.gl/3zxy",
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-built-this-with-guy-raz/id1150510297?mt=2",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510313/podcast.xml"
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},
"hyphenacion": {
"id": "hyphenacion",
"title": "Hyphenación",
"tagline": "Where conversation and cultura meet",
"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Hyphenacion_FinalAssets_PodcastTile.png",
"imageAlt": "KQED Hyphenación",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/hyphenacion",
"meta": {
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"order": 15
},
"link": "/podcasts/hyphenacion",
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"spotify": "https://open.spotify.com/show/2p3Fifq96nw9BPcmFdIq0o?si=39209f7b25774f38",
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"amazon": "https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/6c3dd23c-93fb-4aab-97ba-1725fa6315f1/hyphenaci%C3%B3n",
"rss": "https://feeds.megaphone.fm/KQINC2275451163"
}
},
"jerrybrown": {
"id": "jerrybrown",
"title": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown",
"tagline": "Lessons from a lifetime in politics",
"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game – and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-Political-Mind-of-Jerry-Brown-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED The Political Mind of Jerry Brown",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
"meta": {
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"order": 18
},
"link": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1492194549",
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}
},
"latino-usa": {
"id": "latino-usa",
"title": "Latino USA",
"airtime": "MON 1am-2am, SUN 6pm-7pm",
"info": "Latino USA, the radio journal of news and culture, is the only national, English-language radio program produced from a Latino perspective.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/latinoUsa.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://latinousa.org/",
"meta": {
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"source": "npr"
},
"link": "/radio/program/latino-usa",
"subscribe": {
"npr": "https://rpb3r.app.goo.gl/xtTd",
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=79681317&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510016/podcast.xml"
}
},
"marketplace": {
"id": "marketplace",
"title": "Marketplace",
"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 4pm-4:30pm, MON-WED 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Marketplace-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.marketplace.org/",
"meta": {
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"source": "American Public Media"
},
"link": "/radio/program/marketplace",
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"rss": "https://feeds.publicradio.org/public_feeds/marketplace-pm/rss/rss"
}
},
"masters-of-scale": {
"id": "masters-of-scale",
"title": "Masters of Scale",
"info": "Masters of Scale is an original podcast in which LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman sets out to describe and prove theories that explain how great entrepreneurs take their companies from zero to a gazillion in ingenious fashion.",
"airtime": "Every other Wednesday June 12 through October 16 at 8pm (repeats Thursdays at 2am)",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Masters-of-Scale-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://mastersofscale.com/",
"meta": {
"site": "radio",
"source": "WaitWhat"
},
"link": "/radio/program/masters-of-scale",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "http://mastersofscale.app.link/",
"rss": "https://rss.art19.com/masters-of-scale"
}
},
"mindshift": {
"id": "mindshift",
"title": "MindShift",
"tagline": "A podcast about the future of learning and how we raise our kids",
"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Mindshift-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED MindShift: How We Will Learn",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/mindshift/",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 12
},
"link": "/podcasts/mindshift",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mindshift-podcast/id1078765985",
"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5",
"npr": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/464615685/mind-shift-podcast",
"stitcher": "https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/kqed/stories-teachers-share",
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}
},
"morning-edition": {
"id": "morning-edition",
"title": "Morning Edition",
"info": "\u003cem>Morning Edition\u003c/em> takes listeners around the country and the world with multi-faceted stories and commentaries every weekday. Hosts Steve Inskeep, David Greene and Rachel Martin bring you the latest breaking news and features to prepare you for the day.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3am-9am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Morning-Edition-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/programs/morning-edition/",
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"link": "/radio/program/morning-edition"
},
"onourwatch": {
"id": "onourwatch",
"title": "On Our Watch",
"tagline": "Deeply-reported investigative journalism",
"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/On-Our-Watch-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "On Our Watch from NPR and KQED",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "kqed",
"order": 11
},
"link": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1567098962",
"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5ucHIub3JnLzUxMDM2MC9wb2RjYXN0LnhtbD9zYz1nb29nbGVwb2RjYXN0cw",
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"stitcher": "https://www.stitcher.com/show/on-our-watch",
"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510360/podcast.xml"
}
},
"on-the-media": {
"id": "on-the-media",
"title": "On The Media",
"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
"airtime": "SUN 2pm-3pm, MON 12am-1am",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/onTheMedia.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.wnycstudios.org/shows/otm",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "wnyc"
},
"link": "/radio/program/on-the-media",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/on-the-media/id73330715?mt=2",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/On-the-Media-p69/",
"rss": "http://feeds.wnyc.org/onthemedia"
}
},
"pbs-newshour": {
"id": "pbs-newshour",
"title": "PBS NewsHour",
"info": "Analysis, background reports and updates from the PBS NewsHour putting today's news in context.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3pm-4pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/PBS-News-Hour-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.pbs.org/newshour/",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "pbs"
},
"link": "/radio/program/pbs-newshour",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/pbs-newshour-full-show/id394432287?mt=2",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/radio/PBS-NewsHour---Full-Show-p425698/",
"rss": "https://www.pbs.org/newshour/feeds/rss/podcasts/show"
}
},
"perspectives": {
"id": "perspectives",
"title": "Perspectives",
"tagline": "KQED's series of daily listener commentaries since 1991",
"info": "KQED's series of daily listener commentaries since 1991.",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Perspectives_Tile_Final.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED Perspectives",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/perspectives/",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 14
},
"link": "/perspectives",
"subscribe": {
"apple": "https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/id73801135",
"npr": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/432309616/perspectives",
"rss": "https://ww2.kqed.org/perspectives/category/perspectives/feed/",
"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly93dzIua3FlZC5vcmcvcGVyc3BlY3RpdmVzL2NhdGVnb3J5L3BlcnNwZWN0aXZlcy9mZWVkLw"
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},
"planet-money": {
"id": "planet-money",
"title": "Planet Money",
"info": "The economy explained. Imagine you could call up a friend and say, Meet me at the bar and tell me what's going on with the economy. Now imagine that's actually a fun evening.",
"airtime": "SUN 3pm-4pm",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/planetmoney.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/sections/money/",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "npr"
},
"link": "/radio/program/planet-money",
"subscribe": {
"npr": "https://rpb3r.app.goo.gl/M4f5",
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/planet-money/id290783428?mt=2",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/podcasts/Business--Economics-Podcasts/Planet-Money-p164680/",
"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510289/podcast.xml"
}
},
"politicalbreakdown": {
"id": "politicalbreakdown",
"title": "Political Breakdown",
"tagline": "Politics from a personal perspective",
"info": "Political Breakdown is a new series that explores the political intersection of California and the nation. Each week hosts Scott Shafer and Marisa Lagos are joined with a new special guest to unpack politics -- with personality — and offer an insider’s glimpse at how politics happens.",
"airtime": "THU 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Political-Breakdown-2024-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED Political Breakdown",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/politicalbreakdown",
"meta": {
"site": "radio",
"source": "kqed",
"order": 5
},
"link": "/podcasts/politicalbreakdown",
"subscribe": {
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"amazon": "https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/e0c2d153-ad36-4c8d-901d-f1da6a724824/political-breakdown",
"npr": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/572155894/political-breakdown",
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