Olympians train for it. Education leaders live it.

In elite sports, pressure is an expectation, not an exception. You prepare for it with intention, through conditioning, mental training and countless repetitions. In education leadership, the pressure is constant too: political shifts, community expectations and the unrelenting pace of change. Yet, unlike athletes, most leaders are never trained to manage that pressure as part of their craft. 

That gap has consequences. The found that fewer than half of women education leaders rate their physical or mental health as good, and more than a quarter report poor or very poor health. Fully 93% reported burnout is a major problem and, nearly nine in 10 say they are expected to prioritize work over their own wellbeing. It’s not just women leaders facing these challenges. A recent study by RAND found that fully report high levels of work stress, compared to just 33% of other working adults.

The results are predictable: exhaustion, attrition and a diminished bench of current and future leaders.

Society asks superintendents and system leaders to perform at an elite level when it comes to inspiring, deciding, communicating and advancing progress for students and schools. But those expectations are shouldered without the recovery cycles or coaching structures that make consistent performance possible. Enduring as a leader is not a question of talent. It’s a question of training and sustaining infrastructure.

For a competitive sailor on the water, every decision counts. Each maneuver, each adjustment of the sail and decision made on the course requires clarity and composure. There are no shortcuts, no quick wins and no timeouts from the conditions. Olympic sailing demands resilience, precision and presence. These are the same skills required to lead a school district through uncertainty.

As a two-time Olympian, Lara learned that the hardest work happens long before race day. You learn to trust your preparation, to focus on what’s in your control and to reframe setbacks as data rather than defeat. Leadership is the same. The stakes may be different, but the mental framework is identical: the ability to perform consistently under pressure.

Education leaders, too, face shifting winds and unpredictable currents. They need the tools to help them strengthen their own resilience, manage their energy and refine their decision-making – not in isolation but within a supportive system of peers and coaches.

To perform at the highest levels with consistency and resilience, leaders must tap into their “.” That means building the discipline, structure, and recovery needed to sustain high performance.

This notion crystallized for Julia through a that reframes health as a system of six interconnected domains: strength, cardio, metabolic health, nutrition, mental resilience and emotional well-being.

Getting “fit” as a leader means developing the daily discipline to perform under pressure, manage energy, stay clear-minded and recover quickly. The next evolution of education leadership, then, isn’t about adding more disconnected professional development modules. It’s about creating the space and structure for leaders to train like athletes: with clear routines, feedback and recovery.

For too long, education has treated leadership development as episodic. A conference here, a coaching session there. But sustained performance requires repetition, accountability, and reflection.

That’s why we’ve brought these principles to life through the (SEEN). A new model of leadership development, SEEN brings the same proven principles that drive Olympic training to executive leadership: focused preparation, continuous feedback and a community that holds leaders accountable to growth. It’s not about longer hours or grinding harder; it’s about building the capacity to lead with greater clarity, calm and stamina. 

One of the most powerful lessons from Olympic competition is that pressure itself isn’t the enemy. Indeed, it’s the . When leaders shift from avoiding pressure to embracing it, it can become a catalyst for growth.

That mindset is especially critical now. Education leaders are navigating unprecedented complexity: integrating artificial intelligence, addressing the mental health of students and staff, and rebuilding public trust. These are high-stakes, high-pressure challenges. And like any competition, success depends on preparation for both the challenges we can see and those we know we’ll never be able to anticipate. 

The goal isn’t to make pressure disappear. It’s to teach leaders how to operate within it, to see it as a contextual reality, and not an emergency.

This work is especially vital for women leaders, who often face additional scrutiny and higher expectations in public leadership roles. For them, pressure can feel isolating. But training in community transforms it into strength.

As in Olympic sailing, success isn’t determined by avoiding the wind. It’s about knowing how to read it, adapt to it and use it to move forward. The same is true for education leaders.

Leadership at this level is a discipline. And like any craft, it demands practice.

Because leadership, like sailing, will encounter rough conditions. Success lies in navigating them with focus, courage and a team you can count.

As Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani as his new schools chancellor on Wednesday, he also reversed course on one of his main K-12 campaign pledges: He no longer plans to of the nation’s largest school system.

Instead, he will ask Albany to extend the governance model when it comes up for renewal in June. He said he will work alongside Samuels, a veteran New York City educator, toward a version of mayoral control that will “engage parents, teachers, and students in decision-making,” Mamdani said at a press conference on the northern tip of Central Park just hours before his inauguration.

His stance on mayoral control represents a major about-face for the city’s new chief executive. But Mamdani’s views on school governance compared with other mayoral candidates, and the idea to ditch mayoral control entirely had many skeptics, especially when paired with Mamdani’s sweeping plan to build a free child care system.

Mamdani acknowledged the challenges of the massive system he’s inheriting, with its $43 billion budget, roughly 150,000 staff, and nearly 900,000 students. While literacy rates are improving, he said, nearly 45% of the city’s students in grades 3-8 remained below grade level, . Roughly And thousands of teachers are needed to meet , particularly in hard-to-staff positions for special education, bilingual education, math, and science.

He said he now realizes that New Yorkers should direct their concerns to him.

“I will be asking the legislature for a continuation of mayoral control,” Mamdani said, “and I will also be committed with my incoming schools chancellor to ensure that the mayoral control we preside over is not the same one that New Yorkers see today.”

Under the current governance model, the mayor unilaterally selects the schools chancellor and appoints the majority of the Panel for Educational Policy, a board that votes on school closures, contracts, and other major changes to Education Department regulations. The panel is typically considered a rubber stamp of mayoral priorities, though Mayor Eric Adams left some vacancies on the board, resulting in

Mamdani pledged to incorporate community involvement in a way that will not be “ceremonial or procedural, but tangible and actionable.” He wants to restructure parent meetings for community education councils so that “working parents can actually attend them” and improve awareness of these elected parent boards that oversee school zones and advise on policy. Voter turnout for these boards .

Mamdani also promised to “improve the parent coordinator role to be a meaningful organizer of parents, rather than an administrative coordinator reporting to a principal.” The responsibilities of parent coordinators, a role created in the initial deal allowing for mayoral control, . Many do a tremendous amount of organizing already, particularly when it comes to helping homeless families, but many in the role have long complained about its low wages.

Mamdani said he chose Samuels because “this moment demands a new generation of leadership” that “understands our schools” and has a “transformative vision” on how to lead them.

As superintendent of Manhattan’s District 3 stretching from the Upper West Side to part of Harlem, Samuels oversaw , combining schools with different demographics as in one of the country’s most segregated school systems. He initially used that approach , where he also spearheaded a move away from gifted and talented programs that separate kids toward schoolwide enrichment models, . Samuels started out as a teacher and principal in the Bronx.

Mamdani made clear on Wednesday that he for kindergarten students, but that he has season.

Samuels’ work overseeing the Adams administration’s literacy curriculum mandate, NYC Reads, led to an increase in test scores, Mamdani pointed out. Samuels also secured more than $10 million in grants across districts 3 and 13 to advance integration efforts through admissions policies, mergers, and rezonings.

“Equity is not an abstract idea. It’s a set of choices we make together in policy,” Samuels said. “But what matters is not just what we do, it’s how we do it, by listening to educators, by respecting families, by seeing students, not just as data points, but as whole people with enormous potential.”

In recent weeks, some parent groups had been calling for Mamdani to maintain stability of the school system and .

Liss will be the new child care office head

Mamdani also announced that Emmy Liss will serve as executive director for the mayor’s Office of Child Care, a position that will be critical in realizing Mamdani’s pledge to bring free child care to New Yorkers.

Liss was the chief of staff for Josh Wallack, a top aide in the de Blasio administration who oversaw the Education Department’s rollout for prekindergarten for 3- and 4-year-olds

“When I worked on the expansion of universal 3-k and pre-K, I saw firsthand what it means when city government comes together to deliver the families with the vision of universal child care,” Liss said on Wednesday. “We have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to come together again, to double down on the city’s investments and to design and implement a program that truly meets the needs of families and sustains our child care providers and educators.”

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

The rules were simple: Only eighth-graders could run. Seventh-graders could vote, but “had to just sit and watch,” as former student John McAuliff remembers, playing as special interest groups.

The seventh-graders weren’t having it.

Eighth-graders that fall “weren’t interested in politics,” recalled classmate Evan Roth Smith. “Meanwhile, our year was just chock full of, as it turned out, people who were already obsessed with politics.”

Among them was a bright, charismatic, soccer-loving 12-year-old named Zohran Mamdani. That fall, he, McAuliff and Smith plotted a stealth campaign that would overturn the game’s political establishment. Smith would be Mamdani’s running mate, McAuliff their campaign manager.

Among their key plays: Appeal to the youth vote, said McAuliff — in this case “eight-year-olds to 12-year-olds, basically,” who felt they were being taken for granted by the simulation’s two major parties.

After persuading teachers to let them run an independent-party primary — other kids ran as Greens, Libertarians, Communists and the like — Mamdani and his friends created their own entity: the COW Party, promising free chocolate milk at lunch. They created posters that riffed on the “” ads and, after persuading a classmate representing the National Organization for Women to endorse them, adopted the slogan, “I Want a COW Right NOW!”

“We were all sort of trying to poke holes in the world around us and trying to make it a more fair, caring place,” said McAuliff. 

Twenty-one years later, teachers and classmates who watched Mamdani campaign in 2004 — and who saw him advance through Bank Street more broadly — say the storied, progressive private school, located since 1970 on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, played a key role in forging his public personality and nurturing his love of politics. They say it also informed the improbable in which the avowed state assemblyman became New York City’s mayor on New Year’s Day.

“The school did the right thing by letting a bunch of kids who were really into something play a bigger role in it than the kids who weren’t,” said Smith, now a . “That was prescient in terms of exactly what Zohran did over this last year.”

In its wisdom, Smith said, the school in 2004 enabled Mamdani and his pals to engage in a timeless political maneuver: If the establishment isn’t delivering, “someone has to beat down the door.”

‘The fifth-graders loved him’

Founded more than a century ago in New York’s West Village, the school, part of a larger , has long espoused a hands-on philosophy of learning. First-graders, for instance, spend their entire year exploring , starting in the classroom and expanding to the neighborhood via field trips and interviews. In a culminating project, they build a detailed neighborhood out of materials like cardboard, wood and clay, and create original plays that explore the life of the city.

Fifth-graders spend the whole year — its geography, culture and history. The year culminates in a wide-ranging debate around Mao Zedong’s leadership and impact on Chinese society.

During last year’s New York mayoral campaign, Mamdani’s connection to the school surfaced only occasionally, most notably in a of 2004. Otherwise the school served almost entirely as a stand-in for Mamdani’s and elitism: The New York Post dubbed it “” and a lengthy piece on the mayor in Britain’s conservative devoted exactly nine words to Bank Street, calling it “a pricey private school known for its progressive commitments.” 

called it “a private, ultra-progressive academy long favored by Manhattan’s liberal elite” and noted both its high upper-school tuition — now north of $66,000 — and the fact that students address teachers by their first names.  

More often, Mamdani’s championing of Democratic Socialism simply drove conservative Republicans and moderate Democrats crazy: After he won the city’s Democratic primary in June, President Donald Trump “a 100% Communist Lunatic.” 

In November, after Mamdani beat his nearest opponent, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, by more than 200,000 votes, Trump to the White House, where he changed his tune, saying, “We have one thing in common: We want this city of ours that we love to do very well.”

Born in Uganda, Mamdani arrived in New York City when he was 7, the child of high-flying intellectuals: His mother, , is a well-known Indian-American filmmaker whose credits include Mississippi Masala, Monsoon Wedding and The Namesake. His father, , is an anthropology professor at Columbia University.

As a student at the tiny school, Mamdani impressed just about everybody he met.

Classmate McAuliff recalled him as “extremely generous and, even at that age, extremely charismatic, which is an age where you don’t even really know what that is yet.” A bit of that charisma likely rubbed off on McAuliff, who’d go on to work in the Biden administration and in November for a Virginia state house seat long held by Republicans.

Brooke Nalle, Mamdani’s seventh-grade humanities teacher, recalled his “dimply, bright, sweet smile” and remembered him as “incredibly adept at speaking to adults.”

“He is truly the most charismatic person I have ever met in my life,” she said. 

Nalle still remembers the day in 2004 when Mamdani asked if she needed a personal email account. At the time, Google was offering Gmail, its new service, on an basis. Somehow, Mamdani had invitations to share. Two decades later, Nalle laughed at the memory: “I am **@gmail.com because of Zohran, which is just bananas.” 

She and others recalled him not just as charismatic but generous with his time and attention, especially with younger classmates. 

“You can always tell a kid is a good kid, a good egg, when they are nice to the younger children,” said Nalle. “The fifth-graders loved him, and he was really sweet to them.”

She noted that Bank Street, for years located in a six-story highrise off Broadway, in Manhattan’s Morningside Heights neighborhood, at the time required students to eat lunch in their classrooms. Most days teachers ate with them, and most days Mamdani brought “this delicious snack” in his lunch known as a kathi roll: One for him, another for her.

Striving to ‘live democratically’

Mamdani’s state legislative and transition offices did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Several who knew him in this period say the school played a key part in his personal and political development — not to mention his adventurous spirit, his ease with being in public and his ability to work both sides of an issue.

Founded in 1916 by philosopher and educator , a peer of education pioneer , Bank Street College of Education was among the first to champion child-centered learning as an alternative to the memorization-heavy rote learning in vogue at the time. 

Originally called the , it brought together educators, social workers and psychologists to study how children actually learn — rare for its time. 

That led to several overlapping missions, with Bank Street over the years training thousands of educators even as it turned to its School for Children as an in-house research lab for new ideas.

The school’s influence has been widespread, affecting even our popular culture: In 1921, Mitchell made the case, in a , that children’s stories should be anchored in the real world and familiar objects, not in fairy stories or fantasy lands. She created Bank Street’s , a workshop that nurtured the careers of many children’s authors, including , whose 1947 picture book Goodnight Moon turned the common objects of a child’s bedroom into a perennial bestseller. 

Another Writers Lab alumnus, author , once that the fearsome creatures in 1963’s Where the Wild Things Are aren’t fantasy characters — they’re his unkempt, Old World Jewish relatives, who’d “pick you up and hug you and kiss you. ‘Aggghh. Oh, we could eat you up.’” 

The school’s longtime aims not only to encourage children’s intellectual curiosity, flexibility and “gentleness,” but urges them to “live democratically” inside and outside of school.

Key to living democratically, said Shael Polakow-Suransky, Bank Street’s president, is the ability to understand different people’s perspectives.

A former senior deputy chancellor of New York City Schools, Polakow-Suransky said Mamdani’s experiences at Bank Street may well play a large role not just in how he campaigned but in how he governs: Education makes up 37% of the city’s budget, with “tremendous opportunities” to shape the lives of children and families. 

Mamdani has already put forth an proposal that promises free care for every child from six weeks to five years old, offering child care workers wages that match those of public school teachers. 

But he also faces the daunting task of educating a huge influx of migrant students that over the past several years have both challenged the system and, in truth, kept its enrollment from .

Inaugurated on Jan. 1, Mamdani has moved quickly on education, naming a new schools chancellor a day before he was sworn in: currently oversees Manhattan’s District 3, which covers the Upper West Side, Morningside Heights and parts of Harlem. A former teacher in the Bronx with nearly 20 years of experience, Samuels also led school integration efforts and worked to scale back gifted programs.

Mamdani also reversed course on a campaign promise to end mayoral control of schools, saying he’d ask the state legislature for a continuation of the policy. New York’s mayor picks the chancellor and appoints most members of the , which oversees schools.

Mamdani on Wednesday promised to enact mayoral control differently: “I have been skeptical of mayoral control in the past,” , “even at times going as far as wanting to end the system entirely.” But he acknowledged that New Yorkers “need to know where the buck stops: with me.”

Notably, said Polakow-Suransky, Mamdani may well rely on his alma mater for help with one key task: Keeping schools in the nation’s largest district staffed and running smoothly: Bank Street is now the city’s foremost principal training program, minting as many as 300 new principals a year — and 500 to 600 teachers. 

‘A student who didn’t want to play the thing that was easy’

After Bank Street, the young Mamdani attended the city’s selective public . He’d later earn a bachelor’s degree at in Maine.

Asked whether it’s a bad look to have an alumnus of an exclusive private school become the new mayor, Polakow-Suransky shrugged. “A lot of our leaders go to private schools,” he said. “It’s rare to have a Democratic Socialist leader, and so that’s why people are asking that question.”

As New York City private schools go, he said, Bank Street is a bit different, not just in terms of philosophy and pedagogy. Students of color comprise a majority, and two-thirds now receive financial aid — far more than in Mamdani’s era. It’s also one of the most diverse private schools in the city, both racially and socioeconomically.

Much of the Bank Street curriculum still relies on immersing students in role-playing exercises, asking them to step into the shoes of people they might not always agree with.

Relying on simulations “creates a lived experience in a classroom setting that feels very real,” said Polakow-Suransky. “It sticks with you. It teaches you a lot of the dilemmas and questions and skills that you need to be an active participant in a democracy.”

Longtime humanities teacher Ali McKersie, who trained at Bank Street and taught there for 26 years, said founder Mitchell believed creative, experiential learning that fosters ethical development can help strengthen democracy. 

As the eighth grade humanities teacher in 2005-2006, McKersie introduced Mamdani and his classmates to the foundational principles of democracy in ancient Greece, then “fast-forwarded” to American democracy with an extensive judicial branch simulation loosely based on the First Amendment principles of the 1969 case, which granted students the same free-speech rights in school as elsewhere. The case pitted junior and senior high school students against their school after they vowed to wear black armbands in silent protest against the Vietnam War. 

Mamdani, she recalled, argued on the side of the school board, which wanted to limit expression to minimize disruption.

From there they undertook a 12-week congressional simulation, taking on the roles of actual legislators. Mamdani, the scion of Upper West Side cultural royalty, played  , the moderate Republican senator from Rhode Island. 

“I remember that being a really interesting choice,” said McKersie. Mamdani “was always a student who didn’t want to play the thing that was easy. He wanted to be challenged.”

More to the point, she said, he liked being a consensus-builder. 

McKersie recalled that the students that year in Room 420 — yes, they got the joke about the number associated with — were “really an exceptional group of young people. They wanted to dig into tax policy! I just remember being surprised that they were really interested in the mechanisms of funding around bills.”

So in addition to debating the usual suspects — gun control, abortion, the environment — tax codes were on the table, she said. “They were asking really fundamental questions around equity, and what’s what’s equitable. What does justice look like at the level of minutiae, at the legislative level?”

The simulation that year became such a part of the students’ fiber that McKersie would sometimes have to throw them out of the classroom at the end of class just to end debates. They’d carry it to lunch and would often still be discussing issues after school. 

One morning, she showed up to class expecting students to spend the day writing a bill, only to be presented with the finished version. They’d stayed up late, they said, hammering out the details over the phone. 

In that seminal 2004 mock election, classmate McCauliff recalled, the trio “got very granular” about the vote counting. Each class had only 40 or 45 people, so they were “able to figure out who Zohran needed to talk to, figure out what each person wanted to hear about.” 

In the end, the COWs won the independent primary and took on the establishment. The granular approach apparently worked: Mamdani and Smith won by a single vote.

For Smith, it was a confirmation, for all of the striving seventh-graders, “that you can just go for it and try it and beat down the door. And sometimes it works.”

At McDowell County Schools in North Carolina, we’ve learned that trust grows slowly, through hundreds of small, predictable moments, each one rooted in how schools communicate with families, staff and students.

Several years ago, we realized our communication was too fragmented to build that kind of trust. Families received the same information in multiple messages — emails, flyers, texts, social media posts — all with slightly different tones or details. A single snow day could trigger four versions of the same message. Teachers were frustrated, parents were unsure what to believe and staff spent time managing confusion instead of connection.

We didn’t need more communication; we needed better communication. So, brought all the schools in the district onto a single communications platform. We use , but the real change came not from the tool itself, but from the clarity and consistency it allowed us to create.

After years of trial and error, we’ve learned that the most effective district communications strategies share a few core principles. First, simplifying your tools goes a long way — using fewer channels reduces confusion and makes it easier for families and staff to know where to look for information. Second, consistency matters — templates provide a reliable structure that not only saves time but also builds trust with the audience. Third, it’s essential to explain the “why” behind messages. When people understand the context, compliance becomes true buy-in. Fourth, it is important to close the loop: ask for feedback, acknowledge it and show clearly how it informed your decisions. And fifth, through it all, lead with positivity. Celebrating even the small wins can keep morale high and momentum strong.

We started by rethinking tone. Before, a school message about early dismissal read: “Due to an unforeseen scheduling adjustment, students will be released at 12:15 p.m. today. All extracurricular activities are canceled.”

It was accurate, but the tone was impersonal and it didn’t give families the context they needed. The new version focused on clarity, empathy and the why: “We’ll be releasing students early today at 12:15 p.m. so our staff can attend a district training session. We appreciate your flexibility and want to be sure families have plenty of time to plan for pickup or after-school care.”

That change seems small, but families immediately noticed. They told us it felt more human — and it cut follow-up calls nearly in half.

We also reworked how we communicated policy reminders. In the past, attendance updates sounded procedural: “Students with 10 or more unexcused absences are subject to disciplinary action per district policy.”

Now, we frame them around partnership and shared goals: “Every day in class makes a difference. If your child has missed several days, our team is here to help you get back on track. Reach out to your school’s attendance office for support because we want every student here, every day.”

When we shared this shift during a with school leaders across the country, we saw dozens of comments in the chat responding with that same lightbulb moment: Clarity doesn’t have to mean formality.

Over time, those simple, consistent choices have changed our district’s culture. Messages now follow a rhythm and tone that feel uniform, no matter who sends them. Parents know where to look for information, and teachers know their updates won’t conflict with messages from the district. What used to feel like chaos now feels coordinated.

But communication isn’t just about sending the right message — it’s also about listening to what comes back. Every few weeks, we invite families and staff to share feedback through short digital surveys. We ask: Are you getting the information you need? Is there anything that isn’t clear? The answers help us spot patterns before they grow into problems. When families in one area said they were confused about attendance reporting, we realized we’d been using different phrasing in school newsletters. We corrected it across all schools within a day. That kind of responsiveness signals to families that their voices matter, and that’s where trust takes root.

We’ve also learned that not every message has to be an announcement. Some of the most powerful communication happens when sharing small, everyday wins, such as a picture of a student helping a classmate, a quick thank you to families who attended literacy night or a note celebrating staff for extra effort. During the webinar, one teacher joked that “snacks to the rescue” had become their unofficial morale booster after a principal started sharing photos of Friday staff snack carts. Those little touches remind everyone that communication is not just about logistics; it’s about connection.

Transparency has been another cornerstone. When our district rolled out a new cellphone policy, we didn’t just send the rules. We explained why and how the decision came about from staff input, safety considerations and classroom disruptions. We held Q&A sessions and gathered feedback. Families might not have loved every change, but they appreciated being included in the process.

The results haven’t been dramatic headlines or viral moments. They’ve been something quieter but more sustainable: steadier relationships, calmer campuses and a deeper sense of trust between home and school.

Great communication isn’t about perfection — it’s about connection. Families don’t expect flawless wording; they expect honesty, clarity and care. And when they consistently see those qualities in every message, they begin to believe not just in the information they receive, but in the people who send it.

“It’s pretty grim,” said Natalie Renew, executive director of Home Grown, a national initiative committed to improving the quality of and access to home-based child care, about the outlook for the sector.

“I don’t think anyone is particularly optimistic about child care” in the new year, added Daniel Hains, chief policy and professional advancement officer at the National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC). 

A handful of early care and education experts noted that 2025 did herald in a number of key victories in the field. 

Some states in policies shaping child care and early childhood education. In 2025, , and were among those that made new investments in the field. New Mexico took its gains in recent years a step further by free universal child care for all families, regardless of income, beginning last November. 

Alongside those wins for early learners and their caregivers came some challenges. Head Start was caught in political crosshairs more than once throughout the year — first when it was for elimination, then when many of its regional offices across the country were , and later when programs serving thousands of children nearly lost access to services during the prolonged government shutdown. And some states, such as Indiana, by the end of federal pandemic relief dollars, began to for families and programs, slashing provider reimbursement rates, instituting co-pays for families who use subsidies, and changing subsidy eligibility, among other actions. 

Now, those experts say, the that many states have experienced as historic pandemic-era investments expired is going to run headlong into another kind of budget shortfall in 2026. That’s one of four main issues they said they’ll be watching in early care and education in the new year. 

1. Child Care Spending: States Begin Tightening the Belt

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act that was signed into law in July 2025 includes significant cuts to Medicaid and SNAP. The cuts effectively shift the costs of those programs from the federal government to states. If states decide to pick up the tab, they’ll likely have to pull back on other services.

Most of the cuts won’t go into effect until after the 2026 midterm elections, but states will start planning ahead. 

“It’s less painful to do it slowly than all at once,” explained Melissa Boteach, chief policy officer at ZERO TO THREE. 

Unlike the federal government, states can’t spend more than they earn; they have to balance their budgets. So they’ll be looking for ways to increase revenue, such as through new taxes, or cut costs by eliminating or scaling back programs and services. 

“Uncertainty is the word,” said Aaron Loewenberg, senior policy analyst at New America. “There’s a lot of anxiety and uncertainty at this point about what the next year or two could look like.”

As states look to reduce costs, they will have fewer dollars to invest in early care and education. Certainly the prospect of bold new projects and initiatives seems less likely, experts said, but it’s also possible that existing programs could be scaled back. 

What will emerge, said Hains of NAEYC, is a divide between states that have the will and resources to fund ECE, and states that don’t. 

“We’re going to be looking at two very different countries: States that have revenue to invest in child care and early learning — [like] Vermont, New Mexico, Connecticut, Montana — while other states are going to be in more constrained and challenging situations.”

Ultimately, funding cuts will be felt by children, families and early educators. 

“There’s no way to nickel and dime investing in children,” Boteach said. “At the end of the day, if we’re going to really transform outcomes for children and families, it requires resources. … Children in this country are going to suffer because we are disinvesting rather than investing in their future.”

2. Expanding Access: Can Promises of Universal Child Care Be Fulfilled? 

New Mexico’s pledge of free, universal child care has buoyed the spirits of many early childhood educators and advocates. 

“It’s an enormous bright spot in an otherwise very difficult year,” Boteach said.

The initiative is in its early days — the income limitation was lifted on Nov. 1, 2025 — so this year will offer state leaders a chance to make good on their promise. Early childhood policy experts will be watching closely. 

Loewenberg of New America said he’ll be looking at how leaders navigate in the system, whether families feel it’s successful, and how such a policy could be replicated in states that don’t have the oil and gas revenues that New Mexico uses to fund universal child care. 

Meanwhile, all eyes will be on New York City as Mayor Zohran Mamdani settles into his new role and pursues his own for universal child care. 

“I’m holding out excitement or negativity to wait and see what happens,” said Loewenberg. “I think we’re past the point of saying, ‘This is great because people are talking about it.’ The difficult work is being able to make it work. That remains to be seen.”

One critical step is working out the funding mechanism for universal child care, which will likely require from the state government. 

Hains does find the policy pledge in itself encouraging. 

“Reflecting back on the last decade or two in this work, how amazing is it that we are at a place where mayors and governors are putting forward real, meaningful proposals of child care as a public good that’s available to everybody?” Hains said. “As a whole, looking at the big picture, it’s exciting that child care feels like something that elected officials can deliver on.”

3. Workforce Instability: Immigration Enforcement Creates Chilling Effect

In 2025, the Trump administration intensified immigration enforcement, which has had deleterious consequences for early childhood educators and, in turn, the families who rely on them.

An estimated early childhood educators are immigrants. In large urban areas, such as New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, immigrants make up of the child care workforce, Boteach pointed out. 

New America, a left-leaning think tank, released a in December that found a strong association between the increase in ICE activity and the number of foreign-born child care workers: Between February and July 2025, as ICE arrests increased after President Trump took office, there were 39,000 fewer foreign-born child care workers than the same period in 2024. 

With more funding for immigration enforcement, detention and deportation included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the trend is expected to continue in 2026. 

“Immigration enforcement, to me, right now, is the number one disruptor both to parent behavior and provider behavior,” said Renew of Home Grown. “It is hugely disruptive.” 

Because arrests have been , they have created a culture of fear among immigrants, even those with legal status in the country, New America found. And now that are fair game for ICE activity — prior to Trump’s second term, they were protected under a “sensitive locations” exception — many educators and parents worry about what may unfold before children’s eyes. 

“The amount of stress, the amount of worry about targeting in your community, can affect providers’ mental health and then the health of those kids in their care,” Boteach said. 

In effect, the escalation in immigration enforcement may impact both the availability and the quality of early care and education, she added.

4. Bright Spots: Solutions Emerge Amid Challenges

Even in a challenging political and budgetary environment, there are bright spots to keep an eye on in 2026. 

For one, Loewenberg pointed out, Head Start is still a viable, funded federal program. A year ago, that was not a sure thing.

A second is that a number of states with protected revenue streams for early care and education, including New Mexico and Vermont, will continue to invest in the field. Others are jumping in to commit more dollars to the sector — , and among them.  

Finally, early care and education is proving to be a viable campaign issue. In addition to Mamdani’s victory in New York, Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia both won their gubernatorial races by talking about child care. 

“You’re seeing in the elections that candidates that ran on child care, ran on helping families and children, won,” Boteach said. “These are winning political issues, which means both parties should be vying to talk about these issues and govern on these issues.”

Indeed, Hains feels that the country is moving from a place of “whether” child care is a government responsibility to “how” and how much the government should be involved.

WASHINGTON — States must now provide “justification” that federal child care funds they receive are spent on “legitimate” providers in order to get those dollars, President Donald Trump’s administration announced. 

The Tuesday shift in policy came followingwhich prompted the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to freeze all child care payments to the state. 

HHS could not offer many specifics on how the review process will play out for other states, but clarified that the money in question is provided through the multibillion-dollar federal Child Care and Development Fund, or CCDF. 

“States will be required to provide documentation, such as written justification, receipts, or photographic evidence, demonstrating that funds are supporting legitimate child care providers,” Emily Hilliard, a spokesperson for HHS, said in a statement to States Newsroom on Wednesday. 

CCDF provides federal funding to states, territories and tribes to help low-income families obtain child care. 

The program, administered within the Office of Child Care under HHS’ Administration for Children and Families, combines funding from the Child Care and Development Block Grant, or CCDBG, and the Child Care Entitlement to States, or CCES. 

Funding for CCDF in  stood at roughly $12.3 billion — comprising $8.75 billion from CCDBG and $3.55 billion from CCES. 

Head Start — a separate program that provides early childhood education, nutritious meals, health screenings and other support services to low-income families — does not appear to be affected. 

In a Tuesday  announcing the move, Health and Human Services Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill said he had “activated our defend the spend system for all ACF payments” and “starting today, all ACF payments across America will require a justification and a receipt or photo evidence before we send money to a state.” 

He clarified in a  shortly after that “funds will be released only when states prove they are being spent legitimately.” 

Funds undergo ‘regular audits’

“Federal funding enables millions of parents in every state and Congressional district to access and afford quality child care,” Sarah Rittling, executive director of First Five Years Fund, a federal advocacy group, said in a Wednesday statement. 

Rittling added that “these funds are essential to the nation’s well-being, allowing parents to work while ensuring their children are cared for and safe.” 



She also described the reports of potential fraud as “deeply concerning” and pointed out that “state oversight through regular audits is required by law to ensure that every dollar intended to protect and support young children is used properly and effectively.” 

“At the same time, we must ensure that nothing takes away from making sure funds for child care continue to reach the children and families who depend on them,” she said.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Minnesota Reformer maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor J. Patrick Coolican for questions: info@minnesotareformer.com.

The Department of Education is hiring fewer teachers and seeing an uptick in unlicensed educators in its schools, according to a recent  for the 2024-25 academic year. 

Last year, roughly 48% of newly hired Hawaiʻi educators did not have a teacher’s license, a significant jump from the 27% of new teachers who didn’t have one in the 2020-21 academic year. The numbers include those who have completed an educator preparation program but have not yet earned a state teaching license. 

The number of unlicensed educators, also known as emergency hires, has steadily increased since the pandemic, partly due to the recent increase in pay for these workers. The state also has programs in place to help emergency hires earn their license while teaching.

This fall, DOE reported the lowest number of  in five years, largely due to the uptick in emergency hires filling open positions. Emergency hires can work in schools for up to three years while they make progress toward earning a license. 

The department hired 1,300 teachers last year, down from more than 1,600 the year before that. Of those teachers, 82% were Hawaiʻi residents — the largest percentage of resident hires DOE has seen in the past four years.

Fewer teachers also left Hawaiʻi schools last year, with 1,116 retiring or resigning from their jobs, down from roughly 1,200 the year before. Most commonly, teachers said they left their jobs because they planned to move out of Hawaiʻi. 

The state has introduced more initiatives to improve teacher retention in recent years, including bonuses for educators working in hard-to-staff positions and increasing teacher pay. 

During Thursday’s Board of Education meeting, Assistant Superintendent Sean Bacon said the DOE is continuing to work on recruiting local teachers. For example, he said, schools are developing more career pathways for high school students interested in becoming teachers or educational assistants after they graduate. 

Civil Beat’s education reporting is supported by a grant from Chamberlin Family Philanthropy and “Data Dive” is supported in part by the Will J. Reid Foundation.

As an education support professional in Hawley, Pennsylvania, about 30 miles east of Scranton, she’s been a teacher’s assistant, substitute, district registrar, homeless liaison and attendance officer. She’s currently the principal’s secretary, serves on the city council, is a board member for the state education retirement system and is the president of her district’s educational support professionals union.

Her experience and passion for helping homeless youth were reasons why she was recently named the Pennsylvania State Education Association’s Dolores McCracken Education Support Professional of the Year.

Monaghan was the Wallenpaupack district’s homeless liaison for 15 years. She helped arrange transportation for students and when they didn’t come to school. Before the pandemic, she launched a nonprofit in an effort to find temporary housing for students who didn’t have a permanent home.

When Monaghan received news about her award in November, she said in a that she was honored to be associated with its namesake, who was the first educational support professional to serve as president of the state teachers union. McCracken died of cancer in 2018.

“Having known Dolores and witnessed all that she accomplished on behalf of education support professionals makes this so much more significant and humbling,” Monaghan said. “I have tried to use her belief that if something needs to be done, you just do it and then move on to the next project, all with the hope of improving circumstances for those around you.”

There are more than 2.2 million education support professionals in U.S. public schools, according to the . These include paraprofessionals, office staff, food service workers, security personnel, bus drivers and custodians

More than 75% of education support professionals have responsibilities for ensuring student and student safety. About 84% work full time, with an average of $37,097.

Aaron Chapin, president of the Pennsylvania State Education Association, said in a that Monaghan is a “model of dedication and citizenship” and consistently gave back to her school and community. 

“Ann excels on so many levels,” Chapin said. “She is a compassionate leader, hardworking volunteer, skilled support professional and effective public official. As a leader in her local [union] and in PSEA, she is a strong voice for her fellow support professionals.”

Monaghan spoke recently with The 74’s Lauren Wagner. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about your time as a homeless student liaison.

I was a homeless student liaison for about 15 years. I did not realize how many students are homeless in this district. A lot of people didn’t realize. Our poverty rate is 64% to 65%, but we have a good tax base because we’re land-rich. So people were like, “What do you mean we have homeless students? We don’t have homeless people in this area.” I was like, “Yeah, you do. If you really look very closely at the definition, we have a lot of homeless in this area, especially kids.” I became very interested in the topic, especially when we tried to find places for some of these kids to go. I realized there was nowhere to go in this area. 

Wayne and Pike counties are the only two counties in the state that do not have a homeless shelter. It was not a new situation for the district, it was just one that was never really acknowledged. I was able to work with the administration — even though we didn’t have a place to send the kids — and we were able to work with agencies and made sure they had transportation. The district was really good about taking care of all that. Even though I’m not the homeless student liaison anymore, I work with the person who is now the liaison, and I haven’t given up on the idea of getting a homeless shelter in the area.

In your work with the homeless community, you began the creation of Hawley Forward, an afterschool program nonprofit. How is that going?

The whole idea started prior to COVID, and we had a building that we wanted to see if we could talk to the owner into donating and turning it into a hub for afterschool programs. There was space upstairs that we thought about making into a dorm area for kids we call sofa surfers — for whatever reason, they’re not with their parents or they don’t have a place to go. With COVID, all those plans fell through. So we’re still working on that. I’ve been talking to one of the local pastors who has a church property they’re not utilizing. They’re talking with their church council, so we may be able to do something on a small scale for our students. Sometimes we just need some place for kids to spend a couple of nights because there’s something going on at home and things are not stable. We’ve had seniors who aren’t able to be at home, and we just have to get them through to graduation. That’s what we’re hoping to still be able to do.

What made you want to go into education?

When I was in high school, I wanted to go to college and I wanted to be a teacher. I got my teaching certification in New York. I taught for the Diocese of Brooklyn for a number of years, and then I moved to Pennsylvania. But there were no teaching jobs available, so I subbed for a while and then I was asked if I wanted to take a position as a teacher assistant to do attendance and study halls. That’s how I got into working at the school here. That position just gradually morphed into what it ultimately became. 

I was ready to retire three years ago, and the principal asked if I would take over as [his] secretary. He said, ‘I can coach you.’ Because I wanted to be a grandma, I worked out babysitting issues with my daughter. And I stayed on to be the administrative assistant. 

You’re the president of both a local education support professional union and the Pennsylvania State Education Association’s northeastern region. What are you working on in both positions?

I’ve been the local union president since 2009 and am finishing my third year as president of the Northeastern Education Support Professional Division. Right now, my local Wallenpaupack union isn’t negotiating. We settled a contract last year, so we’re in the second year of the new contract. But [for the regional organization], I’m working with the Bloomsburg School District. They have a whole bunch of new leaders and they’re going into a negotiation, so we’re trying to work with them to get fully acclimated. 

Advocating for a living wage for support staff is still key. I know support staff who have been in their job for 25 to 30 years and are barely making $25,000 a year. That’s not a living wage, and especially in this day and age, with the cost of groceries, gas and utilities. Even [making] $15 an hour, we have people who work two or three jobs just to make ends meet. It’s important that support staff be recognized and be paid adequately, because buildings could not run without support staff. We’re the ones who answer the phones, keep the place clean, keep the kids fed, get them to and from school. It’s a vital role, and it needs to be recognized. For a lot of years, people [thought] it was just a side job. But it’s a career for people, and we need to support them in that profession. We don’t have as many dedicated people coming in as we used to because the money is not there.

“When the economy is doing well, our enrollments are down, and when the economy is in a tough stretch or in a recession, we see our enrollments go up,” said Chris Ferguson, an executive vice chancellor with the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, which oversees all of the state’s 116 community colleges. 

Ferguson said the state has yet to release authoritative data on fall enrollment, but early data shows upward trends. In interviews with CalMatters, some college presidents said they’re seeing over 10% more students compared to last fall. But they say the state hasn’t provided enough funding to keep up with their growth. 

California is not in a recession, but some economic indicators are grim. , and it’s getting . The cost of consumer goods, such as toilet paper and cosmetics, is , and economists say tariffs and President Donald Trump’s increased deportations could lead to further . 

“Typically when the economy gets a little crazy, like it is right now, people need to upskill or find new work,” and workers look to colleges for help, said Nicole Albo-Lopez, deputy chancellor for the Los Angeles Community College District. In the Los Angeles district, students between the ages of 35 and 54 are coming back to school in droves — up 28% compared to last year, she said. 

Other factors may also be bringing students back to school. The COVID-19 pandemic created a in college enrollment, and some schools say the influx of students this year is just a return to pre-pandemic levels. A large portion of recent enrollment growth comes from high school students taking college courses, which has in the past few years. 

But most college officials agree that uncertainty about the economy is at least one of the driving forces for new students this semester. 

At the Los Rios Community College District, which represents four campuses in the Sacramento metro area, enrollment is up by more than 5% compared to last fall. Part of that is due to “the gap between Wall Street and Main Street,” said Mario Rodriguez, an executive vice chancellor for the system: The stock market has performed well in the past few years, even as job seekers see fewer opportunities and families struggle with inflation. Enrollments in career technical classes are up 10% this semester at the district, the equivalent of almost 4,000 new students. 

These job-ready programs, such as medical assisting, welding, and automotive, have always been popular, and some cap enrollment. School officials say waitlists are growing.

Quitting a job, starting school

Carla Gruhn, 29, has worked as a medical assistant in San Jose for 10 years. At one point she was making roughly $50,000 a year, but it wasn’t enough.

“In the last year, eggs started becoming super expensive,” she said. “That’s when I started paying more attention to gas and groceries.” Together with her husband, she started planning ways to scale back — fewer coffee runs, less travel with their truck, cheaper gifts this Christmas. But they needed a long-term solution, too.

In July, she quit her job and enrolled in a two-year radiologic technology program at Foothill College, in the south Bay Area, which will teach her how to read X-rays, CT scans, and MRIs. Her salary will double, maybe even triple, once she graduates with the new credential. 

The pay raise could be “life-changing,” she said. At the moment, Gruhn said her family is small, just her husband and her dog, so their costs are lower, but they know it’s going to get more expensive, since they want to buy a house and have kids. “We’re trying to plan for the future too.”

At Foothill College, enrollment is up, especially in science and technology classes, said Simon Pennington, the school’s associate vice president of community relations. Many of these students are looking to fulfill prerequisites to enter careers in the health care sector, he added. Health care is one of the in the state, according to a recent report from the Public Policy Institute of California. 

In Merced, hours away from major urban centers like the Bay Area, Sacramento, or Los Angeles, students are clamoring for classes in electronics, where the fall waitlist numbers have nearly doubled compared to three years ago. Demand is also up for classes in criminal justice and mechanized agriculture, according to James Leonard, a spokesperson for the school. 

“When the economy goes bad, enrollment skyrockets,” said Dee Sigismond, Merced College’s vice president of instruction, though she wasn’t certain that a recession would have the same impact it did 15 years ago. Staring during the pandemic, Merced College, like most community colleges, now offers many of its classes online, which can make it easier for students to juggle school with a full- or part-time job. She added that Merced is also experimenting with new, more flexible kinds of instruction, such as , which allows students to pass a class by showing they already have the requisite skills.

Colleges call for more funding

California’s community colleges receive most of their funding based on the number of students they serve. When enrollment declined during the pandemic, colleges were set to lose funding, but the governor and the Legislature granted the community college system a special exemption, delaying many funding cuts. 

Now that enrollment is ticking up, many colleges say they have the opposite problem — they aren’t getting enough money to serve the influx of new students. That’s largely because the state’s funding formula is based on the college’s average enrollment over the past three years, so sudden changes this year are slow to have an effect. Rodriguez said his Sacramento area district is serving about 5,000 more students than the system is funded to support, representing about $20 million in lost revenue. 

This summer, the state agreed to to California’s community colleges to account for recent enrollment growth, but Ferguson said it isn’t enough to fully fund all the new students. 

Last month, presidents and chancellors from 10 different community colleges or community college districts, including representatives from Los Angeles and Sacramento, sent to the governor, asking him to change state policy and allow colleges to get more funding in next year’s budget. Though he did not sign the letter, Ferguson said the state chancellor’s office is asking the governor for similar changes. 

In 2008, colleges had to cut back on services or classes, even as new students poured in because the state didn’t provide proportionate funding for each new enrollment. 

Next year, California is expected to face an $18 billion , according to a November analysis by the Legislative Analyst’s Office. For comparison, the state had a deficit of about in 2008, worth about $36 billion in today’s dollars. 

In Chula Vista, Southwestern College President Mark Sanchez said his district is already saying no to potential college classes in high schools and prisons because of a lack of state funding. 

His district had over 32,000 students in the last academic year — the highest enrollment rate since the Great Recession.

Grades are a standard part of the American educational system that most students and teachers take for granted.

WARNER —  The banners stretch along the top of Warner Public Schools’ Event Center wall, each with the letter A as the centerpiece.

Every banner celebrates the 16 overall A grades that schools in the rural eastern Oklahoma district have received since 2013 on . A fresh one printed in 2025 signifies Warner’s high school and K-8 school were again among the top 5% highest-performing public schools in the state.

The A grades, though a heavy focus in the 800-student district, aren’t the point, Warner Superintendent David Vinson said. They’re a byproduct of students’ and teachers’ hard work. And if Warner can do it, he said, any district can.

“You have to make sure your students understand the why,” Vinson said. “It’s about their education. It’s about bettering their lives. It’s not about getting an A on the report card or about getting high marks as a school district. That’s a result or a fallout of them being high achievers individually.”

Public schools across Oklahoma are now implementing strategies Warner has been employing for years — a throughout the school day, frequent benchmark testing and . The district changed its culture and policies more than a decade ago after receiving disappointing results on state report cards.

The town of Warner, home to 1,500 residents and Connors State College, doesn’t have a wealth of industry to keep its school district flush with local tax revenue, Vinson said. State funding and community support for bond issues fill in the gap.

About 60% of Warner students come from households at or near the federal poverty line, . Many district students — 42% of whom are Native American, 31% white and 20% two or more races — have parents who work in farming and ranching in the area or drive 20 minutes north to Muskogee for industry jobs, Vinson said.

Not that he particularly pays attention to demographics. Those details, Vinson said, “tend to be used as excuses.”

High academic expectations and strict discipline are core to the district’s success, he said. Principals are quick to handle behavioral issues, leaving teachers free to teach and students better able to learn without disruptions.

The principal’s office is not a “revolving door,” he said. Any student sent in must leave with a consequence.

“I think education in general across the board has lost sight of that mentality, has lost sight of that philosophy,” Vinson said. “And that’s why you have schools that are in chaos, and you have entire schools scoring 0% proficient on assessments because the school has become so chaotic that teachers can’t teach and kids can’t learn. And there are just as smart of kids in those schools as there are in my school. They’re just not being afforded that opportunity to learn like our kids are.”

Small behavioral problems are addressed consistently, and big incidents are punished “severely,” he said. 

In Warner, that includes the rare use of corporal punishment, a method of discipline that . Simply having it on the table as an option, Vinson said, usually is enough to discourage most students from bad behavior.

While administrators handle discipline, teachers are expected to maximize every minute of their class time, a concept known in Warner as “bell-to-bell teaching.” That means no movies and no downtime, said Charla Jackson, the district’s curriculum director and elementary counselor.

Middle and high school students are discouraged from mingling in the hallways during passing periods. Instead they’re expected to hustle to their lockers and then to their next class, where a bellringer assignment is usually waiting. They’re expected to read a book if they finish their classwork early.

Literacy is a major emphasis in Warner, Jackson said. Several Warner Elementary teachers have completed in-depth training on the science of reading, and the school provides reading interventionists and tutoring for students who need extra help.

“They are the experts,” Jackson said of Warner’s teachers. “They are the ones making the difference. We just try to support them and allow them to do their job. So, that’s first and foremost.”

High morale keeps teacher turnover low, Jackson said. Class sizes, though increasing with Warner’s enrollment growth, max out at about 24 students per classroom.

But, Warner isn’t immune from the teacher shortage impacting public schools across Oklahoma.

About half of the teachers at Warner High School entered the classroom through non-traditional means, like adjunct teaching and alternative or emergency certification, Vinson said. The district tries to support those educators with training, pre-written curriculum plans and co-teaching hours with a veteran teacher.

Having fewer classroom disruptions, too, “just makes everybody a better teacher,” he said.

Several district teachers told Oklahoma Voice that behavioral issues are rarely a problem in their classrooms, but when they do occur, school administrators readily step in.

When asked what sets Warner apart, kindergarten teacher Lisa Lee pointed to elementary Principal Alan Gordon’s desk. 

“This man right here, he’s great,” Lee said. “The administration here, it just makes you feel good. You know what I mean? Like they’re backing us. They believe in us. They push us, and that makes a huge difference.”

Fourth-grade math teacher Pam White said she was ready to quit teaching before she came to Warner Elementary five years ago. White, 65, is eligible to retire but has chosen not to “because I love this school so much.”

She said the supportive administration has been “huge.”

“They’re in our classrooms,” she said. “They’ll take care of problems immediately.”

During a visit to White’s classroom, students in her afternoon math class were equally enthusiastic about their school, complimenting the quality of their teachers, school staff and principal.

But, Warner didn’t always have this culture of success. The turning point was 2012. That year, the district scored straight C’s on state report cards.

Vinson, then in his first year as superintendent, sent an email to Warner families to inform them “we are not pleased with the overall grade on these report cards for our schools.” The district’s administrators and teachers were already implementing changes, he wrote in the email. He still keeps a copy.

That’s when Warner adopted a more structured and disciplined culture, banned cellphones, started adhering to bell-to-bell teaching and aimed to have 90% of students make a proficient score on state tests. 

The following year, the district met or exceeded the statewide average on nearly every state exam.

That trajectory continued over the following decade, despite state test scoring becoming more rigorous in 2017 and COVID-19 interrupting schooling in 2020. In 2025, Warner students scored above the state average in every tested grade level, .

Families in the area have taken notice. While the town of Warner has experienced little population change, its school district has grown from 600 students at the start of the turnaround to more than 800 today. Student transfers are a major source of the spike.  

“I think a big thing is we established a culture here where kids want to succeed,” middle and high school counselor Misty Durrett said. “It’s something they take pride in.

“They know our ranking. They know where we stand. They want to maintain that.”

It’s not all structure and discipline, Vinson said. School still needs to be fun.

That’s why Warner has expanded extracurricular activities, electives and class options available to students. It’s added a competition choir, an art program, boys and girls wrestling, and a high school construction class, where students are building a house that should be ready to sell this spring. 

Students on the high school racing team design and build a dirt-track racing car that Vinson drives in competitions on the team’s behalf.

School spirit events, like Homecoming, consume entire school days. With the winter holidays approaching, the interior of every Warner school is decorated for Christmas with lights, trees and door decals.

“You have to create those opportunities for kids to enjoy school,” Vinson said. “It can’t be structure, discipline, learning, structure, discipline, learning 170 days a year.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janelle Stecklein for questions: info@oklahomavoice.com.

Colorado parents will soon be able to get partial refunds on certain upfront fees they’ve paid to child care centers if their children don’t land a seat there within six months.

A that takes effect on Jan 1. aims to ease the cost burden on families who pay waitlist, application, or deposit fees to child care programs that their children don’t end up attending. It requires child care providers to provide the refunds if a child has not been offered a spot within six months and the parent requests the refund in writing, such as by email.

Democratic lawmakers pushed for the proposal during the 2025 legislative session, citing instances where families sometimes pay fees of $100 or more to a dozen or more child care centers as they search for a slot.

The law applies to fees paid on or after Jan. 1, 2026, so families won’t be able to obtain refunds until they hit the end of the six-month window in July 2026 or after. Families who are offered a spot at a child care center but decline it aren’t eligible to recoup any of the fees they paid.

Under the law, providers are allowed to keep a “reasonable” portion of the waitlist, application, or deposit fee to cover administrative costs. , according to a Colorado Department of Early Childhood document released Thursday.

Besides the refund provision, the new law requires child care programs to disclose their tuition and fees when a prospective family requests pricing information, joins the waitlist, enrolls in the program, or when the provider changes the fee schedule. It doesn’t require that tuition and fees be posted publicly.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

(NCDHHS) will partner with 16 higher education institutions to launch free, intensive, short-term training and certification programs to prepare participants for child care careers, according to

Traditional programs for lead teacher roles in early childhood education can last several weeks or months. These new training programs, called “child care academies,” will be shorter, while still offering curriculum that “meets or exceeds” minimum training standards, the announcement says. The length of programs will vary depending on the college or university in which the participant enrolls.

The NCDHHS press release says these academies aim to “address the severe staffing shortage that is a key contributor to the state’s child care crisis,” expand access to high-quality early learning, bolster workforce development, and reinforce the state’s economy by helping parents stay employed.

Funding for the initiative will come from NCDHHS’s Division of Child Development and Early Education, the announcement said, using dollars from a federal Preschool Development Grant.

“North Carolina’s early learning system depends on a strong, well-prepared workforce, and the Child Care Academies are designed to meet that need head on,” said NCDHHS Deputy Secretary for Opportunity and Well-Being Michael Leighs. “By providing free high-quality training, we’re opening doors for new educators while supporting families and ensuring children across our state have access to safe and nurturing care.”

These academies have gained popularity in recent months as a way to address early childhood educator shortages. that at least 11 counties across the state had institutions running child care academies. According to that report, a 2024 survey found staffing shortages were affecting three out of every five licensed child care providers across the state.

Earlier this year, a $1.476 million pilot to expand child care academies with state funding was included in the . However, the pilot funding did not make it into the General Assembly’s “,” which was signed by Gov. Josh Stein in August.

A February lifted up child care academies as “scalable local solutions,” and the governor’s North Carolina Task Force on Child Care and Early Education highlighted child care academies in its June .

The NCDHHS press release lists 16 new child care academies — including 13 at community colleges, and three at four-year institutions. Of the 13 at community colleges, only two were included in EdNC’s September report, meaning that 11 of the community colleges may be running programs for the first time.

Per NCDHHS, the list of institutions offering child care academies include:

• Appalachian State University
• Bladen Community College
• Central Carolina Community College
• Central Piedmont Community College
• Davidson-Davie Community College
• Durham Technical Community College
• Elizabeth City State University
• Forsyth Technical Community College
• Guilford Technical Community College
• Montgomery Community College
• Nash Community College
• Pitt Community College
• Roanoke-Chowan Community College
• Sandhills Community College
• The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Wilson Community College

According to the press release, participants in the academies undergo training in different formats — with virtual and in-person opportunities — covering CPR/first aid, health and safety, infant/toddler safe sleep and sudden infant death syndrome, playground safety, and identifying and responding to signs of child maltreatment.

Participants are also introduced to the North Carolina Foundations for Early Learning and Development, trained on the Environment Rating Scales, and briefed on program standards for Pathways to the Stars, the state’s updated Quality Rating and Improvement System. They also receive certification and guidance to complete the required NCDHHS criminal background checks.

“Children in early childhood care and education environments need well-prepared teachers to help keep them safe, healthy and learning,” said Candace Witherspoon, director of the NCDHHS , which licenses and monitors child care programs. “Child Care Academies quickly and fully prepare teachers to provide quality care and education to children and families in their communities.”

Each of these schools will have to offer at least three trainings through July 2026, the release says, though participating schools can set their own start date. Some already began in October, while others will launch in January.

NCDHHS’s press release said those interested in the academies should contact the admissions office of the program at their school of choice.

You can

EdNC’s Katie Dukes contributed to this report.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

A jump in immigration enforcement arrests under the Trump administration is having a detrimental impact on America’s child care system, reducing the number of immigrant workers available and prompting mothers with young children to leave their jobs as they scramble for stable care.

That’s according to by the Better Life Lab at the nonprofit , which examined how increased arrests during the first half of the year by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has had a ripple effect on a women-led child care workforce where .

The report estimates there are roughly 39,000 fewer foreign-born child care workers since Trump took office in January. There are also 77,000 fewer American mothers of preschool-aged children in the workforce since that time, a result that researchers found is tied to the impact of ICE arrests. Mothers have already been .

“It’s not surprising that we find that disruptions to the child care market vis-à-vis an increase in immigration enforcement has led to a decline in the number of foreign-born workers, and because of the disruptions in the child care market, this has led to spillovers in the labor market for mothers with kids more generally,” said Chris M. Herbst, one of the authors of the report and a professor of public policy at Arizona State University whose research includes the economics of child care. “These kinds of immigration-induced disruptions have had negative labor market implications.”

The group analyzed and newly compiled ICE arrest data between September 2023 and July 2025 and found that immigrant labor — both among foreign-born and U.S.-born child care workers — decreased as arrests spiked this year and workers tried to avoid being targeted by ICE agents. The report estimates ICE arrests rose more than threefold between December 2024 and June of this year — from just over 8,300 to more than 29,000.

The dynamics also appear to be shifting some workers away from formal center- and home-based employment settings toward private households in work as a babysitter, nanny or au pair. Those shifts may reduce the total number of spots a day care can offer.

“Pay is often under the table, and there’s no formal regulation of this sector,” Herbst said. “We don’t know if it’s high quality, if it’s low quality, how good the pay is — but what it is is less visible, and workers may feel less vulnerable as a result.”

The drop in foreign-born child care workers is most pronounced among highly educated immigrants and those from Mexico. There’s also a 30 percent decrease among Hispanic workers, particularly Mexican workers, born in the United States. ICE agents .

“ICE arrests are having chilling effects on groups that are not eligible for deportation,” Herbst said. “U.S.-born workers of any race or ethnicity are not eligible for deportation, and the fact that we’re seeing reductions in U.S.-born employment among Hispanics, in particular Mexicans, speaks potentially to this chilling effect that ICE is having on these workers.”

Herbst said the administration sold mass deportations on the theory that they would unclog the labor market and create more job opportunities for Americans. That’s not what is playing out in the child care industry, which shows how immigrants and U.S. citizens don’t always compete for the same jobs.

“When a foreign-born worker is not showing up to work anymore because they’re scared, it makes the U.S.-born worker in that program — it makes it more difficult for them to do their jobs because they are doing complementary tasks rather than serving as substitutes for one another.”

The changes to the child care workforce are also impacting employment opportunities among U.S. mothers with preschool-aged children, especially White mothers and those who are highly educated.

“Parents, mothers in particular, rely on having stable child care available in order to work. And 

when you increase instability in the child care market, essentially by ramping up immigration enforcement, you’re scaring the heck out of a lot of workers who are no longer going to show up,” Herbst said. “Because of that, the nation’s ability to provide child care services has declined. Families can no longer find the needed child care to go to work, and as a result, we’re seeing in the data, there are fewer mothers employed.”

This is not the first time researchers have examined the impact of immigration enforcement on child care. aimed at checking the immigration status of people arrested by local police and in effect between 2008 and 2013 also force and among American mothers with young children.

Trump has made mass immigrant deportation a central policy during his second term. The scope of related arrests and subsequent detentions has included people without criminal backgrounds, including and people, and reached into locations once deemed sensitive by the federal government like schools, hospitals and churches.

Trump’s policy decision to rescind “sensitive location” status for places like day cares has translated into more immigration enforcement arrests near centers. A recent arrest of a day care worker inside a Chicago area center as children watched .

Immigration arrests are expected to continue in the new year. Congress approved a massive tax law last summer that for immigration enforcement, including for detentions and deportations. Researchers believe as ICE hires more officers and ramps up arrests, the child care sector could be further harmed.

Herbst said he expects disruptions not just to the child care sector but to other industries that are immigrant intensive.

“What I hope our paper does is start to get people thinking about the trade offs involved in this kind of immigration enforcement policy,” he said. “It’s been sold to us as a policy that’s going to be a boon for American workers, for U.S.-born workers. But I think what we’re finding is that there are trade offs.”

was originally reported by Barbara Rodriguez of . .

Duque, who has taught at the award-winning, urban planning-themed LAUSD in West Hollywood for 18 years, was one of four teachers named as finalists by the state education department for the 2026 California Teachers of the Year in October. She was the only LAUSD teacher to receive the honor.

Duque works hard to create a free-flowing vibe in her first-grade classroom to promote the creativity of her students, describing the scene as the “best kind” of messy.  

“It’s a place where my students are able to wonder, to be curious, to take risks, to be able to make things with their hands and minds,” said Duque, who has been a teacher in Los Angeles Unified since 2000. 

“It’s a place where you can tell learning is happening,” she said of her classroom. 

The veteran teacher’s freewheeling approach is apparent in her classroom but there’s a method to the mayhem. Everything her students do is somehow tied back to the school’s theme of urban planning and urban design, topics Duque admits could be heady for her 6-year-old students, were it not for her approach to the subjects, which links them to kids’ everyday lives. 

On a recent school day, students in Duque’s class were drawing pictures of designs for a new community space in Griffith Park after she noticed a news report about the city’s struggle to repurpose the area .������

Students drew pictures of their ideas for the space, coloring construction paper using markers and drawing their visions for forests and lazy rivers that could be installed in L.A.’s historic park.  

In subsequent parts of the project, Duque said, students will create three-dimensional models of their ideas for the part using recycled materials such as cardboard and paper.  

“We’re making an arcade that’s called Fun Time, and then we put a petting zoo next to it called Pig Pig,” said Ben, a student in Duque’s class, who was working on a drawing with a few classmates. “I wonder if it will really happen.”

Duque often pulls ideas for lessons from real-life events in L.A., finding the sprawling and diverse city offers no shortage of inspiration for classroom activities tied to urban planning. 

“I just keep my eyes and ears to the news, and I just see what’s happening in our community, and I just get ideas from there,” she said. 

A favorite lesson from a few years ago was based on an experience the teacher had while walking her dog in Griffith Park, when a coyote approached the two and nearly attacked Duque’s pet. 

are common in L.A. and such experiences aren’t unusual, but this event inspired Duque to create a lesson for students to create outfits for pets to repel predatory coyote attacks.

Students created costumes for pets that featured things known to deter coyotes, such as flashing lights. One student liked the project so much she created a picture book about the lesson with her parents, a copy of which Duque keeps displayed on the wall in her class. 

“It’s another example of how I really look at what’s in our city, what’s in the news, and what’s relevant to kids and our lives,” the teacher said. 

Duque’s relentless curiosity and enthusiasm make her a natural leader among her colleagues at Rosewood, said the school’s principal, Linda Crowder.

“She is a lifelong learner,” Crowder said. “She gets something and she runs with it.”

Each of these top 10 tools is valuable whether you’re working with little kids, grad students, or learners in between. These services are all free to try, with paid upgrades available. I teach college and grad students, have two elementary school kids of my own and have worked with teachers at all levels for more than two decades. So you’ll find here tools designed to enhance teaching at all levels. 

–Jeremy Caplan

Make Concepts Stick

Inspire Curiosity

VIDEO

Jeremy Caplan Walks Through Three Top Tech Tools for Educators

AI That Actually Helps

Spark Engagement

Tame the Chaos

Bonus: Preserve Academic Integrity

Amid these developments — some amazing research and resources have emerged for the field. As the year comes to a close, zero2eight asked early care and education experts to share what they consider to be the sector’s must-read research of 2025. What emerged from their responses were a collection of reports, studies and data tools relevant to a number of urgent themes. These include the sector’s ability to respond to current events, new ways of thinking about preschool gains and economic analysis of some of the ongoing challenges facing the early care and education workforce. 

Here are some of the themes, studies and resources identified by the field’s insiders as essential to moving the sector forward.

1. Timely Research and Resources for Challenging Times

Steeply rising costs, and have all contributed to a challenging, fast-changing landscape for families and early educators, and reliant on public benefits. The following new research and tools offer timely insights into how such pressures are reshaping families’ lives and the early care and education sector, with some offering inspiration for how to respond. 

Working Paper: 

Authors: Thomas S. Dee, economist and the Barnett Family Professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education

Key Takeaway: Immigration raids coincided with a 22% increase in daily student absences, with especially large increases among the youngest students. 

This study highlights the field’s “ability to innovate and be nimble to understand impacts of policy and policy enforcement,” said nominator Cristi Carman, director of the RAPID Survey Project at Stanford Center on Early Childhood who studies family well-being. It examines the collateral damage of unexpected immigration raids in California’s Central Valley, documenting a clear pattern in children’s school attendance, said second nominator Philip Fisher, director of the Stanford Center on Early Childhood, adding that “ICE raids are associated with increased school absenteeism.” According to the working paper, young children are expected to be the most likely to miss school, with students in kindergarten through fifth grade estimated to be far more likely to miss school as a result of immigration raids than high school students. 

Report:

Authors: Children’s Funding Project staff, including Bruno Showers, state policy manager; Lisa Christensen Gee, director of tax policy; Olivia Allen, vice president of strategy and advocacy; Josh Weinstock, policy analyst (former); and Marina Mendoza, senior manager of early childhood impact

Key Takeaway: Facing dwindling federal funds, several states have innovated ways to provide dedicated funding for early care and education and youth programs.

With pandemic-era relief funds running out, states are in desperate need of models for how to continue supporting early care and education, said Erica Phillips, executive director of the National Association for Family Child Care (NAFCC), who nominated this recent report. The report — from Children’s Funding Project, a nonprofit that helps secure sustainable public funding for children’s services — offers exactly that by providing a crucial, “very comprehensive overview” of how some states are building long-term, dedicated revenue streams for child care, early education and youth programs as federal money runs dry. As the report’s authors explain, stable, dedicated funding is critical to thriving programs, letting states and providers to “budget more than one year at a time, allowing them to make longer-term investments in quality improvement, facilities, staff education, and other key elements of evidence-based programs and services.” 

Data Tools: and

Authors: The diaper need mapping tool was published as part of a research collaboration between the Urban Institute and the National Diaper Bank Network. The affordability tracker was published by the Urban Institute. 

Key takeaway: Families are facing mounting economic insecurity 

The Urban Institute recently released two innovative data tools for policymakers, advocates and researchers that illuminate the increasing economic precariousness facing too many families, said Carman of the RAPID Survey Project. The interactive, produced in partnership with the National Diaper Bank Initiative, shows how many diapers each county across the nation needs to address diaper shortages facing homes with young children that are below 300% of the federal poverty level. illustrates the rising cost pressures facing families across various indicators, including how the price of groceries has changed in counties and congressional districts in recent years. “Being able to see and understand scale and drivers of economic insecurity nationally is very powerful,” wrote Carman. 

2. New Research Reveals Preschool’s Overlooked Impacts

The body of early education research about how preschool affects children often measures child outcomes such as kindergarten readiness, standardized test scores or later graduation rates. While those are all important, Christina Weiland, professor at the Marsal School of Education at the University of Michigan and the Ford School of Public Policy, wrote in an email, “we’ve long suspected they aren’t the full picture of preschool’s effects.” Weiland nominated the following working paper as part of what she considers to be a new wave of research that explores a broader set of outcomes than the field has typically examined, such as parent earnings, and subsequent schooling environments. “Together, these studies suggest benefits of preschool programs that have been largely overlooked,” but that are key to fully understanding the potential benefits of early learning investments for children and families, noted Weiland.

Working Paper:

Authors: John Eric Humphries, faculty research fellow at Yale University’s Department of Economics; Christopher Neilson, research associate at Yale University; Xiaoyang Ye, Brown University; and Seth D. Zimmerman, research associate at Yale School of Management 

Key Takeaway: New Haven’s universal pre-K (UPK) program raised parents’ earnings by nearly 22% during pre-kindergarten, with gains persisting for at least six years.

Weiland said that this notable study, published in 2024 and updated in 2025, expands the preschool picture by looking at how UPK might impact parents’ earnings,” and uses that to estimate the program’s returns on investment. It found that New Haven’s UPK program raised parents’ earnings by nearly 22% during pre-kindergarten, with gains persisting for at least six years, concluding that the returns to UPK investment are “high.” As one of the first studies looking at “earnings data in modern-day pre-K studies,” noted Weiland, it offers more evidence that the field is “likely underestimating the return on investment early education programs have.” 

3. Spotlight on the Early Child Care Workforce

Back in the spring, child care economist Chris Herbst spoke with zero2eight about how the COVID pandemic demonstrated how the child care workforce is “like a leaf blowing in the wind” — “sensitive to all kinds of changes in the policy and economic environment because it is is inextricably linked to the larger labor market.” Because of this, a new surge of recent research by economists has focused on the workforce, with researchers seeking to understand how early care providers respond to policy and market changes. Nominators pointed toward two such studies. 

Working Paper:

Authors: Katharine C. Sadowski, assistant professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education

Key Takeaway: An increase in minimum wage changes who provides child care

Combining “rich data with sensible research designs,” this study examines how an increase in the minimum wage could impact child care quality and access, noted nominator Aaron Sojourner, senior economist at W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. 

Author Katharine C. Sadowski’s findings suggest that an increase to the minimum wage doesn’t lead to a decrease in the number of child care programs or the number of people working in the sector. However, minimum wage policies can influence who provides child care: larger enterprises, such as child care centers, are more likely to open and remain in operation, while smaller, self-employed providers, such as home-based child care programs, are less likely to open or remain in business. Among the smaller establishments that do stay open, the owners are less likely to have advanced degrees, the study found, potentially impacting the quality of child care provided, according to the author. “Unfortunately, minimum wage policy is binding and too important for a lot of child care employers and employees due to chronic underinvestment in the sector,” wrote Sojourner, adding that this is the first paper he’s seen to leverage “restricted-use data available through the U.S. Census Research Data Center system to generate insights on the sector.”

Study:

Authors: Chris M. Herbst, foundation professor in Arizona State University’s School of Public Affairs 

Key Takeaway: The education of the early education workforce has dropped over time, possibly due to the sector’s low wages 

This study found that the education levels and cognitive test scores of the early education workforce have been declining over time, suggesting lower teacher quality, which could have implications for children’s development. The study links this dip in teacher skills to the proliferation of early education programs which might divert future child care workers away from four-year colleges. It also looks at how low wages — which have remained low even as wages for other jobs for similarly-skilled workers have increased — might lead highly qualified individuals to choose other occupations. 

“This is analogous to what,” wrote Jessica Brown, assistant professor of economics at University of South Carolina, who nominated the study. It “underscores the importance of the discussion of compensation in early childhood education.” Brown notes that it’s a difficult topic for the field to discuss, because “no one wants to imply that the current workforce is not high quality. But the reality is that compensation challenges mean that child care is not a very attractive job, and that has implications for the quality of the workforce.”

Here at The 74, we chronicled the administration’s efforts to dismantle the Department of Education and its cuts to crucial department staffing, education research and funding. We wrote about immigration crackdowns that spurred concerned families to keep children home from school (or leave the country altogether), significant changes in vaccination recommendations, efforts to remove crucial protections for students and a broader push for school choice and religious instruction in schools, among other things. And we did much more than just cover that news; our team dug further to help explain what these changes mean to school districts, teachers, parents and – most importantly – children. 

At the same time, other storylines were playing out. A big one was literacy. Testing data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress painted a dismal picture of America’s children’s ability to read. But there were some encouraging signs, especially in the South. Separately, our team created an interactive database that compares literacy versus poverty rates in 10,000 districts and 42,000 schools to discover where educators are beating the odds. (We will be continuing to feature these Bright Spots in the new year.)

We also took a close look at teacher pay, special education and the challenges teachers and parents face as they grapple with the rapid adoption of artificial intelligence. And, with the launch of our zero2eight vertical, we expanded our coverage to include the crucial issues facing early child care and education. 

It has been a busy year and this list only scratches the surface of the great work the team at The 74 produced. We hope you take the time to read (and share) these memorable and impactful stories.

The Justice, the Professor and the Friendship That Could Rattle a Pivotal Religious Charter School Case

By Linda Jacobson

Long before the case over an Oklahoma Catholic charter school reached the U.S. Supreme Court, Nicole Stelle Garnett and Amy Coney Barrett were close friends and neighbors. Some observers say that friendship is the reason Justice Barrett recused herself from what could be the most significant ruling to affect schools in decades, writes Linda Jacobson in one of The 74’s most widely read (and shared) stories of the year, co-published with The Guardian. Barrett’s recusal ultimately led to a rare tie in the Supreme Court’s ruling.

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Why Are So Few Kids Reading for Pleasure?

By Greg Toppo

Over the past two generations, the proportion of young people who “never or hardly ever” read for fun has quadrupled. What’s going on? Digital distraction and social networking seem likely culprits, but it might not be that simple. Could young people be reading less because they got lousy reading instruction? The 74’s Greg Toppo explores young people’s changing relationship with books, showing that the problem is complex and may require a deep commitment to doing things differently.

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Kept in the Dark: Meet the Hired Guns Who Make Sure School Cyberattacks Stay Hidden

By Mark Keierleber

As schools nationwide face an onslaught of cyberattacks, education leaders have employed a pervasive pattern of obfuscation that leaves the real victims in the dark, The 74’s Mark Keierleber reveals in an investigation copublished with WIRED. His in-depth analysis chronicles more than 300 school cyberattacks since 2020 and exposes the degree to which educators provide false assurances to students, parents and staff about the security of their sensitive information. Meanwhile, consultants and lawyers steer “privileged investigations,” which keep key details hidden from the public. 

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Bright Spots: These Schools Are Beating the Odds in Teaching Kids to Read

Analysis by Chad Aldeman; Interactive by Eamonn Fitzmaurice

Early reading is highly predictive of later-life outcomes, and there’s often a strong correlation between a school’s poverty level and its reading proficiency rate. But around the country, exceptional schools are beating the odds. Contributor Chad Aldeman and The 74’s art and technology director Eamonn Fitzmaurice crunched the numbers for 10,000 districts, 42,000 schools and 3 million kids to find the schools that are best at teaching kids to read, and plotted the results on an interactive map, allowing you to discover whether your school is a Bright Spot. 

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‘Going for Blood’: With Half of Its Staff Cut, Many Wonder How Ed Dept. Will Function

By Linda Jacobson, Amanda Geduld and Mark Keierleber

One of the biggest education stories of 2025 documented efforts to dismantle the Department of Education under the Trump administration. In March, a nighttime purge of Ed Department staff left deep cuts to programs long critical to its mission, from investigating complaints of student discrimination to measuring academic performance. At the time, Education Secretary Linda McMahon announced the elimination of more than 1,300 employees, meaning that, along with buyouts and early retirements, the department would be reduced to roughly half the size it was when President Donald Trump took office just eight weeks earlier. 

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Before Special Ed, There Was the School-to-Asylum Pipeline. This Lawsuit Helped End It 

By Beth Hawkins 

In 1971, parents of children confined in a notorious state “school” for disabled people tapped a young lawyer willing to take pie-in-the-sky cases to court. They had no idea the attorney’s brother was locked up there. The settlement he won went on to form the basis for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, guaranteeing children with disabilities the right to an education. Through incredible narratives and archival photos, The 74’s Beth Hawkins lays out the improbable backstory of how the law – now 50 years old – came to be and how its fate is now uncertain. 

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As Immigrant Students Flee in Fear of ICE Raids, Teachers Offer Heartfelt Gifts

By Jo Napolitano

A soccer ball covered in signatures from classmates. A handwritten letter telling a child of their worth. A T-shirt bearing a school emblem meant to remind a former student how much they were loved in a place they once called home. Teachers handed out these mementos after hearing their students planned to leave the country to avoid being deported. “It’s nothing big, but [a signed T-shirt] was a treasure to him to have the physical signatures of his dearest friends and teachers to take with him,” one Philadelphia teacher told The 74’s Jo Napolitano. 

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RFK Jr. Could Pull Many Levers to Hinder Childhood Immunization as HHS Head

By Amanda Geduld

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a conspiracy theorist who “There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective” — was tapped by President Donald Trump to run the Department of Health and Human Services, with vast influence over vaccine research, funding and rhetoric. Prior to his confirmation, The 74’s Amanda Geduld spoke with experts who called the child health implications “dire” and predicted a fresh round in the school culture wars over mandatory vaccines for students. One law professor pointed out that school boards “can’t change the policies, but they might say, ‘We don’t support these policies. Not in our school district. No way, no how.’”

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Many Young Adults Barely Literate, Yet Earned a High School Diploma

By Jessika Harkay

The numbers are staggering: One in four young adults in the U.S. is functionally illiterate – yet more than half earned high school diplomas. In 2023, a total of about five million young adults could understand the basic meaning of short texts but could not analyze long reading materials, according to an analysis by the American Institute of Research. At the same time, the share of young adults earning diplomas increased significantly. “We know that over 20% of (young adults) that get their high school diploma do not have the skills commensurate with that,” Sharon Bonney, chief executive officer of the Coalition on Adult Basic Education, a national adult education nonprofit, told The 74’s Jessika Harkay. “So, when we have this ‘’ agenda, but people can’t read, write, speak the language or do math, they can’t get good jobs and better jobs. They can’t be skilled up.”  

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The South Surges Academically in Alternative View of National Exam

By Kevin Mahnken

According to an analysis of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a raft of mostly Southern states — Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, Texas, and others — can boast the highest math and English scores anywhere in the country. There’s just one catch, The 74’s Kevin Mahnken explained. That new educational hierarchy is only visible when researchers adjust for the demographics in each state. In other words, after accounting for the uneven distribution of low-income and minority families, special-needs students, and English learners, the nation’s K–12 hierarchy looks wildly different. 

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School Spending Is Up. Teacher Pay Isn’t. See What’s Happening in 8,900 Districts

Analysis by Chad Aldeman; Interactive by Eamonn Fitzmaurice

In districts nationwide, school spending has skyrocketed — in Los Angeles, for example, it’s up 108% from 2002 to 2022. But L.A’s teachers have seen a meager 5% salary increase during that time. In fact, teacher salaries nationally have hovered around an inflation-adjusted $70,000 for decades, lagging behind not only per-pupil spending, but earnings of other college-educated workers. Contributor Chad Aldeman and The 74’s art and technology director, Eamonn Fitzmaurice, document this disconnect in a series of interactive charts. See what’s happening in nearly 8,900 districts.

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Another AI Side Effect: Erosion of Student-Teacher Trust

By Greg Toppo

As AI colonizes school assignments, a small but growing body of research suggests it’s eroding trust between teachers and students. It’s making school more transactional and forcing teachers to rely on unreliable AI detectors that create mutual suspicion. The 74’s Greg Toppo explains how that dynamic is damaging student-teacher relationships, with students feeling surveilled and teachers losing faith in student work. Experts suggest returning to the fundamentals: handwritten assignments, in-class work, blue-book essays and addressing root causes of cheating through better course design and intrinsic motivation.

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For Students With Disabilities, Suspension Not Just a Matter of Race and Gender — But Geography

By Amanda Geduld 

An exclusive analysis by The 74’s Amanda Geduld of federal data revealed stark disparities among students already subject to disproportionate punishment in school — not only by race and gender but also geography. Some 15% of special education students in South Carolina faced out-of-school suspensions for up to 10 days in the 2022-2023 school year — nearly twice the national average and more than any other state in the nation. Meanwhile, students with the same disabilities were the least likely to be excluded from school if they lived in California or Vermont.

Shut Out: High School Students Learn About Careers — But Can’t Try One That Pays 

By Patrick O’Donnell

Schools and businesses have prioritized teaching students about careers they might pursue, but they rarely take the next step and let students try them. Though career days, job shadowing and field trips to businesses are common, fewer than 5% of students have a chance at an internship or apprenticeship while in high school. “We still have a long way to go to provide more opportunity for young people,” career training advocate Julie Lammers told The 74’s Patrick O’Donnell.

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For Decades, the Feds Were the Last, Best Hope for Special Ed Kids. What Happens Now?

By Lauren Wagner and Beth Hawkins 

When it wrote the laws protecting children with disabilities, Congress tried to make it simple for parents to act when schools weren’t delivering. But the paths for complaining have never been as easy — or effective — as intended. Now, the threat of federal intervention, the ultimate backstop, is collapsing. The 74’s Lauren Wagner and Beth Hawkins crunched the numbers and found big disparities in how complaints get resolved. 

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The Massachusetts Teen Who Held PowerSchool Ransom Was a ‘Sophisticated’ Cybercriminal, Prosecutors Say

By Mark Keierleber

When The 74’s Mark Keierleber knocked on Matthew Lane’s door in August, the 19-year-old college student seemed an unlikely figure to have pulled off what’s considered the largest exposure of private student data in history. Lane was known as a soft-spoken gamer and skilled computer programmer, but open-source reporting, threat intelligence research and a federal sentencing memo show him to be a “sophisticated” cybercriminal. After pleading guilty to the 2024 PowerSchool hack, Lane was sentenced to four years in federal prison and $4 million in restitution.

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30 Years Without a Real Raise: New York’s Early Intervention Pay Crisis

By Sarah Carr

Emily Lengen has been a special education teacher for the New York State Early Intervention Program since the 1990s. She loves her work, but is distraught about remaining in what might be the only profession in New York that hasn’t gotten a real raise in three decades. “As a 30-year veteran with a master’s degree, I am working twice as hard as when I started in early intervention, and making less now,” Lengen tells  zero2eight’s Carr.

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Some 15 Years After Disastrous Debut, Common Core Math Endures in Many States

By Jo Napolitano 

The once-derided standards have proven their staying power, with many states holding onto the original version or some close iteration, The 74’s Jo Napolitano reports. Despite early complaints from teachers and parents and fierce political opposition from the left and the right, Common Core math has withstood three presidents and more recent revamps to state curriculum. And while critics say it failed to boost student achievement — math scores have dropped nationally since it was adopted in 2010 —  advocates say it did something far more important: provide an on-ramp to algebra. 

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No Idea Too Radical: Inside New Orleans’ Dramatic K-12 Turnaround After Katrina 

By Beth Hawkins 

The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina forced the wholesale reboot of New Orleans schools — by most measures, among the worst in the country in 2005. Two decades later, education researchers and the city’s civic leaders have released comprehensive data outlining what worked to get rapid academic growth for kids, how preschoolers and college students are doing and where racial inequities persist. Beth Hawkins uses highlights from the research to tell the story of the singular reform. You can read (and listen) to our other coverage on the 20th anniversary of Katrina here.    

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The California Mom at the Center of Trump’s Crackdown on School Gender Policies

By Linda Jacobson 

A California mother spent three years battling a school district that supported her child’s social transition from female to male. Her story is now at the heart of the Trump administration’s push to clamp down on schools that conceal changes in students’ gender identity from parents. Some say students’ well-being could be at risk if educators are forced to get parents’ permission before using different names and pronouns. But one attorney told The 74’s Linda Jacobson that officials can’t “by default assume that every parent … is going to reject and hurt their children.” 

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Strapped for Cash: Districts OK Union Raises, But Don’t Have the Money to Fund Them

By Lauren Wagner 

Several school districts across the U.S. had to borrow money or renegotiate teacher contracts over the summer after budget shortfalls left them without enough funding to pay for agreed-upon raises, The 74’s Lauren Wagner discovered. Philadelphia Public Schools approved $1.5 billion in borrowing, while districts in Fairfax County, Virginia, and Baltimore County, Maryland, rescinded teacher pay hikes. Chicago Public Schools considered delaying pay bumps in its union contract to address a $734 million deficit. “Contracts are not optional documents,” Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates wrote in a letter to the school board.  

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From Screen Time to ‘Green Time’: Going Outside to Support Student Well-Being 

By Jessika Harkay

As cell phone bans are widely underway this year in schools nationwide, there’s a question of what else to do in the effort to aid student mental health and re-engage kids back in the classroom, The 74’s Jessika Harkay reports. Some experts believe one next step may be to incorporate outside time into the school day (a.k.a. “green time’) for older students. While some schools have developed full programming, research shows 15 to 30 minutes outside can have big benefits, too.

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How LAUSD School Zones Perpetuate Educational Inequality, Ignoring ‘Redlining’ Past 

By Ben Chapman

School attendance zones are meant to provide Los Angeles families with strong options for their children’s education. But a growing number of critics say the outdated school zones of LAUSD reinforce educational inequality by locking needy students out of a good education. Some of these enrollment zones match racist redlining maps of the 1930s that were used to deny housing loans in Black neighborhoods. “The district doesn’t want to touch those lines, because families overpaid for homes within them,” says local parent and researcher Tim DeRoche

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LifeWise’s Big Red Bus Is Driving Thorny Questions About Church and State

By Linda Jacobson

Lifewise Academy is a fast-growing program that allows students to leave school during the day for religious instruction and is the most visible example of an evangelical Christian movement to require districts to participate. But as LifeWise and similar programs spread, opposition is increasing among those who say releasing students during the day is disruptive and crosses the line between church and state. “It’s insulting,” one former teacher told The 74’s Linda Jacobson about watching students miss his class once a week to attend LifeWise.

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With Bees, Drones & Ancient Technology, New Mexico Schools Engage Students to Save Precious Water for the Next Generation

By Beth Hawkins 

This year, the Rio Grande ran dry in Albuquerque — a climate-change fueled event of particular interest to students at a high school a few blocks from the river. Students at Rio Grande High School and three lower-grades schools that share its sustainable agriculture focus live on neighborhood farms. Lessons combining cutting-edge technology and centuries-old conservation techniques are real-life relevant — and key to the region’s survival.

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Final rules for Texas’ private school voucher program recently that families interested in sending their children to private pre-K could receive an estimated $10,800 per year, the same amount designated for most other participants. 

But the benefit may not radically transform Texas’ early childhood learning landscape, as the students eligible for private pre-K services through the program will be limited to those who already qualify for free public pre-K.

The that created the program earlier this year established that virtually any school-age child can apply for an education savings account, a form of vouchers that will allow families to access public taxpayers’ dollars to fund their children’s private or home-school education. But a lesser-known part of the law also granted certain families the option to use state funding to send their children to as long as they do not simultaneously attend a public program. 

That incentive only applies to 3- and 4-year-olds who meet at least one of to receive free public pre-K — including being an English learner, residing in a low-income household, or having a parent who is active in the military or teaches at a public school.

Creating another pre-K option will likely help those families who successfully make it through the voucher program’s application process and find a private provider to accept them. But Texans should not consider it the remedy to access and affordability challenges currently plaguing the broader early education environment, said Catherine Davis, director of policy for the Fort Worth-based Child Care Associates, which advocated for the inclusion of private pre-K as an option in the program. 

“I think, generally, this is not going to be the game changer for pre-K,” Davis said. 

Research on pre-K has demonstrated that high-quality programs to positive academic and social-emotional outcomes for students. But the state faces obstacles that advocates say prevent all Texans from reaping those benefits. 

Texas requires that public schools provide a full day of pre-K for eligible families — but it only funds the programming at a half-day level. To fund the other half-day, school districts must often decide whether to prioritize investments in pre-K or use their limited financial resources in other areas. Lawmakers recently how the state distributes early education funding, which could help fully cover the costs of preschool.

Additionally, around attend a public pre-K program in Texas, while another do not. That could mean, among other things, that some families do not know free public pre-K is an option for them. 

Meanwhile, families who do not meet the for public pre-K must look elsewhere — and the private sector is not always a practical solution for Texans struggling to make ends meet. The average private preschool in Texas costs , according to Private School Review, an online tuition resource. Preschools may also have waitlists. So do for families searching for alternative ways to pay for child care, which includes pre-K. 

While school vouchers will create another pre-K option for some families to choose from, the significance of the investment is less clear — and not just because of the eligibility requirements. 

The $1 billion program will only accept around 100,000 students. The pool of applicants will come from the more than 5.5 million children who attend Texas’ K-12 public schools, 560,000 who home-school and 350,000 in private school.

“The question that I think remains is whether families will opt out of using public pre-K when vouchers are an option,” said Erin Baumgartner, director of the Houston Education Research Consortium at Rice University. 

The success of private pre-K in the voucher program will also depend on public awareness. A recent of 900 Texas families with children in pre-K through 12th grade found that 53% had either little or no familiarity with the program. 

Several agencies share the responsibility of maintaining Texas’ child care system, each with its own rules and eligibility requirements — which can translate to confusion about where families should go to find accurate information. The same barriers tend to hold steady in programs targeting low-income families more broadly — the demographic that will qualify to receive state funding for private pre-K. 

If existing voucher initiatives in other states are a guide, overall participation in Texas’ program will likely heavily toward more affluent and white families whose children already attend private schools. 

“All that data is going to be really interesting to follow over the first couple years to really see how this shakes out and who’s really using” education savings accounts, said Kim Kofron, director of early childhood education for Children at Risk, a research and advocacy nonprofit. “That’s really going to be, to me, really, where the story is: What do parents really want?”

CJ Walia, a private pre-K provider in North Texas, said the more than $10,000 in state funding would cover about 70% of his school’s fees, and families would have to pay the difference. 

Walia still plans to notify his school community about the voucher program. But he doesn’t think many of them will qualify because they make too much money.

Parents seeking information about child care options could benefit from more cross-sector collaboration between public and private providers, who at times treat each other as competition more than partners, said Wendy Uptain, executive director of Early Matters Texas, a child care advocacy organization.

“No single group — public schools, child care providers, or policymakers — is going to solve this one on their own,” Uptain said. “The communities that are making the most progress are where those partners are working together.” 

Disclosure: Rice University has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete .

This first appeared on .

For nearly two decades, Scott Kern has worked to make history feel more alive for Newark students. He does so through close readings of Fredrick Douglass’ Fourth of July speech or, most recently, by weaving artificial intelligence tools into his classroom.

Kern, the AI innovation lead and history department chair at North Star Academy’s Washington Park High School, teaches AP U.S. history to ninth and 11th graders. He joined North Star in 2007 and has spent the last decade at the charter network’s Washington Park campus.

Kern didn’t always envision himself in the classroom. In high school, he enrolled in a world history course instead of orchestra after realizing he had reached his full potential on the violin. That switch set the tone for his career. A standout teacher sparked his fascination for the past and “started a love affair with history that hasn’t abated since,” Kern said.

Now, in his 19th year of teaching, Kern reflected on the lessons that shaped him, why his favorite lesson still surprises him every year, and how AI is influencing what happens inside his Newark classroom.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

How and when did you decide to become a teacher?

I was certain I would do something with history as a ninth grader. In middle school, I played the violin and was in the orchestra, but it was pretty clear that I had peaked. So I had to meet with my guidance counselor to reconfigure my schedule and replace orchestra. That replacement class happened to be world history. That class and that teacher – Mr. Bentivegna – changed my life and started a love affair with history that hasn’t abated since. I majored in history in college and earned a bachelor of arts, then headed to graduate school to pursue a doctorate in history. One day, when I was at the library working on an esoteric paper for a graduate medieval history class, I started to wonder if this was really what I wanted to do with my life (the answer was “no”). I thought about the people who really changed my life and why, and it was my teachers. After that reflection, I finished my master’s degree, went for yet another master’s degree, and have been teaching history ever since.

What’s your favorite lesson to teach and why?

My favorite is our close reading of a portion of Frederick Douglass’ Fourth of July speech from 1852. I just love everything about it. You have one of the greatest speakers in American history, invited by a group of abolitionist women in New York to give a speech honoring American independence. I try to transport students there. We picture all of these women sitting in their seats and imagining that he is going to thank them and deliver this soaring speech about the Fourth of July and instead, it’s an excoriation. Abolitionists in 1852 are losing – America has just passed a fugitive slave law that endangers all African Americans, including Douglass himself, and slavery is becoming increasingly entrenched in American society.

We zoom out to consider Douglass’s purpose, audience, and word choice. Why would Douglass have come out so intensely in this way? Was this the right message for this audience at this moment in history? What can this tell us about how leaders of social movements try to effect change?

Students are absolutely enthralled every year. We only read a few paragraphs, but they always find something new that surprises. It’s a reminder that history is complicated and beautiful and that we need to bring it to life for students.

What’s something happening in the community that affects what goes on inside your classroom?

Artificial Intelligence is affecting Newark and pretty much every other community in America. I’ve been using AI tools with students for the last two years, such as custom chatbots that I’ve built to help students revise their writing and or debate ideas before class discussions.

The results so far have been really encouraging. Last year, I had my highest AP scores and pass rate ever. I’m also co-teaching an AI literacy class for seniors starting in January and hope to expand it next fall. The goal is not just to teach them how to use these tools, but how to think about them and the world in a humanistic way.

How do you approach news events in your classroom?

We often look at how history echoes the present. Sometimes it’s in the hook and close of class to engage students in the content and then connect it to broader events that will help them see the trends in history.

When we studied the Douglass speech example from earlier, we started off class with pictures of the American flag – one at an ICE protest in L.A. and another from a Fourth of July parade. Students reflected on how the symbol of the flag can evoke different meanings depending on the context. That helped students see how Douglass and his audience could experience the same holiday in very different ways.

Tell us about your own experience with school and how it affects your work today.

I was an underachiever and a procrastinator for a long time. Some great teachers tried to pull me along, but it never clicked for me. That experience makes me hyper-aware of students who are capable but aren’t intrinsically motivated. If my teachers had let me just float in that state, my life would be very different. I’d like to think I’m doing the same thing – trying to nudge students along to reach their potential.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received, and how have you put it into practice?

The best advice I ever got was from my father, who encouraged me to be committed to whatever I chose to do. That has framed much of my life since. I knew I wasn’t going to be the smartest or the fastest at anything, but I could control my effort. Over time, I was determined to commit to things and try to out-hustle everyone else. Teaching isn’t a competition, but it has required extraordinary levels of commitment over the years. I credit my father for instilling that drive in me.

What’s one thing you’ve read that has made you a better educator?

Reading Zaretta Hammond’s “Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain” felt like a strong pedagogical approach to teaching that I believed in and had seen in class. Her explanation of how the brain’s amygdala shuts down when threatened makes higher-order learning nearly impossible. When students feel threatened, their brains shut off the ability to do meaningful learning. It spoke to me deeply and reinforced my belief that a physically and intellectually safe environment is important for meaningful learning.

How do you take care of yourself when you’re not at work?

Friends and family are my priority outside of work. We have family rituals that keep me grounded. Family dinner at the table with no devices is obligatory except on Friday, which is movie night. We spread a blanket on the floor for our kids, and we have dinner and a movie together. I also try to get together with a group of friends at least once a week, usually to play board games. I love that board games bring people together in an analog way that promotes dialogue and human connection.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

There is a new cost to hiring an international worker to fill a vital but otherwise vacant position in a California classroom: $100,000.

In September, the Trump administration began requiring American employers to pay a $100,000 for new H-1B visas, on top of visa application fees that amount to $9,500 to $18,800, depending on various factors. These visas allow skilled and credentialed workers in multiple job sectors to stay in the U.S. On Dec. 12, California joined 19 other states in for instating the “unlawful” fee, according to Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office.

Most foreign workers on H-1Bs in California work in the tech sector. But California also relies on H-1B visas to address another issue: a nationwide teacher shortage and a for staff in dual-language education and special education in K-12 districts.

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Data from the California Department of Education shows school districts filed more than 300 visa applications for the 2023-24 school year, double the amount from just two years earlier. Educators and school officials say its overseas workers on visas are highly skilled, instrumental in multilingual education, and fill positions in special education.

Now education leaders are sounding the alarm that the high additional fee for overseas workers will worsen the strain on California’s public education system.

International employees fill a much-needed gap for school districts

California continues to face an ongoing teacher shortage. In 2023, California K-12 schools staffed 46,982 positions with employees whose credentials did not align with their job assignments, according to from the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing. Another 22,012 educator positions were left vacant that year. Of total misassignments and vacancies, around 28% were in English language development and 11.9% were in special education.

California school districts have also resorted to hiring teachers who haven’t yet obtained certain credentials, according to a study by the nonprofit . Facing a need for teachers, school districts have found that trained professionals from other countries are willing — and qualified — to take classroom jobs that would otherwise go unfilled.

In 2023, in the Bay Area east of San Francisco, West Contra Costa Unified School District had 381 misassigned positions and 711 vacancies, according to the commission. So the district turned to foreign educators, hiring about 88 teachers on H-1B visas — a majority from the Philippines, Spain and Mexico — to teach in mostly dual-language and special education programs, said Sylvia Greenwood, the assistant superintendent for human resources at the district.

“With our shortages in special ed, they were a good fit for our district. And so, therefore, we kept that pipeline open and brought teachers here from the Philippines to support our students and our students with special needs,” Greenwood said.

The decline in the number of credentialed special education teachers continues to worsen. Between 2020 and 2024, the number of credentials earned to teach special education decreased by almost 600 across California, according to from the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing. The number of temporary permits and waivers granted by the commission increased by about 300 during the same period.

Francisco Ortiz, the president of United Teachers of Richmond and a teacher at Ford Elementary School in West Contra Costa, said the workload for teachers in the district will increase if West Contra Costa Unified is unable to bring in new international teachers.

This would create “greater instability” for students, he said, adding, “It’s going to have a great impact in special education, which is already on fire.”

California school district officials say they are unsure they can pay the new fee to fill hiring gaps with international employees. West Contra Costa officials said they do not know yet who will be responsible for paying the new fee: the district, international teachers themselves or another party.

“We are a district that is dealing with a structural deficit as well, and so that cost, in a lot of ways, is going to be very difficult for our district or really any school district, to be able to take that on,” said Cheryl Cotton, the superintendent for West Contra Costa.

Pasadena Unified, in Southern California, filed about a dozen applications for H-1B visa sponsorships in 2024. Now the district, facing a $27 million , will require those applying for H-1B visas to pay for it themselves, according to district spokesperson Hilda Ramirez Horvath. She said foreign employees will also no longer receive other types of financial support, including legal or filing fees related to immigration processing.

Language programs benefit from international teachers

District officials are also worried about the cultural costs of losing international educators. Educators on H-1B visas make dual-language public schools possible, giving families in California a unique multicultural education that sticks with their children for life.

Kelleen Peckham, a mother to two children in West Contra Costa, said she chose to transfer her daughter to Washington Elementary School in Richmond because it has a dual-language immersion program that teaches students to speak and read Spanish.

Peckham also plans to send her son, who will start kindergarten next year, to the same school even though it takes the family an extra 15 minutes to drive there.

“My husband’s family is from Mexico, and so [their] grandmother, on one side, only speaks Spanish,” Peckham said. “It’s important for [them] to be able to communicate with [their] family and extended family.”

She said if the dual-language immersion program at Washington Elementary doesn’t survive, she would consider transferring her children back to the school in their neighborhood.

Fee spells ‘Keep Out’ to foreign workers

Within weeks of the fee’s , a coalition of international worker groups, unions and religious organizations the Trump administration, alleging the fee would inhibit staffing in education, medicine and ministry services.

“It’s essentially a giant ‘Keep Out’ sign for prospective individuals looking to utilize the visa process to be able to come to the United States and fill these roles and provide these services,” said Laura Flores-Perilla, an attorney with the Justice Action Center, a Los Angeles-based immigration litigation group representing the coalition in its lawsuit.

“It’s not just going to hurt these individuals who have this pathway to do this, but it’s also going to hurt employers within the United States,” Flores-Perilla said.

Although the fee , many international teachers are feeling less welcomed to work and live in the states. A.F., an international elementary school teacher in the West Contra Costa Unified School District, said many teachers are still concerned the federal government will announce new policy changes that could force them to leave the U.S.

“I feel like it’s a form of discrimination to impose [a] $100,000 fee for teachers,” A.F. said.

A.F., who is currently on an H-1B visa, asked to only give his initials because he fears speaking publicly will affect his ability to receive a green card in the future. He immigrated from the Philippines to California five years ago on a J-1 visa before transferring to an H-1B visa at the beginning of 2025. J-1 visas allow visitors to temporarily stay in the U.S. to participate in certain programs, including teaching, studying, conducting research and more, according to .

A.F. said the district previously paid for all of his immigration costs for his H-1B visa, which amounted to more than $3,700 for processing fees and an immigration attorney.

The future is uncertain for H-1B visa hopefuls

H.R., a physical education teacher in West Contra Costa who works on a short-term J-1 visa, said he moved his family from Mexico to the U.S. three years ago to work at one of the district’s high schools because he felt it would be safer to raise his daughter in the U.S. H.R. requested to use only his initials because he doesn’t want to jeopardize his ability to apply for the H-1B visa in the future.

“My biggest reason [for moving] is my daughter,” he said. “Me and my wife decided that it would be a good chance for her [and] a big opportunity to learn the language and to grow up in a different environment.”

H.R. can’t apply for the H-1B visa because he missed the deadline and West Contra Costa Unified is now unlikely to pay for his immigration fees. After his visa expires in June 2026, H.R. will move back to Mexico with his family and reapply for the J-1 visa in hopes of returning to California.

“Everybody says here that they need teachers in California … but they don’t want to do anything to [help us stay] here,” H.R. said.

At the Los Angeles Unified School District, spokesperson Christy Hagen said in an email to CalMatters that the recent visa changes have not yet impacted the school’s hiring of educators on H-1B visas. Hagen said the district’s immigration experts were “still evaluating the effect of this order.”

Maria Miranda, a representative for United Teachers Los Angeles — the union for Los Angeles Unified teachers — said the district had, as of mid-November, not provided any guidance to its educators or schools on how H-1B visa hopefuls would be supported.

Flores-Perilla, the attorney bringing the lawsuit against the Trump administration, says no hearings have been set in their case yet. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has now also brought a over the $100,000 fee, arguing that the proclamation overrides provisions of the and harms U.S. employers.

For now, districts will have to wait on the results of either lawsuit to potentially see some relief in immigration costs.

“It’s absolutely unfeasible to be able to pay this fee [and] to be able to actually bring in prospective employees in their fields and industries, so it’s going to hurt everyone,” Flores-Perilla said.

Sophie Sullivan and Alina Ta are contributors with the College Journalism Network, a collaboration between CalMatters and student journalists from across California. CalMatters higher education coverage is supported by a grant from the College Futures Foundation.

This article was and was republished under the license.

In April, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. turned the focus of his  movement toward school food,  “major, dramatic changes” in school nutrition programs, which serve nearly  across the country each year.

“School lunch programs have deteriorated where about 70% of the food that our children eat is ultraprocessed food, which is killing them,” Kennedy . “We need to stop poisoning our kids and making sure that Americans are once again the healthiest kids on the planet.”

The federal government is working to develop a of ultraprocessed foods, but they are to be industrially produced, ready-to-eat foods that contain high levels of sugar, salt, or additives, such as chips, soft drinks, and frozen meals.

Global consumption of ultraprocessed foods has in recent years. published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in August, youth ages 18 and under consumed more than 60% of their daily calories from ultraprocessed foods.

Now, there is a associating ultraprocessed foods with negative health outcomes. In November, a found evidence that increased consumption of ultraprocessed food is a “key driver” of escalating rates of diet-related chronic disease. The series authors to reduce the consumption of ultraprocessed foods, including by restricting ultraprocessed foods in school meals.

Federal efforts to of school meals have largely focused on implementing , which regulate nutrients like added sugars and sodium. However, these regulations don’t necessarily result in less ultraprocessed food — instead, manufacturers often to meet new thresholds. School nutrition programs, faced with tight budgets and limited staff capacity, often rely on ultraprocessed products like frozen pizzas, packaged sandwiches, and packaged breakfast pastries.

As the federal government and other entities work to reduce the consumption of ultraprocessed food, what will it actually take for schools to stop serving them?

“Our government right now has … more of a ‘takeaway’ mentality,” said Jayme Robertson, school nutrition director for and schools, regarding federal school nutrition standards. “If you change that and instead focus on more fresh, more local, more raw ingredients, more scratch cooking, then that’s where the real impact is going to happen.”

Robertson and other believe a paradigm shift is needed for schools to reduce ultraprocessed food and implement more scratch cooking, which involves preparing meals with whole, raw, or minimally processed ingredients. While data on the prevalence of scratch cooking is limited, the latest found that most school nutrition programs make less than 25% of meals from scratch.

“We need to stop penny pinching and start looking at the long-term outcomes of what serving less processed food in schools would produce. And we need to make sure our school districts have the resources they need to actually do this,” said Mara Fleishman, CEO of the . “If we want Americans to stop eating ultraprocessed food, let’s start in kindergarten.”

The technical challenges of scratch cooking

Before scratch cooking can begin, school nutrition programs have to secure necessary equipment, hire staff with culinary expertise, purchase ingredients, and plan menus that meet federal requirements.

Equipment

“When you go into schools that don’t have running water, don’t tell me to scratch cook,” said Dr. Katie Wilson, executive director of the .

Many school nutrition programs cannot scratch cook due to limited or outdated kitchen facilities that prevent the storage, processing, or cooking of whole ingredients — such as a lack of coolers or freezers to store fresh ingredients.

Buying new equipment or renovating facilities can pose a major cost. School nutrition programs operate financially independently of school districts as self-sustaining, nonprofit enterprises. The roughly $4.60 per lunch provided by must be used to cover the cost of food, supplies, labor, equipment, and overhead costs, often leaving little room in the budget for large capital investments.

Even if a district can afford the upgrades needed to scratch cook, there may be additional hurdles to installing and using that equipment, particularly in older school buildings. For example, Wilson recalled speaking to a school nutrition director who spent $500,000 on equipment that hasn’t been used yet because there isn’t enough power in the school building to plug it in.

Staffing

School nutrition programs often face  staff. In a  of school nutrition directors conducted by the School Nutrition Association (SNA) in 2024, nearly 89% of respondents reported challenges with staff shortages, and the overall vacancy rate was 8.7%.

To scratch cook, school nutrition programs not only need sufficient staffing levels — they also need to hire staff with the skills necessary to cook using whole ingredients, including knowledge of specific culinary skills, food safety, and equipment use. According to Wilson, the majority of school nutrition employees are not paid to attend training, making it difficult for them to build the skills needed to scratch cook.

“It’s about valuing food — valuing what they contribute to the school day and to the students’ life. We don’t value them, and that’s why they’re many times the lowest paid,” said Wilson of school nutrition professionals compared to other school employees.

Ingredients

School nutrition programs often need to purchase more fresh, whole ingredients to scratch cook, which may involve developing new vendor relationships and executing new contracts. But this is not as simple as finding a local farmer to purchase meat and vegetables from, according to school nutrition leaders.

As recipients of federal funding, school nutrition departments must adhere to a variety of , which dictate what procurement techniques can be used based on the purchase amount.

According to Wilson, varying interpretations of federal procurement rules are one of the biggest challenges facing school food purchasing. This challenge is further compounded by the fact that, if a state or locality has different purchasing thresholds than the federal government, the more restrictive threshold must be followed.

“If everybody would get on the same page and just follow the federal standard rules, we could work at changing some of those federal rules to make them better for fresh, whole food,” she said.

Menu plans

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) regulates the nutritional quality of school meals through , which dictate each required component of the meal — such as how many cups of different types of vegetables must be included — and place limits on calories, saturated fat, added sugar, and sodium.

Scratch cooking involves preparing recipes that rely on whole ingredients but still adhere to these requirements, which takes more planning and results in greater variation than purchasing pre-made, ultraprocessed items that already meet all requirements. If schools deviate from the meal pattern, they risk not receiving federal reimbursement.

“We have forced, particularly small districts … where they don’t have the money or the team to hire chefs or all these other people to help them with this — we’ve forced them to buy pre-packaged, formulated food, because it guarantees they meet the meal pattern,” said Wilson.

Wilson recalled that, during her time as a school nutrition director, scratch-made zucchini muffins were less than 0.1 ounces away from the required weight, disqualifying the muffins from counting as a meal component that day.

“You can’t do scratch cooking if that’s what you’re under when it comes to the micromanagement of the meal pattern,” she said.

The adaptive challenges of scratch cooking

Beyond the technical challenges facing scratch cooking, shifting away from ultraprocessed food and toward preparing meals from scratch requires change management. This presents a series of , or those related to shifting mindsets, values, and culture.

Through her work at the Chef Ann Foundation, which supports schools in implementing scratch cooking, Fleishman has seen that a strong commitment from school nutrition leaders is crucial to success — because scratch cooking isn’t easy.

“In many ways, it’s easier to pull a frozen chicken nugget out of the freezer,” she said. “When you start building a scratch cook program, there is a lot of uplifting that has to be done. So you really need to be in it, you have to see the value of it, you have to believe in it, you have to be in it for the long term.”

The Chef Ann Foundation “sees the transition to scratch cooking as a continuum of gradual progress rather than an all-or-nothing approach,” according to its , with a five-step continuum that ranges from ready-to-eat meals to scratch-made meals. 

Fleishman said that moving along this continuum takes time, and schools often have to start small and introduce new scratch-made menu items gradually as they secure new equipment.

As Yadkin County and Elkin City schools transitioned to scratch cooking over the last five years, Robertson said she has worked intentionally to build trust and buy-in with her school nutrition team. In her first year as school nutrition director, she worked in school kitchens to build relationships, learn about the speed-scratch approach, and understand equipment and staffing levels.

“It really made sense for me to use that first year to observe, to learn, to really immerse myself in how the program was operating, instead of coming in and just making drastic changes,” said Robertson.

Using lessons from that experience, she then created a menu committee and a managers council to ensure “boots on the ground” voices informed the district’s approach to scratch cooking. She said this created a structured way to gather feedback and troubleshoot plans before they were implemented.

“It gave everybody a voice at the table, and it got everybody on the same page in terms of the direction we were moving,” she said.

School nutrition staff then participated in professional development where they watched new scratch-made recipes be prepared, providing them with a visual, step-by-step explanation of how to cook each component. Just like cooking at home, Robertson said that as staff cooked new recipes repeatedly, their comfort level grew.

Fleishman echoed how important creating buy-in with school nutrition professionals is for the success of scratch cooking efforts.

“If you’re able to build a culture of professionalism and value within school food and help your team understand why cooking from scratch is so important and what the impact of their work will be, then you don’t necessarily get some of the pushback that you see,” she said.

Then, once scratch-cooked items are available, there’s still work needed to shift students’ preferences away from the ultraprocessed foods they may be accustomed to eating. 

“It’s not like they’re serving packaged, processed french toast sticks, and then you put the scratch-cooked french toast casserole on the menu and everyone’s like, ‘Yeah I like this so much better,’” said Fleishman. “Ultraprocessed food is highly addictive. So there is a period of transition.”

Marketing to students and families that explains what scratch cooking is, why the school nutrition program is doing it, and why scratch-made items are healthier can help encourage students to try new items.

For example, Robertson shares new recipes through newsletters and on social media, highlighting which ingredients are locally sourced and tagging farmers. She also uses taste tests with students to ensure scratch-made items are things they enjoy eating.

The financial equation

While there’s a common perception that scratch cooking is more expensive than serving processed food, according to Fleishman, it doesn’t necessarily have to cost more. Although equipment purchases can pose a major cost, when comparing a scratch-made item directly with a processed counterpart, the scratch-made item may be less expensive or cost the same, depending on what ingredients are used.

“In reality, it could cost more — you could buy all organic, regenerative ingredients. But it doesn’t have to. You can scratch cook within the federal reimbursement rate,” said Fleishman, adding that it’s crucial for school nutrition directors to have strong financial management skills in order to manage a sustainable scratch cooking program.

For example, in Yadkin County and Elkin City schools, Robertson said it costs roughly $1.10 per serving of the pre-made spaghetti sauce the district previously purchased, and it now costs $0.95 per serving to prepare a scratch-made sauce. In an of four school districts that participated in the Chef Ann Foundation’s Get Schools Cooking program, the “overall financial health” of school food programs increased after transitioning to scratch cooking.

Robertson has also leveraged strategic menu planning to purchase a core set of ingredients and cut down on unnecessary inventory. For example, she now purchases raw ground beef as a base protein for multiple scratch-made items — including spaghetti, tacos, and hamburgers — replacing several processed items.

What’s needed to support more scratch cooking?

Robertson compares trying to implement scratch cooking in the current policy and regulatory environment as “putting together a Jenga puzzle and hoping it doesn’t fall.”

“You’re asking employees that you’re not paying hardly anything to, to see these regulations through and provide an enjoyable experience. I feel like it’s just becoming harder and harder. It’s almost like you’re being asked to do more with less every single year,” she said.

As more schools work to reduce ultraprocessed foods in school meals and implement scratch cooking, experts point to a variety of possible solutions.

Higher school meal reimbursement rates

As the costs of and continue to rise, many school nutrition programs find it difficult to provide school meals within the per-meal , which is roughly $4.60 for each free school lunch and $2.46 for each free school breakfast, with lower reimbursements for reduced-price and paid meals.

“I do not feel like students thrive on mini powdered donuts … but I know the mini powdered donut is more cost-effective, and it takes me less labor in the morning, and I don’t have the money to put into it,” said Robertson.

In the of school nutrition directors nationwide, nearly all respondents cited challenges with the cost of food (97.9%), labor (94.9%), and equipment (91.4%), and only 20.5% reported the reimbursement rate is sufficient to cover the cost of producing a meal.

Low reimbursement rates can also make it difficult for school nutrition programs to recruit and retain staff. This is particularly true in areas with a higher cost of living where other food service jobs may pay employees a higher wage, making it difficult for school nutrition programs to offer a competitive wage.

Introduced in Congress in October, the would permanently increase the federal reimbursement rate for school meals, adding an additional 45 cents for each lunch served and an additional 28 centers for each breakfast served.

“High costs and insufficient funds are hampering efforts to expand scratch cooking and reduce added sugar and sodium in school meals,” said SNA President Stephanie Dillard in a about the bill. “School meal programs desperately need increased reimbursements to invest in staff and training, upgrade kitchen equipment, and purchase more fresh and local produce.”

Funding for school kitchen equipment

Because school nutrition programs operate financially independently, local school districts often aren’t able to fund equipment for school kitchens. This means state or federal investments are needed to ensure schools have the equipment needed to scratch cook.

In previous years, the USDA has offered , but funds can only be used to cover the cost of the equipment and not the corresponding increase in energy or other utilities needed to use it, which Wilson said poses a challenge.

At the state level, California has allocated from the state’s general fund to provide funding for infrastructure upgrades and equipment in school kitchens, along with staff training, with the goal of helping more schools offer scratch-made items.

Investments in the school nutrition workforce

Investments are also needed to better recruit and train culinary professionals to work in school nutrition programs, school nutrition leaders said.

“Unless we are able to fundamentally look at developing the greater workforce in school food, then a lot of the work that we’re all doing is kind of pushing this boulder up a hill, and it might come back down,” said Fleishman.

To help meet these workforce needs, the Chef Ann Foundation developed the nation’s first for scratch-cooked school meals, currently available in Colorado, Virginia, and California, with more states to come. The apprenticeship programs provide aspiring and beginning school food professionals with the skills needed to create and manage scratch-cook school meal programs.

Adopting universal free school meals

Serving free meals to all students in school meals — along with — providing school nutrition programs with more federal reimbursement funds and giving them a better opportunity to enhance the food they are serving, including through scratch cooking. 

Currently, — California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Mexico, New York, and Vermont — have passed permanent legislation that provides free school meals to all students. Dozens of other states, including North Carolina, have introduced bills that would do the same.

Funding for local food purchases

Given that scratch cooking requires school nutrition programs to use whole, raw, or minimally processed ingredients, funds to purchase local food for school meals can help offset the costs of scratch cooking while keeping school food spending in the local economy.

However, in March 2025, the USDA canceled $660 million for the . Started in 2021, the program provided funding to states to purchase local foods for use in schools, helping farmers sell more of their products to schools and expanding local and regional food markets.

Without this funding, schools face even greater , reducing the amount spent in the local agricultural economy and relying instead on large national wholesalers or distributors.

Looking ahead

Despite the challenges of implementing scratch cooking, Robertson said the shift to preparing more items from scratch has generated strong support from the local community, which has been fulfilling for her staff.

“Staff members will get stopped in grocery stores, by parents or teachers, and they’ll rave about a particular menu item they heard their child talk about,” she said.

Robertson’s mom worked in public education, and she remembers a time when students enjoyed the food they were served in the school cafeteria. They would even ask for recipes. 

“I’m not sure when that stopped, but that’s kind of my ultimate goal — to get back to that and build those relationships,” she said.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

Holidays bring celebration, rest and, for many families, long stretches of indoor time. For some, this means on kitchen tables. Games provide opportunities for learning mathematics actively.

When Cara Romero’s daughter was 11, she became interested in dolls. Romero, who is an enrolled member of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe in Southern California, began to think about doll culture more deeply and what it can convey to the next generation. 

Romero’s husband grew up collecting G.I. Joes, and her mother-in-law had her own Victorian-style porcelain doll collection. For Romero, though, her daughter’s doll phase reminded her of the Native American dolls she grew up seeing at truck stops along I-40.

The dolls were often dressed in plastic pony beads and fake buckskin that parroted the Native American Halloween costumes she knew all too well as dehumanizing stereotypes. So Romero, who is a photographer and artist, set out to create a series of photos that broke down these tropes.

Each photograph in the “First American Doll” series features a life-sized doll box that she designed and crafted, where she poses the women with objects that represent their families, traditions and unique stories. 

She wanted her daughter to be proud of her heritage. “I come from a community where women are allowed to have a voice, allowed to be really strong,” she said. “So [I was] wanting to pass down good self esteem and a strong sense of self and identity,” she said. “That’s what we aim to do as moms.”

She started the series with artist and powwow dancer Wakeah Jhane, who is of Kiowa, Comanche and Blackfeet descent. While the Plains Tribes that she is from are the models for stereotypical dolls and costumes, Romero’s photograph captures her intricate buckskin regalia, which was made by her family. Also on display are her moccasins and a fan.

“You can see the stark contrast between what she’s wearing and the Halloween costumes that people portray Plains people as,” she said. “I really wanted to kind of own it and be like, “You guys even have this wrong.’” 

She has since published nine photographs for the series, the most recent featuring Fawn Douglas, an artist, activist and enrolled member of the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe, who is posed with handcrafted baskets and a gourd rattle made by her family. The box is bordered by a Las Vegas playing card motif. 

The current day symbolism and high fashion lighting communicates that these women are also contemporary, Romero said. “When artwork, and specifically photography, is devoid of modern context, it does something psychologically, it perpetuates [this idea] that we’re gone and only living in history.”  

Naming each of the pieces after the models was also meant to humanize Indigenous women in a way that they weren’t in historical photos. “A lot of times in the ethnographic photographs, they didn’t even say their name,” she said. “We don’t know who they were.”

Some of the photographs from the series are currently traveling the country as part of Romero’s first solo museum exhibition, titled: “Panûpünüwügai (Living Light).” They will be on display next at the Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona starting in February.

was originally reported by Jessica Kutz of ..