was originally reported by Kate Sosin of .Ìę

The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 Tuesday that a Colorado ban on conversion therapy for youth violates the free speech rights of a Christian counselor, clearing the way for a practice that goes against the recommendations of every major medical association in the country.

Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson .

“Today’s reckless decision means more American kids will suffer,” she said. “The Court has weaponized free-speech in order to prioritize anti-LGBTQ+ bias over the safety, health and wellbeing of children.”

Conversion therapy is a in which providers attempt to change a youth’s sexual orientation or gender identity, often through extremely harsh methods including acts of physical, psychological and sexual abuse against minors — , chemically induced nausea and hypnosis, among others.

The and recommended it be banned.Ìę Twenty-three states and Washington, D.C., have laws banning conversion therapy for minors.

The decision comes on , a global day celebrating transgender lives and culture every March 31.

Some LGBTQ+ advocates note that while the ruling favors a discredited practice, it leaves most avenues of regulating conversion therapy untouched.

“I think the most important thing to understand about the decision today is that it only takes one way of regulating conversion therapy off the table,” said Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights.

Tuesday’s ruling throws out Colorado’s ban, but does not strike down bans in other states, which advocates feared could be a worst-case scenario. The case, Chiles v. Salazar, was brought by Christian counselor Kaley Chiles, who argued that the ban violated her free speech rights. Chiles says she only offers talk therapy and does not use physical interventions or prescribe medications.

The ruling does not declare conversion therapy safe or effective. It also leaves intact the ability of medical licensing boards’ to investigate conversion therapy practice as fraudulent.

Minter said in a statement that the ruling still leaves room to discipline providers in states where it is banned.

“This decision is narrowly about how conversion therapy can be regulated. It does not mean that conversion therapy is safe or legal. Conversion therapy is still medical malpractice and consumer fraud,” Minter said. “Every major medical organization in this country condemns it. Survivors can still bring malpractice and consumer fraud claims.”

Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch argued that Colorado’s law applies beyond “physical interventions,” and restricts free speech.

“Colorado may regard its policy as essential to public health and safety. Certainly, censorious governments throughout history have believed the same,” the opinion read. “But the First Amendment stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country. It reflects instead a judgment that every American possesses an inalienable right to think and speak freely, and a faith in the free marketplace of ideas as the best means for discovering truth.”

The majority held that the right to free speech applies equally to licensed medical professionals as to all Americans.

As the lone dissent, argued that the majority “failed to appreciate the crucial context” of Chiles’ case. “Chiles is not speaking in the ether; she is providing therapy to minors as a licensed healthcare professional,” she wrote.

Neither side disputed Colorado’s authority to regulate medical treatments and providers or claimed that a state doing so is unconstitutional, she said.

“So, in my view, it cannot also be the case that Colorado’s decision to restrict a dangerous therapy modality that, incidentally, involves provider speech is presumptively unconstitutional,” Jackson added. “In concluding otherwise, the Court’s opinion misreads our precedents, is unprincipled and unworkable and will eventually prove untenable for those who rely upon the long-recognized responsibility of states to regulate the medical profession for the protection of public health.”

This is the first of three LGBTQ+ blockbuster cases before the court this term. Two others, , were heard at the same time earlier this year.

Grace Panetta contributed reporting.

Six decades ago, Colorado lawmakers made it easier for school districts to band together and offer services that they couldn’t afford to provide on their own.

The creation of Boards of Cooperative Educational Services, or BOCES, allowed districts to pool resources for things like special education services, career and technical education, early intervention services, gifted and talented programming, and teacher training.

Last fall, one of these co-ops proved to be a useful vehicle for a different aim — opening a school intended to on religious education.

Education reEnvisioned, or ERBOCES, launched Riverstone Academy in Pueblo County with 30 elementary students in August. Billed as Colorado’s “first public Christian school,” it is the most prominent example of how its authorizer is using its BOCES status to further school choice.

The school — and ERBOCES’ recent role steering state dollars to home-schooling — is raising questions about whether these co-ops created in a different era for different purposes have too much latitude and too few guardrails.

The Colorado Department of Education’s enforcement powers are limited to certain areas, such as special education, a department spokesperson said. Most oversight falls to BOCES’ boards of directors, which can vary in how much or little they hold school operators accountable.

“Nobody in the state actually regulates how BOCES operate or what they can do,” said Ken Haptonstall, co-executive director of the Colorado BOCES Association, a membership group for BOCES.

“There’s no statutory way for the department to be able to say, ‘Oh, you’re being bad as a BOCES or you need to do this as a BOCES,’” he said.

Some lawmakers and education officials contacted by Chalkbeat said Riverstone’s creation shows school-authorizing safeguards failed — and creates a dangerous precedent.

George Welsh, executive director of the San Luis Valley BOCES, doesn’t agree with public funding for religious schools and said Riverstone’s launch by a BOCES creates a slippery slope.

“Obviously, if one can do it, why couldn’t all?” he said.

Riverstone is currently receiving state funding. But if a state audit underway now finds the school is ineligible because of Colorado’s ban on religious public school, the state could claw back the money. Riverstone and ERBOCES cited that possibility in this month for religious discrimination.

BOCES exist to pool district resources

A 1965 Colorado law allowed the creation of BOCES. A year later, 14 school districts in the San Luis Valley banded together to form the state’s first one. Most states have a version of the public education co-ops, though names and formats vary.

In Colorado, BOCES are typically made up of a group of school districts from a single region. About half include a college or university. The cooperatives are governed by a board of at least five people, usually school board members from districts that belong to the BOCES. In some cases, school district superintendents can serve on the BOCES board.

Five Colorado BOCES authorize schools. ERBOCES, unlike the other four, doesn’t hire school staff or oversee day-to-day operations at its schools. Instead, it contracts with outside groups to operate them.

Some BOCES focus on offering a single service or program. One in Adams County provides insurance services to its three member districts. The only job of the Denver-based Expeditionary BOCES is to run a single school, the Rocky Mountain School of Expeditionary Learning.

“The purpose of the BOCES is it’s a collaborative,” said Welsh, who heads the 14-member San Luis Valley BOCES.

He offered an example: “We have six and a half school psychologists in our stable 
 and so they serve all the school districts in the San Luis Valley in terms of the identification process for special education students.”

Welsh said his BOCES also runs a program for several young adults in the valley who have significant emotional disabilities. This semester, his team launched a pilot internship program that matches high schoolers in member districts with local businesses so they can get on-the-job experience.

Like many BOCES serving small, rural districts, Welsh’s BOCES is considered a “special education administrative unit.” It’s a label that can apply to a school district or a BOCES and means that the entity must ensure special education laws are followed for students with disabilities.

Royce Tranum, the executive director of San Juan Boces, which has eight member school districts in southwestern Colorado, said one of the “curious” things about BOCES is that there are strict state rules governing some areas but not others. For example, the state carefully monitors BOCES for the job they do as special education administrative units.

“They oversee parts of what we do, but not the organization as a whole,” she said.

Education reEnvisioned is different from other BOCES

ERBOCES was founded in 2013 as Colorado Digital BOCES.

Brad Miller, an attorney who helped start the co-op, said by email that its founders “recognized that school districts are reticent to offer student-focused special schools and programs 
 and that a BOCES was statutorily intended for such innovations and opportunities.”

State law says the cooperatives were enacted for the “expansion of education services of the public schools” in Colorado and, where possible, to enable “two or more school districts to cooperate in furnishing services.”

But mostly, ERBOCES isn’t helping member districts achieve economies of scale.

Education reEnvisioned has three member school districts with no shared boundaries, including District 49 in El Paso County and the Montezuma-Cortez district, which is almost 400 miles away in southwest Colorado. Pikes Peak State College is a member, and the Elizabeth school district in Elbert County joined Feb 10.

Montezuma-Cortez Superintendent Eddie Ramirez wrote in an email that his district belongs to the co-op so that it can receive $10,000 in “flow-through funds” to serve English language learners.

Ken Witt, the head of ERBOCES, has long been a familiar face in Colorado’s conservative education circles. As school board president in Jeffco more than a decade ago, he was part of a three-member conservative board majority that was recalled. Later, during his tenure as superintendent in Woodland Park, there was a staff exodus and .

Since Witt took the reins of ERBOCES in 2017, the cooperative has grown from two schools to 10, and enrollment in those schools has grown from 2,200 to 13, 500 students, a 600% increase. Many of those students come from outside ERBOCES’ member districts.

Of Colorado’s 186 school districts and co-ops, ERBOCES is the 22nd largest, serving more students than some Denver metro school districts.

In 2022, ERBOCES began authorizing state-funded home-school enrichment programs, something no other BOCES does. Such programs typically offer one day of classes or activities each week, and the state pays half the normal per-pupil rate. Today, the cooperative authorizes more than 50 such programs, with more than 8,000 students.

Witt said in a presentation last fall that 30-40 more home-school enrichment programs are in the works.

Witt sent ERBOCES’ mission and vision statements to Chalkbeat and answered a couple questions by email, but he didn’t respond to follow-up questions or agree to an interview for this story.

Some district officials have objected to ERBOCES placing schools or programs outside member districts.

The Colorado Springs School District 11 sued ERBOCES over the issue in 2020 after ERBOCES placed a new school in the district without permission. The district argued that allowing the cooperative to open schools in non-member districts without permission violated the principle of local control. In 2024, the , saying state law doesn’t say or suggest that BOCES were meant to open schools in any district they wished.

Haptonstall, of the Colorado BOCES association, said he gets calls from people asking about ERBOCES: “Why are they opening this up in my region?”

“We always encourage them to call the Department of Education and just clarify whether or not that’s legal,” he said.

Cayce Hamerschlag, a mother from the 2,200-student Montezuma-Cortez district, said BOCES were created to provide benefits to member districts, but she doesn’t see that occurring with ERBOCES. Instead, she said it’s acting primarily as a school authorizer, drawing away students from school districts around the state.

ERBOCES’ six online schools enroll about 80 students from Montezuma-Cortez and several hundred from nearby districts, according to data shared at a recent school board meeting. Hamerschlag said when districts lose students, it creates a downward spiral. Declining enrollment leads to fewer offerings for students, the loss of good teachers, decreasing interest in neighborhood schools, and eventually a hit to the local economy, she said.

“I’m disgusted because I’m seeing the dismantling of public education here in Cortez,” said Hamerschlag, who works for San Juan BOCES in southwest Colorado but didn’t speak to Chalkbeat on behalf of the group. “I hear of it happening across the state, and my heart breaks for the students and communities that it’s affecting.”

Sen. Cathy Kipp, a Fort Collins Democrat, said by email that if Riverstone is found eligible for public funding it could set a precedent, encouraging every religious school “to seek ‘public school’ status so they can receive public dollars.”

But one lawmaker believes Colorado’s current system “too often protects institutions over students and families.”

Sen. Scott Bright, a Republican from Weld County, said by email, “BOCES and the Department of Education should not be locked in a tug-of-war; instead, the legislature ought to reinstill clear

guidance so that local partners are not forced to ‘push the edge’ of the law just to expand options for families,” he said.

How Education reEnvisioned created Riverstone

Miller, the lawyer for ERBOCES, said that BOCES “operate schools or programs at the direction of their members.”

But there’s no evidence that District 49 or Montezuma-Cortez officials requested or directed the launch of Riverstone. The school is nowhere near either district.

An email written by Miller indicates that Riverstone arose because Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative law firm based in Arizona, sought a test case on religious public schools after the U.S. Supreme Court last spring.

“ADF asked me if I could find a way for a parallel case to be initiated out of Colorado,” Miller wrote in the June 4 email labeled “privileged and confidential.”

Riverstone opened two months later. Key start-up documents didn’t mention Riverstone’s religious affiliation or that it was intended to spark a lawsuit. There were no public deliberations about the idea of creating a religious public school.

The school board in the Pueblo 70 district, where Riverstone is located, did give permission for the school to locate there as required by the 2024 court decision, but the school’s real purpose went unmentioned at both meetings where it was on the agenda.

It’s not clear whether the ERBOCES board, which unanimously approves the vast majority of motions before it, discussed the school’s true purpose either. The cooperative doesn’t livestream its board meetings, and an ERBOCES employee told Chalkbeat the audio recording of the August 12 meeting where Riverstone’s contract was approved no longer exists.

Last summer, as Riverstone was taking shape, four of ERBOCES’ five board members may not have been eligible to serve on the board, based on Chalkbeat’s review of the state law on BOCES board makeup.

Jeremy Dys, a lawyer for the cooperative from the First Liberty Institute, said by email that ERBOCES Board President Lis Richard is an appointee of Montezuma-Cortez and John Graham, who recently left the board, was an appointee of District 49. Dys didn’t explain how this aligns with state law since neither had been a school board member or administrator in their respective districts for one to three years.

Dys described two other board members — Bethany Drosendahl and James Salazar — as “at large” members, which is allowed under state law provided they live in member districts. Asked why the two members live in non-member districts, Dys didn’t respond.

Salazar participated in the June vote on Riverstone but abstained from the August vote, possibly because of a conflict of interest. He was appointed president of the Riverstone Academy board in July.

None of the five ERBOCES board members when Riverstone was approved responded to Chalkbeat’s request for comment. (District 49 recently appointed a school board member to the ERBOCES board.)

Riverstone is run by a Pueblo nonprofit called Forging Education that runs Christian private schools and home-school programs.

Witt told Chalkbeat last fall that Riverstone is a public school because it was authorized by ERBOCES, and in January, the school received a $55,000 installment of state funding. But on their lease, insurance policy, and other documents. The school also acts like a private school by limiting public transparency.

Quin Friberg, the local pastor who heads Forging Education and Riverstone Academy, recently told an attorney working on behalf of Chalkbeat that Forging Education is not a public entity and therefore not subject to a state law that allows news organizations and others access to public records.

In early October, when Pueblo County officials were surprised. They’d known that Friberg was interested in starting a school, but not that he’d opened it to students without ensuring the building was up to code. They quickly .

In late January, Riverstone leaders after orders from county officials. School leaders have since , and ERBOCES officials say they have no records showing the school’s current address.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

The Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board voted unanimously against an application Monday for a virtual Jewish charter school, citing the state supreme court’s 2024 ruling that public funding for a religious school would violate state law.ÌęAs expected, some board members voiced support for Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation.

“I think our hands are tied,” said Board Member Damon Gardenhire, who said he didn’t see much difference between Ben Gamla’s application and a now-closed Native American charter school that featured a “spiritual component.” 

In a statement responding to the vote, Brett Farley, a member of the proposed school’s board, said organizers plan to challenge the decision in federal court. “Oklahoma families should have the freedom to choose schools that best meet their children’s needs — without losing strong options simply because they are faith-based,” he said.

The Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board is expected to deny an application for a Jewish charter school Monday, but will likely welcome organizers of the school to take them to court.

Peter Deutsch, founder of the Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation, and a former Democratic congressman, made his pitch for the school in January, saying that he aims to bring “a rigorous, values-driven education” to Jewish parents in Oklahoma.

“I anticipate that our board would like to grant them the application,” Brian Shellem, the board chair, told The 74. “But we can’t snub our nose at the court either.”

He means the Oklahoma Supreme Court, which ruled against the nation’s first Catholic charter school in 2024. That decision still stands after the U.S. Supreme Court deadlocked over that case last year. The charter board’s likely denial of Ben Gamla’s application is expected to spark another lawsuit, pitting against those who say it would violate the Constitution’s prohibition on establishing a religion. With a case over a proposed Christian charter in Tennessee already in federal court and another religious school in Colorado founded to test the same legal question, there’s little doubt that the nation’s highest court will eventually settle the debate.

“It is hard for me to imagine the court doesn’t take the issue again when it comes to it,” said Derek Black, a constitutional law professor at the University of South Carolina. But after Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself in the case over St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, resulting in the 4-4 tie, the justices likely in favor of religious charters, he said, “would want a case that was very strong.”

‘Pray and hear Scripture’

So far, the only case to watch is in Tennessee. Wilberforce Academy of Knoxville, a nonprofit that wants to open a K-8 Christian charter school, sued the Knox County school board because the district wouldn’t accept its letter of intent to apply. State law prohibits charter schools from being religious. 

“Students will begin to develop biblical literacy in kindergarten and begin taking catechism lessons by third grade,” according to Wilberforce Academy’s request for a quick ruling in the case. “And they will pray and hear Scripture together in a school assembly every morning.”

As St. Isidore did before them, Wilberforce argues that the nonprofit is a “private actor” and that approving its charter application would not turn it into a government entity.

The Knox County board told the court that it will “most likely” not take a position on the legality of Wilberforce’s argument. On Thursday, the board rejected asking state education Commissioner Lizzette Reynolds to consider granting Wilberforce Academy a waiver so they can open the Christian school.

The Knox board, however, also said the issue of religious charter schools “deserves a thorough examination by the federal courts.” 

Judge Charles Atchley Jr, for the Eastern District of Tennessee, thinks so, too. Last week, he allowed a group of Knox County parents and religious leaders, who oppose Wilberforce’s application, . 

The case, he wrote, has the “potential to reshape First Amendment jurisprudence in the educational context” and it wouldn’t serve the court or parties involved to not have “vigorous advocacy on both sides.”

Amanda Collins, a retired Knox County school psychologist, is among those who have signed up to fight against Wilberforce Academy. She has two children still in the district and one who graduated in 2024. She grew concerned about Wilberforce Academy when she learned the organization didn’t have a history of operating charter schools in the state and feels its attorneys are using the district to “merely force an issue up the ladder to the Supreme Court.”

“In Tennessee, we have plenty of things that are underfunded,” she said. “We don’t need to be wasting our local Knox County taxpayer money on somebody’s agenda that is not intended to promote the education safety and wellness of our public school students.” 

‘The clear constitutional boundary’

Another school that could spark a lawsuit over public funds for religious schools is Colorado’s , which advertises that it offers students a “Christian foundation.” 

The school operates “pretty much just like a charter school” said Ken Witt, executive director of Education reEnvisioned, the board of cooperative educational services, or BOCES, that contracted with the school. 

As , emails between the attorney for the Pueblo County district, which allowed the school to open within its boundaries, and the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative law firm, suggest the school was intentionally founded to test the legal argument over whether public schools can practice religion. 

After threatening to withhold state funds because of the school’s religious mission, the Colorado Department of Education funded Riverstone’s 31 students. But the state is also conducting a , which could take another year, before deciding whether it can legally provide money to the school. In the meantime, Riverstone had to close its building last week because of health and safety violations. It’s unclear whether students are learning remotely or in another facility in the meantime.

For now, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, a Democrat running for governor, hasn’t issued an opinion on Riverstone, but his views on St. Isidore, the Oklahoma school, were clear. Last year, he in opposing state funding for the school.

In , he urged the Supreme Court “to preserve the clear constitutional boundary that protects both religious liberty and the integrity of our public education system.”

Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, a Republican who is also running for governor, made a similar argument about St. Isidore before both the Oklahoma and U.S. supreme courts. 

But that’s where both he and Weiser split with the Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti. In his , Skrmetti states that categorically excluding faith-based schools from public charter programs violates parents’ rights to freely exercise their religion.

To Ilya Shapiro, director of constitutional studies at the conservative Manhattan Institute, it’s a matter of equity. Higher-income families can move into wealthier neighborhoods or pay private school tuition, he wrote in a on the Wilberforce case. The state, he added, already funds religious schools through education savings accounts. 

“But families who rely on charter schools are told that their options must be secular,” he wrote. 

Black, with the University of South Carolina, said the issue comes down to who authorized the school to begin with. In both Oklahoma and Tennessee, either local or state boards approve charter applications.

“That explicit state involvement, to me, makes it clear that state action is involved,” he said, “and thus the Establishment Clause applies.”

In December, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis made waves by his intention to opt his state into the program, becoming the first Democrat to do so and setting the stage for his Democratic peers. Three other Democratic governors — Tina Kotek of Oregon, Michelle Lujan Grisham of New Mexico and Tony Evers of Wisconsin — have that they won’t opt in.Ìę

So the question remains: Will most Democrats stay the course and reject federal support for school choice? Or will they follow Polis’s example, bucking the traditional party line? How they proceed may have profound impacts on Democrats’ electoral chances this year.

As approved by Congress last summer, the program allows donors to receive a $1,700 federal tax credit for money given to organizations providing scholarships for private school tuition, tutoring and other education costs for families whose annual income is at or below 300 percent of their area’s median income. The Internal Revenue Service is currently drafting guidance for administering the tax credit, and states are evaluating whether to participate.

In addition to Polis, have either opted in or declared their plans to do so. One Democrat, North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein, vetoed an opt-in bill but said he expects to sign up after he reviews the IRS rules.

Jorge Elorza, CEO of Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) and former mayor of Providence, has been pushing Democratic governors to opt into the program. This is part of a marked change in DFER’s positioning on private school choice, which Elorza casts as a turn in the right direction for a party that has, according to DFER’s , lost its lead with voters on education. For Democrats concerned about being out of touch with the majority of voters on school choice, this decision represents a “lifeline,” he told me. “It is a convenient off ramp so that we can not only talk about K–12 education policy in a new way, but also take an important step in the direction of choice.”

The main argument he uses to get them on board, he said, is that “if a state does not opt in, then by default, the first $1,700 in every single federal taxpayer’s taxes is going to leave your state.” Because it’s a federal tax credit, Californians are every bit as eligible to donate as Floridians. But because states have to opt in, California’s children aren’t eligible to receive scholarships unless Gov. Gavin Newsom or the state legislature decides to participate. Elorza believes the decision for Democrats is a “no brainer.”

John Schilling, a school choice advocate, offered another argument: “it’s all additive.” Because it’s a tax credit, “it is adding K-12 resources, which are going directly to parents and students. It does not affect what the federal government or what state governments provide for K–12 education.” And since the law allows public school students to benefit from the scholarships, tutoring or afterschool activities, Schilling sees little reason why Democratic governors wouldn’t opt in. He too called it a “no-brainer.”

Not everyone agrees. Thomas Toch, the director of the Georgetown University think tank FutureEd, argues the decision to opt in could be “very problematic” for governors, especially if they can’t target scholarships to students from low-income families or provide much oversight of private schools. Because there are so many unanswered questions, Toch hopes governors will “wait until they understand in detail what the parameters of the program will be” before they opt in or out, which won’t be until the IRS releases its rules later this year.

Another concern is a perennial one for school choice opponents: that private schools can discriminate against students, including LGBTQ kids. Jon Valant, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, said the tax credit is effectively a “backdoor voucher program” that states “actually have very little control over.” Democrats might be wary of opting into a program “where, for example, they can do very little to protect against some discriminatory behaviors.”

Such concerns are why Robert Enlow, president and CEO of the school choice research and advocacy organization EdChoice, believes governors in states on “the harder sort of left” — he mentioned California, Massachusetts and Connecticut — may choose not to opt in. Toch added: “In some states, especially where teacher unions are influential, there’s going to be a lot of pressure to just say no for no’s sake.”

Advocates argue that school choice, and particularly the scholarship tax credit, is popular. In September, DFER released showing that 64% of voters wanted their governor to opt into the program, including 61% of Democrats and 59% of Independents, with even stronger showings among Hispanic and Black voters. Enlow also pointed to done by EdChoice and Morning Consult showing that 65% of adults and 75% of school parents support tax-credit scholarship programs. With numbers like these, “opting in is not just popular, it is overwhelmingly popular,” DFER’s Elorza said.

Yet in 2024, voters in three states — Colorado, Kansas, and Nebraska — pro-school choice ballot measures. Elorza chalks these defeats up to “coordinated campaigns that raise a parade of horribles that will materialize” if these measures are adopted. Coordinated campaigns or no, those ballot measure defeats are surely going to give fodder to opponents of the tax credit scholarship program.

For now, most Democratic governors seem for the IRS rules. As a spokesperson for Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro put it in an email: “The Shapiro Administration is awaiting federal guidance to address key questions about how this program would work, including which students will be eligible, how this federal initiative will interact with existing programs, and more. We look forward to reviewing that guidance.” The offices of the governors of Illinois, Michigan, California and Michigan did not respond to requests for comment.

Toch applauds the wait-and-see approach: “My argument is that the devil is in the details, and the political leaders in both parties should scrutinize the details carefully and not commit to a program unless it serves valuable public policy ends.”

The question for Democratic governors facing re-election is simple: After a decade of declining student achievement, will voters want a massive change in how education is delivered? Or will they prefer a more cautious approach that maintains stricter oversight?

Gov. Jared Polis plans to opt Colorado into a federal tax-credit scholarship program, opening the door to private school choice in a Democratic state where lawmakers and voters have rejected previous proposals.

Conservatives, children’s advocates, and supporters of school choice praised the decision for its possibility to raise money for all students’ education. Meanwhile, a coalition of public school advocates sent a letter to Polis in December asking him to reconsider.

The voucher-like program, part of President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful” budget bill, has the potential to generate billions of dollars for private school tuition and other educational expenses, such as tutoring, but governors have to decide whether to participate.

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Polis appears to be the . North Carolina Gov. Josh Stein did so in August under pressure from state Republican lawmakers who have dramatically expanded the state’s voucher system. Polis also is the second governor to opt in from a state where voters rejected a school choice measure at the ballot. Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen, a Republican, , setting the stage for Nebraska’s first private school choice program after voters there overturned voucher legislation in 2024.

School choice supporters had hoped the federal program would expand educational opportunities in states where politics made it difficult or impossible to pass voucher legislation. Polis, meanwhile, said he saw other potential benefits.

Polis spokesperson Shelby Wieman said in a Dec. 5 statement that the governor would not have voted for the budget bill, but he is not interested in leaving hundreds of millions in federal money on the table that could provide additional funding for after-school programming, summer school, scholarships, and academic tutoring.

“This tax credit creates an immense opportunity for Coloradans to support students in our state, but only if we opt in,” she said. “He welcomes the opportunity to work with school districts and other education stakeholders to help ensure this credit can benefit the greatest number of students across our state with evidence-based programs that supplement school days. He encourages the administration to ensure these tax credits lead to improved student outcomes.”

The tax-credit program allows taxpayers to reduce their tax liability if they donate to eligible scholarship-granting organizations, which then pay for students’ educational expenses.

The law allows donations to benefit public and private school students alike, but how feasible it might be to harness donations for public school students will depend in part on rules that the Treasury Department has yet to issue.

that Polis plans to opt Colorado into the program. He expressed openness to the idea last summer and earlier in his career. Polis said in a statement that he doesn’t believe vouchers are a good use of public funds and that this tax credit is not a voucher.

States officially opt in by presenting a list of eligible scholarship-granting organizations to the Treasury Department, a step that must wait until rules are finalized next year.

Polis’ decision doesn’t necessarily mean Colorado will participate in the tax-credit program over the long term. Polis is term-limited, and the winner of the governor’s race next year could make a different decision.

Supporters of Polis’ decision agreed that the tax credits present an opportunity for the state to raise millions for students, including to support them in out-of-school opportunities and to pay for transportation and school supplies. Advocates say the tax-credit scholarship program helps students in underperforming schools attend other school options.

Tony Lewis, executive director of the Donnell-Kay Foundation, which works on education policy, said he hopes the tax credit rules allow scholarship-granting organizations the ability to pay for a wide range of activities, such as sports, after-school programs, theater classes, and summer camps. (The Donnell-Kay Foundation also has provided funding to Chalkbeat. Read more about our supporters and our ethics policy .)

“If we pass up this opportunity to opt in now, we close any possibility of doing good work for public school kids,” he said. “Why not keep your options open?”

The Colorado Children’s Campaign, an advocacy organization, also expressed optimism about the potential to benefit public school students.

And Ready Colorado Executive Director Brenda Dickhoner said the decision means more opportunities for kids, especially those wanting to participate in enrichment programs. The conservative organization focuses on school choice and education reform.

“It’s a way for us to solve this problem of closing this opportunity gap, and making it more equitable for kids to access after school enrichment, whether it’s band or sports or any type of tutoring,” she said in an interview.

The program doesn’t require state investment. Instead, it allows states to decide whether taxpayers can donate funds to scholarship-granting organizations and receive a dollar-for-dollar federal tax credit. Individual taxpayers can claim a credit of up to $1,700 starting in 2027.

Those organizations would give the money to parents to pay for education expenses, such as a students’ private school tuition, books, transportation, and uniforms. Families earning up to 300% of area median income would qualify. That threshold includes well-off families in expensive urban areas but might exclude middle-class families in some rural communities.

, which would have enshrined the right to school choice in the state’s Constitution. In 2021, they .

Polis reiterated his decision to opt in despite pleas from a that delivered a letter to Polis saying the state should not participate.

The letter said the state should focus on providing more resources to schools and respect voters’ wishes to keep vouchers out of the state.

The group added that the state can and must do better when it comes to public education. “But publicly funded school vouchers are not the way to achieve this,” the letter says.

The letter says studies have shown vouchers provide mixed results in improving student achievement. It also says the program lacks public accountability and allows discrimination against children with disabilities or who identify as LGBTQ+.

“Unlike the private or religious schools that vouchers support, our public schools are obligated to teach all students, holding fast to the American ideal of public education as a springboard to success and as necessary to a well-functioning democracy,” the letter says.

The list of organizations calling on Polis to reject the plan include the Colorado Education Association, Colorado Fiscal Institute, Colorado PTA, Movimiento Poder, and The Bell Policy Center.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat on Dec. 5, 2025. Sign up for their newsletters at .

Colorado officials say money that helps 18,000 low-income families pay for child care could run out by Jan. 31 if federal officials don’t lift the freeze they’ve imposed on funding for several safety net programs in five Democrat-led states.

If that happens, some children could go without care and some parents would have to stay home from work. State lawmakers could cover such a funding gap temporarily, though Colorado is facing a significant budget crunch.

The Trump administration announced the freeze on $10 billion in child care and social services funding for Colorado, California, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York in a press release Monday.

In letters sent to the two Colorado agencies that run the affected programs, federal officials said they have “reason to believe that the State of Colorado is illicitly providing” benefits funded with federal dollars to “illegal aliens.”

The letters didn’t cite evidence for that claim and a spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services didn’t respond to questions from Chalkbeat about why federal officials are concerned about fraud in Colorado.

Spokespeople from both state departments said by email on Tuesday they’re not aware of any federal fraud investigations focused on the programs affected by the funding freeze.

The five-state funding freeze follows a federal crackdown in Minnesota after a right-wing YouTuber posted a video in late December alleging that Minneapolis child care centers run by Somali residents get federal funds but serve no children. It’s not clear why the other four states have gotten the same treatment as Minnesota, but all have Democratic governors who have clashed with President Donald Trump.

In a New Year’s Eve social media post, Trump called Colorado Gov. Jared Polis “the Scumbag Governor” and said Polis and another Colorado official should “rot in hell” for mistreating Tina Peters, a Trump supporter and former Mesa County clerk who’s serving a nine-year prison sentence for orchestrating a plot to breach election systems.

The federal freeze will affect three main funding streams in Colorado that together bring in about $317 million a year. They include $138 million for the Colorado Department of Early Childhood for child care subsidies for low-income families and a few other programs.

The subsidy program, known as the Colorado Child Care Assistance program, helps cover the cost of care for more than 27,000 children so parents can work or take classes. It’s mostly funded by the federal government with smaller contributions from states and counties.

The other two frozen funding streams go to the Colorado Department of Human Services and pay for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, and other programs.

In the letter to the Colorado Department of Early Childhood, federal officials outlined new fiscal requirements the state will have to follow before the funding freeze is lifted. They include attendance documentation — without names or other personal identifiers — for children in the child care subsidy program.

A state fact sheet issued in response to the funding freeze said funding for the child care subsidy program would be depleted by Jan. 31. It also outlined several measures already in place to prevent fraud or waste, including state audits, monthly case reviews by county officials, and efforts to recover funds if improper payments are made.

The state said it is exploring “all options, including legal avenues” to keep the frozen funding flowing.

Six Democratic state lawmakers, most in leadership positions, released a statement Tuesday afternoon calling the funding freeze a callous move that will make life more expensive for working families.

“We stand ready to work with Governor Polis and partners in our federal delegation to resist this lawless effort to freeze funding, and we sincerely hope that our Republican colleagues will put politics aside, get serious about making life in Colorado more affordable, and put families first,” the statement said in part.

The statement was from Speaker of the House Julie McCluskie; Senate President James Coleman; House Majority Leader Monica Duran; Senate Majority Leader Robert Rodriguez; Rep. Emily Sirota; and Sen. Judy Amabile.

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

Up went the drones, and then, suddenly, down went the drones. A frequency conflict resulted in the team losing control of their devices, only to watch them crash back to earth, many of them destroyed. As their district’s superintendent and other attendees of the Colorado Association of School Boards conference helped them literally pick up the pieces, the students were shocked. 

“The kids were crushed,” said Joe McBreen, the assistant superintendent of innovation at the Longmont, Colorado, school district. “They felt like they failed their superintendent.” 

When the students diagnosed the problem, they realized that linking the next set of drones to a secure certificate online would avoid the connection mishap. Nearly a year and 40 shows later, “they haven’t had a problem since,” said McBreen. 

“Tell me where kids can learn that lesson and which standardized test” will mark that progress, said Axel Reitzig, the executive director of innovation for the 33,000-student district located 50 miles north of Denver. 

boldly claims its students “are the future of America,” and once you peek inside its 50,000 square-foot , that phrase seems less like a boast than a statement of fact. In addition to the district’s 260 competitive robotics teams, there are groups of students raising an endangered species of frogs, another group building and designing airplanes, as well as students taking classes in artificial intelligence, cyber security and music innovation. 

St. Vrain’s has been honing its career technical education offerings for more than a decade, pushing not just new fields of study, but encouraging students to dive deeply into one or more career paths, with the goal of cultivating a hybrid set of skills that can set them up to thrive in a changing workforce. 

Career technical education is undergoing a renaissance, with 15% of high school classes in the U.S. offering students instruction that focuses on the skills and knowledge required for specific jobs or fields of work, according to a . This type of learning boosts student achievement, graduation rates, hirability, and college readiness, according to from the nonprofit American Institute for Research. 

While not all of St. Vrain’s Innovation Center classes and training fit the strict definition of career technical education, all of it has been created to help students “test drive a career,” Reitzig said.

The district appears to be on the right track. A recent survey of seniors at the Innovation Center showed that 98% of them correlated what they did in high school to what they hope to do as a career.

St. Vrain’s also has one of the in the state at 94.3% for 2023-24, well in front of the state’s average 84.2% rate. The district’s attendance for the topped 92%, again ahead of the state’s average. 

St. Vrain opened its 6,000-square-foot Innovation Center in 2014 with five staffers offering 10 classes that sought to teach high school students technical skills or project management experience in fields like robotics and coding. Three years and a successful bond measure later, the Innovation Center has mushroomed into a 50,000-square-foot “sandbox” offering 70 classes to more than 1,200 students districtwide. A newly approved expansion will soon double the center’s size, Reitzig said.

The district’s philosophy is that students’ experiences should progress from exploration of various fields to education within those areas to real-world experience. Each of its 26 elementary schools, for example, has two annual field trips to the center, and high school students are encouraged to begin classes in one of 11 different focus areas as a freshman, allowing them to specialize by the time they graduate. The district even pays 200 students for work they complete after school for area companies, local government, or the district itself. 

“These students are doing authentic work for real clients,” Reitzig said. “They are going out and earning contracts.” He added that this work, in some ways, can be more valuable than an internship because students get to lead projects and learn from their failures.

The center maintains a strong relationship with a variety of business owners and entrepreneurs in the greater Denver area. 

Mikki McComb-Kobza of first started working with St. Vrain students several years ago when she was seeking a way to verify the sizes of great white sharks without catching them. Students helped design a photography system using lasers to measure sharks underwater. 

Since then, the nonprofit’s CEO has seen students find “their passion and purpose” through science experiments that have led to publishable research. “They allow students to get in the mud, next to other scientists,” she added. The district is open to hearing suggestions on what she called “dream moonshots” in various conservation projects. 

“Axel never says no,” she added, referring to the district’s executive director of innovation.

The best example of this experimentation came when Mac Kobza, a senior wildlife biologist for Boulder County, asked the district’s students how they could help counter the declining number of Northern Leopard frogs, a species native to the area. After securing state approval, the district purchased tanks and set out to create a system to raise these frogs in captivity before releasing them into the wild. (Kobza and McComb-Kobza are married.) 

Because these frogs had never been raised in captivity before, the methods the students and scientists created would become a template for the future, if successful. Students and scientists worked side by side, Reitzig said, solving problems while fixing a community problem. The experiment was a success and the released frogs have started to self-populate again, Kobza said. 

This program not only incorporated bioscientific research, but it forced students to work through a maze of local and state approval processes while also dealing with private landowners. Students continue to monitor the water temperatures where the frogs live and stay in contact with area scientists and farmers. “This is cutting edge environmental science,” said Kobza. 

Even if a student’s work doesn’t lead directly to a career, they still pick up skills they can use in other jobs, said Hilary Sontag, the Innovation Center’s executive director of advancement and strategic partnerships. After a female student won a state championship in welding, Sontag asked her if she was planning on becoming a welder, a potentially lucrative career. The student quickly said no, but explained that she wanted to enter the military and train to become a cardiac surgeon. She said her welding experience would help sharpen her problem-solving chops and hone her motor skills. 

Another student, senior Mischa Nelson, began his work at the Innovation Center in cybersecurity, a field with a strong business representation in the greater Denver area. He took multiple classes, not only working with expensive machinery but also picking up industry recognized certifications. He landed a summer internship with a local software company. When that ended, the company asked him to stay on as an employee, helping it run a large experiment to test its data security measures. 

“I’m working on a program with more than a million Social Security numbers in it,” he said. 

But while Nelson continues to work for the cybersecurity company, he has broadened his Innovation Center studies to include entrepreneurship and AI. Through his AI work, he entered a NASA competition where he is trying to create a system that would offer astronauts immediate medical advice without requiring them to connect back to Earth. He credits his entrepreneurial classes with helping him develop time management skills and the confidence to present publicly to groups of people needed for this project. 

Once he graduates, he said he hopes to create and run control systems for industries that use robotics and computers in warehouses. “Everything I’ve learned is completely relevant,” he said. “It’s not like we were doing old curriculum. You get to hone the way you want to go.”

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.

They were right.

In Tennessee, the nonprofit Wilberforce Academy is suing the Knox County Schools in federal court because the district refuses to allow a Christian charter school. Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti is on the school’s side. He issued last month that the state’s ban on religious charter schools likely violates the First Amendment. 

“Tennessee’s public charter schools are not government entities for constitutional purposes and may assert free exercise rights,” he wrote to Rep. Michele Carringer, the Knoxville Republican who requested the opinion. 

The legal challenge in Tennessee comes as a Florida-based charter school network prepares to submit an application to the Oklahoma Charter School Board for a Jewish virtual charter high school. Peter Deutsch, the former Democratic congressman who founded the Ben Gamla charter schools, began working on the idea long before the case over St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School even went to court. The 4-4 tie in May means that an Oklahoma Supreme Court decision blocking the school from receiving state funds still stands.Ìę

“The prior decision shows that there’s an open question here that needs to be resolved,” said Eric Baxter, vice president and senior counsel at Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a law firm representing the National Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School Foundation. “We hope the court will get it right this time. We hope the federal courts get it right without having to go to the Supreme Court.”

Idaho also confronted the issue earlier this year. The state’s first charter, Brabeion Academy, initially the school as Christian. But it in August as a nonreligious school and will open as such next fall. 

Deutsch, Skrmetti and other supporters of faith-based charter schools base their argument on three earlier Supreme Court rulings allowing public funds to support sectarian schools. They say that excluding religious organizations from operating faith-based charter schools is discrimination and violates the Constitution. But leaders of the charter sector and public school advocates argue that classifying charter schools as private would threaten funding and civil rights protections for 3.7 million students nationwide.

“Unless and until the U.S. Supreme Court takes up a future case and rules otherwise, we advise all charter school associations and public charter schools to adhere to the letter and spirit of the law in their respective states,” Starlee Coleman, president and CEO of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said in a statement.

‘Not on our watch’

When the Supreme Court considered St. Isidore, Deutsch, was prepared to advocate for Jewish congregations to open schools that not only teach their language, but also their faith. He called the case “a historic opportunity” to bring Jewish education to thousands of children.

To Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, the debate is settled, for now. In November, he said his office would “oppose any attempts to undermine the rule of law.” 

Americans United, which advocates for maintaining church-state separation, has also issued a warning over the new school. The organization represented parents and advocates in a separate case over the school. 

“Religious extremists once again are trying to undermine our country’s promise of church-state separation by forcing Oklahoma taxpayers to fund a religious public school. Not on our watch,” Rachel Laser, president and CEO, said in a press release.

The legal fight over religious charter schools began in 2023, when the Oklahoma Virtual Charter School Board voted 3-2 to approve a charter for St. Isidore, setting off a closely watched case that spanned two years. At the time, the Jewish Federation of Greater Oklahoma City, a nonreligious group, called the charter board’s decision unconstitutional. Rachel Johnson, the group’s executive director, didn’t return calls or emails requesting a comment on Ben Gamla’s proposal.

None of the members who originally voted on St. Isidore serves on the state’s new Oklahoma Charter School Board. But for one person involved with Ben Gamla’s application, this is familiar territory. Brett Farley is on the proposed school’s board, according to a letter of intent the foundation submitted to the charter board in November.

Farley once held a top position with the and is also executive director of the Catholic Conference of Oklahoma, which focuses on public policy issues involving the church. While preparing the St. Isidore application, with Notre Dame law Professor Nicole Stelle Garnett, whose scholarly work formed the basis of the legal argument for the school.

łÒČč°ùČÔ±đłÙłÙ’s is that nonprofits running charter schools are like private contractors, and as with other publicly funded programs, can’t be excluded just because they are religious. She’s also close friends with Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who recused herself from the St. Isidore case. Experts speculated that Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the three liberals on the court, resulting in the 4-4 tie.

‘Passion for religious freedom’

The virtual school, the intent letter says, would initially enroll about 40 students, focusing on “college readiness, while developing deep Jewish knowledge, faith and values within a supportive learning community.”

But some are surprised Deutsch isn’t making his bid for a Jewish charter school in Florida, where his existing, non-religious charter schools have thrived.

“I think Florida could be a good option given the new attorney general’s passion for ,” said Daniel Aqua, the director of special projects at Teach Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates for Jewish education

The demand for a Jewish charter school would be much higher in Florida, which has Jewish population of nearly 762,000, compared with about 9,000 in Oklahoma. 

Charter founders in Florida submit their applications to local school districts first. The state recently added as authorizers, but Oklahoma, where organizers directly with the state charter board, offers a more streamlined process. 

‘Public Christian school’

But efforts to create publicly-funded religious schools are not limited to the charter sector. A new school in Colorado, Riverstone Academy, calls itself the state’s “first public Christian school.” Now serving 30 students in Pueblo, south of Colorado Springs, Riverstone is what is sometimes referred to as a “contract” school because districts sign agreements with private organizations to provide education services. In this case, Education reEnvisioned, one of the state’s 21 boards of cooperative educational services, or BOCES, authorized the school. 

In October, the Colorado Department of Education warned Ken Witt, the BOCES’ executive director, that the school’s per-student funding is at risk because it is “not operating in a nonsectarian nature.” The letter also went to District 49, near Colorado Springs, one of Education reEnvisioned’s member districts. 

In a response, Witt wrote that he was “alarmed at the threat” that the school might not receive funding. “We did not and legally cannot discriminate against this school on account of its religious affiliation,” he wrote. Examining Riverstone’s curriculum to determine if the school is truly sectarian, he said, would be “unconstitutionally entangling and discriminatory against different forms of religion.”

Witt told The 74 that funding usually doesn’t flow from the state to a new school until January, so it’s too soon to know whether officials will withhold funds.

‘Keep coming back’ 

“You’re going to see those within the charter sector and outside of it basically taking the same approach” — arguing that private groups delivering religious instruction can’t be denied public funds, said Preston Green, an education professor at the University of Connecticut. 

To Green, Riverstone’s identity as a “contract” school calls to mind a 1982 case, one that Garnett and other proponents of religious charter schools often highlight when they say that charters are not “state actors.” In , the Supreme Court said a Massachusetts private school that received public funds for educating teens with behavior problems did not act under the “color of state law” when it fired six employees. 

The question, experts say, is not if, but when the Supreme Court will eventually see another case about religious public schools Justice Barrett won’t have the same reason to recuse herself, Green said, and he’s not convinced that Roberts would side with the liberals a second time.

The advocates, he said, “keep coming back at this because they think that they’ll get the votes.”

Two ballot measures to fund Colorado’s universal school meals program, the only statewide contests in the 2025 off-year election, were approved by voters Tuesday night, according to unofficial results.

The Associated Press called the race in favor of Proposition MM, which would raise $95 million annually for school meals by limiting tax deductions for filers with higher incomes, at 8:25 p.m. With more than 1.4 million votes counted, nearly 65% of voters had cast a ballot in favor of Proposition LL, and 58% voted in favor of Proposition MM.

Both measures were by the Colorado General Assembly earlier this year. Together, they will shore up funding for Healthy School Meals For All, a state program that provides free breakfast and lunch to all students regardless of their family’s income level.

“Thank you to every voter, volunteer, community partner, and endorsing organization who turned out to pass Propositions LL and MM, ensuring every child in Colorado can continue to get a healthy meal at school,” Joe Kabourek, campaign manager for the Keep Kids Fed Colorado campaign, said in a press release. “Propositions LL and MM will keep kids fed in school, leading to better grades, higher graduation rates, and better outcomes for Colorado students.”

Colorado voters approved a to create the program three years ago. It was funded by limiting income tax deductions for filers earning over $300,000 per year. The program’s funding mechanism raised more than expected in the 2023-2024 fiscal year, but its costs also exceeded projections, resulting in a budget gap that rose to roughly $50 million this year.

Proposition LL will allow the state to keep the $12.4 million in excess 2023-2024 revenue that would otherwise be returned to voters under the 1992 state constitutional amendment known as the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights.

Proposition MM aims to permanently fund the full program by further limiting tax deductions for filers earning over $300,000 a year. About 194,000 Coloradans in that high-income category would pay an average of $486 more in income taxes yearly, according to nonpartisan state fiscal analysts.

Keep Kids Fed Colorado reported $739,200 in contributions since June, mostly from the nonprofit Hunger Free Colorado. The measures were endorsed by a long list of organizations including Children’s Hospital Colorado, Great Education Colorado, Mi Familia Vota, Rocky Mountain Farmers Union and Save the Children Action Network. The measures did not draw an organized opposition campaign.

During a special legislative session in August, Colorado lawmakers to allow the additional revenue to be spent on broader efforts to reduce food insecurity, once the Healthy School Meals For All program’s costs are covered. That would help the state partially offset the impact — estimated at up to $170 million annually — of reduced funding and higher administrative costs for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, as a result of  in July.

“While we celebrate this victory for Colorado kids and families, we also cannot ignore that, for thousands of Colorado families, this remains a time of deep economic hardship and food insecurity, made worse by USDA’s refusal to provide full funding for SNAP and the devastating cuts to SNAP Congress approved this past summer,” Anya Rose, director of public policy at Hunger Free Colorado, said in a statement.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Colorado Newsline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Quentin Young for questions: info@coloradonewsline.com.

A recent college graduate from Kansas, Phipps chose the district, which is about 45 miles east of Denver, because of an unusual job perk: housing for school staff. The district-owned apartments offer monthly rent starting at $200. Phipps, who still lives in the apartments with his wife and infant son, said it’s a main reason he’s remained in the district.

Affordable educator housing has existed for decades, especially in remote school districts like Byers. But teachers are increasingly getting priced out of the communities they work in — causing them to seek employment elsewhere or avoid jobs in high-priced metro areas. To combat this issue, nonprofits and school districts across the nation — in states including Colorado, Arkansas, California, New Mexico and Kansas — are pursuing teacher housing projects to improve educator retention.

For example, rent for a one-bedroom apartment at a for San Francisco Unified staff starts at $1,183 per month, in a district where this year is $79,468 and similar rentals go for around $3,000 or more. First-year Kansas City educators who make a $48,150 can pay $600 to $900 a month to share a duplex with other teachers. Nearby monthly rents start at $1,000. San Francisco tenants are selected through a lottery system, but many other housing projects prioritize new teachers and have waiting lists.

Between 2019 and 2025, housing costs increased by roughly 50% on average, outpacing the average 24% growth in entry-level teacher salaries, according to a .

“Until all teachers can reliably afford basic necessities like housing, the challenges of attracting and retaining a diverse, high-quality teacher workforce will likely persist,” the report said.

‘I don’t have much turnover’

Phipps interviewed with multiple Colorado districts, including one that paid more than what Byers was offering. But he liked the high school social studies job in Byers the most because of the school community and low-cost housing. Rental units are scarce in the district, with monthly payments starting around $1,400 — a high price tag for Phipps’ $50,738 salary. Having a boss who was also his landlord wasn’t an issue, he said.

“The demand and prices of housing — especially rent — is very high out here,” he said. “I don’t know if I would have moved out to Colorado without this teacher housing. I didn’t know what was going to be do-able with my teacher salary straight out of college.”

The Byers school district has owned staff housing since the 1960s. It has 10 apartments and two houses — all occupied, with a waiting list. Superintendent Tom Trudell said the rent pays for occasional renovations or repairs. Housing has always been part of the district’s strategy to attract and retain teachers, he said, and it allows them to save money to eventually buy a house of their own.

“There’s a kind of a bond that builds between [me and my tenants], because if they’re quality employees, they’re typically not going anywhere,” he said. “So I don’t have much turnover.”

In the Vilas School District in southeastern Colorado, Superintendent Abby Pettinger is the landlord for 11 rental homes that house eight single school staff members and one family with children. Two units are vacant. The homes have become outdated because the district lacks money for repairs and remodels.

“It’s really hard to be somebody’s landlord and be their boss,” she said. “We wanted [the units] to be an asset for our staff, but I wish that we could be at a point that it could be self-sustaining. We’re not at that point.”

Some teacher housing complexes are owned and managed by local nonprofits rather than the school district. That’s the case for Harrison School District 2 in Colorado Springs. An organization called We Fortify is raising $6 million for that consist of 325-square-foot tiny homes. Rent will start at $825 per month. 

Construction has already begun, and teachers will begin to move in next summer, said district spokesperson Christine O’Brien. 

“We did poll all of our staff before we 
 started designing the idea for the village,” she said. “We could have filled five villages with just our initial interest.”

District plans don’t always come through

Of the 12 teacher housing developments in California, seven have popped up in just the last three years, according to a from the Center for Cities and School at the University of California-Berkeley.

“Generally, recruitment has become more and more challenging, so districts are motivated to look for other ways to enhance their ability to recruit staff,” said Sara Hinkley, the center’s program manager. “High costs of housing have become pretty entrenched. And then most states are experiencing declining enrollment, which means there are more properties available.”

The Santa Clara Unified School District was the first in the state to complete a teacher housing project, in 2002. This year, three developments for multiple school districts opened in Silicon Valley, in , and . Educators in Mountain View and Palo Alto were offered free rent as an incentive to move in.

Building affordable teacher housing can be a rocky process, especially if schools or nonprofits run into problems with city zoning laws, insufficient funding or a lack of community support. It to build modern, five-story apartment buildings for San Francisco Unified teachers because of housing density concerns and other issues. And once the lottery opened, some teacher applications .

In 2021, California’s Oakland Unified School District for future teacher housing. The apartments have yet to be built. The project hasn’t received enough funding, and union members have to focus first on raising wages.

“We’ve definitely seen districts realize that what they want to do isn’t going to be financially feasible,” Hinkley said. “They may get as far as choosing a parcel of land, coming up with an idea of what they want to build and [find out] that they are going to have to charge rent that’s way too high in order to make the project work.”

Rural schools in New Mexico have access to , but larger districts like Sante Fe Public Schools don’t qualify. In recent years, the in funding for a 40-unit housing complex project, but that was well below the needed $15 million. Now, Santa Fe is trying to fund it through a .

An initiative in Bentonville, Arkansas, stalled last year when a rezoning request to turn school district property into 40 cottages for low-income staff. The Bentonville School District had next to its high school to the Excellerate Foundation, a local nonprofit that was funding the $35 million housing project. 

Superintendent Debbie Jones said she thought it was the end of a project she had worked on since 2021, when Bentonville began to lose newly hired educators who couldn’t afford to live in the district. But then the foundation included the teacher housing plans in a that’s slated to open in 2026. Two-bedroom cottages will cost $1,000 a month.

“It’s actually better than our original plan because they have built in a 3,000-square-foot child care center that we will run and it serves the families in that neighborhood,” she said.

Giving new teachers a boost with education and a home

The housing projects for the Bentonville and Harrison school districts have guidelines to allow low-income young staffers like new teachers or paraprofessionals to qualify. Residents also have a time limit for staying in the housing. For Bentonville, educators have to move out after five years. In the Harrison district, the maximum is three years.

In both, residents are required to participate in financial management classes that are designed to help them prepare to move out. In Bentonville, staffers can pay an extra $500 a month in rent as part of a program that will give tenants $50,000 toward their next house.

Kelly Davis, president of the Bentonville Education Association, said young teachers in the district are getting excited for the development to open because monthly rent costs anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000.

“When I came to the district back in 2003, I couldn’t afford to live here. I still don’t live in Bentonville,” he said. “They are trying very hard to make sure that the lowest-paid people in the district have a place to live, so that they don’t have to leave the community.”

Kansas City has a similar housing project that not only provides financial education, but helps college graduates get their first teaching job.

In 2020, Trinity Davis left her post as assistant superintendent of Kansas City Public Schools and founded to increase the number of local Black educators. A by the University of Missouri-Kansas City reported the metro area had more than 53,000 Black students but fewer than 1,200 Black teachers.

Teachers Like Me recruits recent college graduates by securing them a job in one of eight partner Kansas City school districts while also providing low-cost housing. School districts pay the organization $15,000 for every educator they receive through the process. The nonprofit has three homes and is in the process of building seven more to create a duplex neighborhood. 

“Suburban districts that don’t have any teachers of color are coming to us to say, ‘Hey, can you help us recruit some Black teachers?’” Davis said. “I have an elementary school where the fourth-grade, fifth-grade and sixth-grade teachers are all Teachers Like Me [participants]. They’re like a family and they live together.”

The little boy clung to his mother as she carried him through the wooden half-door of the preschool classroom on Tuesday morning. Tears streamed down his face. It was going to be a tough drop-off.

While other children finished bananas, raisin bagels, and milk, Vraja Johnson, the lead teacher, ushered the mother and son toward a cozy corner in the back of the classroom. She spoke softly in English and Spanish to the nervous preschooler. Several minutes later, when his mother had slipped away, the boy nestled into a large blue beanbag clutching Tucker the Turtle, a stuffed animal that helps preschoolers understand that it’s OK to retreat into your shell — and to come back out when you’re ready.

It was the first day of preschool in the Otters classroom at El Nidito, a bilingual child care program at The Family Center in Fort Collins. The little boy and his 11 classmates are among 40,000 children enrolled in Colorado’s universal preschool program this year. The $349 million program offers tuition-free preschool — typically a half day — to all children in the year before kindergarten.

Now entering its third year, Colorado’s preschool for all program has smoothed out since its . At the time, application system errors, glitches in the , and last-minute reductions in preschool hours for some children caused widespread confusion and frustration.

A national early childhood group in the country for the share of children served by state-funded preschool. Around 70% of the state’s 4-year-olds are enrolled in the program, which generally covers about $6,000 a year in preschool costs per child.

But wrinkles remain. The state is still brought by religious preschools that objected to non-discrimination rules protecting LGBTQ children, families, and employees. Both suits are pending in federal appeals court. And the national early childhood group found that Colorado meets only two of 10 benchmarks meant to ensure that preschool classrooms are high quality.

Currently, the “universal preschool” label doesn’t indicate anything about the caliber of classroom a child will join. Rather, it simply indicates the state is paying for 10 to 30 hours of class time. Of about 2,000 preschools participating in the program, some have the state’s lowest rating and meet only basic health and safety standards.

Others, including El Nidito, which has been around for 25 years, have the state’s highest rating.

A morning in Johnson’s classroom makes it easy to see why. She and her co-teacher, an experienced sub named Maria Chavira, are warm, cheerful, and organized. Their young charges are curious, silly, and always in motion.

During breakfast, two boys held bananas up to their ears like phones.

“Ring, ring, ring. Hi, Henry,” one said as the other burst out laughing.

Nearby at the sensory table, as one little boy poured dried pinto beans through a cardboard tube, he said, “Did you ever watch ‘Boss Baby?’ The baby is a bossssss. Babies can’t be bosses!”

Meanwhile, the little boy who’d struggled to leave his mother was getting braver, slowly testing the waters of group play. One minute he crouched next to a little girl in front of a tree house play set. Later, he tried out bear and leopard hand puppets as the Boss Baby skeptic threw Tucker the Turtle up in the air next to him.

Johnson, who switched from a sales and marketing career to early childhood education in 2007, seems to have a sixth sense for detecting imminent meltdowns, skirmishes, and rule-bending.

She quickly peeled away from a conversation with a visitor when a little girl dressed in head-to-toe pink accidentally got a squiggle of red marker on her new cowboy boots.

“Your mom can get that out. The markers are washable,” Johnson said as tears welled in the preschooler’s eyes.

Then she averted the crisis with five words: “Do you want a hug?”

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

The Colorado Democrat surprised pundits in April by for governor in the upcoming midterm election. Surrounded at his introductory press conference by a coterie of political notables, and buoyed by impressive , Bennet enjoys a healthy lead in a primary that won’t be decided for another 11 months. 

Winning the nomination fight would put him in a position to extend a Democratic stranglehold on the governor’s mansion that began in 2006. If elected, he would succeed Gov. Jared Polis, a fellow businessman-turned-politician who shares much of his reform-minded outlook on K–12 schools; John Hickenlooper, a longtime colleague who prodded Bennet to take a job as superintendent of Denver Public Schools in 2005; and Bill Ritter, who tapped him to serve as senator four years later. With Democratic majorities controlling the state legislature, he would be able to pursue his preferred strategy to lead Colorado students out of of post-COVID learning loss.

Yet a relocation to the statehouse would also represent something of a retreat from national politics. While not quite a media superstar, Bennet has often found his way into Washington’s spotlight, leading the to permanently expand the Child Tax Credit during the Biden administration. He also sought the presidency in 2020, standing out for in a field that was quickly tacking left. 

Bennet by Washington’s stagnancy — and his criticism extends to his own party, which he says lost focus on children and families during the Biden administration. A decade after the end of No Child Left Behind, he believes the Democrats have allowed “a complete vacuum” to form on the issue of K–12 schools, opening the way for Republicans to charge ahead with an aggressive push to expand private school choice.

If anyone can offer a vision of educational improvement, it may be Colorado’s senior senator, who led a four-year turnaround of Denver schools that saw student achievement and high school graduation rates both shoot upward. Though the to achieve those results — especially heightened accountability for failing schools — engendered backlash, it is also cited as one of the most successful academic improvements ever seen in a district of its size.

In a conversation with The 74, Bennet said that he doesn’t intend to lead a revival of 2000s-style reform. Instead, he spoke broadly about building an education system that would usher high school graduates into middle-class careers.

“I just think this is a moment when people are feeling the economic challenges so acutely, and we’ve got to make the decision to do what every other industrialized and rich country in the world has done: put kids graduating high school in a position to earn a living wage,” he said.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

The 74: You’ve been a fairly high-profile senator for 16 years, and now you’re aiming to leave Congress and lead Colorado. Do your plans suggest anything about your level of optimism for education policy at the national level?

I have very little optimism for the future of education policy as it’s made in Washington. In fact, a better way of saying it is that I am completely pessimistic about our ability to deliver the 21st-century education system that our kids and teachers and families desperately need. 

Washington is going in the opposite direction, if anything: The Democratic Party has no national education policy that I can perceive, and the Republican Party has a national policy of dismantling public education and voucherizing it — to the extent that they’re now incentivizing governors to fund tax credits for kids who want private education. That’s beyond the imagination of people who supported vouchers when I was a school superintendent.

So with respect to education policy at the federal level, we’re at a moment where all there is is wreckage everywhere you turn. That’s terrible for our kids because, just to take one example, our reading scores haven’t been lower for 32 years. The surveys I’ve seen of kids’ and parents’ satisfaction with public education in the wake of COVID are continuing to fall, principally because most kids feel like they’re not being prepared for the century we’re in. 

You mentioned the absence of concrete, consensus ideas about K–12 schools within the Democratic Party. How big of a problem is that, both substantively and politically? I ask because a number of polls have seemed to show Republicans gaining on the issue over the last few years.

Republicans clearly gained ground nationally on education in the aftermath of COVID. That’s shocking because the Democratic Party has always led on education in public opinion. 

I’m proud to come from Colorado, where [Gov.] Jared Polis has been a leader on this subject. We reopened schools in Colorado earlier than in a lot of other states, and I think the governor understood how damaging the school closures were to our kids’ education and mental health because of his deep commitment to education over the years. 

Coming out of COVID, the argument from the Republican Party has essentially been to privatize public education. I really don’t think the American people support that, but Democrats at the national level have provided a complete vacuum. I often ask, at my town halls and the Democratic meetings I have, “What was Joe Biden’s position on public education? What was the Democratic Party’s position at the last election?” Nobody can name anything. Sometimes people come up with free college or deferred student loans, but nobody comes up with anything on K-12. 

To the extent that we focused on anything — well, Biden did, though I disagreed with him — it was on student loan forgiveness, which leaves out the vast majority of families and kids in America. All of a sudden, we weren’t talking to parents who had children in our K-12 system, especially those who didn’t plan to go to college. We weren’t talking to the many young people who aren’t attending college but also aren’t prepared to hold a job. We weren’t talking to teachers or people working in schools, either. We just abandoned this project to the Republicans, which was a huge mistake.

Do you think the party’s difficulty in setting policy priorities was particularly evident during the Biden presidency? The failure to include a permanent expansion of the Child Tax Credit in the Build Back Better negotiations of 2021–22 sticks out to me, particularly because it’s been one of your signature issues in the Senate.

It’s definitely fair to say that we didn’t establish a set of priorities that were affordable for the American people. The Child Tax Credit is the most successful anti-poverty measure, and maybe the most successful domestic policy measure, that we have implemented since the 1960s. In the richest country in the world, our goal should be ending childhood poverty. 

I don’t think there’s any greater education reform we could pursue than ending childhood poverty in this country. It’s critical to our country’s future and to the economy’s present, and that’s why it was where I focused. I do agree that there wasn’t a huge amount of policy coherence [during the Biden White House], and it was just a question of what we could get done. In the end, Washington dysfunction didn’t allow the expanded Child Tax Credit to become permanent. Now we see a version of the CTC in Donald Trump’s trickle-down bill, but it has left out millions of the kids in America who could use the credit the most. 

Do you think it’s possible to achieve these kinds of goals at the state level instead? A number of states, including Colorado, have already implemented or expanded their own to directly address child poverty.

I am very pleased that there are states like Colorado and Minnesota and Maryland that have taken that on themselves as a way of expressing the importance of giving kids a fair shot from the very beginning. None of that obviates the need to fix our education system and bring it into the 21st century, which we clearly need to do; but frankly, it’s just not on the agenda in Washington, D.C. There have been many days in Washington when I’ve felt that we’ve treated the nation’s children like they’re someone else’s children and not our own. 

We have a national interest in the fact that our reading scores are below where they were three decades ago. We have a national interest in the fact that our kids feel like the system we have — whether it’s K-12, higher education or workforce development — is not preparing them to succeed in this economy. It is of national importance that our kids and adolescents are having an epidemic of mental health problems, which simply did not exist when I was in school, in the wake of COVID and social media. And Washington is just not interested in that.

My view is that this is a moment when the states need to set an example for Washington. If I get the chance to be Colorado’s next governor, I hope we’re going to make Colorado the best place in America to raise and educate a kid.

Do you think Democrats, and state education leaders more broadly, need to coalesce a brand-new education agenda? The classic education reform playbook seemed to yield fairly steady learning gains through the 1990s and 2000s in a number of areas — like Denver, where you were superintendent — but have since fallen out of favor.

The results in Denver were extraordinary, but insufficient. We made a huge amount of progress compared to school districts all over the nation, many of which were engaged in the same kinds of reforms we were. We were able to do work in Denver that our community supported, including reforms that have been described as controversial but which had the support of most parents and kids.

It’s not important to re-litigate this now, but the bottom line is that Denver was one of the 10 worst-performing school districts when we started, and by the time Tom Boasberg [Bennet’s successor as superintendent] was leaving, we had risen to the top half of districts in math and reading. Our graduation rates were dramatically improved. I mean, there was a whole list of things we did. 

If we could say the same about America, we’d be feeling a lot better about where we are educationally. If we could say that about Colorado — I would say that no kids in any other district in the state saw the gains we did in Denver — we’d feel a lot better. But the reverse is true: We’re going backwards as a nation. In Colorado, there are school districts where the math proficiency rate is 7% for Latino students in eighth grade. The proficiency rate for reading is 24% among Latino and African American students. It’s still the fundamental civil rights issue we face as a nation, and we have not addressed it. The country is becoming less fair, not more, in education.

It is striking that, given the results you’ve cited, the Denver school board has worked to reverse some of the policies you implemented as superintendent. Last year, you and Boasberg that — it seemed to me — was intended to defend the honor of the reforms you led. If elected governor, do you intend to fight for the same ideas that animated you as a district leader? 

I’m not coming back to be Colorado’s superintendent of schools. I’m not coming back to impose the same standards-based reform effort that we led in Denver. Times have changed, and we’ve seen the limitations of those reforms. But we also saw huge benefits from the way we engaged our workforce, the quality of implementation, and the ability for parents and kids to have interesting choices of schools throughout the district that met their interests and needs. 

Tom and I weren’t [at that press conference] to defend our honor. We’re proud of the work we did, though we didn’t do it perfectly. It was important for us to be there because the results are so clear. The outcomes were dramatically better than any similarly situated school district that I am aware of in American history. To me, the problem isn’t that our politicians on both the right and the left have abandoned school reform itself. It’s that we’ve abandoned our aspirations for our kids when it comes to their education, period. We can’t tolerate a system that creates the kind of outcomes we’re seeing.

So do you intend for your governorship to be more about issues that have developed since your time in the Senate, such as COVID learning recovery or the spread of four-day school weeks?

You’re right, there are a lot of districts in Colorado, especially rural ones, that have been operating for a long time. I was deeply worried when the city of Pueblo went to a four-day school week. I met with some parents at the Pueblo Boys and Girls Club and asked them what they were going to do with their kids on the fifth day. What they said to me was, “No one asked us whether we’d be okay with our kids not attending school on the fifth day. And by the way, none of us can afford child care.”

Is there any world in which the parents of Cherry Creek or Boulder County would be ignored in making a decision like that about school schedules? I can assure you, there would be no way that the superintendent or school board in those communities could ever get to a four-day week. Families would rebel over the child care costs alone. As I said, I’m not interested in re-litigating the reforms of 20 years ago. I’m interested in our state delivering an education for our young people that is relevant to the economy we have and that can put them in a position to succeed.

For more and more Americans, it feels like no matter how hard you work, you can’t get ahead, and your kids can’t get ahead. We’ve got to move our kids back to the center of our vision of what a successful education system looks like. We’ve got to focus on providing kids with economic opportunity — either when they decide to go to college or when they take a job that doesn’t require a college degree, but that can allow them to earn a decent wage and enter the middle class. We need to get much more serious about the state of our kids’ mental health, which is something I’ve focused on in the Senate, but that we haven’t been able to do anything about. 

Fundamentally it’s about enlisting the entire state to deal with these problems. There was literally nothing we could have done in Denver all those years ago without the support of a community that wanted better outcomes for their kids and had aspirations for their families that were the same as parents living in wealthy school districts. Urban parents and rural parents, parents of color and white parents, they all have that ambition. 

The fact that we have an obsolete system isn’t anybody’s fault. I’ve been around long enough to know the ways in which people can just keep clinging to the status quo. I just think this is a moment when people are feeling the economic challenges so acutely, and we’ve got to make the decision to do what every other industrialized and rich country in the world has done: put kids graduating high school in a position to earn a living wage.

If you’re successful in this campaign, you’ll be leaving Washington and focusing on the lives of Coloradans. I’m wondering what principles or policy ideas you think your party should try to draw into a national agenda on K-12 schools? I doubt it would just be fighting teachers’ unions or requiring more testing, which were some of the go-to answers in the 2000s.

Well, it’s not that. I think we’ve learned that we were over-testing in those days. We saw the limitations of standards-based reform, and we also saw the difference that could be made through good implementation and extraordinary leadership among principals and teachers. We saw what could be achieved by unleashing the entire community to make our schools better.

Colorado is ready for that. Our families want to focus on getting the benefits of high-quality education, and that’s where I want to focus. If we are putting young people in the position to embark on a middle-class life, we will know we have succeeded in fulfilling our responsibilities to them. And we will know that the resources that we’ve spent on education have allowed kids to fulfill their parents’ dream for them — to do better than they did, and to contribute to our democracy as well.

During Gayathri Ramkumar’s favorite lesson — a sort of mathematical guessing game — she’ll hear her students asking their partners things like, “Can you tell me the degree of the polynomial?”

Not only does the back-and-forth get the high-schoolers talking precisely about mathematical problems, but it helps English learners boost their language skills without forcing them to talk in front of the whole class.

Ramkumar is a math and computer science teacher at Aurora Central High School, one of Colorado’s most diverse schools, where about half of the students are learning English.

She is also one of named a semifinalist for the state’s 2026 Teacher of the Year award. The winner will be announced in October.

Ramkumar talked to Chalkbeat about why she switched careers, how she incorporates educational influences from India and America into her lessons, and what advice she gives to college-bound students.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Was there a moment when you decided to become a teacher?

My journey into teaching wasn’t one of those stories where I always knew I wanted to be an educator. In fact, 25 years ago, fresh out of high school, I never would have imagined myself in a classroom. It was only after stepping away from engineering work to raise my kids that I unexpectedly discovered a love for teaching. Teaching them reading and math before they started school wasn’t just a responsibility; it became something I genuinely enjoyed. That experience sparked a passion in me, one I hadn’t realized was there, and it ultimately led me down the path to becoming a licensed teacher.

How did your own experience in school influence your approach to teaching?

I completed both my high school and bachelor’s degree in India, where the teaching style was very traditional. From an early age, I was used to taking extensive notes and doing a large volume of homework. Teaching in the U.S. has given me the opportunity to reflect on and compare both educational systems. I strive to integrate the best aspects of each into my own teaching approach. For example, when planning a math lesson, I draw inspiration from problem-based U.S. curricula such as Illustrative Mathematics and Desmos, which I’ve come to truly appreciate and enjoy. At the same time, I firmly believe in the value of practice, and I incorporate worksheets that I’ve found effective from my own experience as a math student in India.

Tell us about a favorite lesson to teach.

As a concurrent enrollment math teacher at the high school level, I strive to maintain the academic rigor of college-level math while also making it accessible, engaging, and developmentally appropriate for high school students. I always try to create lessons where students are engaging in content through exploration, discovery, and collaboration long before formal definitions or procedures are introduced.

One such lesson, adapted from Illustrative Math, was called “Info Gap.” The format supports precise mathematical communication and problem-solving. The lesson’s purpose was for students to put together what they have learned about sketching graphs of polynomials in factored form and factoring polynomials using division. Students worked in pairs, each receiving one of two card types. One student had the problem card with the problem that needed to be solved but lacked certain key details, such as its degree, intercepts, or end behavior. The other student held the data card containing the missing data, but they were not allowed to simply hand over the answers. Instead, the student with the problem card had to ask thoughtful, specific questions and explain their reasoning for needing that information to solve the problem.

One of the most powerful outcomes was the lesson’s support for multilingual learners. In whole-class settings, these students often hesitate to participate due to limited confidence with academic English. However, they had the chance to use vocabulary like “zeros,” “multiplicity,” and “degree” in a low-pressure context. This dialogue supported both math learning and language development.

There was not a dull moment in the classroom. Students were engaged in meaningful dialogue, constructing knowledge collectively, and supporting each other’s understanding. It was a moment that reaffirmed my belief in student-centered learning.

You help guide first-generation students through the college application process. What is your most important piece of advice for them?

I always encourage my students to take full advantage of by applying to all in-state public universities, even if they’re planning to go out of state. Plans can change unexpectedly, and having solid backup options can reduce stress later on. I also advise them to answer every question on the college application thoroughly, including those marked optional.

Tell us about a memorable time — good or bad — when contact with a student’s family changed your perspective or approach.

One memorable moment that really shifted my perspective was when I received a message from my student’s mother after I was selected as a semifinalist for Teacher of the Year. She congratulated me warmly and said she was proud to see someone from the immigrant community being recognized. She also told me she would be sharing the news in parent group chats to celebrate the accomplishment.

That message meant a great deal to me. It reminded me that the work I do doesn’t go unnoticed. It helped me realize that beyond academics, I’m serving as a role model and a source of representation for families in our school community. It was a humbling moment that gave me a deeper sense of purpose and a renewed commitment to advocacy, especially for students and families who may not always feel seen or heard.

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

One thing that deeply influences my classroom is the current political climate and the emotional toll it takes on our community, especially immigrant families and first-generation college students. Many of my students are navigating fear, financial instability, and uncertainty about their futures, all while trying to succeed academically. These pressures create setbacks in the classroom, but not because of a lack of ability or motivation.

As an educator, my role extends beyond academics. I advocate for my students by helping connect them with school counselors, former students, and college access programs. I collaborate with families to ensure they feel informed and supported. I also offer extra academic support through flexible office hours, tutoring sessions, and culturally responsive teaching strategies that validate students’ identities. My ultimate goal is to help students not just survive, but thrive, and to remind them that college and long-term success are within their reach, even when the path feels uncertain.

What was your biggest misconception that you initially brought to teaching?

When I first started my licensure process, I didn’t realize how much advocacy teachers do for their students, their colleagues, and the community in general. Teachers are constantly and relentlessly advocating for better and equitable school policies and systemic structure in addition to teaching the content that they are actually hired for.

What are you reading for enjoyment?

I enjoy reading historical fiction books, specifically by Ken Follett. Recently, I have been enjoying fantasy fiction.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.

Now Christian schools in Maine, where the case originated, want the courts to go even further. 

They object to a state law that requires them to accept all students, including those who don’t follow their religion, have disabilities or identify as LGBTQ. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit heard the case in January.

“This moral panic over letting religious schools be religious — even if they’re receiving tuition subsidies — needs to end,” said Adele Keim, senior counsel with the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty. The nonprofit law firm represents St. Dominic Academy in Auburn, Maine, which sued over the rule along with CrossPoint Church, which operates . 

The nondiscrimination law, schools say, prevents them from participating in “town tuitioning” — a program that picks up a student’s private school costs if there’s no public option in their community. 

The state argues that it’s only asking religious schools to comply with the same rules public and secular private schools follow.

“The schools are asking for special treatment,” said Alexandra Zaretsky, litigation counsel for Americans United for Separation of Church and State. The nonprofit advocacy group submitted a brief to the court in support of Maine’s position. “It should be the state’s prerogative to say ‘If you’re getting funding from the state, then you have to follow our generally applicable laws.’ ”

Most states with voucher programs already allow private and religious schools to deny admissions to whomever they want. Maine is an outlier — a blue state that would prefer to keep religious schools out of the tuitioning program. 

The debate reflects a heightened concern among advocates for public education that the nationwide push for private school choice will further isolate students.

“Religious schools getting the taxpayer-funded ability to pick their own kids is one real goal of this school voucher push — a feature, not a bug,” said Joshua Cowen, an education professor at Michigan State University. Last year, he released a book that delves into the way culture war battles have fueled private school choice.

In March, in opposition to Texas’ new ESA law, which passed in April with help from President Donald Trump. The president of the state House, urging them to vote yes. Earlier in that , which lasted nearly 24 hours, Laura Colangelo, executive director of the Texas Private School Association, said private schools could deny admission to a child whose mother wasn’t married when she got pregnant.

says the state can’t force a school to modify policies tied to their religious beliefs. If the Maine case goes the religious schools’ way, such rules would be “less necessary,” Cowen said.

“I’m a Christian man. I sing in a church choir. I can still say what these schools want to do is wrong,” he said. “These guys just want a blank check to do what they want, even if it’s leaving some kids and families out.”

A ‘source of balkanization’

The issue was also at the forefront of Oklahoma’s legal fight to open a religious charter school, a debate that both supporters and opponents of the idea expect to eventually wind up back in court.

In April, the U.S. Supreme Court tied 4-4 on the question of whether charter schools are private and can explicitly teach religion. The deadlock allowed the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s decision against St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School to stand. Though promising not to turn any students away, school leaders said they would only call students by their birth names and pronouns and would refer students with disabilities to their local district if accommodating their needs disrupted class.

Some experts see the prospect of sectarian charter schools as a threat to American values. 

“Public education, including public charter schools, is one of the few things that holds our society together,” said Richard Kahlenberg, who directs the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, a think tank. “It’s the common experience for 90% of American schoolchildren.” 

“If you suddenly have 
 Christian students going to their schools, Jewish students going to theirs, Muslim students going to theirs, that means fewer Christian students come to know Jewish and Muslim students as classmates and friends,” Kahlenberg said in a panel discussion prior to the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Oklahoma case. “Our public schools are already highly segregated by race and class, and this would just layer on religion as a new source of balkanization.” 

‘Infinite number of options’

In Utah, the state’s teachers union sued last year over a new ESA program because they say it “diverts” education funds to schools that discriminate in admissions. In April, a state district court judge ruled the program unconstitutional.

“We firmly believe, and a judge agreed, that public money belongs in public schools,” said Hailey Higgins, communications director for the Utah Education Association.

To choice supporters — and the Trump administration — the more private schools that cater to families’ individual preferences, the better. That’s the argument that the Institute for Justice, a libertarian law firm, along with parents currently in the program, made in to the Utah Supreme Court.

When she learned about the lawsuit, Amanda Koldewyn, an Ogden mother of four, said she felt “anger, frustration and panic.” Her 12-year-old son, who has autism, was getting sick from anxiety in public school and was “bored out of his mind” in class. The Utah Fits All scholarship allowed her to find a curriculum where he can move at his own pace and pay a private math tutor for her daughter. She hopes to use the program for her 5-year-old twins this fall as well.

“I can actually get the resources that aren’t just passable, but are fine tuned to what my children need,” she said. “I get really, really angry at those few teachers who think public school is the only way.”

The debate over whether religious schools in choice programs can refuse to serve families who don’t share their values is also playing out with younger students in Colorado. The state’s universal preschool program requires participating schools to accept students from families regardless of parents’ housing status, income level, or religion, sexual orientation or gender identity. 

Two over the regulation, saying they couldn’t participate in the program because their faith prohibits them from accepting LGBTQ students or parents. That means the state doesn’t pick up the cost for students in those schools. The case is now before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit. 

In other countries, it’s far more common for students to attend religious schools at the government’s expense. , fully funds Catholic school districts. In European countries like the Netherlands, attend government-funded religious schools.

Many countries place on those schools that choice advocates in the U.S. would resist, explains Sam Abrams, director of the International Partnership for the Study of Educational Privatization at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Religious schools often follow the same criteria for student admissions as public schools, teach to national standards and submit to monitoring visits.

“It’s all regulated, and you can’t screen kids out,” he said, noting that in recent school choice cases, the conservative justices on the Supreme Court never referenced how these systems work in other countries. “They’re not going to talk about the European system. It forces them to acknowledge that what [the U.S.] is doing is very different.”

Maine’s demands on religious schools depart from the way the tuitioning program used to operate. For decades, Catholic and other religious schools were “willing and active participants in this program,” Keim said. That ended in the 1980s — what she called the “shag carpet-era view of the Establishment Clause” — when the legislature passed a law excluding religious schools.

“For 25 years, Maine families have been knocking at the courthouse door and asking the federal courts to let them back in,” Keim said. 

In 2021, as the Carson case made its way to the Supreme Court, lawmakers amended the to prohibit discrimination against students in all private schools receiving public funds, including religious schools. The real “poison pill,” she said, is a provision that requires religious expression without discrimination. 

“If they’re going to allow a Catholic pro-life club,” she said, “they’re going to have to allow a Catholic pro-choice club.”

If the schools prevail in court, St. Dominic’s won’t be accepting any high school students. While the pre-K through eighth grade school will still operate, the this year due to low enrollment. 

“I’m sure the picture would be different,” Keim said, “if they had been allowed to receive these subsidies over the long term.”

Among the biggest wins of her tenure, she counts increases in charter funding and twice electing Democrat and school reformer Gov. Jared Polis as governor. After serving as chief of staff for the Denver Public Schools, she fully expected to finish her career at DFER.

“We worked hard to build power in the Democratic Party specifically around accountability, choice and the role of public charter schools,” she said. “Everything had always been grounded 100% in public education.”

But last year, she said she “saw the writing on the wall” when the organization’s leader embraced Education Savings Accounts and other forms of private school choice. She is among several who have since left the group over the issue.

In a , DFER CEO Jorge Elorza, former two-term mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, suggested that instead of “rejecting them offhand,” his party should explore how ESAs can advance Democratic values like uplifting needy families and protecting civil rights. Eighteen Republican-led states now have such programs, which parents can use for private school tuition or homeschooling. Most Democrats say vouchers and ESAs lack accountability and threaten funding for public schools.

To Alisha Searcy, who just last year, Elorza’s about-face felt like a betrayal. 

“DFER has done extraordinary work to get courageous Democrats elected to push bold policies that would truly improve public education,” said the former Georgia state legislator. She was hired last year to expand the organization’s reach into her state, Alabama and Tennessee, but resigned in May. “We need a strong Democratic voice, now more than ever. This move to embrace vouchers and ESAs is the exact opposite.” 

The issue has brought bubbling to the surface a debate that was previously restricted to Democratic backrooms. Elorza took the helm of DFER at a time when polls began to show that voters were losing confidence in Democrats as the party they most trusted on education. Parents, the surveys suggested, were more preoccupied with whether their kids were recovering from pandemic learning loss than how schools were teaching issues of race or gender in the classroom. The only intensified in the aftermath of President Donald Trump’s election.

Founded in 2007, DFER always advocated for . Leaders worked with the Obama administration and reform-minded Democrats to support like magnet schools, dual enrollment and lifting state . Now, Republicans and their push for parental rights are dominating the education conversation, including a recent to enact a national tax credit for private school choice. Elorza is among those who say the party needs to be open to more options for families if it’s going to regain its edge with voters, especially parents. But he recognizes the risks.

“There are a lot of Democrats who are choice curious,” he told The 74. “They’ll say privately that they’re open to the idea of choice, including private school choice, but that the politics of it are just so darn challenging.”

In a , he pointed to Pennsylvania as the best opportunity for a swing state to pass an ESA program. Democratic came close to supporting such a bill in 2023.

Some observers say Shapiro and Elorza are outliers in the party. During the Obama years, DFER “nudged” the party toward school reform policies like and maintaining strong, said David Houston, an assistant education professor at George Mason University in Virginia. But now it’s “further from the center of Democratic politics.”

The recent departure of other DFER staff offers further evidence that Elorza’s position doesn’t reflect the Democratic mainstream.

Will Andras served as political director in Colorado for Education Reform Now, a think tank affiliated with DFER that Elorza also leads. Andras left last year, shortly after DFER joined the , a group of organizations that advocate for open enrollment and removing school attendance boundaries. 

The member organizations, funded largely by the conservative Koch network, also support vouchers and ESAs. In his resignation letter, Andras referenced the change in direction since Elorza came on board in 2023. 

“The last six months have shown that the organization I have devoted a substantial portion of my professional career to help build no longer aligns with my political or personal values,” he wrote.

Jessica Giles, who led the D.C. chapter, similar words when she walked away in May. It’s one of several chapters to close since Elorza became CEO. The Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts and DFER South chapters have also shut down. 

Elorza said he respects their stance.

“There are a lot of folks who put a great deal of stock into this public-private distinction, and I think it comes from a principled place,” he said. “But I truly believe that it is in the party’s political best interest to be open minded to any approach that moves the needle for kids and families.”

‘Political winds are shifting’ 

Backed by , the private school choice movement has been on a winning streak since 2022, when Arizona passed the first universal ESA.

“The political winds are shifting,” Corey DeAngelis, a self-described “school choice evangelist” and fellow at multiple think tanks, said at a conference in Atlanta in April. “If Democrats are smart, they’ll stop the Republicans from being able to pick up the football and win on this issue.”

He pointed to Louisiana, where six House Democrats — one-fifth of the party’s caucus — for the LA GATOR Scholarship, an ESA that starts this fall. One of them, Rep. Jason Hughes, passionately defended his vote on the House floor. 

“As I watch children in poverty, trapped in failing schools, who can hardly read, I’ll be damned if I will continue to defend the status quo,” he said. 

Rep. Marlene Terry, a Missouri Democrat, delivered an equally heartfelt speech in May after caucus leaders when she supported a $50 million increase to the state’s ESA program. 

“I will vote how I please, when I please and where I please,” she said. “No one can take away my voice. I will not be silent.”

While her own children attended public school, she said families in the St. Louis-area district she represents are frustrated that their schools have for 15 years. 

“That’s a long time for families to wait for improvement,” Terry told The 74. Riverview Gardens, a majority Black, high-poverty district, regained local control from the state in 2023, but leaders are still working to make continued gains in . “That’s why I support giving families a range of high-quality public options, including public charter schools, and — when absolutely necessary — scholarships to attend other schools if no viable public options exist.”

Some Democrats agree with Elorza that the party shouldn’t distance legislators like Terry. In a , Virginia Board of Education Member Andy Rotherham, who served in the Clinton White House and co-founded Bellwether, a think tank, said Democrats need to welcome “a much wider range of perspectives on these questions,” given school choice’s surge in popularity since the pandemic.

“This is America — we like choice,” he wrote. “Being on the wrong side of that culturally and politically is not a great place to be.”

‘Solidly entrenched’ 

Using an ESA can be particularly uncomfortable for a lifelong Democrat — especially In Arizona, where Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs has called the program a “” and wants to on families using it. Kathy Visser, who administers a ESA Facebook group for parents and vendors, knows some who left the forum because they felt that it was “not a safe space for Democrats.” 

“I hate election time because it’s always a mess in the group,” she said. “People think we should be able to talk about ESAs without talking about politics, but when you’ve got one party so solidly entrenched against it, it’s really hard.” 

Some Democrats who use ESAs say they hold their noses when it comes to other aspects of the Republican agenda. 

Christina Foster, whose daughter has used an ESA in the past, said she gets “heart palpitations” when she has to decide on a candidate. She’s board chair for Arizona’s , which runs microschools serving students using ESAs, and wants to protect the program. But in the 2024 election, she voted for Democrats. 

“Some of those Republicans were not supportive of minority rights, immigration rights, women’s rights. Those are very important to me,” she said. “I said ‘OK, unfortunately, I’m going to have to vote against the ESA.”

For those within the traditional K-12 system, the choice to use an ESA can be tricky. As a kindergarten teacher in Arizona’s Peoria district, Melanie Ford is familiar with about how the program undermines funding for traditional schools and is susceptible to waste and fraud. 

But she overlooked those arguments when public school no longer seemed like a safe place for her transgender son Ash. He avoided using the bathroom all day because students said he didn’t belong in the boys’ or the girls’ restroom.

For the 2023-24 school year, Ash used an ESA to attend the , a microschool for middle schoolers in Phoenix that incorporates into the curriculum. Ford told her colleagues that despite her support of public schools, she had to think first about her son. Ash has since returned to a public high school, where he plays on a drumline in the marching band and has straight A’s, his mother said. But using the ESA allowed him to transition in a more supportive setting.

“He didn’t have to deal with the comments from peers that slowly rip a person apart from the inside out,” she said. “He could grow into himself without judgement from others and this was so important for his mental health.”

While some Democrats, as Elorza suggested, may think an ESA is the best option for their children, that interest hasn’t risen to the national level. No Congressional Democrats, for example, have endorsed the federal Educational Choice for Children Act, the tax credit scholarship program tucked into the Republicans’ reconciliation bill.

In some states, vouchers remain unpopular, said Joshua Cowen, an education professor at Michigan State University and a strong opponent of directing public funds to private schools. 

He points to Kentucky, where a private school choice measure last November. Coloradans also defeated a school choice-related , and voters in Nebraska .

While the Democratic party may embrace vouchers in the future, that day is a long way off, said Ravi Gupta, a former Obama staffer who runs a nonprofit media company. On an intellectual level, he’s intrigued by ESAs. Democrats, he said, would never say Medicaid should only be used at a public hospital or Section 8 vouchers only in a housing project, so why doesn’t the same principle apply to education? 

“Twenty years from now, do I think that could be the reality?” he asked. “I think it’s very likely, but it will take some time.”

Disclosure: The Charles Koch Foundation funds Stand Together Trust, which provides funding to The 74. Andy Rotherham sits on The 74’s board of directors. 

The American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second-largest teachers union, and CareerWise USA, which runs apprenticeship programs for high-schoolers in five states, announced the Education and Apprenticeship Accelerator late last month.

The International Union of Painters and Allied Trades and the governors of California, Colorado, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania have also joined the coalition.

Its goal is to improve and expand Career Technical Education (CTE) both in high schools and community colleges and create more student internships and apprenticeships where students are paid to both work and go to school. Only about 5% of high school students nationally have a chance at an internship or apprenticeship, estimates available show.

AFT President Randi Weingarten said the union sees a need to shift away from the “college for all” mindset of the last 20 years, and be a part of giving students other ways to prepare for work and life.

“Look how many kids we’ve seen in schools that feel totally at sea,” said Weingarten, who also called for changes in a May 6 New York Times opinion piece

Instead of working independently and sometimes at cross-purposes, which has kept the number of opportunities for students low, CareerWise founder Noel Ginsburg said the new partnership will help government, business and schools work together in support of training efforts.

Challenges include aligning school and work schedules, finding transportation for students between work and school, giving students course credit for work-based learning and making sure students are working in fields that are hiring.

Both Ginsburg and Weingarten said the states can serve as laboratories to find the right formulas to succeed, then the partnership can promote them and find a common plan that covers all states.

“This is intended to truly create
examples for the country in multiple states that can show how this matters,” Ginsburg said. 

“We’ll bring resources to it, both financial, technical and consulting, to enable these states to accelerate faster, to make this happen,” Ginsburg said. “(We’ll) bring these systems together so that our gears aren’t grinding, that they are connected and, in fact, we’re moving forward.”

Governors of the participating states echoed the call for improving training opportunities for students.

Apprenticeships are common in Europe, with more than half of students in countries like Switzerland participating. Apprenticeships In the U.S. usually start after high school, instead of the equivalent of junior year in Europe, and have traditionally been in construction trades.

But apprenticeships across the country have been growing in recent years and in other fields, particularly health care, information technology and advanced manufacturing. New U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has also , and has called for more CTE, apprenticeships and tuition assistance for career training.

President Donald Trump signed an. But the administration also shut down a Department of Labor advisory panel on apprenticeships that Ginsburg had a major role on and , a training program for 25,000 young people a year, a decision that is being

That finding comes from a hodgepodge of state documents and research reports. With the caveat that those sources may count things in slightly different ways and at different time periods, the pattern that emerges is consistent. 

In fall 2020, the country was still in the thick of the COVID pandemic. The economy was on uncertain footing, many schools stayed remote and teacher turnover rates fell. That is, more educators stayed put. 

But as the world began to open up, teachers started leaving in higher numbers, first in 2021 and then again in 2022. That fall, the country hit modern highs in the percentage of teachers leaving their positions. 

But those moves were temporary. Last year, Wall Street Journal (and former 74) reporter Matt Barnum found that teacher turnover rates in 2023 for each of the 10 states for which he was able to find data. Not all the changes were big, but the trends were all falling. 

For fall 2024, the current school year, I was able to find data from six states: Colorado, Delaware, Arizona, Texas, South Carolina and Massachusetts. All but Texas experienced year-over-year declines in teacher turnover. 

The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics’ survey shows similar trends nationally. For a broad category that includes all state and local government education employees, employee quit rates surged in 2022, fell in 2023 and then decreased again in 2024. Similarly, the American School District Panel from found turnover rates falling among teachers and principals in the fall of 2023 and 2024. Notably, the biggest declines were seen in the places where turnover had surged the most during the initial pandemic years. 

You could squint at the data closely and note that turnover rates are still a bit higher than where they were pre-pandemic. But zoom out, and the numbers look broadly similar to historical trends. For example, Dan Goldhaber and Roddy Theobald looked at from 1984-85 to 2021-22 and found that total turnover, including teachers who left the profession, switched schools, or left teaching but stayed in education, has ranged from about 14% to 20% in Washington since the mid-1980s. It did indeed hit a modern peak (of 19.8%) in 2021-22, but Goldhaber and Theobald’s in Washington showed turnover was again starting to fall in 2023.Ìę

How should we put these figures in context? First, despite its recent surge, public education has maintained than any other industry except for the federal government. In any given month, less than 2% of public education employees leave their jobs, compared with rates twice that high in the private sector. 

Within public education, teachers tend to have lower turnover rates than other employees do. Colorado, for example, has published by role since 2007. The chart below shows the results. Teachers (in red) tend to have similar turnover rates as principals (light blue), but those are much lower than the turnover rates in other roles. Paraprofessionals, in dark blue, typically have turnover rates that are 10 to 15 percentage points higher than teachers do. 

How should we square this with soft data coming out of teacher surveys? Those results are messier, but they could fit the same basic trajectory. One high-quality study out of Illinois found that teacher working conditions worsened substantially from 2021 to 2023. And research looking at a range of survey and pipeline indicators suggested that the state of the profession was as of data ending a couple years ago. More recently, Education Week’s Teacher Morale Index a significant rebound in 2024-25 over the prior year.  

None of this is to say that policymakers should be content with the status quo. And indeed, there continue to be problem spots. Rural schools, those in low-income areas and certain teaching roles, especially in special education, tend to have higher turnover rates than others. But those call for more specialized and tailored solutions rather than universal policies.  

Moreover, policymakers can at least take heart that the worst of the teacher turnover surge appears to be in the rearview mirror. 

And yet, systematic and regular use of data is at the heart of successful schools. In a from Education Reform Now, we surveyed 53 principals, assistant principals and superintendents across Colorado, Massachusetts, Texas and Georgia to understand the strategies central to the success of their high-performing, high-poverty spotlight schools. Despite a wide range of geographies and school models, all of them agreed: Data is key.

While DQC’s polling indicates that most teachers struggle to access and mobilize the data they need, 100% of the leaders from the “spotlight schools” we surveyed agreed that data and assessments are very important for professional development. This highlights how these schools have invested in building data literacy so that all their educators understand what the data means and how to use it to help students succeed. 

During follow-up interviews, “data” was the most frequently mentioned word, with administrators describing extensive use of both academic and non-academic data to shape a wide range of decision-making.

But what does effective data use actually look like in practice? Here are five ways schools are leveraging data:

1. Daily instruction

Quick and can be used to briefly assess students at the end of lessons to gauge their understanding of the material covered. This serves as live data to help teachers adjust instruction in real-time. At IDEA Carver Academy in San Antonio, Texas, administrators design end-of-lesson quizzes — exit tickets — to monitor content mastery consistently across classes. Teachers discuss the data with one another during daily “exit ticket huddles” to determine appropriate instructional adjustments.

2. Interventions

Implementing tests to evaluate student learning throughout the year allows educators to identify which children need extra help, inform how they are grouped, shape instructional priorities during intervention blocks and monitor progress.

Several spotlight schools in Massachusetts leverage data cycles to shape WIN (“What I Need”) time — a type of small-group instruction. Nicole Mack, executive director of Conservatory Lab Charter School in Boston, uses “June data to start the first round of interventions during the second week of school. 
Then we do five intervention cycles across the course of the year, where our administrative team does the review of our data to identify the kids that should go into the different interventions,” such as tutoring or extended learning time.

In Texas, administrators are guided by Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (), which serve as specific, detailed standards that are aligned with the state’s standardized exams. At Ortiz Elementary in Brownsville, Principal Julie Peña says, “We monitor data on a regular basis to help identify the TEKS that have not yet been mastered and plan targeted instruction. 
 If students are missing a TEKS, then we regroup the students and we make sure that we’re giving them lessons that are geared toward learning those skills. So if a student is falling behind, they are asked to participate in tutorials, they are asked to come on Saturdays and they’re given the reviews targeted to what it is that they’re missing.”

3. Professional development

Both academic and non-academic data can be leveraged to pinpoint professional development sessions that address key shortcomings, evaluate the effectiveness of these sessions and identify educators who may benefit from further coaching or support. For example, at IDEA Carver Academy, administrators collect data through “cultural and instructional observations” each week using the — a benchmarked tool designed to objectively evaluate what teachers are doing well and how they can improve, Principal Laura Flack says. These rubrics, alongside classroom climate, exit ticket and disciplinary data, are then “reviewed, and professional development is created to address areas of need across the campus.”

4. Chronic absenteeism

As schools navigate unprecedented levels of chronic absenteeism, it is vital to collect detailed data to properly identify, diagnose and monitor the issue. For example, Rocky Mountain Prep charter schools in Denver have teams that collect attendance data each morning and call the families of each student who is absent. Teachers are notified of the total absences for the day, how many students came to school after their parents were called and who teachers should follow up with.

5. Student and family empowerment

Data isn’t just a tool for educators — it also empowers students to take an active role in their learning and helps parents better support their children’s academic growth. At Eastside Elementary School in Grady County, Georgia, Principal Chiquila Wright reports that students have one-on-one “data talks” with their teachers to discuss their interim test scores. Families are engaged through trainings that teach parents how to “understand their child’s assessment scores and how to support growth at home.”

Data is not a new concept. However, it is one that is too often underutilized in education. Children cannot learn and schools cannot thrive based on subjective observations and good intentions alone. The data revolution is already here, and it’s time students reaped the benefits.

Undocumented students in Colorado have gone on to be teachers, nurses, and business owners thanks to a program that allows them to pay in-state tuition at public universities.

Now the future of that program and ones like it in 23 other states are in doubt after President Donald Trump signed an executive order that seeks to punish states and cities with so-called sanctuary policies.

, signed on April 28, also specifically calls out programs that provide in-state tuition for undocumented students who graduated from high school in that state or who meet other residency requirements.

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Allowing in-state students who are not citizens to pay less tuition than out-of-state students who are citizens represents discrimination, according to the order, which says that the attorney general, in cooperation with the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, “shall identify and take appropriate action to stop the enforcement of state and local laws, regulations, policies, and practices favoring aliens over any groups of American citizens that are unlawful.”

Advocates for immigrant students say that without in-state tuition, many undocumented students will struggle to afford college. They don’t qualify for any federal financial aid and face other barriers to college.

“This is absolutely essential for immigrant students,” said Raquel Lane-Arellano, communications manager for the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, which fought to pass Colorado’s in-state tuition law in 2013. “It’s not these students’ fault that our immigration system is so broken. They deserve the opportunity, just like all of their peers, to access higher levels of education.”

So far, Colorado universities are not making any immediate changes to their policies. “The executive order does not provide enough details to truly know what federal actions will be taken,” said Colorado Department of Higher Education spokesperson Megan McDermott.

The Trump order sets up a possible legal showdown over the state-supported tuition programs that immigrant rights and higher education-advising groups have called essential to help undocumented students access higher education and educate them to fill in-demand jobs.

Twenty-four states, including Colorado, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey, along with Washington, D.C. have programs that allow undocumented students to pay in-state tuition. While the programs have received bipartisan support, Republicans in have recently filed bills to consider rolling back in-state tuition for undocumented students. Last week, .

The order adds to an , who worry about the while grappling with deportation fears. Denver Scholarship Foundation’s Natasha Garfield said the college-advising nonprofit will continue to provide students information about their options and allow them to decide whether college is right for them during a time when Trump’s .

“There are some who are very, very concerned about the state of things, and I don’t think there’s anything that DSF or anyone else could say to reassure them,” said Garfield, the scholarship organization’s director of scholarships and financial aid. “I think that’s completely understandable given some of the actions that we’ve seen coming from ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and the federal government.”

The order is part of Trump’s larger push to crack down on people in the United States without legal authorization. His directive to punish states with these programs also included several other enforcement actions such as punishing so-called sanctuary cities and states. The administration filed suit Friday against

The administration argues in the order that some state and local officials use their “authority to violate, obstruct, and defy the enforcement of federal immigration laws. This is a lawless insurrection against the supremacy of Federal law.”

States have a long history of offering in-state tuition at public universities to youth who were brought as children and without legal status. Texas and California passed the first laws in 2001, and other states followed with similar laws. Each varies in how they approach granting in-state tuition.

About 408,000 undocumented students enroll in higher education each year, although not all benefit from these state programs, according to the . However, even in states without these laws, some private schools in Tennessee and elsewhere may offer in-state tuition for . And in Pennsylvania, at least .

Colorado’s Advising Students for a Stronger Tomorrow law, or ASSET, updated in 2019, says students must have attended a Colorado high school for at least one year before graduation or been physically present in Colorado for at least one year to qualify for in-state tuition.

New York’s law says students must have attended at least two years of high school in New York and graduate or receive a general education diploma. Students must also apply to a college or university within five years and show proof of residency. They must also sign an affidavit saying they will file for legal status.

Illinois’ law has similar requirements, while New Jersey requires three years of residency.

National student immigrant advocacy organizations , TheDream.US, and the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration all criticized the order. Collectively, they said states, colleges, and universities shouldn’t overreact and that the order hurts states that need qualified workers.

“Blocking states from offering in-state tuition to undocumented students who have lived in these states for most of their lives would purposefully lock countless individuals out of the higher education system, waste years of educational investment, hurt local economies, and rob all Americans of future leaders,” said Todd Schulte, FWD.us president.

State leaders are still working to understand the impact of the order, and a spokesperson for Colorado Gov. Jared Polis said in a statement the administration is looking into the impacts of this order. The state remains committed to ensuring the state remains a destination for all learners, the statement says.

The state has not filed any legal action against the order, but leaders have been willing to .

Colorado’s largest university system also doesn’t plan changes at this time. University of Colorado System spokesperson Michele Ames said its schools are committed to following applicable laws and will not make any changes at this time. Other universities, such as the University of Northern Colorado, are monitoring the actions.

Schools across the state have also said that they won’t release individual student information, such as information about undocumented students who attend schools through the ASSET program, to the federal government without a court order or warrant, per federal student privacy laws.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.ÌęSign up for their newsletters at .

The broad political support for career pathways isn’t a fluke: It was between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump during the 2024 presidential campaign. With the law supporting these programs due to be and the , career pathways will be on a short list of issues that could move quickly in this divided Congress.

Given this bipartisan momentum, how can leaders in Washington create programs that truly prepare students for jobs and fulfillment in the real world? They can start by learning from successful career pathways programs that are already flourishing in red, blue and purple states across the country. 

For example, Colorado demonstrates that successful career pathways programs can’t be one-size-fits-all: They must meet the needs of students in communities with very different economies and job markets. That means policymakers designing pathways programs should speak to local government leaders, school leaders, educators and students to understand potential barriers to student participation and success. 

Leaders of the Colorado Succeeds career pathways initiative conduct a local needs assessment that covers every region of the state every two years — and adjust policies, funding or programming based on what they hear. Through this assessment, leaders learned that high school students participating in dual enrollment were limited to attending their local community college, regardless of whether it was affordable or offered the program they wanted. Colorado Succeeds leaders shared this information with the state Department of Higher Education, which then changed the policy to enable high school students to enroll regionally and virtually at community colleges across the state.

By regularly gathering and acting on feedback from communities, Colorado Succeeds has not only strengthened its statewide programs, but built trust among business leaders, educators and students.

Knowing that flexibility and innovation are essential to building effective pathways programs that meet changing student and economic needs, leaders in Indiana embrace creative, outside-the-box ideas and refine them as they go.

Recently, the state’s Department of Education redesigned its in an innovative way — a process that required many rounds of refining that ultimately offered graduates three pathways: college, career or military. The state also created the Indiana Career Scholarship Account program to provide funding to high school students for work-based learning opportunities like internships and apprenticeships. And they expanded course options by allowing more people with relevant industry experience but no traditional teaching license to head up classes that require highly technical knowledge.

In Delaware, new approaches show that while bold new ideas are important for innovation in career pathways, so are adaptability and resilience. Leaders shouldn’t expect to get everything right on the first try, but they should expect that regular adjustments will bring them closer to creating programs that effectively serve more students. That requires a well-designed data system and using it to decide whether specific programs should continue, shift or end.

Delaware regularly reviews its career pathways programming and uses data to make necessary changes. Committees of educators, students and employers review all career and technical education programs in the state every five years. By regularly working with a wide range of partners, state leaders ensure that this programming remains up-to-date and relevant for students.

Delaware’s data also inform ongoing adjustments to program offerings and funding. For example, when data revealed that high school students with disabilities participated in pathways programs in lower numbers than students without disabilities, Delaware officials made policy changes that improved access for all students.

Building successful career pathways programs is hard work, but Colorado, Indiana, Delaware and many other states show what’s possible by listening to local leaders, thinking creatively and using data to guide improvement. Leaders in Washington have a rare opportunity to embrace common ground on this issue, give students a leg up in high-demand careers and help maintain America’s competitive edge in the global economy. They must not squander it.

Colorado school districts should revise their school attendance zones at least every four years with a “civil rights focus.” State lawmakers should increase funding to transport students to and from school. And attorneys, advocates, and community organizations should embrace the right to sue over school assignments that increase racial segregation.

Those are among the recommendations in a new report from the Colorado Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. “” concludes that the way Colorado draws school attendance boundaries and assigns students to schools mirrors segregated housing patterns and results in low-income families having less access to high-quality schools.

“This segregation fuels a widespread belief that schools serving predominantly white and affluent students are inherently better than those serving predominantly students of color or low-income families,” said.

from local and national and have . While some local school officials, such as the Denver school board, , the federal Trump administration that could trigger civil rights investigations.

The Colorado Advisory Committee is a 10-person group of bipartisan appointed volunteers. Each state has an advisory committee that produces reports on civil rights issues ranging from housing discrimination to voting rights to the use of excessive force by police officers.

In its latest report, the Colorado committee found that “thousands — perhaps tens of thousands — of Colorado students are likely to be assigned to schools in violation” of a federal law that says assigning a student to a school outside their neighborhood is unlawful “if it has segregating effects.”

The committee’s recommended solutions attempt to balance strong support for neighborhood schools with allowing families to choose the best school for their child. School choice, or the ability for a student to apply to attend any public school, .

The committee advocated for what it called “controlled choice,” which it said could mean that popular schools reserve seats for students who live outside the neighborhood or that schools give priority admission to non-neighborhood students who live the closest.

To produce its report, the committee held hearings in 2023 to gather input from national experts including university professors, the author of a book on school attendance zones, and representatives from think tanks across the political spectrum.

The committee also convened a group of 10 local experts including Brenda Dickhoner from the conservative advocacy organization Ready Colorado; Kathy Gebhardt, who was then a member of the Boulder Valley school board and now sits on the State Board of Education; former Aurora Public Schools superintendent Rico Munn; and Nicholas Martinez, a former teacher who heads the education reform organization Transform Education Now.

The committee’s other recommendations include:

• The civil rights divisions of the federal education and justice departments should review options for enforcing “the permissible and impermissible use of race in drawing attendance boundaries and setting school assignment policies.”
• Colorado lawmakers should correct “the systemic racial and ethnic disparities” caused by the state’s school transportation system, which does not require school districts to provide transportation to students who use school choice.
• State lawmakers should improve Colorado’s school choice system, including by adopting a uniform school enrollment window statewide and providing families with more information about schools’ discipline policies, class sizes, and other factors.
• Colorado school districts should revise their school attendance zones and student assignment policies at least every four years and “consider racial and ethnic integration as part of the rezoning process.”

“Redrawing school boundaries every few years can help prevent segregation from becoming entrenched while still allowing students to maintain a sense of stability in their educational environment,” the committee’s policy brief said.

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

She became a park guide at the Fort Scott National Historic Site, a military outpost that was instrumental in the nation’s westward expansion and played a pivotal role in the Civil War. Peitsmeyer had just retired from the Cherry Creek School District southeast of Denver where she worked for 30 years as a science teacher and saw the National Park Service role as the next chapter in her long career teaching children. 

Peitsmeyer, 59, was in the middle of developing new programming around when she got fired — just four months after her first day. 

“With retirement, I turned toward the national parks thinking that an interpretive ranger position would be a nice next step to expand my skill set — and to apply my skill set as well,” she told The 74. Now, she’s out of a job and is considering selling the home she just bought.

 â€œTrauma has been inflicted on the federal employees,” she said.

Peitsmeyer was one of some employees who were as part of a broader federal shakeup by the Trump administration and billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Some 700 other national park workers have and, with a reported , the parks could soon be gutted further.

Bill Wade, the executive director of the Association of National Park Rangers, said the rangers most affected by the layoffs “were the people who do the educational and interpretive programs in parks, do school groups, manage the visitor centers and so forth.”

“So to the extent that those kinds of people were fired, the likelihood is that ranger-led programs are going to be reduced,” Wade told The 74. 

While the passionate protests that has sprung up in the wake of the park service cuts — including from the , an independent group of roughly 800 off-duty rangers — have focused more on the threats to public land and the impact on the parks’ of yearly adult visitors and families, the park service has a longstanding partnership with schools, teachers and students. 

Part of the mission of the National Park Foundation, the service’s nonprofit arm chartered by Congress in 1967, is its , which has reached more than 2 million children since 2011. Last year, it into its Open OutDoors for Kids venture that partners with schools and other groups “to provide opportunities for as many students as possible to inspire the next generation of park stewards.”

Other educational opportunities include , which gives fourth graders and their families free access to national parks nationwide, and the , which is designed to help young people learn about history and conservation through self-guided interactive activities. 

‘The highlight of your child’s school day’

During her short stint at the Fort Scott National Historic Site, Peitsmeyer dressed up as a Civil War nurse in January and taught second graders at Winfield Scott Elementary School about 19th-century medicine. 

The fort, which was built in 1842 to keep the peace between white settlers and neighboring indigenous tribes, in the 1850s when abolitionists fought for control of the abandoned complex and named it the Free State Hotel. 

After violent conflicts with pro-slavory forces, the abolitionists prevailed and Kansas entered the union as a free state just three months before the beginning of the Civil War. Fort Scott was transformed into a major Union military outpost and became a key supply depot for soldiers in the West. Among those sworn in at Fort Scott was the First Kansas (Colored) Volunteer Infantry Regiment, the first African-American unit to fight Confederate troops. 

Much of the complex was used as a hospital, Peitsmeyer said, primarily to treat Union soldiers. Most of the fatalities during the war, she taught the students, were from illness, not injury. Peitsmeyer saw the role as an opportunity to improve learning in both the parks and local schools. 

“My role — or the hope — was that I could bring more science into the park and link it to educational programming,” she said. The lessons she was planning on monarch butterflies involved threats to the vibrantly colored, long-distance travelers. She also hoped to build a butterfly house in the visitor center. In April, she said, the fort was planning what would have been an ambitious event about how Civil War encampments shaped America. 

“Prior to my termination, there were really serious questions as to whether or not we could actually host that type of programming because it was too large of an event,” said Peitsmeyer, who noted the fort now employs just one interpretive ranger. “I was just looking on the website to see if there was any advertisement about Civil War encampment, and I don’t see any so my guess is it’s probably been canceled.” 

In a viral Valentine’s Day social media post, wrote about “los[ing] my dream job of an Education Park Ranger” at Effigy Mounds National Monument in Iowa. He talked about how the cuts could limit learning opportunities for children at his own site and the 432 others nationwide. 

“I am the highlight of your child’s school day,” Gibbs, who couldn’t be reached for comment, . “I am the lesson that showed your children that we live in a world of gifts- not commodities, that gratitude and reciprocity are the doorway to true abundance, not power, money, or fear.”  

Court orders rangers reinstated but 


 The Trump administration hasn’t released a list of Park Service employees whose jobs were eliminated, Wade, of the park rangers association, said, but efforts by advocates and fired workers suggest employees who worked as interpretive guides, managed school field trips and ran visitor centers were most likely to have received termination letters. Because the government announced plans to hire some for the busy summer months, the full force of the staffing cuts could accelerate in the fall. 

Layoffs specifically targeted “probationary employees” who, like Peitsmeyer, had been in their position for less than a year before losing their jobs based on claims of poor performance. 

At parks across the country, the firings mean fewer workers to conserve natural resources and teach visitors — including students — about the nation’s natural and cultural history protected and preserved in the parks’ roughly 85 million acres. 

Staffing woes have already had an impact on educational opportunities at multiple parks, and reduced hours at visitor centers. At Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico, the staff was of the caves and implement a shorter schedule for self-guided exploration — a change that affects visitors of all ages, although the park for educational field trips.

Although two federal courts have found Trump’s cuts unlawful and have ordered federal agencies to reinstate purged workers, Peitsmeyer said she can’t wait for a long court battle before seeking work elsewhere. 

“It’s been a month and how long can people wait without health benefits?” she said. “I moved here specifically for the position, and at this point I’m considering — actually, I was ready to put my house on the market this weekend.” 

‘An easy target’

Families should “still go to the parks” to learn and relax this summer, Wade said, but not before visiting a specific national park’s website. He advises against showing up in person “and assuming that everything is going to be normal.” 

Wade noted that recent polls have shown wide bipartisan support for the National Park Service. Last Year, a Pew Research Center poll found that — and 75% of Republicans — had a favorable opinion of the National Park Service, topping the list above the Postal Service, NASA and every other federal agency. 

“Park employees are on pins and needles waiting to see if their job is going to be next,” Wade said. “Unless the public gets angry enough and upset enough that they contact their elected officials and insist that this get turned around.” 

The retired superintendent of Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, Wade acknowledged the Trump layoffs aren’t the first the Park Service has endured, including by President Bill Clinton in an effort to balance the federal budget. But this time, he said, is different, with Trump’s cuts being carried out “totally indiscriminately.” 

“They [the rangers] were all sent the same exact memo which implied that it was based on ineffective performance, but you know, many of the people who were terminated shared their performance evaluations, which were fully successful or above,” he said. “It was just a broadsword approach.”

Peitsmeyer got the letter which, she said, was a lie. Her termination, she said, wasn’t truly based on her performance. In fact, she hadn’t yet undergone a formal evaluation. 

“Probationary employees were just an easy target,” she said. “All of the feedback that I had received while in this position with this national park site indicated that I was the polar opposite of what this termination letter was stating.”

Staffing reductions mean Fort Scott could be forced to limit the number of students who can make school visits, but Peitsmeyer fears a more existential threat to America’s smaller national treasures. Located in a town of just 7,500, her fort receives some . 

“My concern is, for a site that is as small as this,” she asked, “will it have the potential to be shut down?” 

As an underlying technology, AI does seem different — more conversational, more flexible, more powerful. Most notably, past ed tech products have relied on multiple-choice tests that don’t always accurately assess a student’s understanding of different concepts. Now, AI can analyze and react to open-ended student responses, helping to boost critical thinking skills and deepen comprehension. In addition, AI provides real-time visibility into each student’s performance so teachers can be more strategic with classroom discussions.

Here are three guiding principles to help educators be rigorous when selecting AI tools to pilot and scale as they lean into this new chapter of teaching:

First, rather than look to develop an “AI strategy,” district leaders should create a strategy for teaching and learning and use AI to power specific aspects of it. They should start by identifying goals and priorities, then ask: What can AI do to help our district achieve them?

In both our districts, the most urgent focus was increasing student achievement. To help schools achieve this goal and narrow down potential tools from the on the market, district leaders centered objectives on implementing high-quality instructional materials, increasing teacher effectiveness and improving student engagement and well-being.

Our districts landed on that creates high-quality, interactive experiences for students with personalized feedback and support to deepen their understanding of the curriculum. It also directs educators’ attention in real time to the students who most need help. By combining the power of top-rated curricula and AI, teachers can embed intervention-type support into core instruction.

Second, ed tech providers should design their tools with teachers, students and district leaders, not just for them. Part of the reason educators have not gotten needed quality and usability out of products in their schools is that vendors exclude teachers and students from the development process.

A big part of why teachers and students in our districts are enthusiastic about this is that educators were able to offer feedback directly to ed tech company leaders who regularly visited our schools — and then implemented that feedback. This fall, Sumner County teachers asked to make the AI writing support more bite-sized, giving students an initial score, one piece of feedback at a time and the ability to revise their writing multiple times and update their grade. A Denver Public School leader asked whether AI could identify the most common misconceptions students were having in class, which led to an expanding suite of real-time analysis tools. Students asked for more clarity into their progress at each step, more celebrations and the ability to customize their experience.

Because every voice was valued and the solutions evolved to meet stakeholders’ needs, both student achievement in English Language Arts and teacher satisfaction have increased. In Sumner County, the six schools using the tool have shown significantly more progress on their English assessments than the six schools not using it, and 90% of teachers reported that the product made their jobs easier and more enjoyable.

Third, educators must break the ed tech habit of having students work silently on their own personalized pathways with headsets on and without interacting with their classmates. Instead, AI should emphasize the and foster connection, inclusion and discourse. 

At our districts, a top priority is the effective implementation of high-quality instructional materials. While various schools have chosen different, top-rated curricula, they share a vision of classrooms with rich and interesting texts, student writing and lots of discussion both in small groups and the full class. District leaders want AI products that bring schools closer to this vision. Rather than dedicating 20 minutes a day to a supplemental, skills-based tool that students work on silently, teachers should have tools that make collaboration easier and give students more confidence to bring their insights into full-class discussions. 

AI brings new possibilities for better ed tech, but schools will realize this potential only if district leaders lean into this moment, guided by their goals and values. If they do, they can create future-ready schools that prioritize transformative student outcomes and human connection.

Now, a new analysis, exclusive to The 74, sheds light on why he’s had so much trouble. While it’s common knowledge that in the state House have been standing in his way, homeschool parents opposed to education savings accounts have also been part of the resistance. 

Leslie Finger, a political science professor at the University of North Texas, analyzed roll call votes on 13 private school choice bills that reached the floor of either the state House or the Senate between 2013 and 2023. She found that lawmakers were more likely to vote against private school choice not only if they represented a rural area, but also if they had more homeschoolers in their districts.

“We specifically opted out of this system,” Faith Howe, president of Texans for Homeschool Freedom, said about public schools. While proponents of the voucher plan say it will be optional for families, that doesn’t satisfy Howe. “I don’t think they’re going to have a problem coming back and saying ‘Well we need more regulations on these homeschoolers.’”

Texas voters ousted the Republican holdouts in last year’s primary election after Abbott campaigned against them. He is counting on their replacements to deliver a victory this session. But even if that happens, Finger’s results point to a segment of parents who have been getting louder in recent years as ESAs, which parents can spend on tuition or homeschooling costs, have spread across red states. Many traditional homeschoolers fought for the right to educate their children at home and fear that ESA laws could erode some of those protections — even if they don’t take the funds. 

While voucher advocates dismiss many of the homeschoolers’ concerns, Finger said her findings should serve as a warning.

“The presence of big homeschooling communities could make selling private school choice challenging,” Finger said.

‘Government control’

That was certainly the case in Colorado, one of three states last November where voters defeated school choice ballot measures. 

“Government money comes with government control,” said Carolyn Martin, who monitors state legislation for Christian Home Educators of Colorado. Her group viewed the measure as a potential infringement on parents’ rights to educate their children as they see fit.  

Two issues raised red flags for them. The measure said all children should be able to “access a quality education,” which they interpreted as an opportunity for the government to define quality for homeschoolers. It also gave students, as well as parents, the right to school choice. That could spell trouble if kids and parents aren’t on the same page when it comes to education, Martin said.

“At some point the state would probably have to step in and arbitrate between the parent and the child,” she said. “That is not our worldview.”

Other homeschoolers say ESAs contradict conservative values, such as smaller government and less regulation. Gary Humble, executive director of Tennessee Stands, a Christian organization, called the state’s recently passed voucher bill “wealth redistribution.”

“This is another Tennessee entitlement program,” he said. “It’s expensive. It’s irresponsible.” 

The state is expected to spend $1 billion on the program over the next five years. While opponents weren’t able to stop the Republicans from passing the law, Humble tells homeschoolers that if they participate, they could be giving up the freedom to educate their children the way they choose.

“All they hear from special interest groups is that they get seven grand and there are no strings attached,” he said. “They’re not policy wonks, so they don’t understand the trap doors that are laid out ahead of them.”  

ESA programs often require homeschooling families to reapply for funding every year, to take annual standardized tests and to only buy approved items from specific vendors. Homeschooling families who don’t participate want to ensure such restrictions don’t eventually extend to them. 

But those worries fall under what Jeremy Newman, vice president of policy and engagement for the Texas Homeschool Coalition, calls “free-floating anxiety.” 

“They’re concerned somebody is going to do something, sometime, but they’re not sure who or when or what,” he said. 

His organization is strongly in favor of passing a voucher bill in Texas, saying that tax-paying homeschoolers should have just as much access to state education funds as parents who send their kids to public school.

He points to on “regulatory creep” from Angela Watson, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and an expert on . She found that publicly funded school choice programs, like ESAs, don’t contribute to more government overreach. 

Not ‘a monolith’

But the fact that some homeschoolers are so opposed to them proves a point, Watson said. 

“The mistake that everyone makes when they talk about homeschooling is that they continue to think of it as a monolith,” she said. “Homeschooling is just so varied.”

Nationally, of the nation’s students are homeschooled, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Traditional homeschoolers often chose that path for ideological or religious reasons. 

But many new converts, who left public schools during the pandemic, show support for what former Education Secretary Betsy DeVos calls “” — allowing parents to spend education dollars on any type of schooling they choose. It’s a policy that polled high in a from the National Parents Union, with 71% of parents favoring such a system. 

The split among homeschoolers over ESAs, Watson said, has created some “interesting bedfellows” — conservative parents aligning with liberal teachers unions to oppose school choice ballot measures. That’s what happened, not only in Colorado, but also in , where two-thirds of voters rejected such a proposition last year.  

Howe in Texas has heard the criticism. “We’re being accused of being leftist, Marxist and supporting the teachers unions,” she said. 

Newman, with the Texas coalition, said his group is watching out for homeschoolers’ interests. Leaders maintain a “strong presence” at the state capitol in Austin to ensure legislation doesn’t interfere with homeschoolers’ freedom to choose their own curriculum and teaching methods, he said. 

Homeschooled himself as a child, Newman sympathizes with those who recall when it was to educate children at home and not unusual for child protective services to a family when a neighbor reported children not being in school.

But Howe notes that it was a state regulation in Texas — not legislation — that treated homeschooled students as truant. After a lengthy legal fight, the state that parents who homeschool are essentially small private schools.

In Idaho, it’s the state tax commission that will be writing some of the rules for a new that Gov. Brad Little signed into law last month, despite from the public. The state also has an existing grant program targeted toward lower-income families.

Audra Talley, a board member of Homeschool Idaho, said Republican lawmakers have assured her that as long as they control the legislature and the governor’s office, homeschoolers don’t have to worry about rules encroaching on their parental rights. But that’s what she finds disturbing.

“It’s an admission that the potential exists,” she said. “Now we are relying on a certain party or a certain group of individuals to keep those regulations from coming at some future date.”

‘Don’t want to go back’

She’s not exaggerating that some Democrats would prefer to increase monitoring of families who homeschool.

A , for example, would require families to notify their local school district if they intend to homeschool. Families would have to submit teaching materials and their children’s work if authorities are concerned about their education. Hundreds of at the state capitol against the bill earlier this month.

Under another , Michigan homeschoolers would have to register with the state. Superintendent Michael Rice argues that officials should have a count of students in all types of schooling — public, private, parochial and home. and neglect involving homeschool families led to his proposal for more oversight. 

Homeschoolers opposed to ESAs often point to West Virginia — a Republican-led state — as an example of how lawmakers sometimes forget that not everyone wants the government’s money.

The state passed its Hope Scholarship ESA program in 2021, which requires homeschooled students receiving the scholarship to take annual or have their work reviewed each year by a certified teacher.  The law specifically exempted homeschoolers not in the program from the requirements, but a 2023 bill would have erased what advocates call a “carve out” if they hadn’t stepped in. 

ESA proponents use the same example to say the homeschoolers’ fears were overblown and no harm was done. Colleen Hroncich, a policy analyst with the libertarian Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, thinks the division among homeschoolers over school choice will fade over time.

“As we get further past the generation of homeschoolers that fought for the right to homeschool, it seems like most homeschoolers support funding programs,” she said. “Hopefully the bigger numbers also help push back on additional regulations down the road.”