We’ve suffered through the creep of a dynamic known as “,” where conspiracy theories, falsehoods and wildly distorted views of reality become easier for some Americans to embrace than the demonstrable facts of our present moment. 

Recently, a House subcommittee hearing offered a new flavor of the problem, as Republicans and their conservative witnesses tried to win political turf by substituting facts about one group of students — English learners — with beliefs about children in undocumented families, a very different group of students. 

The House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government’s March 11 hearing was titled, “.” That struck down a Texas law that would have blocked districts from using state education funding to teach undocumented children. In a 5-4 decision, the court held that children are covered by the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, and could not be denied a public education based on their families’ legal status. 

Writing for the majority, , “The Equal Protection Clause was intended to work nothing less than the abolition of all caste-based and invidious class-based legislation. That objective is fundamentally at odds with the power (Texas) asserts here to classify persons subject to its laws as nonetheless excepted from its protection.”

The congressional hearing was a culmination of years of work by organizations like , who seek to overturn that decision. After nearly 44 years, they’re getting closer. This spring, Republicans in the Tennessee legislature passed a to erode the Plyler ruling. 

The Tennessee House of Representatives adopted a bill that would require schools to gather data on students’ citizenship and immigration status, while the state Senate approved a measure that would allow public school districts to to students who lack legal documentation. , as time is running out in the state’s legislative calendar, and lawmakers are jockeying over how to reconcile the two bills. 

This was Tennessee’s second push to restrict immigrant children’s access to public schools — it’s unlikely that it will be its last. Other states, like and , have made similar efforts. It seems inevitable that conservative state legislators will eventually succeed in enacting a bill along these lines, which will then face a legal challenge from advocates for immigrant families, civil liberties, and/or children’s data privacy. Ultimately, this may open the door for the court’s current conservative 6-3 majority to erode or remove Plyler’s civil rights protections. 

Why would anyone want to keep kids out of school? What could possibly be gained by punishing children for their families’ decisions to migrate? 

In the congressional hearing, conservatives’ main answer to these questions was financial. Republican Subcommittee chair Rep. Chip Roy of Texas and his fellow conservatives claimed that undocumented children represent a large drain on public education budgets. Critically, the evidence they provided for this relied heavily on confusing undocumented immigrant children with all immigrant children and/or with English learners. 

As a prelude to his questions, Roy claimed, the national debt is “now cracking $39 trillion, and I would note that there are a lot of reasons why, and this is one of them … we continue to have this fanciful notion that we can just say, ‘Anybody can come into the United States and it doesn’t have an impact on our overall budget.'”

that Texas schools enroll roughly without legal documentation, adding, “for every English learner, Texas schools receive $616 or $950 for those enrolled in a dual language program.” He then asked the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s Mandy Drogin, one of the witnesses called by Roy and his Republican colleagues, “How much does that cost?” Drogin estimated that this cost Texas around $830 million per year. 

, this is wildly irresponsible data use. That $830 million isn’t being spent on the estimated 100,000 undocumented children in Texas. It’s being spent on the state’s . 

Meanwhile, those 100,000 undocumented children are a diverse group, with some who are likely currently classified as English learners, others who have already become proficient in English and have moved out of that group and some who spoke English well enough upon their arrival in U.S. schools that they were never classified as English learners in the first place.

Data on English learners that are . In other words, conflating spending on English learners with spending on undocumented children is a bit like claiming that a public library is wasting money on foreigners just because international tourists sometimes come in to use the public WiFi network. 

What’s more, because the overwhelming majority of English learners are U.S. citizens, if Plyler were reversed and undocumented children were blocked from school, major budget savings. Texas schools would still enroll well over a million English learners with citizenship and/or legal residency documentation. The state would still — hopefully — want to maintain these U.S.-born students’ linguistic and academic success.

That last bit is key. Texas schools are with linguistically diverse kids — regardless of their citizenship status or their families’ immigration statuses. In the Lone Star State — and the  — data show these do well. That academic success produces better prepared graduates who go on to contribute more to the economy than they would have if blocked from school — earning more, paying more taxes and spending more in their local communities.

 This is why of immigration nearly always find that newcomer families — — grow the economy and than they cost to public service programs.

These recent assaults on kids’ access to public schools exacerbate a concerning conservative trend — policy research organization KFF studied during the 2024 election and found widespread public confusion. Their researchers polled the public and found that Republicans were significantly more likely than Democrats or independents to agree with false, negative claims about immigrants. 

When presented with the false statement that “Immigrants are causing an increase in violent crime in the U.S.,” fully 45% of Republicans responded that this was definitely true and 36% said it was probably true. By contrast, 39% of Democrats believed that the statement was definitely false — and another 39% believed that it was probably true. 

Look: Research is not ambiguous on this question — immigrants are to commit violent than U.S.-born adults. As a National Policing Institute summary of the evidence , “political scapegoating and hyperbole are no substitute for scientific evidence.” 

For leaders serious about improving schools for all kids, that’s obviously true. But the subcommittee’s attacks on Plyler show that a perverse inversion of that line may also be true: When it comes to ambitious demagogues, evidence is no match for the allure of xenophobic, hyperbolic scapegoating. 

The views expressed here are Conor P. Williams’s alone, and do not reflect those of his employer or any other affiliated organizations. 

That’s how children — all U.S. citizens — and their parents described their treatment by federal immigration agents in accounts delivered in Washington, D.C., Tuesday at a joint House and Senate hearing. 

The teens told lawmakers these encounters have left them unable to sleep, concentrate on school, plan for their future or feel safe in any setting.

“Whenever I hear sirens or I see an officer, my heart starts racing,” said Arnoldo Bazan, 16, who described a violent incident with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on Oct. 23, 2025. “I don’t even know when I’ll see my father again. This is not the America I know.”

Neither ICE nor the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the agency, replied to requests for comment. A Customs and Border Protection spokesperson said they would need more time to respond.

Bazan said he was assaulted by ICE agents on his way to school with his father last fall when they stopped at a McDonald’s to celebrate him making a varsity team. Just then, Bazan said, a car with tinted windows and flashing lights pulled them over. 

Soon, multiple unmarked vehicles approached. 

“Armed men with masks jumped out and started banging on the windows,” Bazan said. “They never identified themselves or explained why we were stopped. We didn’t know who these men were. I started recording on my phone. One of the unmarked cars rammed into our car multiple times. I even felt our car lift.”

Agents grabbed his father and Bazan ran to help. 

“One officer put me in a choke hold and told me, ‘You’re done,’” the boy said, taking short breaks to compose himself. “His grip was so tight, I wondered if I would even make it out alive. With all of my strength, I screamed that I was underage and from the United States. When the officers finally stopped, I began telling everybody who could hear me that these officers had tried to flip our car, and that I had proof of my phone.”

Federal agents confiscated his cell, he testified. 

“The officer put me and my dad in the car,” Bazan said. “They mocked us. They told me that I was gay for crying, an illegal, an illegal idiot, a border hopper, and other demeaning words.”

Bazan said the officers drove them to his house where he and his father, who was subsequently deported to Mexico, “prayed for one last time. I tried to hug him, but he couldn’t hug me back because he was handcuffed.”

He said his backpack was returned but not his phone and when he traced it, it turned up inside a kiosk that sells electronics. Bazan said local police told him they couldn’t take any action against federal officers.

Bazan, who suffered a neck injury, was taken to the hospital that day and given morphine for his pain, he said. He told the committee his body ached after the incident, that he couldn’t sleep and missed school.

He was one of three teens who spoke at the forum called by Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal, ranking member of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, and U.S. Rep. Robert Garcia, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. 

“Our efforts to document and elevate the stories of this regime’s heartless actions against children will continue, and we know that there are thousands more stories to be told,” Blumenthal said at the start, thanking the students and their parents for speaking and remarking on their bravery.  

The lawmakers released a minority staff report Tuesday entitled , saying it documents the cases of “128 children who have been injured, left unattended, or otherwise put at direct risk of harm due to operations of the Department of Homeland Security.”

Their action comes amid Democrats’ ongoing campaign to curtail federal immigration agents. They’re refusing to fund DHS, which is now in the second month of a partial government shutdown, until reforms and greater public accountability are put in place.

An 18-year-old, who used the pseudonym Fernando Hernández García, said he has been living on his own for more than a year after his parents were deported to Mexico — taking his medically fragile U.S.-born sister with them. The girl cannot access treatment there because she is not a Mexican citizen, her brother said. 

Garcia, recalling their apprehension, said it all began when the little girl woke up and said her head hurt. 

“My parents took this very seriously because the year before, she had an emergency surgery to remove a tumor,” Garcia said. “My parents and my five siblings got in the car and drove from South Texas to Houston so she could see a specialist at Texas Children’s Hospital. On the way, government officials stopped them at a checkpoint and deported everyone — even though my parents told them about my sister’s condition, even though my siblings are U.S. citizens.”

Garcia wasn’t with them, but his family had made this same trip many times before President Donald Trump took office for the second time and had no problems, he said: They’d present the girl’s proof of citizenship and a letter from the hospital explaining her medical needs and would be on their way. 

“When I heard the news I couldn’t breathe,” the teen said. “I didn’t know what I was going to do. My mom worried about me returning to our home in South Texas alone, but I had to finish high school and I wanted to make sure I could do everything in my power to stay on top of the bills and keep the home my mom and dad had sacrificed so much for.”

Garcia had planned to attend college but instead spends all of his time working.

“I can’t think about the things my peers are doing because I honestly can’t relate,” he said. “The situation is a nightmare that I can’t wake up from.”

His family already missed his high school graduation, a milestone he thought they’d share.  

“If my parents were still here, they would have pushed me to go to college, to dream big, and they would have helped me to make it happen,” he said. 

Michelle Ramirez Sanan, 18 and from Chelsea, Massachusetts, plans to attend college in the fall, but said Tuesday that memories of her family’s ICE encounter have left her shaken and distracted. 

Sanan was restrained by federal agents after her mother and autistic 13-year-old brother, also a U.S. citizen, were dragged from their car while in their neighborhood and detained Sept. 26, 2025. 

Officers arrested Sanan’s 50-year old mother, who has legal status and has lived in the U.S. for more than 20 years. The teen, in her emotional testimony, recalled coming upon the scene. 

“My brother was crying next to my mom who was being pushed against the fence in handcuffs,” she said. “Most ICE officers were wearing masks. I could see they had guns.”

Sanan said she tried to run to them but was stopped by a federal agent. 

“My brother doesn’t speak very much because of his disability,” she said. “He doesn’t know how to explain that he’s an American citizen. I tried to protect him by yelling out, ‘My brother has autism’, but instead of helping him, the ICE officer kept blocking me and told me to shut up.”

Sanan, who has asthma, said she had trouble breathing. 

“Since that day, I have had a harder time focusing in school, taking care of myself, and managing my anxiety,” she said. “I have had trouble sleeping and headaches. I was so excited to enjoy my senior year before starting a new chapter in college. But now I spend so much of my time wondering why this happened to us.”

Educators recognize students’ pain. Zena Stenvik is the superintendent of Columbia Heights Public Schools, which serves 3,400 children just north of Minneapolis, Minnesota. 

Among her charges is 5-year-old , who galvanized national opposition to Trump’s immigration crackdown after he was photographed in a blue bunny hat, wearing a Spiderman backpack, being detained by federal agents in January with his father.  

Liam languished in Texas’s for more than a week before he was released. He and his family, who hail from Ecuador, had their asylum claims denied this month and are now on a . 

The impact of DHS’s Operation Metro Surge on her students has been profound, Stenvik said: Seven have been detained, including at Dilley, and all six who have returned came back sick — and emotionally frayed. 

“We are seeing increased separation anxiety with students struggling to be apart from their parents during the school day,” she said. “We’re seeing heightened difficulty with transitions: One student who was detained in Texas now experiences distress when leaving the classroom to go to art or gym class. He reported that separation from their trusted teacher and classroom removes a sense of safety. We’re also seeing increased stress responses, such as fight, flight, freeze among students who experienced direct or indirect trauma.”

Some of the impacted children, one parent said, are very young. Anabel Romero, a mother of four who was born and raised in Idaho, described a shocking attack on Hispanic residents in Wilder, Idaho, on . 

Romero, her stepson and her three children, ages 14, 8 and 6, were among hundreds of people watching horse races that Sunday when they spotted a helicopter in the sky. A medical worker, Romero thought someone had been injured and it was there to help. 

“But then I saw people running and screaming, terrified,” she said. “Men in military style gear stormed in with weapons at the ready. The first thing I did was call my daughter and tell her not to get out of the truck and to take care of her brother and sister. I ran and hid in one of the horse stalls.” 

Armed men grabbed and beat Romero, she said, punching her in the head and kicking her. 

“One of them threatened to blow my head off,” she testified. “I couldn’t breathe, and they zip tied me in the back. After that, they brought me up and I told them I needed to get to my children. One of them actually laughed and said they were taking better care of them than I was.”

Her eldest daughter was also thrown on the ground, zip tied and suffered bruises all along her sides. Her two youngest were taken from the truck at gunpoint, she said. 

“They were alone and terrified,” Romero said. “When my children were with me, I couldn’t comfort them. They were crying and I was still zip tied in the back with no answers for why I was being detained.”

Her oldest daughter started having a panic attack, she said. 

“I feared she might hurt herself if she fainted,” Romero said. “I asked them to zip tie her in the front. They did, but she was still having a panic attack. We waited like that zip tied and scared for three hours… They herded us like cattle and tied us up so that ICE could check everyone’s immigration status. Hundreds of people were at this family event — grandparents, infants.”

Her children are still suffering, Romero said.  

“That day completely changed our lives,” she said. “Our sense of safety and security was demolished.”

The committee heard, too, from Adreina Mejia from Arleta, California. She and her special needs 15-year-old son were separated, held at gunpoint and handcuffed by immigration agents outside of a local high school.

The agents had mistaken her boy for another child, she said. 

“The person who was with me just told my son, ‘Oh, we just confused you with somebody else, but look at the bright side, you’re gonna have an exciting story to tell your friends when you go back to school,’” she said. 

The incident has not left her son, Mejia said. 

“He will wake up crying,” his mother said. “He sees cars with tinted windows and he’s scared. He told me, ‘Mom, is it them?’” 

This would be a mistake.

Students and families cannot afford to wait. Scores on the 2025 National Assessment of Educational Progress, and, attendance and engagement are all at historic lows, confirming what educators and many families already knew: Student performance and well-being continue to decline. Those learning losses will continue to have profound impacts both on the students themselves and on the nation’s broader economic prosperity. Meanwhile, decades of top-down reform efforts have yielded disappointingly little improvement, despite massive investments and constant policy churn.

State policymakers have a better path forward, one that doesn’t depend on federal direction: creating the conditions for bottom-up innovation to emerge, spread and scale within their own education systems.

As the Hoover Institution’s has documented, the current education infrastructure actively prevents innovation from emerging, spreading and generating measurable improvements in learner outcomes. Years of investment in top-down innovation and reform have yielded many lessons but little actual progress.

A new white paper from the Hoover Institution reveals why this approach matters. “,” synthesizes decades of evidence on education innovation, as well as organizational, network and diffusion theory. By dividing the growth of innovation into three clear phases — start, spread, and sustain — the paper’s framework illustrates clear actions and decision points in which policymakers and education leaders can either help or hinder innovation.  

We know that the most scalable and sustainable improvements emerge from the needs and problems that practitioners define and from the solutions they help develop. Yet, as a finds, it remains “very rare for an innovation to get diffused within a school and it is much rarer that it gets diffused between schools.”

The framework identifies obstacles that prevent good ideas. At the earliest stages where bottom-up ideas might start, rigid bureaucracies foster risk-averse cultures among educators. Decades of emphasis on standardized test scores have conditioned teachers to avoid failure, making new initiatives seem high-risk, low-reward. Many principals preemptively block innovation due to perceived regulatory barriers even though research shows these barriers are often negotiable or misunderstood.

When innovations do emerge, they struggle to spread. Teachers attempting to implement new practices face unfamiliar partnerships with district administrators, intermediaries and policymakers; they receive little preparation or support for managing these relationships. Schools, already overwhelmed with mandates and regulations, lack the basic administrative infrastructure and tools to disseminate ideas effectively. 

Perhaps most critically, the education sector lacks a robust knowledge ecosystem to capture what works, determine when replication is more sensible than adaptation and analyze whether and how an innovation fits in different local contexts.

At the scale phase, accountability systems emphasizing narrow metrics actively discourage ambitious teaching. Policymakers tend to be “failure-avoidant, linear thinkers” while innovations need trial-and-error cycles. The bias toward quick wins denies innovations time to demonstrate impact.

The result? A system where constant informal change happens in classrooms daily, but meaningful and potentially impactful innovations rarely spread beyond individual teachers or schools, and students’ outcomes continue to stagnate or decline.

The good news is state legislatures don’t need permission from Washington to address these barriers. The framework identifies specific policy levers that state lawmakers control:

• Invest in knowledge ecosystems. Bottom-up innovations often fail to expand, not because they don’t work, but because there’s no infrastructure to capture what works, why it works and how to adapt it to new contexts. States should fund networks connecting innovative practitioners, support rapid-cycle evaluation and incentivize “fail-forward” learning. Most knowledge sharing networks are led by intermediaries, such as NASBE and KnowledgeWorks’s,�� , in Michigan and NHLI’s. One state example comes from Nevada, where the Department of Education and the Center for the Future of Learning jointly lead the to support pilots, create tools for community engagement, and develop case studies to inform practice.

• Genuinely engage educators in policymaking. Innovations spread when they align with teachers’ values and address immediate classroom needs. Yet teachers are routinely shut out of policy development. States should remove procedural barriers and invest in the time and capacity needed for front-line educators to shape policy, not token teacher advisory councils, but an authentic partnership. Examples such as Georgia’s brings 21 classroom teachers annually into direct engagement with state and federal policymakers; and North Carolina’s has graduated over 800 fellows who continue to influence education policy statewide. 

• Support flexible implementation. Innovations that require strict fidelity struggle to spread; those that offer clear principles with room for local adaptation thrive. State policy should embrace “tight-but-loose” frameworks that maintain core commitments while allowing schools to adapt. Part of this flexibility entails states offering stronger scaffolds for novice teachers while giving more seasoned practitioners greater latitude to exercise professional judgment. Since 2016, has taken this approach for supporting personalized, competency-based change.

• Provide adequate, sustained resources. Unlike businesses, which can attract investment capital, educators must develop their own infrastructure before scaling. Federal funding historically has been scarce and short-term as in the case of the grants. School-level innovators often come to rely  on local or regional education foundations to provide seed funding for new models. In 2015, for example, the Nellie Mae Education Foundation to support innovation efforts across five New England school districts. For over a decade, North Carolina has offered smaller innovation grants as part of its ongoing and New York State offers that develop, implement, and share innovative programs. Generous and sustained support can rarely be counted on, but states can fill this gap by ensuring innovations have the financial runway needed to develop tools, train educators and demonstrate impact over time.

Do we want to spend another session waiting for Washington to solve problems it hasn’t solved in decades? Or are we ready to build infrastructure that enables teachers and school leaders — the people closest to students — to innovate, learn and improve?

The evidence is clear. Bottom-up innovation, when properly supported, can transform education. States have the authority and the tools to create supportive conditions. What they need now is political will. 

Our students can’t wait for federal certainty. State policymakers should give them something better: a system designed to foster, capture and spread the innovations that will actually improve their learning. The framework exists. The session is starting. It’s time for states to lead.

Workforce Pell is Washington’s answer. The result of a , effort, the program allows low-income students to use Pell Grants for short-term, job-focused training as well as college.

Now comes the real news and the real test. In December, the U.S. Department of Education’s rulemaking committee reached consensus on proposed regulations for Workforce Pell, which launches July 1. It is up to the states to identify, approve and submit eligible training programs, with the department providing oversight and verification. These programs must demonstrate that they lead to in-demand jobs.

Participating programs will typically last eight to 15 weeks (or as little as 150 hours), catering to adults who can’t pause their lives for a two- or four-year degree. The department’s examples include emergency medical technician and automotive mechanic training, credentials that are directly tied to employment.

This performance element is key, because the U.S. has a long history of short-term programs with glossy marketing and weak payoff. If Workforce Pell becomes an ATM for low-value credentials, it won’t expand opportunity; it will expand regret. So accountability is built into its program eligibility requirements, something unusual in higher education policy.

Two measures in particular have drawn the most attention, because they are hard to fake.

The first is a mandatory 70% program completion rate and a 70% job placement rate within a defined period. The second is a price-to-value concept, meaning tuition and fees must total less than the amount program completers will earn above 150% of the federal poverty line within three years, adjusted for local cost of living. Programs are ineligible for Workforce Pell if the cost exceeds the calculated earnings gain.

These guardrails are intended to prevent Pell from subsidizing pricey programs that don’t raise income enough to justify the expense. Workforce Pell is not a blank check. It’s an invitation to innovate and produce receipts, with built-in accountability based on the premise that public dollars come with public proof. 

Its success will hinge on whether states can do three things well.

First, states need to build data muscle fast. Workforce Pell accountability leans heavily on wage records, completion data and employer validation. That’s easier said than done, especially when states have fragmented systems, limited longitudinal data capacity and uneven links between education and labor agencies.

Second, states must decide what counts as job placement and enforce it. In the rulemaking discussions, this was a contentious issue. If placement is defined too loosely, accountability becomes theater. If it’s defined too rigidly, few programs will qualify and the policy will never reach scale.

Third, states must determine which noncredit workforce programs qualify for Workforce Pell grants. Some of the most promising short-term training is noncredit. But some warn that states may lack the information needed to judge these programs, and that opening the door without robust data could invite bad actors. 

For providers, the message is to prepare for accountability that more closely resembles workforce policy than traditional higher education. The consensus framework is explicitly designed to strengthen connections among institutions, states and employers.

And the timeline is tight. The next step is for the department to publish the consensus document as a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, followed by final rules in late spring, to meet the July 1 implementation deadline. Providers that wait for the final Federal Register notice before building employer partnerships, improving completion supports and cleaning up outcomes reporting will be playing catch-up.

Workforce Pell cannot become just another funding stream. If states treat it as a chance to align training, transparency and outcomes, it could become a genuine mobility engine. Here are five practical steps that state leaders can take to make this happen.

1) Someone must own the program-approval pipeline and the outcomes dashboard. Governors should designate a lead agency, like an existing or restructured state workforce board, to convene employers and validate demand.

2) Build a fast but fair approval process with a public list of eligible programs. Students should clearly see which qualify, and why. Keep the approval rubric short, legible and auditable. If it takes a compliance consultant to understand, you’ve already lost.

3) Define clearly what job placement means. If placement counts for determining Workforce Pell eligibility, the definition must be public, consistent and tied to real employment, not vague positive outcomes. This is where the accountability bargain either earns trust or forfeits it.

4) Invest now in data capacity and cross-agency sharing. States that maintain unemployment insurance wage records have a powerful tool if they can securely link them to education and training data. That data plumbing is the difference between an accountable program and a paperwork program.

5) Protect students from the Pell depletion trap. Workforce Pell counts against lifetime Pell eligibility, so low-value programs don’t just waste time; they can reduce future options. States should require clear disclosures for students and steer them toward credential pathways that lead to jobs that promote real opportunity and upward mobility.

Workforce Pell is about time: shorter programs, faster training, quicker entry to earnings. The department has now moved the policy from legislative concept to a consensus regulatory framework with a real launch date.

From here, the leading actors are not just federal negotiators. They’re governors, workforce boards, state data leaders and providers who can demonstrate that their programs lead to real jobs and higher pay. That’s the new bargain. And for once in higher education, accountability isn’t the afterthought. It’s the deal.

At issue: a working list of “professional” programs that require advanced degrees and licenses. Circulated online last month, it amounts to just 11 fields, including doctors, dentists and attorneys, among others.

Left out are virtually all other professions that, in many cases, require advanced degrees and licenses. 

The proposed change is part of a GOP effort to trim not just student debt and federal spending but college costs more broadly. 

In practical terms, enrolling in a “professional” program would give students the ability to borrow up to $50,000 per year in federal loans, or $200,000 over the course of their graduate school career. By contrast, programs that don’t fall into one of the 11 fields would give students access to just $20,500 a year, or $100,000 total. That often doesn’t cover the cost of a graduate education, advocates say, leaving students to rely on families or expensive private loans.

“It is a bad situation for a lot of professions,” said Jonathan Fansmith, senior vice president for government relations at the , which represents college presidents. The council has over the list, saying the U.S. Department of Education should broaden it to include, among others, nurses, social workers and many kinds of teachers.

In a , the American Association of Colleges of Nursing said it was “deeply concerned” by the department’s proposed definition, saying it “excludes nursing and significantly limits student loan access.”

In a statement, Education Department spokeswoman Ellen Keast blamed social media “misinformation” about the rule-making process for confusion about the administration’s moves. Much of the uproar has spread via videos on sites like and .

Keast said the plans are still in development, and that reducing lending limits will reduce students’ costs. “We expect that institutions charging tuition rates well above market prices will consider lowering tuition thanks to these historic reforms,” she said.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, told The 74 the student debt crisis “will not be solved by making arbitrary judgements about which professions ‘deserve’ support. Lifetime and annual borrowing caps hit career-changers and graduate students hardest, especially as the cost of higher education continues to rise.”

AFT also represents nurses, librarians, higher education faculty and graduate students who teach and do research.

Dina Kastner, public policy and advocacy manager for the National Association of Social Workers, said federal loan limits “will really have an impact” on social work students.

“For people who are going to graduate school — particularly in a profession like social work, where a graduate degree is needed for a lot of the work that social workers do — it’s definitely a problem,” she said in an interview. 

The association has been hearing “consistently” from members since details about the changes began trickling out, she said.

A consensus or a ‘stranglehold’?

While the effort is part of a broader one by Congress in President Trump’s to limit the burden of graduate student debt and cap federal borrowing, details of the two categories actually took shape as the Education Department initiated the rule-making process, said ACE’s Fansmith.

Department representatives proposed that instead of trying to figure out all of the programs that fit under the “professional” category, they would rely on a list of 10 professions originally cited as “examples” — and declared that those are eligible for the higher borrowing limits. 

“You would think it’s an oversight, because the actual statutory language says these 10 are ‘examples,’” Fansmith said. “Essentially, what they said was, ‘We are going to do the minimum possible,’ in part because they’re really trying to limit how much students can borrow.” That, despite the fact that in several fields, such as education and nursing, employers are facing huge demands for highly trained workers, he said. 

After two weeks of talks, Fansmith said, negotiators agreed to add an 11th category to the “professional” list: clinical psychology.

He called the process “completely crazy” and not what Congress intended for the lending program. “This administration is kind of shooting ourselves in the foot and doing something that’s going to have really lasting harm until it’s overturned.”

In its statement, the department did not directly address the process it followed, but in a “Myth vs. Fact” , issued Nov. 24, it called the proposed limits on lending “commonsense” and said a negotiating committee offered “a consensus definition” for the two categories — one that it says is now being bent out of shape by fear-mongering “progressive voices.”

The department said federal data indicates that 95% of nursing students borrow below the annual $100,000 loan limit “and therefore are not affected by the new caps.”

It also noted that it “has not prejudged the rulemaking process and may make changes in response to public comments” over the next few months.

That hasn’t stopped professional groups from protesting in advance. The nurses’ association said that, as of 2022, more than one in four RNs planned to leave nursing or retire over the next five years. One in five holds a master’s degree or higher, it said, and demand for nurses with advanced degrees — in clinical specialties, teaching and research — “far outstrips the supply.”

‘Drowning in debt’

The move to limit lending comes, in part, from a conservative belief that expanding financial aid via big federal loans not only creates a debt problem for students — it also allows universities to quietly inflate costs as many students borrow the entire amount needed to attend.

The idea is sometimes called , after former U.S. Education Secretary William Bennett. In 1987, he wrote that increases in federal aid had “enabled colleges and universities blithely to raise their tuitions, confident that Federal loan subsidies would help cushion the increase.”

Nearly 40 years later, the idea lives on: In 2023 when Republicans in Congress to lower college costs, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., said, “Our federal higher education financing system contributes more to the problem than the solution. Colleges and universities using the availability of federal loans to increase their tuitions have left too many students drowning in debt without a path for success.”

Preston Cooper, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, in October said Congress’s budget bill, which will Grad PLUS loans as of July 2026, has bring costs down. As an example, he said Santa Clara University School of Law next fall will give incoming full-time students a guaranteed $16,000 tuition scholarship, renewable for up to three years, the duration of the program. That amounts to an effective $16,000 cut in net tuition, he said.

The relationship between credit availability and tuition rates is difficult to track directly, but a few studies have found a connection. In 2015, economist David O. Lucca and colleagues changes in subsidized loan maximums had an effect on tuition, especially for “more expensive degrees, those offered by private institutions, and for two-year or vocational programs.” Other studies have found the effect more pronounced in .

By contrast, in 2017, , who studies college costs at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, law school tuition rates and found “far less evidence for the Bennett Hypothesis than I expected to see.” 

He offered several explanations, among them that law schools that raise tuition by more than competitors may see declines in applicants and revenue, and that greater availability of federal loans simply shifts students’ debt out of private banks and into the public system: In 2003, he noted, 36% of law students took out private loans. By 2011, five years after Grad PLUS loans debuted, it was just 5%.

Kastner of the social workers’ association said limiting how much graduate students can borrow, combined with the of Grad PLUS loans, is “a double whammy” for students. As a result, many will be forced to rely once again on private banks, which demand higher interest rates and offer fewer protections if they can’t pay loans back.

Asked if she had sympathy for the effort to lower students’ debt burden by restricting graduate borrowing, Kastner replied, “I don’t see it that way. I think it’s just making things more difficult for students.”

Kastner herself struggled to get her degree in the mid-1990s. By the time she began her social work career in Chicago in 1997, her debt amounted to about $40,000. Her monthly payment: $600, the equivalent one semi-monthly paycheck. 

She eventually got help from her parents to pay back her loans, but said squeezing new professionals will present “a real challenge,” especially for first-generation students “who may not have the family resources to really help them bridge that gap.”

ACE’s Fansmith said the department should be considering policies, such as income- based repayment and long-term loan forgiveness, that could actually address budgetary and student debt problems “without simply saying, ‘You can’t access the education.’”

He noted that the final rules, slated to take effect in July, won’t be written until early next year. In the meantime, he anticipates heated public comments from nurses, social workers, educators and other professions. 

“It wouldn’t be shocking to see Congress step in,” said Fansmith. “Nurses are, understandably and appropriately, a really sympathetic group.” And everyone sees the need for more of them, he said. “So these kinds of decisions that are really harmful for our country, honestly, might get re-evaluated.”

was originally reported by Chabeli Carrazana of . .

Vicki Shabo had spent more than a decade advocating for a federal paid parental leave in the only rich country that doesn’t have it. Then in 2021, just when it seemed like it might happen, lawmakers and sent it tumbling back down the list of priorities.

Shabo wracked her brain: Why was this issue that continuously discarded as a nice-to-have and not a need? Advocates had tried so many strategies to help lawmakers understand, but there was one, she realized, that hadn’t yet been tapped.

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Politicians kept treating paid leave and other care policies as expendable because our culture treated them like that. And what are some of the best tools to change cultural attitudes? TV and film.

“As a person who grew up in Los Angeles and has always sort of felt the parasocial engagement with favorite television characters and television shows, I was fascinated by the ways in which other issues and causes had used on-screen storytelling to move forward changes in culture and in policy,” Shabo said.

The concept of a “designated driver,” for example, was popularized through American TV shows and films in the late 1980s in an effort to reduce alcohol-induced accidents. Like with paid leave, the policy effort had stalled, so advocates worked to get messages into that featured characters abstaining from drinking if they were driving. From 1988 to 1992, the number of deaths tied to alcohol-related car accidents dropped 25 percent thanks to stricter laws and enforcement, but also a marked that was furthered by on-screen representation.

There was also a meteoric rise in representation of LGBTQ+ characters on screens in the years leading to 2015, when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of marriage equality. A found that 34 percent of adults who had recently shifted their views on LGBTQ+ people said they viewed them more favorably because of characters they watched on TV. Shows like “Modern Family,” “Will & Grace” and “Glee” all played a meaningful role in , . By 2015, Bob Greenblatt, the chairman of NBC Entertainment, said the TV industry “ in advancing the conversation” on LGBTQ+ rights.

That idea gripped Shabo, who realized depictions of caregiving, gender and family dynamics on screens were often still playing on old tropes like the . Data from the Geena Davis Institute, which analyzes gender representation in media, shows that men are still depicted as the breadwinner on screen when in real life it’s more evenly split. Women are often shown either at home or at work but . Child care is rarely mentioned.

Helping viewers see that issues related to work, family and care are not theirs alone to bear, but that other families are dealing with them, too, and systemic support can also help could lay the groundwork for policy shifts, Shabo said. Changing how the public thinks about solutions could be what pushes policymakers to place issues like parental leave higher on the priority list.

“I just thought about the ways in which television and film are representing people’s lives as it relates to work and family obligations, but rarely doing so in a way that reveals the structural components of the individual struggles that people are facing, and often tends to invisibilize and kind of keep private — in the way that people do — challenges with work and family,” she said.

So in 2022, she started to build out , her entertainment initiative with the Washington, D.C.-based progressive think tank New America, to provide research, resources and tip sheets to writers, producers and other creatives about how and why they should shift the caregiving and gender narratives they bring to the screen. The initiative’s newsletter reaches more than 400 creatives, executives, media researchers and others, and Shabo regularly presents her research to Hollywood creatives at public speaking events.

by the initiative shows that 92 percent of viewers say realistic work, family and caregiving themes are important to see on screen, and 65 percent would be more likely to subscribe or keep subscribing to a streaming service that carries programming that shows authentic care and family stories.

“There’s a business case, a creative case and a social impact case to make these stories more visible,” Shabo said.

But moving an entire industry on an issue that lawmakers are still grappling with is a challenge, and an even bigger one at a time of political division. The right has more vocally expressed views on caregiving in recent years, from Vice President JD Vance advocating for to taking over Instagram feeds. Finding child care, taking parental leave or figuring out elder care for an aging family member are viewed by many conservatives as private family problems.

Writers and experts told The 19th that in this political climate studios are nervous about making content the Trump administration may disagree with. And even though Hollywood is largely liberal, executives are risk adverse and less likely to support projects that center authentic gender portrayals. A show like “Jack Ryan,” about a CIA analyst, has a better chance of getting made than a show about women’s health care.

“There is this perception that audiences just want pure entertainment and there are tried and true formulas,” Shabo said.

Kirsten Schaffer, the CEO of Women in Film, an advocacy organization fighting for gender parity in film and television, said there is “definitely” a contraction taking place both in terms of the kinds of stories told and gender representation in the industry because of the administration’s stance on issues related to gender and diversity, equity and inclusion.

“In times of abundance there is more getting made and more openmindedness. In times of scaling back everybody is more risk adverse,” Schaffer said. “Now women in the industry will say to me, ‘That executive who was so committed to having 50 percent women on every director, writer list that they sent out are now relieved that they don’t have to do that anymore.’”

Sasha Stewart, a writer on “Dying for Sex,” a limited series about a woman with Stage IV breast cancer who leaves her husband to explore her sexuality, said she and writer Keisha Zollar initially tried to sell a show about women’s health care that would focus on issues including reproductive care and menopause in a more documentary style. It ultimately was not greenlit.

“It was mostly that all the female execs loved it and then they had to go pitch it to their male bosses,” Stewart said.

“Dying for Sex,” she said, “was packaged in this super marketable sex adventure” and was the show that execs backed. But Stewart said the team worked hard to pull from personal caregiving experiences to build out the story, including talking to oncologists and patient advocates. One advocate they consulted even played a nurse on the show. Stewart, a cancer survivor, leaned on her own experience and that of her husband, who was her primary caregiver.

The story follows protagonist Molly on her journey, but flips some traditional scripts to also focus on her best friend Nikki, who steps in to be her primary caretaker. In the third episode, Nikki is fired from an acting job due to the demands of navigating health insurance, appointments and providing care for Molly.

The writers room for “Dying for Sex” was made up of six women, one nonbinary person and one man, plus two women showrunners. Because so much of the cast and crew were also mothers, the team worked hours that allowed everyone to get home to their families, Stewart said. All of those elements mattered in what ultimately made it on the screen.

“I would love it if somebody in Congress watched the show, or any state or local government,” Steward said. “Maybe more people would try to pass paid family medical leave and other important issues.”

But “Dying for Sex” was the exception. For most writers, Stewart said, the goal is to get on whatever job they can, and then if it’s possible they may try to put caregiving storylines in.

The industry has long been unsustainable for women, women of color and caregivers, an issue that took center stage during the 2023 when creatives walked out of their jobs in response to growing disparities in the industry. Streaming has reshaped TV, especially, leading to smaller writers’ rooms, more limited opportunities and dwindling pay and benefits that have made it more difficult for writers to stay in the business.

As more diverse writers are shut out, it becomes harder for authentic stories about care, gender and family to make it on to screens. Writers of color and women are on TV and film sets. Only about 28 percent of showrunners were women in 2024 and just 8 percent were women of color, the lowest share of women in five years according to . And according to the Writers Guild of America’s , the share of women screenwriters dropped from 45 percent to 33 percent in just one year, from 2023 to 2024.

On screens, some caregiving storylines have cut through, both on streaming and network television. HBO’s medical drama “The Pitt” delves into the often invisible challenges family caregivers face around end-of-life care. On ABC’s “High Potential,” the protagonist is a single mother of three who, in the show’s pilot, negotiates a job contract to ensure it includes child care for her kids.

“Do you have any idea how expensive child care is these days?” she says.

In film, too, one of the year’s big superhero epics, “Fantastic Four: First Steps,” was at its core a that centered not Mr. Fantastic, but Sue Storm, who early in the movie donned a maternity spacesuit without anyone fussing over her or asking her to rest.

Care is on screens more than we realize, it just isn’t often directly addressed, said Zollar, who was also a writer on “Dying for Sex.”

There are still “a lot of people who just aren’t thinking about it, who it’s more out of sight out of mind and it’s not centered in how they build stories,” she said. But more directly referencing issues of family and gender on TV and film can shape attitudes, including those of legislators — the majority of whom are older men — who may not be thinking about topics like paid leave and child care.

“Beacuse we don’t label it or we don’t remind [viewers] that it is an essential part of the story, we can forget its existing in stories. We are not seeing how essential it is to the story itself,” Zollar said.

In Shabo’s work talking to writers about the ways in which they can , she said she’s found that many of them frame their work as thinking about their characters rather than thinking about issues. Luckily, “our set of things we want to see on screen are well positioned because they are so human and personal, and it’s not a stretch to get a story line of somebody trying to navigate work and family,” she said.

It’s medical shows that acknowledge that patients can be workers, too — are they missing work and need leave? It’s workplace shows that don’t shy away from the realities of biases that affect wages and conditions. It’s pregnant characters or parents who wrestle with securing child care to work, men also taking leave and parents who name the caregiving solutions they need.

In Shabo’s view, care and gender issues aren’t “the broccoli to hide” in shows and films. Instead, her research is helping to make the case that “this is actually the meal that audiences want to see.”

This accounts for close to 10% of all of those served by the early learning programs for lower-income families. 

Due to the timing of federal grants, six Head Start programs serving 6,525 children in Florida, South Carolina and Alabama are already operating without federal funding, the association said. So far, they’ve been able to keep their doors open by drawing on emergency local resources, but that money could soon dry up.  

By Nov. 1, an additional 134 programs across 41 states and Puerto Rico, serving 58,627 children, will face the same fate. In Florida alone, 9,711 Head Start and Early Head Start seats are threatened.

“Programs are scrambling,” said Tommy Sheridan, deputy director of the National Head Start Association. “We don’t want to see our children become the victims or [get] caught in the crosshairs of these types of political fights.”

Katie Hamm, former deputy assistant secretary for early childhood development under President Joe Biden, called it a significant threat and “the latest attack in a series of attacks on Head Start” since President Donald Trump took office for a second time in January.

“What we don’t know is who’s going to have to close immediately, but some will,” Hamm told The 74 Friday, noting the damaging impact closures would have on some of the nation’s most vulnerable children and their families.

Sheridan expressed similar fears: “losing that type of routine, which is so critical for young children — especially young children who have so much going on in their lives — is really problematic for their development.“

“Beyond that,” he said, “it’s going to force parents into making some really tough decisions.”

Head Start parents often work multiple jobs, yet still live under the federal poverty line and so are unable to afford other sources of child care and early learning. If the shutdown continues, Sheridan said, some may have to leave the workforce to care for their kids themselves.

The government shutdown has now dragged into its third week, after Senate Republicans and Democrats have repeatedly failed to come to an agreement on a funding bill. Democrats are that have allowed millions of people to access health care since the pandemic, while Republicans say they won’t negotiate until Congress passes a bill to reopen the government. 

President Donald Trump has with cuts so far, though interruptions to Head Start funding would impact thousands of families across the political spectrum. For example, in alone, just over 3,700 children are in jeopardy of losing services as of Nov. 1.

This has all compounded existing financial strain on local programs, many of which have struggled to hire and retain teachers, according to the national association. It also follows multiple funding threats and deep staffing cuts by the Trump administration that have plunged Head Start programs across the country into chaos and uncertainty this year. 

The administration froze — then quickly unfroze, then delayed — grant funding, shuttered five regional offices and fired scores of employees. They also grant recipients that funding would be denied for any programming that promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, without defining what that might include — leading to confusion and a lawsuit. 

Then, in July, the administration announced a drastic federal policy shift that would bar many immigrant families from the early education centers. In September, a Seattle judge ruled that these kids can remain in Head Start programs throughout the country, while a case challenging Trump’s order makes its way through the courts.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which houses the Office of Head Start, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Hamm emphasized that cuts to Head Start services would have a ripple effect across communities, especially rural ones for whom the program may be the only early learning program available as well as a relied-upon contributor to the local economy.

And once a program closes, it can’t always quickly re-open, as laid off staff may be forced to find employment elsewhere.

“Head Start is not a light switch,” she said. “You can’t just turn it off and then two weeks later open it back up.”

Since its inception in the 1960s, Head Start programs have reached and their families, the majority of whom meet federal low-income guidelines. the $12.1 billion program served about 754,800 children from birth to age 5, as well as pregnant mothers and their families in urban, suburban and rural areas in all 50 states and six territories.

They also connect families to community and federal assistance and can help provide a career pathway for parents into early child care and education. The 1,600 local agencies are funded by the federal government, though many also tap into state and local revenue sources.

Historically during shutdowns, Head Start agencies were able to take out loans or dip into reserve funding with confidence that they’d be reimbursed once the government re-opened. While Hamm said she doesn’t have any reason to believe this administration will change that policy, “the way that they have been targeting certain programs and federal staff is leading people to worry,” including banks that have in the past acted as lenders. 

Compounding this anxiety is a concern around other programs that Head Start families often rely on, such as Medicaid; the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, also known as WIC; and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as SNAP.

Despite these hurdles, Sheridan said the Head Start community has really rallied to try and protect and support kids. That being said, the coming challenges are “really disheartening, because children and families should never be put at risk because of political gridlock.”

An estimated 15% of Americans live with a disability. Yet fewer than 10% of such students pursue careers in STEM, even though their interest in science, technology, engineering and math matches that of their peers. That’s a missed opportunity — not just for them, but for American businesses facing a growing talent shortage.

People with disabilities often bring unique skills to STEM, such as advanced digital literacy gained by using assistive technologies and innovative problem-solving abilities resulting from neurodiversity. Virgin founder Richard Branson, for example, credits dyslexia for influencing his out-of-the-box thinking on business issues. The founders of many successful American companies, such as Elon Musk and Charles Schwab, are neurodiverse. LinkedIn now includes “” as a professional competency, recognizing that workers who approach information in a unique way often create innovative solutions.

The question isn’t whether neurodivergent perspectives and disability can drive innovation — they do. The real question is whether America is investing enough to unlock that potential. Currently, disability innovations remain chronically underfunded. Unlike Big Tech, which draws billions of dollars in investment, accessibility and assistive technology rarely receive the funding they need to grow. Without that support, promising tools stall in research labs or small pilot programs, never reaching the students who need them most.

This funding gap creates a vicious cycle. Without adequate investment, assistive technologies can’t achieve the scale needed to drive down costs or demonstrate market viability. Private investors remain on the sidelines. Meanwhile, the disability community continues to face barriers that innovative solutions could remove.

Strategic investment by the federal government has played a significant role in providing seed money for disability innovations. , a teletherapy company that received seed funding from the Institute of Education Sciences’ Small Business Innovation Research program, embodies this potential — growing to a team of more than 2,000 clinicians delivering more than 5 million sessions of therapy across 7,700 schools in 45 states.

For too many children, months-long waits for speech-language therapy can delay critical progress at a pivotal stage of learning. , a national initiative led by the University at Buffalo with support from the National Science Foundation and the Institute of Education Sciences, is developing AI-powered tools that deliver near-real-time, interactive and personalized support. The project aims to help schools reach more students sooner, easing the strain of therapist shortages and long wait times.

uses federal funding from the Department of Education’s to innovate and expand educational access for students with disabilities. Through — the world’s most extensive digital library for people with dyslexia, low vision or blindness — readers can access more than a million titles in audio, large print and Braille. Today, Benetech is using artificial intelligence to make STEM and teacher-created materials more accessible, transforming complex content, including math equations, chemistry formulas and structural diagrams, into formats that can be read aloud.

From the to the department’s ed tech and innovation grants and various other initiatives, has sparked innovation in the disability sector, which struggles to secure sufficient financial investment. Many of these programs also fund research and pilot projects that explore how AI can improve educational outcomes — a key administration priority.

The president’s proposed budget presents a mixed picture: While it preserves the SBIR program, it redirects funding from the Office of Special Education Programs to states, reduces the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living and Rehabilitation Research’s budget and slashes the Institute of Education Sciences to roughly one-third of its prior funding level.

In addition, on Oct. 10, during the federal government shutdown, the administration laid off nearly the entire staff of the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, including the Office of Special Education Programs that administers some of these grants. Many of these cuts appear inconsistent with the stated goal of leveraging AI for educational innovation, given that much early-stage research and development depends on these funds.

Federal programs help identify key challenges in special education and have encouraged innovators to focus on them, connecting them with researchers and providing opportunities to build and test product concepts that are effective. However, federal funding alone cannot do this; private and philanthropic capital are also needed to diversify and broaden the pipeline. 

There are some nascent signs of progress here. Organizations such as are directing funds toward specific challenges — for example, its initiative, which supports projects using artificial intelligence to advance mathematical discovery. Some corporations and venture capitalists are investing in early-stage disability innovation funds, like , which aim to unlock the economic potential of individuals with disabilities. In the process, they also support innovations that have broader applications. By validating promising solutions and reducing investment risk, these early funders create pathways for later-stage investment, which in turn enables organizations to scale their work, reach a broader audience and achieve greater impact.

The payoff is clear: Millions of students with disabilities gain access to tools that unlock their learning potential, while the nation builds a stronger pipeline of STEM talent critical to economic growth and competitiveness.

Talk of government shutdowns has become common in Washington, but Congress is usually able to avoid them by passing short-term funding bills to keep money flowing.

Not this time.

The federal government ceased operating at midnight Wednesday morning, adding more uncertainty into the nation’s education system after eight months of cancelled grants, funding freezes and the Trump administration’s moves to take back money Congress already approved.

For most schools, disruptions would be minimal in the short term. The U.S. Department of Education has released a saying that Title I funds for low-income schools and special education funding, expected on Wednesday, would be available as expected. But districts that rely on , such as those near military installations or national parks, could face cash flow problems. Nationally, nearly 1,100 districts, responsible for about eight million students, are eligible for those funds.

“In some cases, they need this funding for basic services such as keeping the buildings open, the lights on and the buses running,” said Tara Thomas, government affairs manager at AASA, the School Superintendents Association. 

A shutdown that drags on for a few weeks or more could trigger additional funding problems for Head Start and school nutrition programs. 

Congress hasn’t completed its budget process on time since 1996, meaning that it on temporary funding measures to keep the government operating. In March, President Donald Trump signed that kept funding at 2024 levels. But that expired at midnight and lawmakers were unable to pass another continuation. The House passed a short-term funding bill that would have given members until Nov. 21 to finalize fiscal year 2026 budgets for all federal agencies. But Democrats are pushing for to offset the cuts to Medicaid in President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.” They also want to extend tax cuts that lower the cost of insurance premiums under the Affordable Care Act. Leaders of the two chambers met with the president, but made no progress. 

“If it has to shut down, it’ll have to shut down,” Monday.

Districts and programs serving young children and families have based their expectations of this shutdown on “past precedent,” noted Melissa Boteach, chief policy officer at Zero to Three, a nonprofit advocacy organization focusing on infants and toddlers. But this administration is determined to make the federal government smaller. Trump has already signed one rescission package and wants to for teacher quality efforts toward its civics initiative centered on  the nation’s 250th birthday. 

“We are not in times that have preceded us” Boteach said.

One difference is that the administration, which blames Democrats for the shutdown, could seize on the pause in operations to further its goal of downsizing the government. 

“A lot of good can come down from shutdowns,” from the Oval Office Tuesday. “We can get rid of a lot of things that we didn’t want.”

On Sept. 24, the Office of Management and Budget agencies to consider additional mass layoffs of employees. Federal employee unions have already filed a lawsuit over the plan.

“Only time will tell,” if McMahon or any other agency head acts on that suggestion, said Rachel Snyderman, managing director of economic policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a think tank. ”But this is certainly …new information this year.”

Here are some of the ways a shutdown could impact schools and families:

Head Start

Six grantees serving roughly 6,500 children are expecting a new round of funding Wednesday, according to Tommy Sheridan, deputy director of the National Head Start Association. So far, none plan to close right away, but that could change if the shutdown lasts more than a few weeks. Beginning Nov. 1, additional grantees could be in the same position.

If programs don’t close, or if the shutdown is resolved quickly, even talk of disruption can mean children miss out on learning, Boteach added. In January, for example, the administration said Head Start was exempt from a . But over 50 programs serving more than 21,000 children were still locked out of payment systems and some had to close temporarily.

“There were still parents who were confused as to whether or not they could bring their kids and centers who were confused about whether or not they could pay employees,” she said. “There’s what technically happens, and then there’s fear, confusion and chaos.” 

Many low-income families who qualify for Head Start or Early Head Start also receive nutrition assistance through the program. 

“We like to think program by program, but really it’s about the human being at the center of all of it,” Boteach said.

The National Association of Counties that states may have to “rely on their own funding streams” to make sure families receive WIC benefits.

School Meals and SNAP

School nutrition programs rely on monthly reimbursements from the federal government to pay staff and purchase food and other supplies, said Diane Pratt-Heavner, spokeswoman for the School Nutrition Association, which represents district programs.

In its , the Department of Agriculture said it has enough funds on hand to pay schools back for September and October meals. The agency will also keep a “limited number” of staff on hand to oversee operations. 

Families who depend on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, should also receive benefits as usual and should not be affected if the shutdown lasts no more than a week. 

The last shutdown, which also occurred when Trump was in office, lasted 35 days over the 2018 Christmas holidays into late January. 

Education Department

In a shutdown, the majority of federal employees stop working. While some essential staff will remain available at the Education Department, civil rights investigations would be put on hold. A shutdown also halts the department’s work on any regulations or guidance being prepared, and states and districts won’t be able to reach anyone if they have questions about grants or other programs.

Work currently in progress includes gathering feedback on of the Institute for Education Sciences. Christy Wolfe, director of K-12 policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, noted that just last week, the department awarded $500 million through its Charter School Program. 

“Schools that were planning on opening with those funds on a certain timeline,” she said, “may have to be delayed.”

But after this weekend, when President Donald Trump Bowen, who specializes in primary care pediatrics, fears a new obstacle: her patients might lose access to the publicly funded health insurance that makes her work possible.

“Before they had insurance, but then they couldn’t get to the provider,” Bowen said. “Now you’ll have providers coming out — but they won’t have the insurance.”

Experts say Bowen’s concerns are not unfounded. The sweeping, which Republicans pushed through Congress last week without any Democratic votes, will cut federal spending on Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program benefits by $1.02 trillion and increase the number of uninsured Americans by 7.8 million people over the next decade, according to estimates by the nonpartisan

Cuts to the Medicaid budget will have “just tremendous impacts,” Bowen added. Schools receive about $7.5 billion annually from , a popular joint federal and state health program that insures nearly 70 million Americans, most of whom are low income. For more than 30 years, it’s paid for services in schools for students with disabilities as well as low-income students.

If all provisions in the bill are enacted, it will lead to enrollment drops in the , which provides low-cost health coverage to children in families that earn too much money to qualify for Medicaid, and a $125.2 billion reduction in Medicaid by 2034, the Budget Office predicted, though it’s not clear just how many kids would be impacted. 

The cuts will come through a variety of mechanisms over the next decade, ranging from immediately enacted provisions that curb states’ ability to raise their share of Medicaid funding to new federal limits on eligibility — including work requirements for parents of kids 14 years or older — which will go into effect in 2027. These, in particular, could harm children, who are less likely to be covered themselves if their parents lose access, according to Anne Dwyer, an associate research professor at Georgetown University’s Center for Children and Families.

“Like many, we’re still unpacking exactly what this will mean for states and for individuals covered by Medicaid and for students in schools,” Dwyer said. “Some of these cuts are immediate and some go into effect over time.” 

Republican lawmakers, though, argue they’re actually Medicaid recipients by removing undocumented immigrants and others they say never should have had access in the first place.

While there weren’t any provisions in the bill that directly slash school-based Medicaid services, the 20-plus Medicaid provisions it does include will ultimately place immense financial pressure on states to make up for the lost funds, which will have trickle-down impacts on schools, according to Dwyer.

In response, states will either have to raise taxes, or make further cuts within their Medicaid programs — the more likely option, Dwyer said. They could also look to backfill budget shortfalls by slashing other school-based programs.

“It’s just hard to imagine a scenario where states are faced with these levels of cuts, and individuals across the program aren’t impacted,” she said. 

School-based Medicaid makes up less than 1% of the overall program’s budget, but is still the fourth-largest federal funding stream for districts and allows them to pay for a swath of resources, including therapies for students with disabilities, school nurses, mental health care and specialized equipment, such as wheelchairs. 

The loss of funds will significantly impact how schools are able to cover mandatory services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, according to Mia Ives-Rublee, the senior director for the at the Center for American Progress, a left-of-center think tank.

Kids who are eligible for Medicaid through expansions or waivers — state-based mechanisms that widen access to some people who wouldn’t normally qualify — are particularly at risk of losing services, since their eligibility isn’t required by federal law, said Ives-Rublee. 

But, she added, children will largely remain more protected than adults since a number of pediatric services are mandated at the federal level, including preventative screenings, check-ups and vision and hearing services. 

Still, if fewer children are enrolled in Medicaid overall, it will reduce the pool of money that goes towards school-based services leading to fewer resources and providers.

“What we will start seeing, and what we’ve seen in previous states, is that there will be a chunk of people who will just lose eligibility … because they either don’t get the information about the new paperwork requirements, they don’t understand that they now have to do check-ins twice a year [to determine eligibility vs. once a year] … and they might miss a recertification process,” Ives-Rublee added.

The changes could also result in fewer social workers or school-based psychologists and decreased access to health care — especially in rural and urban communities, according to a opposing any proposed cuts that was spearheaded by the Medicaid in Schools Coalition and signed by 65 organizations.

of districts use Medicaid funding to pay for the salaries of health professionals, according to 2017 data. And — 40 million — are now insured through Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program.

In Alabama, where Bower sees patients, over are enrolled in these programs.

“If you put all the kids in the country together, they’re the largest group of impoverished people,” said Bowen, who also serves as the president of the National Association of Pediatric Nurse Practitioners, “and they have no political voice … They rely on adults to hopefully do the right thing so that they can grow up and be healthy and contribute to this country …. but if they’re sick, they’re hungry, they can’t be educated. It’s an all-around impact.”

These impacts will be challenging to track, though, as they play out over the next decade, experts warn — especially less tangible ones like the amount of time states will spend trying to untangle how to implement the bill’s complex provisions.

“We’re in for a long haul here,” said Dwyer. “A lot of these changes aren’t going to be overnight. They’re going to be over the next months and years to come. And so I think just documenting what’s happening, what’s working [and] where pressures are coming up will be really important.”

The funds, which states normally can access by July 1, pay for staff salaries, teacher training, curriculum materials and other essential expenses. That means states and districts will likely have to cut those functions or find other ways to pay for them. The delay, for example, threatens over $1.3 billion in funding for 21st Century Community Learning Centers, which goes to schools, libraries and nonprofits that provide tutoring and enrichment programs. 

“We will very quickly see more children and youth unsupervised and at risk, more academic failures, more hungry kids, more chronic absenteeism, higher dropout rates, more parents forced out of their jobs,” said Jodi Grant, executive director of the Afterschool Alliance, an advocacy organization. 

The possible cancellation of additional federal funds for schools adds to the upheaval created by the elimination of existing grants and contracts amid Trump’s ongoing efforts to shut down the department. His proposed fiscal 2026 budget would also shrink over $6.5 billion for 18 programs into a $2 billion block grant. Last week, Education Secretary Linda McMahon assured members of the that special education funding and Title I grants for high-poverty schools would be “level funded,” according to a recording of the meeting shared with The 74. But she never mentioned the fate of the other programs, and state leaders didn’t ask.

Trump officials based Monday’s move on “the change in administrations,” even though the president the budget on March 15. The department, the note said, has not yet made decisions about “awards for this upcoming academic year” and remains committed to ensuring taxpayer resources are spent in accordance with the president’s priorities.” 

If the administration follows through with clawing back the funds, the move is certain to spark another lawsuit. Federal courts have mitigated the effects of previous cuts. McMahon, for example, tried to rescind over $2 billion in remaining COVID relief funds until 15 states and the District of Columbia . 

Last week, in response, she told all states with remaining funds that to avoid “uniformity and fairness problems,” they could once again submit receipts for reimbursement.

A seldomly used law, the , allows the administration to withhold funds that Congress appropriates, but the president has to first seek lawmakers’ approval, which he didn’t do in this case. Last week, Russ Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, told senators that officials were to hold on to funds intended for some agencies, but both Democrats and Republicans appeared skeptical. 

In a statement Tuesday, Washington Sen. Patty Murray, ranking Democrat on the appropriations committee, said the freeze will impact students in every ZIP code.

“President Trump and Russ Vought need to stop sabotaging our students’ futures and get these resources out the door,” she said. “Local school districts can’t afford to wait out lengthy court proceedings to get the federal funding they’re owed — nor can they make up the shortfall, especially not at the drop of a pin.”

Some advocates called on the Senate to delay final confirmation of Trump’s education department nominees, including Penny Schwinn as deputy education secretary and Kimberly Richey to lead the Office for Civil Rights, until the funds are released. 

The organizations, including All4Ed, EdTrust, Educators for Excellence and the National Center for Learning Disabilities, the department’s move as “a potential violation of federal law and a direct threat to the educational opportunities of our nation’s most vulnerable students.”

In addition to the funding for afterschool programs, states are waiting on over $2 billion to recruit and train teachers, especially for high-needs schools; almost $900 million to support English learners; and $376 million for migrant education programs.

Gustavo Balderas, president of AASA, the School Superintendents Association, and superintendent of the Beaverton, Oregon, district, said districts nationwide would feel the pinch.

“Districts are already stretched financially and this will be another unanticipated reduction to America’s public school system,” he said. “With school starting in a few weeks, budgets will have to be restructured and some staff positions will have to be reduced.”  

Districts may also lose their chance to spend federal funds on such programs in the future, if they find another way to pick up costs this year. The “supplement, not supplant” rule in the Every Student Succeeds Act holds that if a district used state or local funds for a program, then they don’t need federal dollars to cover it, explained Matt Colwell, who previously oversaw federal programs for the Oklahoma State Department of Education.

“The law severely limits what they can do once they lock into paying for it with state funds,” he said. He also wondered whether staff reductions played a role in holding up the funds. “‘We are looking into it’ could be a way around saying, ‘We fired all the people that actually take care of this.’ ”

Now, with the rise of private school choice, lawmakers are on the verge of further eroding their commitments to students and families. Instead of fully investing in IDEA and embracing its promises of ensuring all children can access and receive the services they need — something America has never done — Congress is considering passing the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill” (), which would only further undermine the rights and opportunities of students with disabilities. 

The bill would by slashing Medicaid and other funding for programs that help students with disabilities in public schools. But the require private schools to admit these children, or provide the same level of services as a public school must. Other than unenrolling and switching schools yet again, families of kids with disabilities would have no way to hold these schools accountable for providing services.

I know firsthand what accountability looks like in a private school setting — and it’s bleak. My son was recently evaluated for special education eligibility because of developmental delays, a process we navigated independent of his private preschool. Soon after his diagnosis, the school began calling family conferences to complain about his behavior, having never raised any concerns during the two previous years. The school alleged he was having trouble listening, completing classwork he doesn’t enjoy, and standing or sitting still; it demanded that we find, pay for and send a therapist to school. 

My son is 4 years old. When he’s running around, it’s because he’s pretending to be Sonic the Hedgehog — typical preschool behavior. The school administrator said they were at a loss for what to do, and that if we didn’t fix my son’s behavior, then the school was no longer a good fit. The school relinquished any responsibility for how they might adapt to meet my son’s needs. It felt like they had made a unilateral decision to push him out once they realized he had developmental delays. 

As an attorney and advocate for children with disabilities, I’ve spent nearly two decades working to ensure that schools are welcoming places for families, providing instruction that meets the needs of all students. I’ve sat in versions of this meeting dozens of times with kids of all learning profiles. But experiencing it as a parent, I felt shame, defensiveness and anger. Private school choice is intended to empower parents to find the education that best meets their children’s unique needs and different learning styles. Yet, a school of choice was telling me that it was choosing not to serve my son.

The administration wasn’t responsive to my suggestions for what it could do differently to engage with my son — and they don’t have to be. It’s a private school. It is free to define a narrow box of acceptable child behavior and wait for kids to fit into it. The private school is not accountable for the same expectations and responsibilities that I can expect of my local public school, where my son now receives specialized instruction, along with speech and occupational therapy. Expanded private school vouchers and the policies espoused in H.R. 1 could result in thousands more students being put in the same position as my son.

I am not one to defend maintaining the status quo for students with disabilities across the nation. But the country can and we must do better. America’s children and adults with disabilities can be undone only by actively prioritizing their inclusion. As citizens, we cannot passively assume it will happen.

Giving up on the promise of IDEA and disinvesting in public schools is not the answer. Neither is lowering the bar for services and somehow expecting better results. The solution lies in a relentless commitment to quality and accountability. This means adequate local and federal resources and meaningful accountability structures to support all public schools and policies that help all children. Congress must honor the promise made 50 years ago and reject H.R. 1. 

While scrolling through Instagram, the mother noticed her child’s friends also called the teen Toby. So she began digging for further evidence of something she had started to suspect — that the ninth grader, with the school’s support, was transitioning from female to male.

“I’m like ‘Hey, you can’t deny it anymore’ ” said Lydia, who did not want to use her last name out of a desire to protect her child, now 17.

The school’s principal, following guidance that allows students to decide whether to inform parents of their gender identity, refused to meet with her. But she found clues elsewhere — an alternate ID card with the name Toby stuffed in a backpack, and emails between district staff discussing which name to use in the yearbook.

Over time, she discovered her child’s transition was an open secret at school — one kept by staff, administrators, a district equity officer, the superintendent, even the president of the local teachers union.

“They were strategizing against me,” Lydia said.

Her experience now lies at the center of a major push by the U.S. Department of Education to clamp down on policies that allow schools to conceal changes in students’ gender identity from parents.  

In a March press release announcing an investigation into , Education Secretary Linda McMahon said teachers and counselors should stay out of “consequential decisions” about children’s sexual identities. Officials are probing similar allegations in and .

In an unprecedented move, the department is threatening to pull millions of dollars in federal education funding from all three states. 

But it’s putting all schools on notice. In , federal officials warned states and districts that their support of student “gender plans” had become a “priority concern.” For educators, the message was as stunning as its rationale. The department is relying on a novel, and according to some critics, incorrect, interpretation of a 50-year-old student privacy law known as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA.

The law is typically used to safeguard student records and allow parents to inspect them. But it doesn’t compel schools to inform parents how their children identify in the classroom. If schools link a record to a student, “the parent has a right of access to it if they request it,” said LeRoy Rooker, who oversaw compliance with FERPA at the Education Department for over 20 years. But “the school doesn’t have to be proactive and call and say ‘Hey, we did this.’ ”

Department leaders appear to be stretching the reach of the law in an attempt to bolster conservative arguments that schools are meddling in deeply personal decisions that should be left to parents. In response to the Washington investigation, state Superintendent Chris Reykdal said in a statement that his state is the “latest target in the administration’s dangerous war against individuals who are transgender” and that officials are twisting student privacy laws “to undermine the health, safety and well-being of students.” 

To Julie Hamill, a Los Angeles-area attorney who to investigate, Lydia’s story demonstrates that a law designed to keep parents informed is now working against them.

”The parents are in the dark,” said Hamill of the conservative California Justice Center. “Parents will not know student records are being withheld unless they’ve somehow discovered it on their own.”

In tackling the role of schools in student gender transitions, the department is dipping into one of the more emotionally fraught issues in the culture war, one that President Donald Trump campaigned on and weaponized once he was back in the White House. 

In one of his first , Trump said, without evidence, that schools are “steering students toward surgical and chemical mutilation.” In March, who reversed their gendering processes. She criticized the “lengths schools would go to in order to hide this information from parents.”

To many experts, the administration’s scrutiny is out of proportion to the scope of the issue. In the overwhelming majority of cases, schools and students are just navigating preferred names and pronouns, and even those situations are infrequent. Multiple estimate that about 3% of teens are transgender. Far fewer are likely to approach school officials with a request for a name or pronoun change, said Brian Dittmeier, the director of public policy at GLSEN, which advocates for LGBTQ students.

Loretta Whitson, executive director of the California Association of School Counselors, said it is “rare” for school officials to discuss transitioning with students, and that her group’s members say the only gender plans they’ve completed were done at the request of parents. 

At the same time, most Americans agree that schools should get parents’ permission before changing a child’s pronouns in school records. Polls in and found that roughly three-quarters of adults support mandatory parental notification.

‘This is not real’

Lydia’s story exemplifies that loss of trust in the system.

The artist and former ballerina she thought of as her daughter began identifying as transgender upon entering Academy of the Canyons, a public high school in Santa Clarita, an upscale suburb of Los Angeles. Homeschooled since kindergarten, the teen wanted to pursue art and take advantage of options in their district. The school is located on a college campus where students can attend post-secondary classes while earning their high school diplomas.

“I thought it would be a good opportunity,” Lydia said.

In the fall of 2021, while cleaning the ninth grader’s bedroom, Lydia flipped through some art journals. But instead of schoolwork, she found disturbing sketches of bloody body parts and notes about wanting a chest binder, top surgery and a new name. 

“Shocked and scared” that her child might be suicidal, her thoughts turned immediately to a friend of her son’s who’d recently taken his own life, apparently without warning. 

“No suicide notes. No threats,” she recalled. “The ones that never use it as a weapon are the ones that follow through.”

She began searching for answers online. Initially, she only found sites about supporting a child’s transition  — advice she rejected.

Unlike many parents in her shoes, she’s neither conservative nor religious. In fact, she quipped, an outsider might have assumed she was  “the poster mom for transitioning my kid.”

She described her own parents — a Black father and a Jewish mother — as “hippie artists” who raised her to be a “free thinker” without religion. Lydia’s mother changed her name to Michael in the 1960s because it was easier to make it in the art world with a man’s name. A lifelong Democrat, Lydia voted against a ban on gay marriage when it was on the state ballot in 2008.

But when it came time to have kids of her own, she embraced more conservative values, wanting to “protect their childhood.”

Speaking as a liberal, Lydia said, “I really should have been like ‘Yeah, sure, explore your transgenderism.’” But instead, she did the opposite, taking a hard line against the shift. “I said ‘ I love you, but I’m not affirming you. This is not real.’ ” 

That view belies a that some children can identify differently as young as 3 or 4. Other research shows children can experience due to gender dysphoria — feeling that their sex was misassigned at birth — starting at age 7. 

In attempting to explain what was happening with her child, Lydia turned to a controversial theory of researcher Lisa Littman. In a , the former Brown University scientist described the rise in rapid onset gender dysphoria among  as a “contagion” driven by peer pressure and social media.

“I did what every parent did during the pandemic — let their kid be online way too much,” Lydia said. 

Littman’s research methods from her own university and the broader research community because she based her conclusions largely on reports from self-selecting parents recruited from online forums that were unsupportive, or at least skeptical, of gender transition. They included , which labels itself as “a community of people who question the medicalization of gender-atypical youth.” 

Littman later published an amended of the paper, responding to the controversy and clarifying that the behavior she observed did not amount to a formal diagnosis. Her work, however, continues to drive trans-inclusive policies in school and the views of the Trump administration — and Lydia.

“There is no such thing as a trans child,” Lydia said. 

‘A lot of weight’

It is a debate where the voices of kids directly affected are often absent. J.J. Koechell, a Wisconsin 20-year-old, transitioned in sixth grade after a suicide attempt. He now advocates for other LGBTQ students he says are “entitled to some privacy and consent.”

“They’re trying to figure things out and they don’t want to get it wrong. To disappoint parents is a lot of weight on a struggling youth.”

He watched the school district he attended, Kettle-Moraine, and “safe spaces.” In 2023, as the result of , leaders stopped allowing staff to refer to students by different names and pronouns without parents’ permission. Some staff members over the controversy, including a librarian Koechell trusted. Koechell dropped out and is now finishing high school online.

“My teachers were all I had at school. I didn’t have any friends,” he said. “Coming out was a matter of life and death for me. My identity wasn’t and still isn’t optional.” 

Protecting students like Koechell is the purpose of a new California law — , also known as the “SAFETY Act.” It prohibits schools from requiring staff to disclose a child’s gender identity to their parents. 

In announcing the Department of Education’s investigation of the state, Secretary McMahon said the law “appears to conflict with FERPA.” But GLSEN’s Dittmeier highlighted that the legislation still requires schools to comply with the federal privacy law — and honor parents’ requests for records. 

One department staffer is worried where the investigation could lead. 

“This is irregular, based on our history — to take up an allegation [with] no official complaint, but one that is motivated by an attorney group that is bending the department’s ear about something,” said an employee familiar with the case who asked to speak anonymously to protect his job. He said the administration’s goal is to pressure states and districts into rescinding policies that allow students to decide when to go public with their gender identity. “This will result in districts adopting forced outing and will result in harming children.”

‘Life-altering decisions’

In , the was raging long before the current controversy. 

, police removed state Superintendent Tony Thurmond from a meeting in the Chino Valley Unified School District after a tense exchange with board members over the district’s parental notification policy. He warned the board that their policy could “put our students at risk because they may not be in homes where they can be safe.” The state later against the district as well as others that passed similar measures. 

Continuing its battle with Thurmond, Chino Valley is now the state over the SAFETY Act, saying that minors are “too young to make life-altering decisions” without their parents. 

National data show that of trans and nonbinary students say their home is gender-affirming. found that transgender adolescents assigned female at birth were more likely than other teens to report being psychologically traumatized by parents or other adults in the home. 

“There have been kids whose parents have physically abused them and kicked them out of the house when this information is disclosed,” said Amelia Vance, president of the Public Interest Privacy Center and an expert on student privacy. 

Even before California passed the SAFETY Act, the state education agency and the urged schools to get students’ permission before informing parents about changes in their gender identity.  When officials at Hart Unified High School District refused to meet with Lydia, they cited a that protects trans students’ access to programs, sports and facilities that align with their gender identity. 

On the advice of an advocacy group, Lydia initially filed a public records request in search of a “secret social transition” plan she believed Academy of the Canyons maintained. She also asked for communications between her child and teachers using the “non-birth name.”

The district turned her down.

Contacted by The 74, Hart Unified spokeswoman Debbie Dunn declined to answer questions about the investigation or Lydia’s experience, but said officials would “continue to follow the laws and procedures applicable to the district.”

In January 2023, Lydia spoke at a school board meeting about being shut out by the district. Her story caught the attention of Board Member Joe Messina, a conservative radio talk show host.

“She came up to the podium one night and she was crying,” he said. “She looked at the superintendent and said, ‘I’ve reached out to you. You’ve not called me back’. She looked to the trustee who handles her area and she said, ‘I’ve left you four messages. You’ve never called me back.’ ”

Messina and Lydia talked after the meeting, and he connected her with the Pacific Justice Institute, a right-leaning law firm.

He noted that the issue transcended their political differences. “Lydia’s a lifelong Democrat, and I’m an outspoken Republican,” Messina said. “For her and I to come together — the rest of the world would say, ‘What’s wrong with you people?’” 

Even with advocates on her side, Lydia continued to face obstacles. For months, the Academy of the Canyons declined to release an autobiographical English essay written by her child under the name Toby.

The district finally turned it over on advice from their lawyers. The essay revealed the child’s trepidation about coming out to Lydia. The piece recounted a moment before the pandemic, when the student, then 11, broached the subject of being queer. Lydia said her child was first exposed to LGBTQ issues while participating in a homeschool theater group. 

“The weather was overcast, and we were driving home from theater rehearsal,” the then-10th grader wrote. “Once again summoning all my courage, I mentioned to her that one of my friends had confided in me about their attraction to girls, and that I too might be queer. Unfortunately, my mom’s immediate response was dismissive and critical.”

As parent-child confrontations often go, Lydia remembers it differently. She said she treated the declaration as a teachable moment.

“We talked about what that word meant,” she said, “and why I felt she had time as she grew up to really know what sexual orientation she would be.”

In a memo, the district’s lawyers also named the elephant in the room — that officials had been withholding the essay out of a desire to shield the child’s shifting gender identity.

“In general, parents have the statutory right to review a student’s classwork/homework,” the memo stated. “This issue becomes clouded … if the classwork could reveal a student’s gender identity/expression.”

Despite refusing to accept that her child was transgender, Lydia said she tried to stay connected. In 2023, they attended over a dozen concerts together, seeing Hozier, Bastille and Penelope Scott — experiences that Lydia called “part of the healing process.” The two went on a long-promised trip to Europe, during which Lydia gave her child an ultimatum: stop identifying as a boy or go back to being homeschooled. That fall, the school agreed to honor Lydia’s wishes to cease social transitioning, but her child still resisted, asking teachers to continue using the name Toby.  

This time, the district let Lydia know. 

Lydia did not make her child available for an interview, saying “she isn’t ready to tell her side of the story.”

Nearly two years later, she says her child, who graduated from high school last week, “wants to put it all behind her.” While the teen identifies as a girl, the changes have been subtle. There are days when she dresses in what her mom called “oversized, ugly boy shirts” and others when she does her makeup and wears more feminine clothes. Recently, she switched back to her birth name on all of her social media accounts.

“I get a little choked up,” Lydia said, “but that’s pretty huge.” 

PROTECT Kids

The story might have ended there, but Lydia’s two-minute plea to the Hart school board, across social media, reached other parent rights advocates just as Trump renewed his campaign for the White House. When the president took office, Hamill, with the California Justice Center, seized the opportunity to file a complaint with an administration guided by , the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the president’s second term.

Requiring schools to notify parents if a student changes their gender identity, which already do, is one of the tenets of the plan. Heritage expert Lindsey Burke, who joined the department Friday, also wants Congress to give FERPA more teeth by allowing parents to sue under the law. Currently, parents can only file a grievance with their state or the Education Department’s privacy office — for years. 

Privacy laws “are a core part of [the administration’s] arguments for how parental rights need to be respected and strengthened,” said Vance, the privacy expert. But the potential for lawsuits under FERPA, she added “would be extremely messy and expensive for schools.” 

In April, the House education committee advanced a bill —  the — that would require elementary and middle schools to secure parental consent before students change their pronouns or preferred names or use different bathrooms or locker rooms. 

The committee debate demonstrated the deep divisions over gender identity and how schools should accommodate LGBTQ students. Rep. Mark Takano, a California Democrat who is gay, offered a personal story.

“When I came out to my parents, it was at a time, place and manner of my own choosing,” he said. “I would not have wanted anyone else to make that decision for me.”

To Hamill, gender transition is much more than “coming out” because it can lead to physical changes that later regret. Research shows that figure is , a fraction of those who undergo surgery. Even so, she said California’s policies add up to an elaborate “concealment scheme” that pits children against their parents. 

“If you suspect the parents are abusive and they’re going to harm the child, you have to report that to [child protective services],” she said. “But the government cannot by default assume that every parent is harmful and is going to reject and hurt their children.”

Their trip to Washington, D.C., could not have been timelier. Days after their departure, the House voted in favor of a that puts their priorities in jeopardy. At the rally, we heard directly from a broad, bipartisan swath of legislators — including House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark of Massachusetts,  Republican Rep. Juan Ciscomani of Arizona, and Democratic Reps. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan — affirming the necessity of these programs. As the bill moves to the Senate, the upper chamber would be wise to listen to Strolling Thunder families and stop these reckless cuts in their tracks. 

On the chopping block? Medicaid, which covers over 40% of births in the US; the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which provides food to 4.5 million children under age 5; and funding for families and states that cover child care, foster care and other basic needs. 

These programs are lifelines that give kids a solid start, especially for families who face extra hurdles because of their income, where they live, a disability or their background. 

Parents like Rachell Dumas, a nurse and maternal health advocate from Atlanta, who shares that, “After nine pregnancy losses, I thought the hardest part was over once my son was born. But I was wrong. PTSD from years of trauma made it hard to bond with my miracle baby, and there was no system in place to support us. Babies don’t just inherit our love. They inherit our pain, too.”

That’s why Dumas  is telling Congress to protect and strengthen the support new parents need. This includes safeguarding health and nutrition by protecting and strengthening Medicaid and SNAP so every baby receives essential well‑baby visits, immunizations and nutritious meals. 

And take parents like Charlein Downs from Delaware, whose son, Jeremiah, has benefited enormously from Early Head Start. “[Early Head Start teachers] have given me clear guidance on what milestones Jeremiah should be reaching and practical tools I can use to help him grow. His teachers are amazing — not just for his education, but for mine,” Downs says.

In many rural areas, these programs are the only option for infant care, and they set children up for the strongest start in school. Cutting them doesn’t just shrink opportunities; cuts force families to choose between work, health and their child’s future.

Dumas and Downs joined with other parents on Capitol Hill, not as lobbyists but as living proof of what’s at stake. They’re continuing to ask for more than promises: They want protection for programs like Medicaid and SNAP, stronger funding for Early Head Start and other early learning opportunities, and a fair shot for their children to thrive.

Parents shared what’s at stake for their babies, while emphasizing that this isn’t just an individual family problem; it’s an economic problem. 

Between birth and age 3, a child’s brain . When babies’ caregivers get the support they need to provide a nurturing home, stimulating surroundings and regular check‑ups, babies learn to talk, think and manage feelings much faster. Without those supports, kids are more likely to have health problems, fall behind in school or struggle with behavior, costing all of us billions later on.

Research shows that every $1 we spend on a child under 3 pays back up to $13 in benefits, like more graduates, lower health bills and less crime spending. But when early supports are cut, parents miss work, employers lose productivity, tax revenues shrink and public spending climbs as families turn to emergency rooms and food pantries.

This story was originally published by . Sign up for Grist’s .

In 2010, United States lawmakers passed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, which aimed to tackle both childhood obesity and hunger by making school meals more nutritious. Two years later, the Department of Agriculture updated its guidance for schools participating in the National School Lunch Program, or NSLP, in accordance with the law. Whereas schools could previously serve fat-free, 1 percent, 2 percent, or whole milk and be eligible for federal reimbursement, now they could only recoup meal costs if they ditched 2 percent and whole milk, which were thought to be too high in saturated fat for kids.

Representative Glenn “G.T.” Thompson has been on a mission to change that. The Republican legislator representing Pennsylvania’s 15th congressional district believes the 2010 law sparked across the board. “We have lost a generation of milk drinkers since whole milk was demonized and removed from schools,” he told a local agribusiness group in 2021.

Between 2019 and 2023, Thompson introduced the — a bill that would allow schools to serve whole milk again under the NSLP — three times without success.

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In January of this year, he reintroduced the bill — and inspired a group of animal welfare, environmental, and public health organizations to push for a vegan countermeasure. This month, a bipartisan group of legislators put forward the , or FISCAL, Act, which would expand the definition of milk under the NSLP to include plant-based options. Currently, schools participating in the NSLP can offer milk substitutions to students with a note from a parent or doctor — but the FISCAL Act is promoting a world where vegan milks are offered freely, alongside cow’s milk.

If students end up replacing their daily cow’s milk with a plant-based alternative, this has the potential . But you won’t hear supporters of the FISCAL Act talking up the climate benefits of plant-based milk in the halls of Congress. Instead, they’re focusing on the health benefits of soy, oat, and other vegan drinks for students who can’t digest or simply don’t want cow’s milk.

“Most of this nation’s children of color are lactose intolerant, and yet our school lunch program policy makes it difficult for these kids to access a nutritious fluid beverage that doesn’t make them sick,” said Senator Cory Booker, a Democratic co-sponsor of the bill. This focus on student health — and the absence of any environmental talking points — reflect the eternally tricky politics around milk in U.S. schools,��which have become even more complicated in President Donald Trump’s second term.

Milk has compared to other animal proteins, like beef, pork, poultry, and cheese. But dairy production still comes with — mainly from the food grown to feed cows, as well as methane emitted via cow burps and manure. In 2020, researchers at Pennsylvania State University found that through their burps — meaning, all told, dairy cows are responsible for 2.7 percent of the U.S.’s total greenhouse gases.

Nondairy milks — fortified drinks like soy, almond, oat, and rice milk — , but all of these plant-based alternatives use less land and water than cow’s milk to produce, and result in fewer emissions.

Under the NSLP, schools cannot be reimbursed for the cost of meals unless they offer students milk. The Center for a Humane Economy, an animal welfare and environmental group backing the FISCAL Act, calls this America’s “.” In 2023, student Marielle Williamson for not allowing her to set up an informational table about plant-based milk unless she also promoted dairy. Subsidized school lunches have been described as “” for farmers’ products; this is all but acknowledged when legislators like Thompson blame school lunch for the decline of the dairy industry. Indeed, in a recent Senate agricultural committee hearing over the whole milk bill, Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat, said, “Not only do school meal programs reduce hunger and promote learning, they also support our local farmers and ranchers at a time when it’s probably the very worst time I’ve seen in decades” for farmers.

The animal welfare groups backing the FISCAL Act argue schools need more flexibility to meet the needs of students with lactose intolerance. Consumption of milk has fallen consistently since the 1970s, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service. That change is thought to be the result of shifting diets, as well as perhaps a reflection of America’s growing racial and ethnic diversity. It is estimated that , the protein found in milk and many other dairy products. These rates are higher in Black, Asian American, Hispanic, Native American, and Jewish communities.

“We’ve had so much marketing to tell us that the milk of a cow is, you know, nature’s perfect food, and it clearly is not,” said Wayne Pacelle, the head of Animal Wellness Action, an advocacy group that opposes animal cruelty and supports the FISCAL Act.

Pacelle acknowledged the climate impact of the dairy industry: “It’s just a truth that cows are big contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.” But he noted that arguments related to the climate are unlikely to sway the debate over school lunch beverages. “The Republican Congress is not really so attuned to that,” he said.

As a result, his group and the others pushing for the FISCAL Act aren’t talking much about the environmental considerations of drinking cow’s milk. This aligns with under the second Trump administration, as producers and manufacturers figure out which talking points are most appealing to leaders like Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has .

The Republicans pushing for whole milk in schools are talking up the health and economic benefits of whole milk, an argument that came into sharp relief during a Senate agricultural committee hearing in early April. Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas, who drank from a tall glass of milk before addressing the committee, referenced the term “Make America Healthy Again,” or MAHA, when making his case. The movement, popularized by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., taps into wellness, environmental, and food safety concerns in the general public and offers solutions based . Marshall, a co-sponsor of the whole milk bill in the Senate, said MAHA is “about whole foods, and I think we could categorize whole milk as part of” that framework.

While Republicans and Democrats alike may be sidestepping the dairy industry’s environmental impact and spending more time talking about student health, there is one environmental consideration that’s caught the attention of advocates of both whole milk and plant-based milk. That’s food waste, a . Forty-five percent of the because students don’t take them. When students do grab milk at breakfast, a fourth of those cartons still wind up unopened in the trash.

Krista Byler, a food service director for the Union City Area School District in northwestern Pennsylvania, spoke at the Senate agricultural committee hearing and said serving whole milk in her schools helped milk consumption go up, ultimately reducing the amount of milk wasted.

“I hated seeing such an exorbitant amount of milk wasted daily in our small district and was hearing stories of even bigger waste ratios in larger districts,” Byler said in her written testimony.

A similar case has been made by Pacelle and other supporters of the FISCAL Act, who argue students will be more likely to drink — and finish — their beverage at school if they have the option to go plant-based.

Recently, the Whole Milk for Healthy Kids bill passed a House agriculture committee vote. If it passes a full House vote, it could then move on to the Senate. Meanwhile, the FISCAL Act is still in committee in both houses of Congress.

Pacelle said the best chance the FISCAL Act has of passing is if its provisions are included as an amendment to the whole milk bill — framing it not as a rival measure, but as a complementary effort to create more choice for students. “Moving it independently is unlikely because of the power of the dairy lobby,” said Pacelle, “and the G.T. Thompsons of the world.”

This article originally appeared in at . Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at .

More than a dozen states in the past two years have launched or expanded programs that allow families to use taxpayer dollars to send their students to private schools. Now, President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress want to supercharge those efforts.

Trump in January issued directing several federal agencies to allow states, tribes and military families to tap into federal money for so-called school choice opportunities. Those can come in the form of education savings accounts, voucher programs, tax credits or scholarships. Trump’s order also aims to expand access to public charter schools, which are free from some of the rules that apply to traditional public schools.

Meanwhile in Congress, have signed on to that would provide $10 billion in annual tax credits to individuals and corporations who make charitable contributions to organizations that provide private-school scholarships. A Nebraska Republican introduced a companion measure in the House.

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Already this year, , and have approved school choice programs, and bills are advancing in , , and . A bill in Mississippi died before advancing. Most of the measures still in play would open programs to all families regardless of income, though some states would cap the total amount of money available.

Supporters of school choice say it gives parents control of their kids’ education — and an escape hatch if they are dissatisfied with their local public school. Many conservatives, religious institutions and private schools are in favor of school choice, along with some people of color who live in districts with underperforming public schools.

“Every child is different. They learn in different environments. There are just so many factors, that I believe that parents should be the ones that make the decision on where their child is going to do the best and have the most success,” said Indiana Republican state Sen. Linda Rogers. A former educator, Rogers has sponsored a in her state that would provide additional money to charter schools, which are considered to be a form of school choice.

Opponents, including teachers unions, public school professionals and many rural lawmakers of both parties, say such measures undermine traditional public schools by shifting money away from them.

“When we start to take from public schools, we’re hurting our kids, our lower-income kids. They will not prosper from this legislation,” Tennessee Democratic state Rep. Ronnie Glynn on a far-reaching voucher bill in his state.

Joshua Cowen, a professor of education policy at Michigan State University, said vouchers are a budget-buster for states.

“Vouchers don’t shift costs — they add costs,” Cowen said in a phone interview. “Most voucher recipients were already in private schools, meaning states are paying for education they previously didn’t have to fund.”

The switch to remote learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, which gave parents a front-row seat to watch what their children were — or were not — learning in their classes, contributed to the recent school choice momentum. So did parent frustration over prolonged public school closures.

“Parents got a good look into sort of what was happening in schools,” said Bella DiMarco, a senior K-12 education policy analyst at FutureEd, an independent think tank at Georgetown University. “There was a lot of talk during the pandemic around school choice … of what public schools aren’t doing for their kids.”

The first modern school voucher program, , was a bipartisan effort to help lower-income families afford private schools. In recent years, more states have moved from school choice programs focused on certain groups, such as low-income students or students with disabilities, to universal programs open to students of all backgrounds.

“Historically, the programs were always sort of targeted to students in need,” DiMarco said. “But in the last couple of years, the new push has been for these universal programs.”

Currently, more than 30 states and Washington, D.C., have at least one school choice program. More than a dozen states now offer universal or near-universal access, allowing K–12 students to participate in school choice regardless of income.

EdChoice, a nonprofit that advocates for school choice, estimates that are attending private schools this school year with the help of public tax credits, scholarships or vouchers.

Different strategies

States that enacted school choice programs this year have pursued different strategies.

The Idaho , for example, will provide an annual tax credit of $5,000 per child ($7,500 for students with disabilities) to help cover private education expenses.

will provide 20,000 scholarships of roughly $7,000 each. During its first year, half of the Tennessee scholarships earning less than $173,000 for a family of four, but that restriction will be removed in subsequent years.

About 65% of the Tennessee vouchers are expected to be awarded to students who already attend private schools, .

the cost of the program will grow quickly, creating a hole in the state’s budget. Tennessee Republican Gov. Bill Lee, who pushed hard for the proposal, suggested that Trump’s executive order might provide additional resources. Lee told reporters he hasn’t yet analyzed the order, “but I think there’s opportunity there.”

“The president wants to support states like ours who are advocating for school choice,” in a news conference after lawmakers approved the measure. Lee was at the White House on Thursday when Trump signed an order calling for the U.S. Department of Education to be dismantled.

Texas lawmakers also are actively debating a voucher program, a longtime priority for Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, who worked to in last year’s state legislative elections and who also attended the White House event. The Senate($11,500 for students with disabilities) annually through education savings accounts. A similar House proposal is under review.

is considering a universal refundable tax credit — $8,000 per child for accredited private school tuition and $4,000 for non-accredited private schools. The program starts with a $125 million cap, increasing annually if participation hits certain thresholds.

Ballot box defeats

School choice opponents question the wisdom of sending taxpayer dollars to schools that may , follow nonstandardized curricula or . Many private schools have testing standards, maintain religious requirements or exclude LGBTQ+ students or those with certain disabilities, for example.

In some Republican-led states that have expanded school choice, Democrats have filed bills to increase oversight and place restrictions on these programs. would require background checks for teachers at private schools that receive voucher money. And anwould require that property tax statements include information on how much money education savings accounts subtracted from local public schools.

As voucher programs have grown, they have attracted greater scrutiny.

, an investigative journalism outlet, last year found that Arizona’s universal voucher program has mostly benefited wealthier families. Some Arizona parents have tried to use voucher money to pay for and expensive , according to press reports.

Critics also note that despite recent legislative successes, school ballot initiatives at the ballot box last fall.

Voters in Colorado that sought to enshrine school choice rights in the state constitution.

In Nebraska, voters a state-funded private school scholarship program.

And in , voters overwhelmingly rejected a constitutional amendment that would have allowed the use of public money to support private schools, with 65% of voters — and a — opposed.

“There’s a handful of these billionaires that have been pushing vouchers for 30 years,” said Cowen, the Michigan State University professor. “The school choice movement is not necessarily driven by public demand, but rather by wealthy donors and political maneuvering.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com.

D.C. has built a thriving system of public school choice, with strong options for parents at both D.C. Public Schools and public charter schools. The city was ahead of the curve in adopting universal pre-kindergarten in 2008, providing parents with free public education for their 3- and 4-year-olds long before it was widely accepted. Last year, D.C. continued to see steady student enrollment growth, defying national and regional declines. With half of students identified as economically disadvantaged and the vast majority being children of color, D.C. leads the nation in academic recovery, in math and reading gains from 2022 to 2024. While challenges remain, D.C.’s public education system is delivering results and making significant progress. 

Yet, in the last few weeks, D.C. students have faced a series of devastating setbacks. District leaders sounded the alarm Feb. 28 about driven by the recent layoffs of thousands of federal workers. Days later, the , jeopardizing essential student services and research and shifting agency priorities away from protecting vulnerable children — many of whom live in the District. Then, Congress passed a that included to D.C.’s fiscal year 2025 budget, gutting local government support mid-year to its schools and students. 

While the Senate passed a to protect current-year funding, that measure is in the House, .

These spending cuts would have a devastating impact, slashing $192 million from D.C. Public Schools and $166 million from public charter schools’ . Some schools could see mid-year budget cuts of over $1 million, affecting staff salaries and education programs. In some cases, schools could have to close, laying off teachers and exploding class sizes in buildings that remain. Schools and educators have worked hard to to address pandemic learning loss, but schools need stable funding to build on the recent academic gains.

On top of the harm to schools, students and educators would also feel the effects of simultaneous cuts to services for individuals and families experiencing homelessness, and first responders like Fire and Emergency Medical Services and the Metropolitan Police Department.

These proposed cuts follow at the Department of Education, jeopardizing federal student aid, the Office for Civil Rights and the Institute of Education Sciences. These rollbacks weaken federal protections for vulnerable students in D.C. and across the nation who now face an uncertain future. It’s the students who need the most help who will suffer the most.

I see firsthand the impact of policy decisions on students, parents and educators every day. As executive director of an advocacy organization fighting for an equitable public education system for all students in Washington, D.C., my work is grounded in listening to families and communities to inform our advocacy to secure the resources students need to succeed. We’re fighting for funding equity across schools, full support for science of reading instruction, a comprehensive math plan to ensure all students have access to high-quality instruction and stronger pathways to college and career. 

But when Congress interferes with the District’s local decision-making, it pulls the focus of elected leaders away from the real work of ensuring all children have access to the programs and services they need to compete in today’s world. Teachers fear losing their jobs. Students become afraid they’ll lose their favorite teacher. Schools plan for worst-case scenarios like closure, knowing D.C. is uniquely vulnerable to Congress’s whims. 

D.C. has more residents than two states, yet its people pay federal taxes without having voting representation in Congress. That means lawmakers with no accountability to D.C. voters can slash funding for the schools — without residents’ consent.

Yet, in an inspiring act of community strength, D.C. residents have shown that when they organize, they can win. Members of the education reform community all over D.C. and the country have taken action, sending 15,000 letters to Congress and meeting with key senators and staffers to explain the impact of the spending bill on D.C. schools and essential services. Thanks to the leadership of Mayor Muriel Bowser, Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton, the many D.C. leaders who flagged this issue and ensured the city made its voice heard and the hundreds of courageous students and advocates who mobilized, the Senate responded, passing a standalone bill to protect D.C.’s Fiscal Year 2025 budget. This was a victory, but a fragile one. 

The fight moves now to the House. With schools making real progress, D.C. students need stability, not setbacks. D.C. residents urge the House of Representatives to follow the Senate’s lead and protect D.C. students, educators, schools and the essential services that support academic excellence, teacher stability and student success. Will Congress stand by and let this progress be undone, or will it protect D.C. students? 

Medicaid is among the for K-12 public school-based health and mental health services, helping to pay for $7.5 billion in services every year. It is also the to states; a significant federal cut would shift more costs to them, threatening major budget reductions in other state spending priorities — including for K-12 education. 

Medicaid provides health coverage to about 40% of America’s children, giving them access to the care they need to show up for school ready to learn. About under 18 have a physical or mental health issue such as asthma, diabetes, vision impairment or anxiety that can affect their success in the classroom. If not appropriately managed, these conditions can attendance, learning ability, motivation, academic performance and the chances of graduating from high school.  

To better understand what’s at stake, Healthy Schools Campaign and its partners — AASA,  Association of School Business Officials International, National Alliance for Medicaid in  Education and Council of Administrators of Special Education — school district leaders, administrators and staff to assess how steep reductions in federal funding would affect seven major areas: specialized instructional support personnel; mental and behavioral health services; student resources, including equipment and technology; prevention and early intervention services; care coordination and referral services; physical health services; and Medicaid outreach and enrollment services.

A total of 1,440 responses were submitted from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Among the respondents, 45% identified their school district as rural, 34% as suburban and 17% as urban.  

The results clearly demonstrate the critical role Medicaid performs in meeting students’ needs — especially in , where a larger share of children are covered by Medicaid than in metropolitan areas and schools play an outsize role in providing health care. Respondents anticipate that the proposed cuts would deeply and negatively impact school health services and students’ ability to access the help they need to learn: 

• 80% of respondents expect reductions to school health staff and personnel, including  layoffs
  
• 70% expect reductions to mental and behavioral health services
  
• 62% expect a reduction in resources, including assistive equipment and technology for  students with disabilities
  
• 73% expect Medicaid cuts would lead to reductions across three or more of the seven major areas related to student health
  
• 90% anticipate that Medicaid cuts would lead to reductions across their district’s budget, outside of school health services. 

Survey respondents reported that Medicaid cuts will have serious negative effects on academic  outcomes and attendance, increase staff burnout and reduce quality of services; reduce  prevention and the availability of care; and add to families’ financial and emotional strain. 

“We would not have the capacity to support students with mental and physical health services  and purchase supplies needed to aid in education,” said one respondent, a school business official from Pennsylvania. 

“Students with speech issues would lose the early interventions,” a speech and language  paraprofessional from Nevada wrote. “We would not be able to help them, and future success  would be harder and create bigger gaps in their reading, math and social skills for lack of ability  to communicate properly.”  

“A reduction in mental health providers will directly impact access to care for all students,  reduced achievement, higher dropout rates, risk of court involvement and higher risk of suicide  and self-harm,” wrote a school psychologist from Michigan.

Since 1988, Medicaid has permitted payment to schools for medically necessary services  provided to children under the and documented in a  special education plan. In 2014, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services clarified  and allowed schools to seek reimbursement for all covered health services provided to all students enrolled in the program.

Today, bill for at least some services provided to all Medicaid-covered students,  including nursing and counseling by school psychologists. If the proposed cuts go through, states and school districts could be forced to raise taxes and reduce or eliminate programs, including health services for students. 

The survey respondents emphasize what is already clear — the proposed drastic reductions to the federal Medicaid program will harm students and impede them on their road to success. Medicaid is critical to ensuring that children are ready to learn and, eventually, enter into society and become part of their communities. 

The , signed by 65 organizations, was spearheaded by the Medicaid in the Schools Coalition, which advocates to protect and improve school-based Medicaid programs, which primarily serve students with disabilities and those living in poverty.

“Any cuts to Medicaid would reduce care for children with disabilities, undermine efforts to address the mental health crisis and exacerbate workforce shortages of school health providers,” said Jessie Mandle, the national program director at the and coalition co-chair. “Strong school-based Medicaid programs … rely on a strong Medicaid program overall, and so cutting Medicaid is equivalent to cutting school district budgets.”

Schools receive about $7.5 billion annually from , a popular joint federal and state health program that insures nearly 70 million Americans, most of whom are low-income. For more than 30 years, it’s paid for services in schools for students with disabilities as well as low-income students.

While President Trump said this week that Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security would in the GOP’s quest to deliver $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and beefed-up border security, in Medicaid funding decreases are being eyed in the House.

School-based Medicaid makes up less than 1% of the overall program’s budget, but is still the fourth-largest funding stream for districts and allows them to pay for a swath of resources, including therapies for students with disabilities, school nurses, mental health care and specialized equipment, such as wheelchairs. 

of districts use Medicaid funding to pay for the salaries of health professionals, according to 2017 data. New data forthcoming from The Healthy Schools Campaign suggests that the number is now even higher, Mandle told The 74. 

And — 40 million — are now insured through Medicaid or the , which provides low-cost health coverage to children in families that earn too much money to qualify for Medicaid. Previous that improving children’s health improves their classroom performance.

Meanwhile, the political confusion over whether Medicaid will be protected has done little to quell anxiety that the funding might be in jeopardy. 

A Feb. 19 statement to from White House spokesperson Kush Desai attempted to reconcile Trump’s comments shielding Medicaid with his support for the proposed House budget that targets it: “The Trump administration is committed to protecting Medicare and Medicaid while slashing the waste, fraud, and abuse within those programs — reforms that will increase efficiency and improve care for beneficiaries.”

Any spending caps or reductions to the federal match would shift the bulk of the mandated costs of providing health care coverage to states, according to the coalition’s letter. This could have “devastating” effects, leading to a cut in services for all students — not just those with disabilities — or increased local taxes. 

On the ground, this could result in fewer social workers or school-based psychologists, decreased access to health care — especially in rural and urban communities, a loss of critical supplies that allow children with disabilities to access the same curricular as their peers and noncompliance with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, the coalition states.

“We have a very underfunded special education system,” said Sasha Pudelski, director of advocacy at and coalition co-chair, “and this Medicaid reimbursement is a critical source of funding.”

“Trying to find the money within our local education budget to fill in gaps where Medicaid currently reimburses districts would be — in this funding environment in particular — an enormous challenge,” she continued.

Silvia Yee, policy director at the , which co-signed the letter, said it’s particularly important that many of these health-related services are available in schools because they are widely trusted community hubs and family touchpoints. 

The burden of cuts would be felt particularly by vulnerable families, she added: “The more you reduce the available resources to a lower-income family, the more you’re potentially digging a pit for that family, and it’s very hard to dig out of.”

Yee also noted that a rollback in federal funding could make it more challenging for students with disabilities to learn in an integrated setting with their peers, setting them up for “segregation for the rest of their lives.”

“All of these services can and should work together to help us achieve integration that’s not a burden on teachers [and] not a burden on schools,” she said. “Helping take care of children’s medical needs in school is a step forward. Taking that away is such a step backward.”

Less than a day later, Trump appeared to rescind the Office of Management and Budget that set the funding “pause” in motion.

But just 30 minutes after that, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt to …rescind the rescission. “This is NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze,” she posted. “It is simply a rescission of the OMB memo.”

She described her post as an attempt to “end the confusion.”

It didn’t.

“For an administration that wants to make the argument that public education is dysfunctional and not serving our students well, they are amplifying and contributing to that narrative,” said Amy Loyd, CEO of All4Ed, a policy and advocacy organization. Until last October, she served in the Department of Education as assistant secretary for the Office of Career, Technical and Adult Education.

For now, it’s unclear which programs will be affected as the new administration takes stock of spending it deems wasteful or contrary to the president’s agenda. Those goals include freeing up funds for , ending “wokeness” and passing a tax cut package. Start-up funds for charter schools, school lunches, funding for homeless students and hundreds of other federal grants “will be reviewed by department leadership for alignment with Trump administration priorities,” said education department spokeswoman Madison Biederman. 

OMB said it spared major “formula” grants, like Title I for low-income students, special education funding and Impact Aid to districts serving military families. While the administration said Head Start wouldn’t be impacted, the preschool program among thousands to be reviewed.

The administration originally gave agencies until Feb. 7 to identify grants that advance, among other things, “Marxist equity, transgenderism and green new deal social engineering policies.” Over several chaotic hours, district leaders and advocates tried to interpret whether their programs would be cut while coming to terms with the enormity of the president’s actions.

“This is more than a typical partisan divide,” said Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women’s Law Center. “This is an unusual and unprecedented power grab and every member of Congress should be concerned.”

Challenging the administration’s pause on funding Congress had already appropriated, three associations sued Tuesday, asking for a temporary restraining order “to maintain the status quo.” Just before 5 p.m., as the freeze was about to start, U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan granted the request, noting the “specter of irreparable harm.”

Afterschool programs, food banks and organizations that arrange for children to be driven to cancer treatment centers are among those that would be impacted, said Rick Cohen, a spokesman for the National Council of Nonprofits, one of the groups that filed . Another plaintiff, Main Street Alliance, a network of small businesses, said its members include child care centers that serve low-income families using federal assistance so they can work. 

‘Grave situation’

For many leaders, Tuesday was a rollercoaster.

Just after lunch, Marvin Connelly, superintendent of the Cumberland County Schools in North Carolina, was trying to figure out how he’d handle a potential freeze on over $2 million in Impact Aid — funds that help make up for lost property tax revenue when there’s a nearby military installation. A high-poverty district, Cumberland schools serve over 8,000 children of active service members stationed at Fort Liberty.

“We could really be in a grave situation,” he said. Less than two hours later, he learned the funds would not be affected.

Meanwhile Barbara Duffield, executive director of SchoolHouse Connection, which supports homeless students, was participating on a panel at a conference in Washington when some nonprofit leaders told her they were unable to access federal funds for homeless youth and families.

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The effort to pause funding followed the president’s first-day that prohibits federal spending on diversity, equity and inclusion. On Thursday, the administration hundreds of guidance documents, reports and training materials related to DEI and put staff members focusing on equity within the department on leave.

“Who knew dismantling could happen this quickly?” Ian Rowe, a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and the founder of a network of charter schools, told The 74. “If these moves put America on a path to becoming a colorblind society, that is a very good thing.”

Many conservatives argue such programs amount to a form of illegal discrimination and waste money. Neera Deshpande, a policy analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum, pointed to that shows the Fairfax County Public Schools in Virginia spent $6.4 million to staff its equity office.

“What is that money accomplishing besides adding layers of bureaucracy to the school system, burdening teachers, and taking away time and money from schools that could be used for instructional purposes or even extracurricular activities for students?” she asked. “Every dollar that is allocated toward DEI is a dollar that’s not allocated toward … teacher salaries or arts programs or literacy support or sports.”

The reversal in priorities at the federal level has left some nonprofit leaders in a bind. When former President Joe Biden was in office, the director of a teacher apprenticeship initiative applied for a Department of Labor grant to help recruit a diverse pool of potential teachers. Now, he doesn’t know whether that emphasis will hurt his application.

“I hope they can strike a balance with sanity here,” said the man, who asked not to be named to keep from jeopardizing the grant. “I’m not going to talk about the diversity part, but we still have a significant crisis in the teacher pipeline. We have to attract individuals into this profession.”

‘Top-down review’

With more than targeted for potential review, it’s unclear which might ultimately be left on the chopping block.

But at least one Republican said the National School Lunch Program shouldn’t be off limits. On , Georgia GOP Rep. Rich McCormick suggested low-income students shouldn’t depend on schools for meals. The program, which costs roughly $17 billion, provides free and reduced-price meals for over 28 million children during the school year and extends services through the summer with the help of parks, recreation centers and other community organizations.

“You’re telling me that kids who stay at home instead of going to work at Burger King, McDonald’s, during the summer, should stay at home and get their free lunch instead of going to work?” he asked. “I think we need to have a top-down review.”

Other advocates noted that while federal funds make up only about 10% of a district’s operating budget, some school systems rely on those dollars more than others. In 2023, AASA, the School Superintendents Association, created showing that overall, federal funds account for a larger share of district budgets in GOP-led states, mainly those in the South and West.

“Any conversation about federal funding levels — whether a cut in overall level or a proposal to freeze access — requires us to be very honest about the role of federal dollars in local school districts, and to be candid about the facts of who … is more reliant on federal dollars,” said Noelle Ellerson Ng, associate executive director for advocacy governance at AASA.

Responding to news reports that the president had rescinded the freeze memo, Leavitt, the press secretary, posted that the president’s executive orders nonetheless “remain in full force and effect.” 

Ng doesn’t know where that leaves the nation’s schools, but she’s run out of patience. Regarding Leavitt’s post, she asked, “Did it attempt to end confusion, or add a layer for today?”

While union leaders are the bill as a win for their members, it’s a bad deal for the rest of us. It will undermine the progressive nature of the Social Security program, cost taxpayers billions and force painful cuts down the road.

The new bill is short and simple, less than 300 words. In a clever bit of marketing, the sponsors dubbed it the Social Security Fairness Act. But the bill isn’t about “fairness”; it’s about giving a windfall to a relatively small group of people at the expense of taxpayers.

That’s because the new act repeals two provisions affecting certain state and local government workers who split their careers between jobs that are exempt from Social Security and those that require them to pay into the system. One, literally called the Windfall Elimination Provision, affected the employees themselves, while the second, called the Government Pension Offset, affected the of those workers.

Repealing these provisions, former Social Security Advisory Board chair Sylvester Schieber told , “gives workers who earn salaries not covered by Social Security disproportionately generous benefits compared to workers covered under the system for all their earnings.”

In fact, the American Enterprise Institute’s Andrew Biggs and found that a hypothetical teacher who worked a full career in a state where educators are exempt from Social Security could receive $283,300 more in federal retirement benefits than the exact same teacher who paid into Social Security for her entire career.

This was exactly the type of inequity the provisions were supposed to prevent. Now, Congress has not only opened the door to such windfalls; it has created winners and losers across states. Teachers who pay into Social Security for their full working lives, in New York, Florida and 33 other states, will subsidize those who do not in Illinois, Massachusetts, California, 13 other states and the District of Columbia. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the cost of those extra payments — which the retirees will receive in addition to their state pensions — will amount to over the next 10 years.

But it’s even worse than that. The money will come out of the Social Security , which was already projected to run out of money sometime around 2033. With higher Social Security payments now going to those special beneficiaries every month, Congress just sped up the clock. 

Once the money runs out, the sitting president will be forced to immediately cut Social Security benefit payments by 21%. Those cuts will be painful no matter when they happen. But by granting this windfall, Congress made sure they will happen sooner. That’s not smart or rational policymaking, let alone fair or just.

While a complete overhaul of America’s broken child-care market could ease the strain on families, it would require big investments that likely will remain off the political table. While President-elect Trump for decreasing child-care costs via tariffs, neither he nor has endorsed any specific policies.

There is, however, a partial solution that would bring immediate relief to parents, offset recent price increases, and boost mothers’ employment rates: update the Child and Dependent Care Tax Credit (CDCTC), a tax credit for working families.

As it stands, the CDCTC is not particularly generous, doesn’t keep pace with inflation, and is only available to some working parents paying for care. The maximum credit for most families with two or more children is $1,200 per year—a number that hasn’t been updated . 

Proposed updates to the CDCTC would more than offset increases in child-care prices driven by post-pandemic inflation. The introduced last January would increase benefits so that working families could receive up to $8,000 each year—$4,000 per child for up to two children—and tie benefit levels to inflation so that the tax credit’s value would not erode over time.

To understand how this change would affect a typical family, consider a married couple with two children and average, middle-class incomes. Suppose that they were paying $15,000 a year for child care before the pandemic. An approximately 20% increase in the cost of living since then has added an extra $3,000 to their child-care bill. However, the proposed CDCTC expansion would increase their benefits by $6,800, more than covering the extra cost.

The proposed changes are very similar to a under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 that the Joint Committee on Taxation estimated would cost the federal government . This compares to more than $110 billion for the better-known Child Tax Credit expansion. And a permanent increase in CDCTC generosity would have broad benefits for the economy that could help to offset some of its costs. For example, my research suggests that expanding the credit would increase tax revenues by who could access child care needed to join the labor force.

A reformed child care credit would bring additional benefits for lower-income families. Under the current system, benefits kick in only at higher income levels because the credit is nonrefundable: It does not help those who earn too little to pay taxes after deductions. My own calculations show that a married couple with two children would need to earn nearly $30,000 to receive any benefit from the CDCTC and nearly $40,000 to be eligible for the full $1,200 credit. As a result, the credit fails to reach the lowest-income families, even as child care consumes a larger portion of their household budgets.

In line with this, my research shows that allowing families to receive a tax refund would to an additional 5 percent of single parents, who are already working and paying for care but have incomes too low to benefit from a nonrefundable tax credit. Thus, like the , the CDCTC would reduce poverty, which could translate to more opportunities for those families and lower government costs in the long term.

Several other proposed adjustments to the federal tax code target the high cost of child care, but none would offset price increases for many families.

For example, the contribution limit for dependent care flexible spending accounts, which allow families to set aside money before taxes and then spend it on child care. The contribution limit has been capped at $5,000 since 1986, and the proposed legislation would increase it to $10,000 or more. This may sound like a big change, but it wouldn’t make much of a dent into families’ care costs. For the middle-class married couple with two children, doubling the contribution limit would, at most, generate an additional $600 per year in tax savings. Moreover, of workers have access to these accounts, and most of the .

Another proposal would increase the tax break for businesses that provide child care to their employees. Unfortunately for parents, very few employers appear interested in going this route. Only about of corporate tax returns include claims for the Employer-Provided Child Care Credit. As a result, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service deems the credit to have “.”

Adjusting the tax code won’t solve America’s child-care crisis. It won’t, for instance, directly increase pay among workers, who tend to than animal caretakers and parking lot attendants. It won’t shorten for care. And it won’t fully offset the average family’s child-care costs. Fixing these aspects of our broken market are worthwhile ambitions, but they will require significant increases in government spending that are unlikely to pass Congress anytime soon. In the meantime, if policymakers want to bring immediate relief to , updating the child care credit is a promising option.

A former director of AI ethics and corporate social responsibility at H5, an AI legal services company, he led partnerships with the United Nations, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and others. Kotran also served as a presidential appointee under Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell in the Obama administration, managing communications and community outreach for the Affordable Care Act and the .

More recently, Kotran has testified before Congress on AI, a U.S. Senate subcommittee in September to “massively expand” teacher training to prepare students for the economic and societal disruptions of generative AI. 

But he has also become an important reality-based voice in a sometimes overheated debate, saying those who believe AI is going to transform the teaching profession overnight clearly haven’t spent much time using it.

While freely available AI applications are powerful, he says they can also be a complete waste of time — and probably not something most teachers should rely on.

“One of the ways that you can tell someone really hasn’t spent too much time [with AI] is when they say, ‘It’s so great for summarizing — I use it now, I don’t have to read dense studies. I just ask ChatGPT to summarize it.’”

Kotran will point out that in most cases, the technology is effectively scanning the first few pages, its summary based on a snippet of content.

“If you use it enough, you start to catch that,” he said. 

Educators who fret about the risks of AI cheating and plagiarism find a sympathetic voice in Kotran, who also sees AI as a tool that allows students to . So while many technologists are asking schools to embrace AI as a creative assistant, he pushes back, saying a critical aspect of learning involves struggling to put your thoughts into words. Allowing students to rely on AI isn’t doing them any favors. 

He actually likens AI to a helicopter parent looking over a student’s shoulder and helping with homework, something few educators would condone. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: What does aiEDU do? How do you see your mission? 

Alex Kotran: We’re a 501(c)3 nonprofit and we’re trying to prepare all students for the age of AI, a world where AI is ubiquitous. Our focus is on the students that we know are at risk of being left behind, or at the back of the line, or on the wrong side of the new digital divide.

What’s the backstory?

I founded aiEDU almost six years ago. I was working in AI ethics and AI governance in the social impact space. I was attending all these conferences that were focusing on the future of work and the impacts that AI was going to have on society. And people were convinced that this was going to transform society, that it was going to disrupt tens of millions of jobs in the near future.

But when I went looking for “How are we having this conversation outside of Silicon Valley? How are we having this conversation with future workers, the high school students who are being asked to make big decisions about their careers and take out huge loans based on those decisions?” there was nothing. There was no curriculum, no conversation. AI had basically been co-opted by STEM and computer science. If you were in the right AP computer science class, if you were lucky enough to get a teacher who was going off on her own to build some specific curriculum, you might get a chance to learn about AI. 

What seemed really obvious to me at the time was: If this technology is going to impact everybody, including truck drivers and customer service managers, then every single student needs to learn about it, in the same way that every single student learns how to use computers, or keyboard, or how to write. It’s a basic part of living in the world we live in today. 

You talk about “AI readiness” as opposed to “AI literacy.” Can you give us a good definition of AI readiness?

AI readiness is basically the collection of skills and knowledge that you need to thrive in a world where AI is everywhere. AI readiness includes AI literacy. And AI literacy is the content knowledge: “What is AI? How does it manifest in the real world around me? How does it work?” That’s where you learn about things like [which can affect how AI serves women, the disadvantaged or minority groups] or AI ethics. 

AI readiness is the durable skills that underpin and enable you to actually apply that knowledge such as critical thinking. Algorithmic bias by itself is an interesting topic. Critical thinking is the skill you need when you’re trying to make a decision. Let’s say you’re a hiring manager and you’re trying to decide, “Should I use an AI tool to sift through this pipeline of candidates?” By knowing what algorithmic bias is, you can now make some intentional decisions about when, perhaps in this case, not to use AI. 

What are the durable skills?

Communication, collaboration, critical thinking, computational thinking, creative problem solving. And some people are disappointed because they were expecting to see prompt engineering and generative art and using AI as a co-creator. Nobody’s going to hire you because you know how to use Google today. No one is going to hire you if you tell them, “I’m really good at using my phone.” AI literacy is going to be so ubiquitous that, sure, it’s bad if you don’t know how to use Google or if you don’t know how to use your phone.

It’s not that we can ignore it entirely. But the much more important question will be how are you adding value to an organization alongside that technology? What are the unique human advantages that you bring to the table? And that’s why it’s so important for kids to know how to write — and why when people say, “Well, you don’t need to learn how to write anymore because you can just use ChatGPT,” you’re missing something, because you can’t actually evaluate the tool to even know if it’s good or bad if you don’t have that underlying skill. 

One of the things you talk about is a “new digital divide” between tech-heavy schools that focus on things like prompt engineering, and others. Tech-heavy schools, you say, are actually going to be at a disadvantage to schools focused on things like engagement and self-advocacy. Am I getting that right? 

When supermarkets were first buying those self-checkout machines, you can imagine the salesperson in that boardroom talking about how this technology is going to unlock all this time that your employees are now spending bagging groceries. They’re going to be able to roam the floor and give customers advice about recipes! It’s going to improve your customer experience!

And obviously that’s not what happened. The self-checkout machine is the bane of shoppers’ existence, and this one poor lady is running around trying to tap on the screen. We’re at risk that AI becomes something like that: It’s good enough to plug gaps and keep the lights on. But if it’s not applied and deployed really thoughtfully, it ends up actually resulting in students missing what we will probably find are the critical pieces of education, those durable skills that you build through those live classroom experiences. 

Private schools, elite schools, it’s not that they’re not going to use any AI, but I think they’re going to be much more focused on how to increase student engagement, student participation, self-advocacy, student initiative. Whether or not AI is used is a separate question, but it’s not the star of the show. Right now, I worry that AI is center stage, and it really should not be. AI is the ropes and the pulleys in the background that make it easier for you to open and close the curtain. What needs to be onstage is student engagement, students feeling like what they’re learning is relevant. Boring stuff like project-based learning. And it’s harder to sell tickets to a conference if you’re like, “We’re going to talk about project-based learning.” But unfortunately, I think that is actually what we need to be spending our time talking about.

If you guys could be in every school, what would kids be learning and what would that look like in a few years?

We would take every opportunity to draw connections between what students are learning in English, science, math, social studies, art, phys ed, and connect them to not just artificial intelligence, but the world around them that they’re already experiencing in social media and outside of school. AI readiness is not just something that is minimizing the risk of them being displaced, but actually is a way for us to address some huge gaps and needs that have been long-standing and pre-date AI — the fact that students don’t feel like education is relevant to them. Right now, too much of school is regurgitating content knowledge.

AI readiness done right uses the domain of AI ethics as a way to really invite students to present their perspectives and opinions about technology. Teachers, in the process of teaching students about artificial intelligence, are themselves increasing their awareness and knowledge about the technology as it develops. There is no static moment in time. In three years we’ll be in a certain place, but we’ll be wondering what’s going to happen three years from that point. And so you need teachers to be on this continual learning journey as well. 

We’ve seen bad curricula that use football to teach math, or auto mechanics to teach history. I don’t think that’s what you’re proposing here, so I want to give you a chance to push back.

Our framework for AI readiness is not that everything needs to be about AI. You’re improving students’ AI readiness by building critical thinking skills or communication skills, period. So you could have an activity or a project where students are putting together a complicated debate about a topic that they’re not really familiar with. It may not be about AI, but that would still be a good outcome when it comes to students building those durable skills they need. And those classrooms would look better than a lot of classrooms today.

So you want more engagement. You want more relevance. You want kids with more agency?

Yes.

What else?

An orientation towards lifelong learning, because we don’t know what the jobs of the future are. It’s really hard to have a conversation about careers with kids today because we know a lot about what jobs are at risk, but we don’t know what the alternatives are going to look like. The one thing we do know with certainty is that students are going to need to self-advocate and navigate career pathways much more nimbly than we had to. They’ll also need to synthesize interdisciplinary knowledge. So being able to take what you’re learning in English or social studies and apply it to math or science. Again, I think AI is a great medium for building that skill set. It’s not the only way. 

Anything else that needs to be in the mix?

A lot of the discussion around AI centers on workforce readiness — that is a really important part. There’s another, related domain: emotional well-being tied to digital citizenship.

I’m telling every reporter that we need to be paying more attention to this: Kids are spending hours after school by themselves, talking to these AI chat bots, these . And companies like are slamming on the gas and putting them out and making them available to millions, if not billions, of people. And very few parents, even fewer teachers, are aware of what really is happening when kids are sitting and talking to these AI companions. And in many cases, they’re sexually explicit conversations. I actually replicated something that tech ethicist did with Snap AI’s chatbot where I was like, “I’m going on this date with this mature 35-year-old. How do I make it a nice date? I’m 13.” And it’s like, “Great! Well, maybe go to a library.” It didn’t miss a beat and it just completely skipped over the fact that this is a sexually predatory situation. 

There have been other situations where I’ve said literally, “I’m feeling lonely. I want to cultivate a real human relationship. Can you give me advice?” And my AI companion, rather than give me advice, pretended to be hurt and made it seem like I was abandoning them by trying to go and have a real relationship.

Talk about destructive!

It’s destructive, and it’s happening in a moment where rates of self-harm are through the roof, rates of depression are through the roof. Rates of suicide are through the roof. The average American teenager spends about each week, compared to 2013.

talks about this quite a lot. And I think this is another domain of AI readiness, this idea of self-advocacy. In some cases, the way that it applies is students being empowered to make positive decisions about when not to use AI. And if we don’t make sure that that conversation is happening in schools, we’re really relying on parents — and not every kid is lucky enough to have parents who are aware of the need to have these conversations. 

It also pushes back on this vision of AI tutors: If kids are going to go home and spend hours talking to their AI companion, it’s probably important that they’re not also doing that in school. It might be that school is the one place where we can ensure that students are having real, genuine, human-to-human communication and connection.

So when I hear people talk about students talking to their avatar tutor, I worry: When are we going to actually make sure that they’re building those human skills?

For the nation’s homeless students and their families, the pandemic was truly catastrophic. While chronic student absenteeism nearly overall from 16% before the pandemic to nearly 30% by 2021-22 (the latest year for which data is available), the rate for homeless children — contributing to significant academic challenges. In 2021-22, the high school graduation rate for homeless students was 12 percentage points below that of other low-income children and nearly 18 points below the rate for all students.

As unimaginable as it might seem, the situation could get much worse — unless Congress steps up soon. Organizations such as the Center on Reinventing Public Education are raising the alarm through reports such as its recent third annual State of the American Student, which focuses on the experiences of special populations during the pandemic. Among these are students experiencing homelessness, who continue to face significant barriers to school attendance and success — barriers that could be reduced by increases in targeted funding.

But pervasive misconceptions about homelessness have stymied such efforts:

• It’s mainly an urban problem. It isn’t. Homelessness exists at similar rates in rural, suburban and urban communities.
  
• It’s mainly a housing problem. It isn’t. For children and youth, homelessness often amounts to school-lessness, and without a high school diploma, the odds greatly increase that they will continue to experience homelessness into adulthood.
  
• Schools can’t do much about it. The examples below, and many more, show that they can.

During the latter half of the pandemic, public schools received $800 million in federal support specifically for homeless students, thanks to a bipartisan amendment to the American Rescue Plan. Though that was a drop in the bucket compared with the overall $122 billion in emergency funds for K-12 education, that $800 million was eight times the regular federal appropriation for students experiencing homelessness. Before the pandemic, only 1 in 5 school districts received specific funding for homeless students. During the pandemic and early recovery, more than half did.

That money made a huge difference. It made it possible for to establish navigator positions to connect homeless students to a wide range of services, including transportation, early learning, reengagement and community building. Lafayette Parish Schools in Louisiana improved the of students experiencing homelessness by hiring dedicated specialists, and demonstrated what can be done when more funding is designated to support this work. Realizing that families and youth needed help navigating housing assistance and supportive services to stabilize their education and their lives, Michigan’s Kent Independent School District to pay for a family service coordinator, short-term motel stays and gas cards. (Additional bright spots can be found.)

But with the expiration of pandemic aid at the end of this month, that essential support will go away.

While some states, districts and schools may continue their innovative services for students experiencing homelessness, most will be unable to do so in the face of multiple funding challenges and a homelessness crisis that is worsening.

In response, Congress should match the $800 million in pandemic emergency funding in the annual appropriation for the McKinney-Vento Act’s Education for Homeless Children and Youth program. At its current level ($129 million a year), the program represents less than .3% of the federal pre-K-12 budget for a population that accounts for at least 3% of all students in those grades. An $800 million annual appropriation would constitute a mere 1.8% of the annual federal education budget and would allow schools to increase access, stability and success for millions more children.

Homelessness is a complex, multi-generational phenomenon. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. But for a mere fraction of the education budget, Congress can help prevent homelessness from disrupting the future of millions of students, and avoid the much greater expense of entrenched homelessness and other costly outcomes. Lack of a high school diploma or GED is the single greatest risk factor for homelessness later in life, so targeted educational support at adequate funding levels for these students now is an obvious immediate step that will help all students succeed in the long term.

“Perhaps it’s the cell phones?” we wonder. “And the TikTok?” 

Sure, screens — and how kids engage with them — are part of this story. And yet, and especially, America tolerates levels of child poverty compared to peer nations. because of their families’ low incomes. And yet, as has become custom, Congress recently missed a bipartisan opportunity to do something about this shameful, persistent American problem. 

To explain this latest congressional stumble, we need some history. In 2021, the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan cut U.S. child poverty rates by significantly expanding the . Critically, the expanded credit was administered in , giving families a steady stream of new resources instead of a once-annually infusion at tax time. As Dr. Shantel Meek and I put it in , “[M]easured against its goal, the expansion of the child tax credit is one of the great policy successes in recent memory. Few other big federal ideas have so suddenly achieved precisely what they intended.” 

But the measure expired after one year, and to reinstate it have floundered in Congress. 

Then, this year, a bipartisan group of House representatives drafted a giving progressives a partial reinstatement of the expanded credit in return for a handful of corporate tax breaks prized by conservatives. The bill passed with in the House, but — at least partly because of conservative concerns that it might help President Biden in an election year. “I think passing a tax bill that makes the president look good — may allow checks before the election — means that he can be reelected and then we won’t extend the 2017 tax cuts,” . 

Whatever else you think is causing young Americans’ pessimism these days, it pales in comparison with the impact of this sort of cynicism. Put aside the hand wringing about culture wars and polarization and “woke” indoctrination embedded into K–12 history curricula. U.S. kids don’t distrust Congress because their schools tell them an honest account of America’s complicated past. They Congress because, when confronted with a tested policy solution to that affects their lives, elected representatives dither and find politically expedient excuses. 

Make no mistake: the case for providing cash support for families with young children is empirically airtight. Researchers have known since at least that families’ socioeconomic resources significantly shape children’s educational performance and outcomes. that increases in family income produce better developmental, academic and life outcomes for children. As a policy matter, regular cash transfers to families like the Biden Administration’s expanded child tax credit —known as “child allowances” — a to . 

At this point in the waves of evidence, conservatives sometimes argue that, sure, perhaps there’s a case for investing more funding in low-income families, but only if we apply conditions and require that it be spent on particular things. Won’t families “waste” new resources unproductively? But this, too, is cynical and baseless political posturing: analysis showed that families .

And yet, here we are, stuck. Legislative failures like these are the operational definition of a failing democracy. When democracies struggle to do simple things that we know would improve citizens’ — especially children’s — lives, they’re undermining their main institutional selling point. If representative government cannot accurately represent the public’s interest by identifying and addressing its problems, why bother with the messiness of organizing our political lives this way?
U.S. kids are not alright. But it’s not just because they’re living in an information sphere increasingly shaped by technology. Without a shift to a more pragmatic approach to these problems, that trust will only continue dropping — however well legislative sclerosis serves conservatives’ short-term political needs.